by Sara Wolf
“Stop!” Malachite snarls, eyes blinking rapidly with the assault. “Stop, stop it! I’ll duel the both of you!”
“Revenge is sweet!” I tackle him from behind and smack my mouth. “And a little salty!”
Lucien stops splashing, and there’s a moment where Malachite glares daggers into him, me hanging like a monkey on his back and grinning around his shoulder. Lucien’s smirk lights up his handsome face as he dares to flick one last tiny bit of water onto Malachite with two fingers, and Malachite explodes, scrabbling for the nimble prince as he swims away. I’m too heavy to swim with, and Malachite claws for me.
“You flirty little shit! Get off me!”
My shrieking laughter echoes up the beach, Lucien’s light taunts sending Malachite into a hilariously frothing rage as he tries to swim after the prince with my added weight. At some point I decide to let go and allow the boys to kill each other, Lucien’s taunts turning to pleas and Malachite gloating as he gives the prince a terrible underwater noogie.
And I just…float. The sun beams in the blue sky, blue-green sea rising up to kiss it. The water in my ears mutes the world, covers it in a muffled, gentle blanket so that all I can hear is the sand swishing and the sound of the air in my body moving in and out. I feel so small, in such a big ocean. In such a big world. Vetris had been my everything for so long, and the forest before that. Always confined to cramped spaces, wasn’t I? But I’ve seen more of Cavanos now than ever. More of the world than ever.
I remember on the ship Fione said something idly about saltwater being easier to float in, and she’s right. Floating in the warmth of the ocean is nothing like trying to float in the bone-chillingly cold rivers of a Cavanos forest. The spring Lucien and I bathed in was beautiful, certainly, but the ocean has its own charm. I start to think, as my conniving brain is wont to do. If I could live anywhere, if at the end of all this death and destruction I could start over like I’d always wanted to, in a shack somewhere no one knows me, it would be on the ocean. Somewhere close to the ocean. I’d adore this view every day. To fall asleep to the sound of the waves, and wake up to the sound of the waves, to bathe in sun and sand and a sound that drowns out every worry—that’s my new idea of perfection.
The blue sky—Evlorasin’s up there somewhere.
Varia’s out there somewhere. Killing people. Causing suffering. Suffering herself.
The tide brings a soft something against the top of my floating head, and I look up. Dark, wet hair, a proud chin.
“Lucien,” I say, staying still. His smile is soft as he puts his hands beneath my back, holding me as I float and he stands, acting as a rock, a dock, an anchor to the world. My anchor. I don’t know where Malachite’s gone—probably to the beach to dry off like a disgruntled puppy. But really, I don’t need to know. All that exists now is Lucien’s comforting presence, the sweet warmth of the water’s embrace and his hands on my back. I can feel my hair floating all around my head like a halo, flickers of gold catching in the sun and in his dark hawk eyes.
My own voice sounds muffled through my submerged ears as I ask quietly, “What will we do? When it’s over?”
“A question for the ages.” There’s a beat, and then Lucien smiles down at me. “Eat? What’s the human food you like most?”
“Cinnamon sweetrounds,” I answer immediately.
“Then the lady will have a plate of them,” he asserts, then pauses. “We could always get married.”
“After all that fuss I went through being a Spring Bride?” I huff. “Absolutely not. We can do a few hundred years of trial runs, first.”
“I might not be around for all of it.” He laughs. My smile pulls at my lips, my eyes.
“And with any luck, neither will I,” I say.
It’s more than just a dry joke. It means, after it’s over, I’ll be human. No matter what, once Varia and the valkerax are stopped, I’ll become human. My life with Lucien after this, all human. All mortal. All pain and slow healing and wrinkles and old age and sagging. And I’m dying for every bit of it. Repeatedly. Until our goal can be achieved.
Lucien seems to always know when I’m getting too lost in my own unheart. I don’t know who taught him, or if he just knows me by now—my tells, my expressions. The price of showing him my best and worst moments, I suppose. He scoops me out of the water easily, arms straining but strong, and smiles down at me.
