“I do not remember,” I said, quietly. “I do not remember any of it.”
His gaze softened. “I know.”
“Perhaps you are looking for Aefe. Perhaps she no longer exists.”
Another change in that stare, one that I did not have the language to understand.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But I am happy to have you here, nonetheless.”
Strange, I thought. I did not know how to describe the sensation in my chest. It was uncomfortable. Everything was uncomfortable.
“Even if I am only Reshaye?” I said.
Caduan’s hand fell over mine. This time, I did not pull away.
“Even then,” he said.
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Max
Reality slipped through my fingers like falling sand. I could only catch grains of it at a time. Sometimes, I glimpsed a fragment of a memory — something big, something important — only for it to slip away like a ghost.
Consciousness swung in and out of my grasp. I awoke several times in a room so white it made my stomach turn, greeted by excruciating pain and people I didn’t recognize leaning over me, looking perplexed. Those days passed in a blur. They were less vivid than the dreams. I experienced reality as if it were on the other side of foggy glass. But my dreams? My dreams were sharp, even if only in broken pieces.
I was searching for something. I was missing something. I didn’t know what. In my dreams, I saw the girl with mismatched eyes and spotted skin. Sometimes, she was laughing or talking or buried in a book in utter concentration. Other times, she was leaning towards me, her face serious, her hands on either side of my cheeks.
Come back, Max. You have to come back.
And then she would lean over me, her white hair tickling my eyelids, brush her lips against my ear, and whisper something I couldn’t hear.
Blink.
Making my way to consciousness was a battle every time. I fought it valiantly. But once I got there, I didn’t know what to do with it. Reality shifted constantly. I was in the white room. I was in a crowded room in a little cottage. I was crouched in a garden, surrounded by flowers, turning around as someone called my name. I was in a beautiful golden hallway, being jostled by bickering dark-haired children. I was in the same golden hallway, surrounded by dark-haired corpses.
Blink.
I was in the white room. A slender woman with braided silver hair stood there, arms crossed over her chest. “Check again,” she was saying, to other people here. “They cannot have fled that fast. They’re traitors, and we do not let traitors escape in wartime. Not alive.”
My brow furrowed. I strung together pieces of memories. Traitors. Tisaanah. The Scar. Nura — the woman in front of me was Nura. And she was trying to find Tisaanah. Trying to…
Panic leapt.
I tried to sit up, tried to say something. But the moment I moved, the word unraveled like burnt paper.
Blink.
I was walking down a long hallway. I was wearing a stiff jacket that didn’t fit me. The edges of my vision were fuzzy. My head ached. There were soldiers on either side of me. I turned my head. Two behind.
I looked down. Chains shackled my hands together. I turned my wrists and saw circular symbols tattooed on the insides of my wrists, black ink over dark veins. Stratagrams. The word leapt to the back of my mind with satisfying certainty. I wished my mind would produce something more useful.
“Where are we going?” I asked. The sound of my own voice surprised me. It seemed to surprise the guard beside me, too. He looked at me and opened his mouth.
Blink.
I was standing in a circular room. Hundreds and hundreds of eyes looked upon me. The light shining down on me was so blinding that I couldn’t make out their faces, only silhouettes.
The woman with braided hair was in front of me, facing them. Her voice was loud, echoing off of high ceilings, so powerful it reached even the people crowded into the back of the room.
“We face an enemy more powerful than any of us have ever imagined,” she was saying. “The Fey are monsters. And Maxantarius Farlione sold his own people out to them. We will find Tisaanah Vytezic and her fellow traitors. But today, we are able to find one shred of justice.”
Tisaanah Vytezic. The name shook something loose.
The woman turned to me.
“We should have known,” she said, “what Farlione was capable of, after he slaughtered so many innocents in the battle of Sarlazai. But so often, we do not see the ugly truth of people until it is too late.”
Sarlazai. Fire. Corpses. Decimated buildings. Blink. When I opened my eyes, I was shaken. Did I do that?
My knuckles were white.
Wait, I wanted to say. But I wasn’t sure what I would say. I remembered so little. Perhaps I was guilty of what she accused me of.
The woman’s voice cut through the air again.
“On seventy-two charges of murder, for the Syrizen killed in the battle of the Scar and the civilians killed in the collapse of the towers, we find Maxantarius Farlione guilty.”
Wait—
“On the charge of high treason, for inviting the Fey into the country of Ara, and undermining his own people in a war the likes of which we have never seen, we find Maxantarius Farlione guilty.”
No — that wasn’t right. Something was very, very wrong. I just didn’t have the words to describe what.
The woman with braided hair looked over her shoulder at me. Her gaze was sharp on the surface. But there, a little deeper, there was something else, something that ran deeper than cold leadership.
I closed my fingers around a fragment of memory.
“And, in light of new information, to bring justice to all those who lost loved ones in the fall of Sarlazai,” she said, “we now find Maxantarius Farlione guilty of war crimes, resulting in the slaughter of four-hundred and thirty-two known Aran lives, and countless other missing persons.”
