by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Forty-Five
Darkness had long since fallen by the time the councilmen released Allara and Quinnon from the war room. Most of the corridors were deserted. People had given up for the night, gone to bed, or delved into the darkness and mayhem of the city.
Quinnon leaned a shoulder against the wall and scratched both hands through his wild hair. “What a day.” In the flicker of the candle globes, his skin was as gray as his two days’ worth of stubble.
Allara stared at the war room’s closed door. “It might have been worse. We could have gotten here too late. We have Chris to thank we didn’t.” She pulled his eyes to hers and waited for his acknowledgement.
He flashed a frown. “You don’t have to tell me that. I know that.”
“You’ve been relentless with him ever since he crossed.”
He stood away from the wall and faced her. “And you haven’t?”
“We both have.” In the beginning, she’d been harder on him than anyone. But if he’d won even her faith, then shouldn’t he be able to win anyone’s? “Lately, it just seems you’ve been even more set against him.”
“I’m not set against him. I could even learn to like the lad.” He paused, almost hesitating. Quinnon never hesitated. He always knew what he wanted to say and do.
He looked away for a second, then back. “I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to remember it. Just because Chris Redston’s heart’s in the right place doesn’t mean he’s going to save us all.”
The truth of his words trembled all through her. “I know.”
His good eye drilled her. “I’ve a feeling in my blood none of us are going to emerge from this unscathed. I don’t want you on hurting end anymore than have to be.”
She almost reached out to hug him, but stopped herself. Quinnon and his prudish warrior soul would probably be scandalized beyond words by such a display.
He turned to go. “Best get yourself off to a bed. The only good thing Mactalde’s given us today is the chance for a whole night’s sleep. We can’t do much of anything until we see his next move.” He brushed past. “Tonight’s likely to be the only chance you’re going to get for sleep for a long while more. I suggest you take it.”
She caught his arm as he passed, wanting to thank him somehow—for everything. “Quinnon—”
He just gave her hand a pat and stumped on down the hall.
Wearily, she turned and trudged up the stairs to the third floor. The surgeon’s assistant admitted her to Eroll’s darkened bedchamber, then retreated to the sitting room to give them privacy.
Eroll lay facedown, his face smashed in the pillow. When the light from her globe touched his eyes, he looked at her, and the side of his mouth lifted in a smile. “Appears I’ve died after all and ascended to the realm of angelic beauty. Jolly good.”
“That would be neither good nor jolly.” She set the globe on the night table and straightened the bedclothes. “How do you feel?”
“If I were going to be honest, I’d have to tell you I feel like someone kicked me off the Karilus Wall. However, since I’m being all gallant and brave, I suppose I’ll have to make some noise about never having felt better in my whole ruddy life.”
“You shouldn’t have gotten out of bed this morning.”
“I’ll admit to seeing the wisdom in that now. But when one feels the sky is falling, curiosity naturally gets the better of one.” He quieted. “It was bad out there today, wasn’t it?”
She waited until she had folded the sheet down over the top of the blankets. “Yes. It was. We’ve detonated Faramore Bridge and cut the skycar cables out of the city. We’re essentially stranded until Father arrives. But the good news is the city can hold out for an indeterminate amount of time. Mactalde will lose thousands if he attempts to invade across the water.”
She slid a hand between his cheek and the pillow, found it hot, and crossed the room to fetch a fresh pillow from the dressing room. When she returned, he allowed her to switch out the old one.
“Seems we owe a lot to your Gifted, doesn’t it?” he said.
She hugged the old pillow. “Yes. I think we do.”
A stray lock of hair fell across his forehead and made him look unbearably earnest. “I’m going to tell you something you may not know. You’re falling for him.”
Heat touched her cheeks, and she shook her head. “Hush. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She moved forward to give his blankets another tug.
He winked. “I will admit he’s not so charming and handsome as my dapper self, but I suppose one can’t expect the impossible.”
“No one could replace you.”
He let out a soft laugh. “Oh, my darling girl, God knows I love you. But I’m not what you need. Never have been, never will be.” His eyebrow arched. “Never claimed to be.”
“Stop. I mean it.” But even as she said it, she could feel the warmth of Chris’s presence in the back of her head. Reaching for it was almost a reflex now. When had she allowed him to become such a comfort to her? He felt nearer now than he had been for the last few hours. He was coming to her. She straightened away from the bed and steadied her voice. “I haven’t time for this nonsense.”
“Of course you do. Soon as this ridiculous war is over, it will be the only thing you’ll have time for.”
She stooped to smooth back the stray hair and then press a kiss on his forehead. “You’re an idiot.”
_________
She was all the way up in the back hallway on the fourth floor when Chris found her.
He held a sleepy-eyed jiswar cub in the crook of his arm.
“Where’d you find that?” she asked.