“Busy thinking, are you?” he asks lightly. My face heats, unbearably hot despite the water.
“Trying to,” I sniff. “But a certain someone with his hands on my thighs is making it very difficult.”
He leans in, dark hair dripping into his eyes, dropping cool water on my burning face as his lips skim mine.
“Shall I make it more so?” he murmurs.
“And why would you want to do that?” I ask innocently.
“Because you’re gorgeous, you silly thing.”
His fingers tighten into my legs, pressing the lush skin there like feather pillows under strain and all I can think about is a bed, with him in it, with me in it, and I give in first, for once. He tastes like salt, like honey and bread, and a flick of my tongue on his and the moment changes. His eyes search mine, and I search his face, looking for permission.
We give it to each other with wordless smirks.
And then I’m squirming out of his arms and both of us are racing for the sand, for our shoes, for the steps, Malachite calling after us but both of us ignoring it, ignoring everything but peering into each volcanic rock room of the Archives’ long hall looking for somewhere safe, somewhere just for us. A perfect room is the one with a bed— a cot, really—and a window overlooking the sea. When Lucien shuts the door, all our frantic energy suddenly closes in, solidifies, and in the quiet, the prince just stares at me, and me at him.
New God’s eye—he’s beautiful. He’s grown, somehow, from the boy I first met at the Spring Welcoming. It hasn’t been long, but experience has changed him. Magic has changed him. Or maybe it’s just my unheart beating for him that makes him look so devastatingly perfect. The edges of his sharp jaw, the curve of his proud nose, the deep dips of his thick brows as he looks back at me curiously, questioningly. The bright sunlight catches every raven part of him—his hair, his eyes somehow both darker and brighter than the volcanic rock of the room. The outline of him calls out to me from beneath his clothes. A tense knot vibrates in my chest, in the hollows of it, every hair standing on end as I reach up and, shaking but determined, pull my collar open.
It’s just a little skin. Barely anything, really. It’s a pallid move considering all the seduction techniques in the world. But I can smell myself—salt and cotton coming off my throat—and maybe he smells it too, or maybe it’s the sight of me doing it, because he’s stock-still one moment and then striding across the room in the next, pulling me in to him and kissing every exposed bit of flesh. Hard. Hard in a way I know will leave marks, and at the thought, the vibrating knot inside me suddenly feels like it unfurls, reaching its buzzing tendrils into my bloodstream at the idea of me welcoming his bruises on me.
A slow smile overtakes me. He’s been like this since he met me, hasn’t he? Wanting me.
wanting your body and nothing more.
I waver. Like he can hear it, feel it moving inside me, Lucien makes a snarl and a flood of magic pulses into me, so torrential and huge I can feel it move, spread rapidly, and it dulls the hunger to an insignificant buzz like a hand over a mouth.
“No more,” the prince pants. “No more hunger. You are not the hunger’s. You are yours. And you are mine.”
Of all the ways I’ve died, I’ve never been struck by lightning. But this is how it must feel—this hot, sweet relief lancing through my spine down to my softness, to the place between my thighs. We’ve kissed before, certainly, but the hunger I kiss him with now is all mine, all blazing, all promises and gratitude and love.
“Zera.” He pulls away suddenly, panting and putting his forehead to mine. “You— Please—”
He can’t even speak anymore. I want him. I can want him now, and the feeling is like flying. Like throwing off something incredibly heavy. I can take what I want, for myself. For my own happiness. And so it’s my turn to kiss his neck, beneath his ear, gently moving up to the shell of it and whispering, “All you had to do was ask nicely.”
The soft noise he makes at my words, the sudden breath he sucks in—it’s like music. The best music I’ve ever heard, all the finest quartets in Vetris paling to nothing in comparison. I’ve plucked a string in him and he sings and I do it again with a whisper, the better to hear him with.
“I’m yours.”