Four-hundred and thirty-two?!
The protest that I’d been about to unleash died in my throat. The smell of burning flesh hit me so vividly that it might have been happening here, in this room. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
Stop. Something is wrong.
“And in fitting punishment for the severity of these crimes—”
Wake up, Max.
“—and in light of the grotesque power obtained by ex-Captain Farlione—”
Come back.
“—for the protection of all Arans, as the Arch Commandant of the Orders and the acting Queen of Ara, I sentence him to life imprisonment in Ilyzath.”
Ilyzath.
Blink.
Salty ocean sprayed my face. I was standing on a stone walkway. My arms burned. I looked down. More Stratagrams had been tattooed on my skin. My hands were bound. So were my ankles.
The guards on either side of me pushed me forward. The woman with braided hair stood beside us. The air felt wrong, putrid. I looked up. A smooth ivory tower loomed, rising into grey mist. The ocean thrashed against it so violently that salt sprayed over me, as if nature itself was trying to topple it.
Tall black doors opened before me like loving arms or parting jaws.
Welcome home, it whispered.
I didn’t move.
Something still lingered behind curtains in my mind that I couldn’t part — something so important. But my mind was a collection of broken pieces that didn’t fit together. Something escaped me. Something was missing.
I peered over my shoulder. I could have sworn I saw a figure there, shrouded in fog and the mist of the sea. A woman with mismatched eyes and spotted skin, reaching out for me.
Come back, Max.
“Come on,” one of the guards muttered, and pushed me forward. The cold shadow of the prison enveloped me. It seemed to slither, a serpent of shadows, and it wrapped around me like a lover’s embrace.
I told you, Ilyzath crooned, this is where you belong.
I did not belong here.
I stopped short, just befo
re the doors.
“Move—” the guard growled, but I whirled around.
All at once, the broken pieces snapped together. I remembered all of it, every moment rendered in perfect, fleeting clarity.
Nura stood still, watching me.
“Does this feel good, Nura?” I ground out. “Does this feel right?”
She said nothing.
One of the guards tried to grab me, but I held my ground.
I thought of Tisaanah. I thought of Sammerin. I thought of Moth, and the people who had relied on me to lead them, to protect them.
I had let them down.
Tisaanah would keep fighting. The thought came to me with an equal measure of pride and sadness. All I’d wanted was for this world to be good enough to let her rest. Now she would be fighting forever.
I resisted the guards’ grips for one more second, meeting Nura’s stare.
I pitied her.
“You have made such a massive mistake,” I said.
“Come on—” the guard growled. I pushed his grip away and turned around. I didn’t hesitate as I walked into Ilyzath’s open maw. It was only after the shadows enveloped me that the fear took hold. My memories withered. I was seized by sudden desperate desire to turn back one last time, to see if there was someone there reaching for me — a girl with spotted skin and mismatched eyes.
Max, come back—
Too late. The door had closed.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
Tisaanah
The garden was especially lovely today. When I looked outside the window, I saw nothing but a sun-drenched expanse of color, like paint spattered upon a canvas. It was overgrown and feral. The way I loved it most.
Day turned to sunset turned to night. The familiar clutter of our bedroom surrounded us. I felt so safe here. Max’s lips were at my earlobe, my throat, my jaw. And then, at last, my mouth. Kissing him felt like coming home. Our bodies melted into each other, limbs intertwining, heat mingling, until there were no boundaries where he ended and I began.
“Tisaanah,” he murmured.
“Hm?”
“What if this was always us?” Another kiss, and another. I was drunk on them.
“This?”
“All of this.” He pulled away, just enough for me to look into his eyes, our lips still nearly brushing. “Do you ever think about that? What if this was us, forever?”
Gods, the way he said it. The way he looked at me. Like it was a question he truly wanted to know the answer to. Fear clenched in my stomach — the fear that I hadn’t made myself into someone deserving enough of this kind of love, yet. The fear that when I opened my fingers to give him whatever I had locked away for so long, it would not be something worth taking.
But I looked at him, and I loved him, and that love was more powerful than the fear of it. I placed my hands on either side of his face.
“I think about it,” I whispered. “I think about it all the time. It is a dream so vivid that I know every detail. I know what your eyes look like surrounded by the lines of age. I know what your hand feels like beneath mine weathered by decades of life. I know the way our features look combined in our children, the cadence of their voices, the way you sound when you call their names. And I already love them.”
I kissed him again, deeply.
“You make me selfish. You make me want. And nothing has ever been enough, except for you.”
I felt his smile beneath my kiss. Felt his warmth envelop me. And whatever fear I felt in allowing myself to voice such a ridiculous dream, voice a dream that would be so painful to lose, was drowned out by his affection.
How silly of me, I thought. To ever have been afraid of something so beautiful.
But then, my eyes opened. Outside the window, where there had once been flowers, there now was only ash and a burning pile of hands. Where Max’s form had once been, there now was only cold sheets.
Dread fell over me. Dread and horrible regret.
