Kherron merely searched her gaze, confirming it when his eyes widened and he raised his brow, wordlessly asking her how he could possibly have thought anything else.
Turning away from him to look back across the canyon, she slid her fingers out from under his, yet again met with no resistance. “Geyr was my son.”
“What?” He swallowed audibly.
“My son, Kherron. I had a child, and he could have been the one to free the Nateru from this burden. Only half of him belonged to mankind, and he strived more than anyone I’ve ever known to right the wrongs my people have faced for so long. But he was hunted. Slaughtered for nothing more than his pelt. And now that duty falls to you, because it seems there is no one else.” Her voice had remained even and low, but she suddenly grew aware of how wet her cheeks had become—how many tears so long unshed now made it impossible to hide herself.
The cavern seemed eerily quiet, the warm air now stifling. Aelis unclasped her bearskin cloak and let it slump to the floor behind her. She sniffed but made no attempt to wipe away the tears falling quickly and heavily from her cheeks.
“I’m so sorry,” Kherron said, sounding as if he might choke if he could not at least offer her that.
“I’ve only spoken of this to one other,” she said, “and even that conversation was shorter than this.” She sniffed again and pushed her curly red hair back from her forehead. “It was Geyr’s death led me to the void, Kherron, and the sacrifice I made of myself there that brought me back. Very few ever manage to return, you and I among them. That’s why we’re here.” Again, she brought herself to look at him, and the kindness in his dark blue eyes brought the start of a sob to her throat, where, fortunately, it stayed. “I came down from... where I’d been to help you. Guide you from the nothingness and show you what such a freedom has made you. And to show you what you must do to free the rest of us.” The slow, conceding blink he gave before briefly lowering his gaze nearly broke her. “That was my duty, Kherron. Perhaps the only use left for me in this world. But when I saw what you’d endured... your scars... It’s...”
“I know,” Kherron said, delivering her from the torture of fumbling through what she’d meant to say. “There’s more.” He gave a halting sigh and glanced up at the cavern’s ceiling and the few massive tree roots having broken through from above. “It’s more than duty. More than prophecies and vows and senseless riddles.” When he looked back down to meet her gaze, he shifted closer, their knees now touching. “You and I...” This time, she took his hand. “Aelis, what would you have me do?”
The mere fact that he’d asked her undid her completely. She wanted to tell him to stay, to release everything he’d been told about who he was and forge his own path. And she wanted to tell him to go, to continue on his search, fulfill his duty, right the wrongs that had had nothing to do with him when they were committed. Instead, Aelis leaned forward and kissed him.
She would have toppled over if she had not also wrapped her arms around his neck, such was her urge to do—for the first time in a long time—what she wanted and not what she should have done. At first surprised, Kherron reacted only in wrapping an arm around her waist to steady her, having not responded to her kiss until she pulled back just a little to tuck her knees under herself and take a breath. Then he returned it.
Aelis could not remember ever being kissed like this—like she were breath and life and hope instead of flesh and blood. His heavy sigh brought a new wave of tears streaming down her cheeks, and she lifted herself one more time to straddle him, sliding effortlessly into his lap. The warmth of his arms around her, his hands on her upper and lower back, nearly made her shudder while she kissed him again and again. Then she leaned back only to lift the hem of her tunic up and over her head; her shoulder ached in residual tenderness, but she ignored it. Kherron did the same before pulling her once more into his embrace, the touch of another’s skin against her own making her gasp as if it were for the first time. In a way, perhaps it was.
In this, she did not have to think, to weigh the consequences of each action and what they might mean for her future. She placed her hands upon his chest and pushed him back; Kherron let her, albeit slowly, until he lay on her bearskin cloak and reached up to pull her down on top of him. Inch by inch, her kisses moved across his cheek and down his neck, pausing briefly at the thin rope of white scar wrapping around his throat. His breath hitched, but he did not stop her.