It’s a blur. It’s a blur of very pointed moments, sensations—his mouth on me everywhere, so furiously hot and eager; his hardness against my hand; our mouths in and out of each other’s, dipping and scraping like two valkerax in death dives. The smell of his skin, no, our skin. This belongs to us. To me and no one else. Not the hunger. Not Cavanos. Not the war waiting outside, not the world. There’s that moment, that moment, and we’re connected, and I understand what it truly means to have a heart, finally, when we’re moving together as one, the sea breeze and the silly little cot and the two of us making it happen, together, making this moment in time all our own.
Forever.
22
BLOOD
AND
PROMISES
There’s always this strange unspoken opinion that floats around Cavanosian society, and it’s that one’s first time changes a girl. That lying with a loved one in the carnal sense is transformative, somehow. I wish I could report that this was accurate, but alas—it barely changed me at all. It really just made me more, well, me.
“Is it hard to eat?” Malachite drawls at dinner, a fish-and-rice affair of the Black Archives’ mess hall. “With a permanent shit-eating grin on your face?”
I grin even wider and bat my eyelashes at him across the table. “I wouldn’t know.”
Malachite rolls his eyes and looks at Lucien. “You’ve created a monster.”
“I can hardly claim to take credit.” Lucien smiles contentedly into his water glass. “When she’s worked so hard on it herself.”
His black-glass eyes catch mine over the candlelight, knowing and full of himself and I can’t stand it one second more and neither can he, apparently, because we both stand and dump our trays with some muttered excuse to Malachite. The halls that were buzzing an hour ago are now empty, everyone at dinner, but an unfortunate (or should I say fortunate?) silver-robed polymath rounds the corner and catches Lucien pressing me against the wall. Nothing lewd, of course. Just simple kisses. All over my body.
I watch the polymath round the hall corner, then murmur breathlessly down at Lucien, who’s currently thoroughly engaged with my collarbone.
“We could—we could find a room, you know. A broom closet, even.”
He rumbles his assent against my skin. “Forgive me my impatience.”
“Forgiven,” I tease, pulling him by the hand. “But not forgotten.”
There’s a giddy urgency to it all this time. And the next. And the next after that. The novels in Nightsinger’s library never spoke of the intricacies of it—the way you learn someone’s body, freckle by freckle and line by line and scent by scent. They never spoke of how different and yet the same people are in their love, in their wants and needs and lusts. The novels never warned me of the sheer glow, the incredible feeling of an empty mind and a full heart.
We’ve been forbidden to each other for so long that being together feels like a dream. We relish in each and every moment, and a day passes like this, wrapped in kissing and holding and just lying, just being with each other. Someone will find us if they need us, but we try so hard to pretend the world doesn’t exist for just this short time. And it works. He knows exactly how to touch me, and where, and when, and part of me faintly realizes that’s probably his handy little skinreading ability. Used for good this time. Oh so good.
But reality always finds a way in. It needles at first, piercing tiny holes in our joy through our conversations afterward—me tracing the gorgeous planes of his stomach and listening to him worry. About Vetris, about Varia, about the war, about everything.
And then, it punctures with an arrow.
I’m brushing the dark hair off his neck, kissing a line down his spine when I reach for his hand. The unmoving one. I miss, but my eyes are on his back, so it’s understandable. I flounder around for his hand again, feeling for it everywhere, but it’s not there. My fingers follow the line of his arm, his elbow, knowing it will lead me to his hand. Because it has to.
Except it doesn’t.
I feel down to his wrist, but that’s it. There’s nothing after that. Just air. I recoil at the smooth stub, the lack of fingers and palm and—and anything. I thought he—I thought it was there! It was, wasn’t it? It didn’t work, but it was there…
“Y-You—” I stammer. Lucien straightens instantly on the cot, his expression taut as he looks up at me. With one dark eye. The other socket is empty, perfectly smooth just like the stub where his hand should be. Not wound-smooth, not scar-tissue smooth. Just…smooth. Like the skin’s been unnaturally sanded down to an inhumanly perfect flatness.
