There’s a stretch of silence that feels too fragile.
I turn to see she’s spun, now facing forward with her back to the cliff, arms appearing heavy at her sides, chin dropped. A submissive stance.
Vulnerable.
I yearn to see her eyes, but they’re cast in the darkness of her lashes as she looks down at the spring’s rippled surface, her lips twitching.
“Raeve …”
“I get it.”
The words are the slash of a claw.
“You—”
“What you were trying to tell me back at the village. It—” A pause, a swallow as she cracks her neck, then speaks past tight lips. “It …hurts.”
No two words ever sounded so awkward coming out. Like she tried to punch them into shape first, but they still arose squirming. Nor have two words ever relieved me of so much weight, my breaths coming easier, lighter than the last.
Hope …
For her, I’m so easily the fool.
“I’m sorry, Moonbeam.” I reach back to set my tunic on the edge. “I suspected this part of the process might be …difficultfor you this time. You’ve been through much since you tamed Slátra.”
She flinches like I just struck her, cracks her neck again, hands balling into fists. Like just the mention of her fallen Moonplume has her preparing to battle something, leading me to wonder if bonding with Líri has shed light on the wound left from Slátra’s passing. If that’s the reason she’s struggling through this.
Hungry, isolating grief.
The strongest opponent I’ve ever encountered.
“Raeve … The bond hasn’t settled yet, has it?”
A slight shake of her head floods me with relief. Hits my heart with another strike of hope.
I nod, certain it’ll harden soon. I know of a male who took seven cycles to settle into his bond with a particularly boisterous Sabersythe—basically unheard of—and she’s been out here for almost five.
“If you completely abandon the tender side of your nature, it’s gone. There’s no retrieving—”
“Itwasgone,” she grits through clenched teeth. “Shejust spat it back out at me like a loose tooth.”
“Who? Líri?”
Raeve shakes her head, and my heart slams through its next beat.
I think back to the moment I pinned her beneath me in Bothaim, Rygun stretching my skin as we looked into pupils that reminded me of the sky in The Shade. As I grew almost certain I felt the presence of something …otherstaring back at me.
I’m almost scared to ask the question pressing on my chest.
“What do you mean?”
She takes me in from beneath heavy lashes. Although there’s still very little color around her pupils, I’m relieved to see the ring is thicker.“Doesn’t matter.”
I beg to differ. But if I’ve learned anything since I first laid eyes on her after all these phases of thinking she was gone from this world, it’s that it’s best to choose my battles. Or get stabbed to almost-death by her words.
“Grief walks hand in hand with love,” I say with my entire chest. “I know it’s tempting to cut away the pain, but that rib-cracking ache is proof that something good came first. Somethingworthremembering.”
“I didn’t come over here for a lecture.”