“My sister rescued him in the city. I was looking for Parry to take him to the kitchen for some supper. I’d take him myself, but I can’t find the kitchen in this place.”
“It’s in the basement.”
“Ah.” He grinned. “Well, I was only off by five levels.”
She crossed the hall into a small round room that hid the railed entrance to a downward-spiraling stairway. A skylight, set with blue and silver stained glass, glittered under the moon. More than half the panes had been smashed in the storm, and the wind filtered through the cracks. A double set of glass doors, still whole, lined the wall opposite and revealed a wide terrace.
“This is the servant’s staircase.” She walked around to the far side of the stair hole and turned back to face him. “It goes down to the kitchen.”
He propped his free arm against the railing. “I hear you had a run-in with Nateros today.” His voice hit a note somewhere between sternness and concern.
She stiffened. “Not with Nateros exactly. Just some people.”
His brows came together. “The same people I let into the palace earlier?”
She shrugged. “You didn’t know.”
“Tielle said they tried to kill you.” This time the note of concern strengthened.
“But they didn’t.”
“Yet.”
She rubbed the thin material of her tunic sleeve. “What happens to me doesn’t matter. So long as you survive, it doesn’t matter.” She looked at him. “Searchers have died for their Gifted before.”
“You’re not going to be one of them.” The set of his jaw was adamant.
The jiswar squirmed in his grip, propped its chin against his arm, and let out a long sigh.
She shivered. A week had passed, and so much had changed, since their conversation on Eroll’s balcony. She should have had time to think about what he’d told her, but somehow she hadn’t. Perhaps she’d deliberately not thought about it.
She’d never planned to marry. She’d never even planned to fall in love, and certainly not with him. But from the moment he had raced into her presence, bloody and defiant, he had been nothing she’d expected him to be. Every time she adjusted her expectations to fit his reality, he changed. She had expected a puppet, and a renegade had arrived. She’d resigned herself to the renegade, an
d a paladin had arisen.
Eroll said she was falling in love with him. Perhaps she was. Perhaps that was what frightened her more than anything.
She dragged in a breath and turned to the glass doors. “I come here to think, when the weather’s inclement.”
He circled the stairs. The floor creaked beneath him.
She kept talking if only so she wouldn’t have to listen to the rush of her pulse. “The servants don’t use these stairs very much in the evening. It’s almost the highest place inside the palace. On a clear night you can see the stars through the skylight.”
He stopped beside her and joined her in looking outside to where glass and crushed plants littered the octagonal stones of the terrace.
She rubbed at the shiver spots on her arms. “This war isn’t going to last forever. One way or the other, it’s going to end soon.”
His presence surged in the back of her head. “And when it’s over, I’d kind of like you to be alive.”
A spark of light bloomed in the center of her chest.
He leaned his shoulder against the wall next to her and canted his head to see her face. “Somebody has to be around to keep me out of trouble, right?”
“Every bit of trouble I’ve pointed out to you, you’ve promptly jumped into the middle of.”
“Here.” He lifted the jiswar into her arms. “You have the distinct appearance of a woman in need of something warm and furry.”
The jiswar sniffed her face, and her fingers caressed the snip of white up its nose. It licked her chin, and she murmured a laugh and craned her head back, out of its reach.
Chris stood in front of her, smiling at the jiswar, and then he looked up at her. The smile faded. “Allara.” His hand moved to her face and his fingertips touched her cheek, feather-light. He leaned nearer and tilted his face to hers. “What if I were to kiss you?” His voice deepened. “Would that be such a terrible idea?”
She lifted her face. Her words caught in her throat, once, twice. “I don’t know.”
He lowered his face to hers and kissed her softly. For an instant, he pulled back and his eyes found hers, asking permission. And then he kissed her again, deeper this time.
The sense of him in the back of her head churned and spread and dizzied her with its warmth. She almost pulled back. She wasn’t strong enough or brave enough for this. An enemy, with a sword in his hand, she could fight. Hatred and anger, she could wield. This was different by far. This left her bare and defenseless.
But Eroll was right. Somewhere along the way, somehow, she’d let him past her defenses. She’d welcomed him inside her walls and given him the key to her gates. She’d put her trust in him, without even meaning to. And despite all her fears, she couldn’t find it in herself to regret it.
He deserved her trust. He’d fallen, made mistakes, but he’d risen from them and faced them. He stood before her as a man, when so many had crumbled all around her when she’d needed them most. He’d seen into her depths. He’d understood her. And he wanted her anyway. Perhaps that was the most terrifying part.
She pulled back and tried to look anywhere but at him. She had to remember how to breathe. Her laugh sounded self-conscious even to herself. “You were right. About a war being a bad time to fall in love.” She made herself face him. “We haven’t the time for it.”
