by Tracy Deonn
I have a feeling he’s doing it on purpose, giving me a moment to collect myself.
Once he finishes, he settles back against the headboard and folds his hands in his lap. “Will you sit with me?” he asks pleasantly.
And just like that, the air between us feels lighter, easier. Like nothing unusual had happened at all.
I’m impressed, despite my still-racing heartbeat. How does he do it? How does this boy navigate my emotions like a seasoned sailor, finding the clear skies and bringing them closer, when all I seem able to do is hold fast to the storms?
He waits patiently for me to decide, his eyes soft and open. Finally, I nod and crawl up to the headboard, making myself comfortable in the space beside him.
We sit like that for a long time, until our breaths rise and fall as one.
* * *
I must have dozed off, because I jump when I hear the Lodge’s front door slam downstairs.
The room is black. For a moment I forget where I am.
Nick presses a hand to my knee and says in a groggy voice, “If it’s bad, they’ll come find us.”
The digital clock above his door says it’s close to one a.m. “I should go.”
“If you leave now, Sel will know you’re still here and yell at both of us,” he says reasonably. “Stay.”
I can’t really argue with that. Plus, now that the adrenaline has fully left my body, I’m beyond exhausted.
Still, I pull out my phone and text Alice to let her know where I am and that I’m okay before putting my phone on silent. When the screen goes black, we sit in the darkness listening to the voices downstairs until the house becomes quiet again.
I start to wonder if I should find some pajamas and sneak into one of the spare rooms to go to bed for real. I reach up to my hair and tug on my bun. I’d hate to sleep without my satin pillowcase. Maybe Felicity has a scarf?
Before I can slip off the bed, Nick starts to speak, his voice low and disembodied in the pitch-black room.
“Most Scion parents can’t wait until their child is old enough to begin training. I know my dad couldn’t. My mother, though? When I look back, it was obvious that she was terrified.”
“You don’t have to talk about this now, if you don’t want to.”
“I do. Want to.”
I reach for his hand in the darkness, and he squeezes my palm.
“My mother was raised in a Vassal family, and she Paged right away but never tried for a Squire title. Marrying a Scion of Arthur was the next best thing, her parents figured. My dad was never Called, but Scions of Arthur still hold… a lot of power. When I was growing up, she and my dad fought a lot. About my future, about my dad’s training regimen. I couldn’t go to regular school; he homeschooled me so he’d have more control over my studies. I was eight when Dad started bringing other Lieges around to train me. He told them not to go easy just because I was a kid. Because really, I wasn’t a kid. I was their king. And they didn’t. Go easy, that is. They…”
Nick pauses, and I can hear him swallow once, twice. I’m scared that he’s crying and I don’t know what to do. I press my shoulder into his and hope I can send my warmth and strength over to him. When he starts again, his voice is thick with memory.
“It’s not the broken bones or the bruises, the black eyes or the concussions, that keep me up at night. Those were healed by a Scion of Gawain. It’s the look in my mother’s eyes when I’d come inside, like the sight of me was carving holes into her heart. They’d fight the most those days.”
He takes a deep breath in the darkness, and I take one with him because I want him to know I’m here.
“One night she woke me up and told me to grab my things, that we were leaving. She’d had enough of watching her son get beaten. We made it about a mile out of town before these black cars surrounded us. Dad comes out of one of them and he’s frightened and angry. More upset than I’d ever seen him. I think he was scared we’d both been kidnapped by the Shadowborn, and that’s why he called the Regents for help. He’d never imagined his own wife would take his son from him. A Merlin I’d never met took my mother away without letting either of us say goodbye.” His voice has gone cold with rage, quiet with sorrow. “Dad broke down in tears when they drove off, because he knew she’d be punished. I think he tried to stop it, but the Regents’ word is final. The trainings stopped for a while. He started me at private school, stopped talking about my rank, our bloodline. The next… the next time I saw her was a few weeks later at a park near our neighborhood. My dad and I were getting ice cream. Mom walked by, and I ran up to her and gave her a hug, told her I was glad she was back. But she wasn’t back. She smiled, but… then she held me at arm’s length and asked who I was.”