“Godsdamnit,” Lucien breathes softly. He tilts his head to shade his missing eye with his bangs, cradling his missing hand with his other. “I didn’t want you to see this.”
“I thought they—they just stopped working.” My voice cracks. “But have you been hiding this? The whole time?” I swallow nails. “Were they always gone?”
The prince won’t look at me, his one eye thin and entirely focused on the far wall.
“Lucien, please,” I beg, reaching for his other hand and bringing it to my unheart. “Please talk to me.”
He swallows too, our throats mirror images, mirror-bruised with the ghosts of lingering kisses, of our love, and he nods slowly.
“Yes. I did the magic. Overdid it. And they just…disappeared. But I knew if you saw that, you’d never tolerate me using magic again.”
“You hid it,” I finish for him. He nods again, a flinch to it this time.
“Illusion spells are difficult. But they’re much easier if you’re filling in the natural gaps of appearance, rather than altering it to something completely different.” He pauses. “It doesn’t take much magical effort, is what I’m saying. So don’t worry.”
“I’m not,” I blurt, and his wounded look turns into a sardonic one for a moment. “Okay. So maybe I am worrying. But gracefully, and with a shit ton of poise.”
“Varia did the same thing,” he continues. “Before she went missing all those years ago, she used a spell to kill her guards and make it look like a Heartless attack. But it was beyond her skill at the time. We found only a few parts: her leg, two index fingers. But when I met her again, she was missing far more fingers. No doubt they’d been—”
“Eaten,” I repeat, pressing down the rising panic. Lucien nods, the sunrise coming through the little window painting his profile in rainbow translucence.
“I felt it. When I met the High Witches. They willingly offer their bodies to be consumed by the Glass Tree. To power it. But if any witch attempts to use a spell beyond their control at the time, the Tree will consume them, too.”
“As punishment?” I ask.
“No.” He shakes his head. “The feeling I got when I used the spells was more like…repayment. Like I owed the Glass Tree something for reaching too far. Like my reaching hurt it, and so it took from me to stem the wound. It felt as if it was making some kind of exact equilibrium.”
“But the Tree of Souls gives you your magic, right?” I say. “Not the Glass Tree. The Glass Tree is only for Heartless. So why would the Glass Tree consume you?”
He shrugs. “Perhaps when the Tree of Souls was split, the Glass Tree became the arbiter of the magic flow on Arathess. Or maybe it’s simply how magic works; I don’t know. I’m not the one translating the book with all the potential answers right now.”
There’s a soft quiet. And then I reach my breaking point.
“You won’t do this again,” I say. “You won’t use magic you get consumed for.”
Lucien doesn’t say anything, and that sets my unheart on fire even more.
“Right?” I press. “Right?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Zera.” He sighs. “You chose to use your Heartlessness to fight her. I choose to use my magic. All of my magic, if it comes to that.”
Every inch of my skin feels as if it shrivels at once. “No. No, not all of it. You can’t. I’m not going to lose you.”
His dark eye seems so distant as he moves to stare out the window. He suddenly feels a million miles away, like a mirage through a heavy fog I can’t navigate.
“I’ve realized, lately, that you may have to.”
“But—” I leap up. “All our plans! You’re going to change Vetris, right? Cavanos? We’re going to rebuild together what it means to lead your country. I said I’d help you. I want to help you.” I scrabble for his other hand, but it feels cold as I press it to my cheek. “I can’t help you with it if you…if you aren’t here anymore.”
He finally looks down at me, his smile wan. “I know. I want to be here, after it’s over. You know I do. I want to be here with you. But she’s my sister, Zera. Family. Perhaps the only family I have left. I can’t let her destroy herself like this, not for one second more. If it comes to it, I’ll use all of myself to save her.”
“It won’t come to that.” I stick my chin out.
His laugh is gentle, sad in the sunrise. “You’re so stubborn.”
I crawl onto the cot again, shivering. There’s a moment where I’m afraid to approach him. Afraid to get closer, only to lose him.