“The war will end.” He tilted a smile. “Maybe then we can make time.” Her sense of him said he was happy in spite of her rebuff, serene even. He wasn’t taking her words seriously at all. He was doing it again, seeing right past her shields and reading her down to her core.
She swallowed and forced a nod. It was a good enough fallacy to hide behind. By the time the war ended, they’d find all the work—and the damage—of falling in love already done.
He leaned away a bit. “You’re exhausted.”
She looked at her hand, frozen on the jiswar’s head, and smoothed it down his back once more.
She cleared her throat. “Does he have a name?”
“He’s just a stray.”
“Perhaps I’ll keep him.” She peeked up. “If your sister won’t mind.”
“I’m sure she’d be honored.” He rested both shoulders flat against the wall.
A strand of hair slipped past her cheek, and she slid it behind her ear, smoothing it between her fingertips. Then she looked at him. “What if I named him after you. Christian—that’s your full name, isn’t it?”
He raised both eyebrows. “You expecting to get rid of me so easily you’ll need to name your pet Christian to remind you of me?”
She shook her head. “Better to be safe, just in case.”
“I don’t know about that.” He peered at the skylight, where the glass glinted like shattered diamonds. “All that stuff people say about better safe than sorry. I lived that way for a long time, and it was a mistake. If we want to win, if we want to succeed at anything in life, we have to play all our cards. We can’t hold anything back, because we never know what we’re going to be dealt in the next hand.”
She stroked the jiswar, slowly. She didn’t need to hear these arguments from him. She’d spent a lifetime trying to refute them in the depths of her own lightless caverns. All her life, she’d hedged her bets. She never went anywhere without a fallback plan.
“If you don’t look at the future, you’ll never be ready for it,” she said.
“The world doesn’t turn on a steady axis.” His gaze dropped back to her. “And that makes the future a pretty slippery place. Life has to be more than a series of random coincidences. What’s happened to me here—to us . . . There has to be a bigger plan.”
She turned away from the glass doors. “I believe in the God of all and I believe He does have a plan.”
His eyes charted her face. She sensed his own exhaustion, his own searching. He wasn’t speaking to her out of a deep well of conviction, but more from a place of tentative and ongoing discovery.
“Maybe you want to believe that,” he said. “But you don’t. Even right now, there’s doubt in your face.”
She rubbed her thumb against her crooked forefinger. Her struggles, her failures, her broken dreams—they were a private graveyard she shared with no one, not even Eroll.
“My life has been a cliff.” Her lips barely moved around the words. “When I found my first Gifted when I was nine, it was as though someone had shoved me over the edge. I’ve been hanging there ever since. What I know, what I understand about life, is what I can feel—the rocks I’m clutching. Below me is the future, and, because I cannot see how far down it is, I am afraid to let go, even though I know I’m supposed to.”
“You’re afraid you’ll never stop falling.”
“Yes. But what if all these years, I’ve been hanging over a drop the length of my arm?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Let go and find out.”
“I suppose I can’t get past the thought that it’s better to hang on to what I know, no matter how much it hurts, rather than risk believing I have ten inches to fall—only to discover it’s really ten leagues.”
She looked away. She hadn’t meant to tell him all this, anymore than she’d meant to kiss him. These were things better not spoken of. If she kept them locked away, where only she could know of them, then she was the only one they could harm. And yet hearing herself saying the words, and watching him listen and accept without judging, was like opening the door of a dark room and letting in a pinprick of light.
In her arms, the jiswar gapped his mouth and curled his tongue in a yawn that ended with a whine.
“I should find him something to eat.” She looked up. “And you’re as exhausted as I am. We should sleep while we can.”
He nodded and pushed up from leaning against the wall. One hand reached out to her. “I’ll take him down to the kitchen.”
“No. You don’t know the way. And you probably need the rest more than I do.”
But she didn’t move just yet. She wanted to hold onto his assurances for just a
moment so the sparks might spread their warmth through the winter of her spirit. She wanted to thank him.
But she had no words, so she only nodded and started down the stairs.
He followed to stand at the entrance. “Alla.”
Only her father and Eroll used that nickname. She looked up through moonlight shaded blue and green by the stained glass in the skylight.
He propped both hands on the railing and leaned over the stairs. “Do me a favor.”
“Aye?”
“Take care of yourself.” His face softened. “Don’t jump off the cliff until somebody’s around to catch you.”
“For an instant today, I found myself believing with all my heart that you will be able to save Lael.” She filled her lungs with one great breath of resolve. “When the war is over and done with, perhaps then I’ll be able to let go of the cliff without fearing the fall.”
“I hope so,” he said.
She descended out of his sight, and with every step, the warmth of his presence seeped away a bit more, until only the familiar hum remained. As she walked the cold brick tunnels to the kitchens, that lessened too. But something remained. Something tiny and indefinable. Something different. Something better.