Aelis pressed her lips to each reminder of his sacrifice—the raised flesh covering nearly his entire shoulder; the round scars where he’d been pierced through, impossible to survive in this realm; the overlapping net of healed lances running down and across his chest and stomach, some pale, others discolored and dark. The rise of his flesh lent proof and story to who he was, what he’d done, what he could then become, and Aelis thanked him for all of it with her lips and the gentle brush of her fingers.
At first, Kherron had seemed hesitant, breathing unevenly and running his fingers through her hair. When she’d reached where his navel would have been had it too not been scarred over, he let out a low cry, part moan and part sob, and she glanced aside to see his hands no longer on her but clenching fistfuls of her bearskin cloak beneath him. Then she paused to undo his belt, his breeches straining against his growing need for her. Once she did, Kherron sat up partially to lift her back into his lap, pressing his mouth to hers again and rolling in one swift movement to pull her beneath him. She felt the thick bear pelt at her back, the soft, mottled warmth of his chest pressed atop hers. And she felt the heat of Kherron’s tears falling onto her cheeks, cooling instantly as both their hands worked to undo the ties of her trousers and he guided himself inside her.
THE ECHOING RUSH OF the frigid river in the gorge below and their own languid breath filled the open cavern as one continuous sound. Eyes closed, Kherron turned his head toward where Aelis’ own settled in the crook of his arm, her hand on his chest, and breathed in the scent of her—sweat and earth, new leaves and an animal musk that might have come from her bearskin cloak beneath them. They’d had hours to wait until whatever doorway Aelis expected opened for them and they joined the clanning, but he felt they had all the time in the world now. He wished it were so.
Pressing another kiss to her temple, he trailed his fingers down her cheek, her neck, over the rise of one breast before it dipped down her ribs and into the low valley of her waist. He put a hand on her hip and gently rolled her onto her back, but when his fingers came to her belly, Aelis covered them with her own, stopping him. She lifted her head a little to look at him, then pressed his palm to her flesh and said, “The proof.”
With a small frown, Kherron propped himself up on an elbow to see what she’d meant. He’d wanted to explore her as she had his own marred flesh, to offer her as much a sense of being known with a reverence he’d never expected to receive. She gazed up at him with large brown eyes framed by her wild red hair, then slowly moved his hand across her belly. He felt the raised flesh there, the tautness of healed wounds stretched over the gentle curve of her stomach. Only now, when his gaze fell over her collarbone, down her pale breasts, and to the dip of her waist did he see what she had stopped him to witness.
A huge, curved scar ran below her navel nearly from one hip to the other. Above it rested another mound of healed flesh as big as his hand, which would on anyone else have been a mortally gaping wound, never to heal like this. He brushed his fingers lovingly across these, and Aelis took a long, deep breath. When he glanced back up at her, she wore a subdued smile.
“I went to the void after Geyr,” she said, her voice low and soft. “After they took him from me. I went willingly, hoping it would kill me. That I won’t ever deny.” She lifted her hand to trace a few of his own scars in turn. “That’s not what the void is for, is it?” Kherron returned her smile filled with not quite regret and not quite acceptance. “I lost him so many times in that place, Kherron. From my own womb. Sometimes, once I birthed him, creatures I did not know c
ame to take him away. Or they cut him out of me. Other times, he died in my arms or did not take a single breath outside my body.”
She blinked, pushing tears from the corners of her eyes to slide down her cheeks and dampen the hair at her temples. But these were not the same shameful, yearning tears as when she’d first spoken of her son, Kherron knew; these were cleansing, much as his own had been, and few.
“In the end,” she continued, “when I had nothing left, I ripped the babe that was not a babe from my own flesh and left it in the mists. I knew it was not Geyr and could never be Geyr. My son had lived. He had grown, and he had died, and I will never get him back.” Aelis returned her own hand to the shining scar of once torn and irrevocably damaged flesh over her womb, impossibly healed but for the realm of purple and grey. “I gave my motherhood to the void. I will never bear another child. And I did not have another purpose until I heard of one Blood of the Veil who still walked our world. Until you.” Grabbing his hand, she brought it to her lips and kissed his fingers lightly before glancing back up at him.