I choke on my next breath. Tears burn at the edges of my eyes.
“I spent years researching Merlins’ mesmers. Trying to figure out how to break what they’d done. Extracting a mother’s child from her psyche is mesmerwork only a Master Merlin could do. When we met and you told me you’d broken Sel’s mesmer, I thought maybe I’d missed something…” His voice trails off into a heavy sigh.
That’s what I’d seen in his eyes that first night at the Lodge. Hope. “I’m sorry,” I murmur.
He squeezes my thigh. “Not your fault.” He inhales sharply, returning to the memory. “Anyway, after we ran into her, Dad moved us out of town within the week. To protect me, I think. Not long after that, Sel came to live with us, and another Merlin brought us here to perform the Kingsmage Oath. Sel’s a little kid, pledging his life to protect me, and all I could think was how much I hated the Merlins for being monsters and how I didn’t want this strange boy in our house. I wanted my mother. I blamed my dad for calling the Regents that night, but, in the end, it was Arthur who drove my parents apart, and I’m… I’m so angry with him, Bree. Angry with a sixth-century ghost.” He laughs bitterly. “I was so… so furious at all of it that I thought if I stopped training every day, stopped doing everything my dad wanted me to do, and stopped hanging around everyone here—William, Whitty, Sar, everyone—that I could make it so Arthur wouldn’t even want to Call me. I left this world, the people, the politics, the rituals… so that maybe he’d think I was unworthy and leave me alone. And now that it might be real…?” He huffs out another hollow laugh. “I’ve pushed it all away for so long that sometimes I’m not sure I’d even be able to hear Arthur if he did Call.”
I wrap my arms around his chest and squeeze until he drops his cheek onto my head and squeezes back.
I don’t mention Sel saying that same thing when he was aether-drunk, about Nick not being able to hear Arthur’s Call.
I hate that Sel, in his own fit of fury, might have been right.
* * *
I wake up to the sound of Nick showering in the room’s bathroom. My phone says it’s seven thirty—early enough that I can still make my first class. I sit up, hands smoothing down my unwrapped, slept-on curls in apology, and notice a small basket of toiletries on the nightstand beside me. Soap, a washcloth, a comb I’ll never be able to use, and a small toothbrush and tiny tube of toothpaste.
I can already hear Alice’s squeal of delight when I tell her about Nick’s efforts. I may not be able to tell my best friend everything, but I can at least tell her about sleeping in Nick’s bed and waking up to a literal gift basket.
I grab the toiletries and head downstairs to one of the hall bathrooms, hoping against hope that no one saw me emerge from Nick’s bedroom. Ten minutes later, Nick finds me and insists on walking me back to my dorm.
Dew and fog have settled over the grounds of the Lodge overnight, and the quiet of the morning falls thick and heavy around us.
Nick shakes his head, eyebrows drawn tight as soon as we step away from the building and toward the tree-lined gravel road and trail that leads back to campus.
“What?”
“Every time I come here, people look at me like I know what the hell I’m doing.”
I cross my arms as we walk
, and a memory comes to me. “My mom used to say, ‘Fake it till you make it.’ Maybe that’s what you’ve got to do. Fake it till you make it.”
He chuckles, and the warmth of it fills my chest. “Thanks, partner.”
“Oh, I’m not your partner.” I jerk a thumb over my shoulder, back toward the Lodge. “I think Vaughn wants that gig.”
“Ugh, that dude.” He rolls his eyes. “He keeps asking me to spar. It’s all very… bro-y? Is that a word?” I giggle, imagining Vaughn the asshole chasing Nick down with sparring swords, begging him to practice. “I really don’t want him as my Squire.” Nick’s eyes widen hopefully. “Any more thoughts about—”
I hold my hands up. “As we all saw last night, I don’t have a clue how to hold a sword or a bow and arrow or… anything. I’d be horrible.”
“We’d train you.” Nick grins. “I’ve seen you move. You’d be incredible.”
“Oh, really?” I cross my arms, narrowing my eyes.