I tore out the door, searching for him. He couldn’t leave me. I hadn’t told him the most important truths. I hadn’t given him my dream to share. There was so much he needed to know.
And I could not lose him.
I could not lose him.
I ran outside, ash still burning beneath my feet, scorching my skin.
I screamed his name.
But he was already gone.
The sky was blue and cloudless.
No — it wasn’t the sky. It was fabric. The roof of a tent, made of faded blue cotton. The floor seemed to shift and move. My mouth was so dry it felt as if it was full of sand. When I jerked upright, I did it so clumsily that I tumbled out of the makeshift bed and fell in a heap on the floor.
The air smelled different. And it was hot, dry. Not the moist cool air of Ara in the winter.
Reality came back to me in pieces. The Arch Commandant battle. The attack by the Syrizen, by the shadows — by the Fey.
Cutting it out of Max’s mind.
Panic suddenly overwhelmed me. I knew right away that something was wrong. Everything was wrong.
I was halfway across the tent, on my hands and knees, when the curtain parted.
“Tisaanah.” Sammerin said my name in one breath of relief. “You woke up.”
“Tisaanah?” I heard the shout from outside. Seconds later, and Serel pushed his way through, already on his knees beside me, wrapping me in a rough embrace. “I was so afraid you were never going to wake up. Gods below, after a month, I—”
A month?!
I was only looking at Sammerin’s face. Something in it made my stomach churn with dread.
“What happened?” My voice was hoarse.
“We fled,” Sammerin said, quietly. “Fast.” There was a wrinkle between his brows. Something he was not saying.
Panic rose.
“Where’s Max?” I asked.
Neither of them answered.
“Where’s Max?”
Silence. Horrifying silence.
I tried to get to my feet, stumbled. Serel tried to stabilize me, but I yanked my hand away.
“We had to leave fast,” Serel said, quietly. “After the collapse at the Scar, the Syrizen were already looking for you. And Sammerin. And all of us. Ishqa brought you back to us.”
I didn’t care about how little sense any of that made. I didn’t care about how casually Serel mentioned Ishqa’s name, or that he knew Ishqa at all. I didn’t know why he was telling me any of this when it didn’t answer my damned question.
My head whipped to Sammerin. Sammerin, who was looking at me with this terrible, terrible sadness.
“Sammerin. Tell me where he is.”
And then Sammerin said, quietly, “He is in Ara.”
In Ara?
Where were we?
Bile rose in my throat. I forced myself to my feet, ignoring Serel as he tried to steady me, as if I were a newborn deer about to fall. I pushed past Sammerin and stumbled outside, squinting against blinding sunshine. The smell of the ocean hit me all at once.
Ara’s ocean? No, that smelled thick and weedy. This… this was dry and salty.
When my eyes adjusted, I was looking at a beach. Large tents, like the one I had stumbled out of, were set up along it. People — men, women, children — were going about their business outside. It was clear that this was a settlement that had been here for some time.
Slowly, people stopped. Stared at me in silence.
It took me a moment to realize that these were the Threllian refugees. Only one of them approached me. Filias, who took two steps forward, then stopped, lips parted, looking lost.
They were all looking at me with such pity.
“Where are we?” I demanded, to no one in particular.
“We are in Threll.” A gentle voice came from behind me. I whirled around to see Riasha, books stacked in her arms, as if she had been on her way somewhere important.
All the air left my lungs. “Threll?”
“We fled. Do you remember, child?”
I did not remember. I didn’t remember anything.
“Of course you didn’t. You were… in and out. Ishqa told us everything, as we left. He brought you to us. Told us of the Fey war, and how they have allied with the Threllian Lords.” Hatred flickered in her eyes. “The new Arch Commandant hunted everyone who had anything to do with you. Just like you feared. So we fled. Barely escaped, if I’m being honest.” Her gaze rose past me, to Filias. “And now we are here. Biding our time, until we can fight.”
No.
None of this made any sense. How could I have been unconscious for so long? How could I have made it out, but Max didn’t? The last thing I remember, we were entangled. Even our minds were locked together.
How could I have escaped without him?
My gaze fell to the horizon, to the sea. The next thing I knew, I was running down the beach, my limbs only half-cooperating. I didn’t stop until the cold rush of the surf hit my feet, then ankles, then my shins, and then I fell down to my hands and knees in the water. I tasted nothing but salt.
“Tisaanah.”
I hated how gentle Sammerin’s voice was. How calm. How could he be calm?
“How could you have left him?” I whirled to him. The words wrenched through me like knives. I didn’t realize I was weeping until sobs contorted my words. “How could you have left him behind?”
Pain shuddered across Sammerin’s face. He said nothing.
“We have to go back for him.”
“We’ve tried, Tisaanah. Many times. Nura has him. She sentenced him to Ilyzath.”
I closed my eyes.
This pain put everything else to shame.
“No,” I choked out.
My love, trapped in a place that preyed upon his mind, that twisted all of his worst memories. The most precious soul imprisoned in the most horrific place. The thought of it made me want to tear out my own heart. The thought of it made me want to burn down the world.
Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Page 55