Kherron swallowed, feeling his heart about to burst in his chest with a mix of sorrow and understanding and a deep reverence for this woman who had bared herself to him in more ways than anyone he’d ever known. Lacing his fingers through hers, he said, “I died forty-eight times, and I remember every single one of them.” He stared at their clasped hands, more grateful than he’d expected to be faced with hardly any reaction on Aelis’ part. It seemed not to surprise her at all. “It was always the same demon. This... thing that came for me. It told me I had summoned it myself, because I wished to...” Feeling the terror and despair rise up in him once more, he clenched his eyes shut and forced himself to focus on the cool smoothness of Aelis’ fingers between his own.
“You don’t have to tell me any more than that,” Aelis said and gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “Not now. I have had years to relive what I did in that place. It will grow easier with time.”
Kherron nodded, feeling like a child afraid of the dark, but that small wound to his pride did not lessen his gratitude for the woman lying naked and unafraid beside him. For a few moments, they were silent, listening to the faraway echo of birdsong and the rush of the river far below. “The creatures in that place,” he finally said again, opening his eyes to meet Aelis’ brown gaze searching him with such unabashed compassion. “Do they actually exist?” He couldn’t imagine having created such a horror from his own mind, let alone having summoned it—though he understood now more than ever what the creature had meant.
“I don’t know,” Aelis replied. “I don’t think the void is meant to be understood. Or that it ever will be. Some things come into being only there, and the few who enter beyond the doorway see more than is meant to be seen. But it has a purpose, in a way. You and I are proof of that much.” She reached up and placed a cool hand on his cheek. “And we never have to go back.” Then she pulled him down to her for another kiss that seemed to last forever.
Kherron could not fathom where he would be or what he would have done had he not come across her when he had, albeit under the nerve-wracking circumstances of an arrow in her shoulder and him having killed two soldiers to defend her. Nevertheless, this woman had shown him so much. She’d guided him through the terror that nearly suffocated him when he’d pulled her and the healer with him into the doorway and through time; she’d named him as a Blood of the Veil, offering the union with that sacred pool and a new awareness of what he might become—what he might accomplish with an understanding of the things he could do. And now, offering him her body and her soul in as much exchange as she had accepted his was a soothing balm to the torment he’d had little time to process. No one knew him like this. And he thought, in this moment, that he would do anything she asked of him.
When Aelis broke away from their kiss and glanced languidly through the cavern’s opening, her brow lifted, and she pushed herself into sitting. “It’s almost time. Get dressed.” The words might have sounded like a hurried command had she not said them with a barely subdued excitement, her brown eyes glistening as she met his gaze.
Unable to contain himself, Kherron chuckled and reached for his own clothes. He watched her hurried movements with no little pleasure at the sight of her, naked and pale beneath the wild red mane, bustling swiftly about the cavern as if someone had just stumbled upon them. Aelis stopped only to shoot him a glare very much like those she’d given when they’d first met, though it held kindness and a certain amusement of its own. “My last clanning was a very long time ago,” she offered in explanation, then finished lacing up her breeches.
“You’re looking forward to it?” Kherron pulled his own tunic over his head just in time to see her pause at his words and stare blankly at the cavern floor.
“Not quite.” Then she quickly donned her own tunic, offering a brief grunt when pushing her newly healed arm through the sleeve, and retrieved her bearskin cloak to drape it casually over her shoulders.
Kherron fastened his own cloak at his neck, having grown quite accustomed to the act of attaching the clasp to the hole in the fabric created by its missing counterpart. “Should I be concerned, then?”