“Yeah, really.” His laugh is a soft rumble in the quiet morning air. “Maybe I like watching you move.”
I open my mouth, but no actual words emerge, so I just shake my head and turn away.
He stops in the road, catches my wrist, and tugs until I have to angle toward him. “Don’t do that,” he chides.
“Do what?” Shadows play across his face as he draws me nearer. Like last night in his room, he presses his thumb into my palm, and just that bit of pressure ignites my insides, sets my heart racing.
“That thing you just did. That thing you do,” he says, his eyes filled with humor—and a shadow of hurt. “Tell yourself I’m just teasing. It’s okay to be nervous, but please don’t dismiss the idea that I like you, B.”
I make a strangled sort of indignant sound. “I’m not nervous. I’m just…”
He tilts his head. “Just what?”
I blink in shock, because he’s really, really expecting an answer, isn’t he? “I’m… a lot of things.”
He hums in amused agreement, his lips tight in a suppressed smile. “You are. I agree.”
“And… and… I’m not used to feeling this way.”
“What way?”
I feel heat rise in my cheeks and look away just as Nick flashes a soft, knowing grin. He trails his fingers up my forearms to my inner elbows, making me shiver. His right hand skims past my elbow to my bicep, over my shoulder to rest on my collarbone, his thumb swiping along my jaw.
“I had a thought about what I said last night.” His voice is quiet, almost meditative, as he watches his thumb on my cheek. “About being Arthur’s Scion and how, on some level, I never thought I’d have to really deal with it, you know? Not really. My dad didn’t. Granddad didn’t. A dormant Scion has clout, but no real say in the Order. I never thought about how his powers might feel and what I might do with them, until…” His eyes flick to mine.
My breath hitches. “Until?”
“Until the uchel took you.”
“Oh, sure,” I joke, my voice trembling only slightly. His face is so close I can smell the shampoo he used this morning. See the fine lashes against his cheek. I’m scared to want him—but I want him anyway. My next words come out breathy and faint. “Damsel in distress activates your hero mode?”
The passion in his voice, the breathless force of it, is enough to make me shiver. “You’re not a damsel to me, Bree. You’re a warrior. You’re strong and you’re beautiful and you’re brilliant and brave.” He presses his forehead against mine, his eyes squeezed shut, and takes a slow, ragged breath. “And I’d really like to kiss you.”
“Oh,” I squeak, and immediately wish I’d thought of something more to say. Anything more.
He chuckles, his clean, minty breath already intimate against my mouth. “Oh, ‘no’? Or oh, ‘yes’?” He pulls back to meet my eyes, and there is affection and something more flickering in their heated depths. It’s the something more that sends an arc of electricity through my body.
“The second o—” He tilts my chin and presses his mouth against mine, warm and soft.
I’ve read books, watched movies, whispered secret wishes to Alice in the darkness of bunk-bed sleepovers. I expect this kiss to feel an awkward sort of good.
I don’t expect each gentle brush of Nick’s lips to shift, grow insistent—and set me on fire.
The distant sounds of early morning birds fade away when Nick’s fingers smooth up the column of my throat, angling my face so that our mouths connect more fully. My fingers clutch at his T-shirt, pulling closer until I am all feeling and no thought: my heart pounding with his, the heat of his chest against mine, the strength of his thigh pressing into my own. Someone gasps for air; then we find each other again. I make a sound in the back of my throat that should be embarrassing, but Nick consumes it with a low hum against my mouth, drawing me forward until we’re flush. In that instant, I feel the two sides of our familiar dance. The call and response of trust and loyalty, intermingling until they become a melody. A beautiful truth that circles in the wind, swirling against my mind, growing louder until everyone, everyone must hear it too.
I don’t know what our kiss is becoming—just as his lips ghost over my jaw, just as his fingers feather over my sternum, we hear someone’s feet crunching down the gravel road behind us.
“Nick? That you?” Russ.
I instinctively freeze, but Nick lifts his head, a frustrated groan rising from his chest.
Another voice nearby. “Who’s that—?” Oh God. Evan too. “Whoa!”