“Oh, they’ll be happy enough to see you there. I don’t think they’re expecting me.” Adjusting her cloak, she stepped much farther toward the edge of the cavern’s cliff than was logical. Kherron hesitated to join her there until she turned back to eye him with a mixture of amusement and annoyance, nodding toward the emptiness of the gorge before them and beckoning him to join her.
He did, quite slowly, not very much liking the fraction of her boot tips hanging out over nothing but an impossible drop. Standing slightly behind her and catching the smallest hint of a smirk from Aelis, he stared out over the vast expanse stretching in front of them. The sun had just hit the highest peak across the gorge, seeming to swell over it, as though it were a ripe fruit about to split upon a sharpened knifepoint. Together, they watched the sunset, brilliant streaks of pink, gold, and orange lighting up the chilly sky of autumn.
Then a sudden, unnaturally bright glare flared out from atop that peak, bursting over the mountains across the gorge, into the valley, and directly upon the two witnesses at the cavern’s edge. Kherron had to shield his eyes with a forearm, ducking against the brilliance of it. Blinking furiously, he opened his eyes to look at Aelis, only to find her stepping forward off the edge of the cliff.
His stomach lurched in dread a split second before he realized the cliff was no longer a cliff, the open expanse before them no longer the cold, rocky gorge and the forested mountains beyond. Where Aelis had stepped, and just beyond his own booted feet, what had been open air was now a verdant carpet of grass, gold-tinged in the light of sunset. The muted roar of the icy river had given way to a chatter unlike anything he’d ever heard before—the warbles and trills of countless birds; the snuffling and grunts of larger, denser creatures; sharp, canine yips; and the rising cadence of human voices.
At first, he could see nothing but the grass-covered earth before him, having appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and Aelis’ silhouette against the sunset, which lit a wide halo against her hair, as if her locks had caught flame. He hadn’t realized she’d turned to glance at him over her shoulder until she called his name and he saw her outstretched arm inviting him forwards. Hoping whatever illusion this was would hold, Kherron swallowed, nearly held his breath, and took the first step out of the cavern and onto solid ground.
Chapter 16
The rising din of the clanning did not abate or even lessen as Kherron and Aelis joined them. A few heads—man and beast alike—turned to survey them with apparent impassivity, but theirs was hardly a grand appearance, given the manner of their arrival. That did not make the sight any less impressive and unnerving.
They’d entered a clearing very much like the one to which Kherron had returned when he’d escaped the violet realm. What it lacked for in a body of water—neither a river like that in the first clearing nor a
pool like that in the underground cavern Aelis had revealed to him—it made up for in variety of species. Exotic flowers in bursts of blue, yellow, purple, and red both rose from the forest floor and fell from the huge tree branches around them covered in vines and ivy and moss. The trees themselves were enormous and ancient, having stood the test of time in a form Kherron did not recognize; the existence of this place was far more impossible than the clearing in which the river-woman had revealed herself to him. But most striking remained the odd conglomeration of lifeforms among them—men and women, yes, but also birds in as many sizes and colors as he could possibly imagine; wild hogs and wolves and a few bears; a massive cat slinked down from its perch within one of the ancient trees. Kherron spotted two brown does with one fawn between them, reminded instantly of the deer he’d met in his travels and now thinking it far more possible for those same creatures to have made it this far. Two snakes dropped from the same tree branch to coil in upon themselves in luxuriant anticipation, ignoring completely the mice and squirrels scampering across the grass beneath the trees.
He tried to take it all in, but it was nearly impossible with so many creatures moving about. Even more difficult to follow was the rate at which these changed their forms. A few of the men and women gathered shrank or expanded into their own animal forms, while a number of beasts did the opposite, rising on two legs to converse. Some animals shifted into others; a red hawk swooped down from the sky and became a frog midflight, plopping onto the ground to approach another of its kind in that form. There seemed little to no order here at all save for the single fact that those who had come to the clanning had arrived in peace and seemingly little natural inclination to hunt, eat, or challenge each other.
Sacrament of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 3) Page 16