At some point, we’d rotated so that my back is toward the way we’d come, and Nick is facing Russ and Evan’s disembodied voices. Thank the Lord, too, because I can duck my face into Nick’s shoulder and catch my breath instead of die of mortification in front of frat boy Evan Cooper.
Evan crows. “Oh-kayyy, y’all! Sheeit…! Get it!” He’s wheezing with laughter.
“Is this a good morning kiss or a good night kiss?” Russ calls, the sound of a grin all over his voice. “Are we coming or going?”
“Kinda busy right now, guys.” I can’t help but feel a little thrill at the steel underneath Nick’s hoarse voice.
“Oh, we can see that.” Russ laughs at his own joke while Evan says, “Sorry to interrupt, my liege! Please, proceed with thy gentle tonguing!”
They both laugh a long time at that, and even I crack a grin into the soft fabric of Nick’s shirt. They walk around us, whooping and cheering the entire way down the gravel road toward campus.
As soon as they get out of earshot, Nick sighs, pulling me tighter into the circle of his arms. “You okay?”
I nod into his chest and press my ear to it. We stand there in comfortable silence. After a few minutes, both our hearts slow from a rapid gallop to a steady thump. My lips still tingle and the fine hairs on my arms are alert with want, but I sigh into it all rather than act on it.
For the first time in a long while, I let myself enjoy a moment of warmth and safety without wondering if it’s real.
25
“TONIGHT?” ALICE’S VOICE goes near supersonic in my ear.
“Yeahhhh,” I say as I stroll through campus. It’s a gorgeous day, and I navigate the brick pathways with a smile on my face. On Wednesday it was surreal to walk among thousands of Carolina students who had no idea what really went on at their school. Now it’s Friday and that secret feels like nothing at all.
Reality sure does change after a kiss like that.
After he’d walked me home yesterday morning, Nick and I’d been texting each other constantly. I pretty much wore a perma-grin the entire day. This morning he sent a text asking me to go out with him and the other Legendborn tonight. I’d said yes, and then, like any good best friend, texted Alice. She’d called me back right away. I only have a few minutes to talk before I meet with Patricia, but I have to agree with Alice—melting on the phone with my best friend about any Nick-plus-lips topics is worth a quick phone call.
“Where?”
“Some bar downtown?
A beer garden? I’m not sure.”
She laughs. “You mean you don’t care.”
“Not really.” I don’t. I’m buzzing and eager to see Nick again.
“Okay, so is this a date?”
I turn down a narrow walkway while I think about her question. “Is it a date if there are like twenty other people around?”
“Wellll,” Alice starts. In the background I can hear the murmur of voices and the shhhhh sound of wind; she’s on her way to class somewhere near mid-campus. “I think it is if you act like it is. If it feels like it’s just the two of you, then it’s a date, no matter who else is around.”
“Um, how are you this wise?”
“I read a lot of books. Next question: What are you gonna wear?”
“Um…” Patricia waves at me from where she’s sitting against one of the campus’s ubiquitous low stone walls. I wave back and hope she doesn’t misinterpret the blanket of terror that has just taken over my expression. I hadn’t even thought about what to wear on a date.
“Bree!” Alice cries.
I’m a few feet from Patricia now, and not a second too soon. “Gotta go, Alice.”
“No! My parents are picking me up this afternoon, so I won’t be there to be your glam squad. Do I need to call Charlotte? She’s got cute clo—”
“Bye, Alice!” She grumbles but says goodbye. It’s a bummer that she won’t be around tonight. I make a mental note to at least text her a selfie before I go.
“Sorry about that,” I say to Patricia, and tuck my phone into my messenger bag.
“No need to apologize.” Patricia beams. Her burgundy lipstick matches today’s shawl. “Thank you for meeting me here.”
I look past her to take in our meeting location for the first time. I hadn’t thought much of the cemetery during the campus tour; it was common for old towns in former colony states like North Carolina to have historic graveyards in the middle of a modern development. I certainly hadn’t imagined I’d visit it during what was supposed to be a therapy appointment. “I did kinda wonder why you’d bring me here, not gonna lie.”
