His throat rolls before he nods, silence slipping by. When he finally opens his eyes again, he looks at me with a gaze full of ache. “Slátra wants you to know that her heart still beats with yours,” he says, the words thick like syrup. “And that she’s waiting.”
I try to respond. Swallow.
Try again.
“I know,” I finally rasp, moving my fingers farther up his face until the tips of them brush his bruised and split cheekbone. One of too many wounds. “You should go back to sleep. You need it.”
His face threatens to buckle again, every muscle in his body tensing hard like this rocky mountain we’re entombed beneath. “I’m afraid I’ll open my eyes and this will all be a dream,” he rasps, voice cracking. “That you’ll both be—”
“Sleep,” I implore, painting my finger down his nose, over his cheek again. Mapping all the slants of his face. “Please, Kaan.”
He searches my eyes, a line forming between his brows. “Those words hold too much power on your lips, Moonbeam.”
“Really?” I offer him a smile that’s much lighter than I feel. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Lie,” he murmurs with the slightest lift of his lips. The ghost of a smile, gone in a beat.
He reaches up, brushes his calloused thumb across one of my dimples as his body loosens, features softening.
He finally closes his eyes.
I lean forward and kiss both his lids, and a dense sound moves up his throat before slumber pulls him away, somewhere he can hide a little longer. That’s all I want for him right now. For his soul to have a chance to breathe before he faces the harsh realities of everything that has come to pass.
Again, I look at our daughter, her chest rising and falling in slow but steady beats. Again, I wonder how I missed it all.
Everything.
How it came to be that she resorted to writing those three lonely words on a parchment lark she sent to someone who had long since passed. What pain she must’ve been feeling at the time. What horrors she must’ve gone through.
The tips of my fingers tingle. That side of me that’s been feral for bloody vengeance since the dae I came to beneath this mountain is perched forward on its haunches, frothing for the answer.
For itsanchor.
I reach over, use my thumb to smooth Kyzari’s brows before planting a kiss between them.
Her pale lashes flutter in response.
I take her hand in one of mine, Kaan’s in my other, drawing strength from their presence as I close my eyes and drop within myself, gently removing the tendrils tangled around my hands. With heavy gratitude, I set them on a rock, then disassemble the stony pyre I piled upon the splinter on the shore of my internal lake.
Exposing its stark glow.
Lifting it close to my chest, I move toward the stretch of ice capped across the lake, using my free hand to carve a hole that’s big enough to slip through. Not a single hesitation hinders me while I swim down into my depths, coming upon my Other’s luminous den … where a massive Moonplume is bundled on her nesting perch, radiating an argent luminosity I’ve only seen from one other.
The small wonky one I loved so much.
Her wing is fanned around her, leaving only her tail visible from this angle—draped on the perch’s border.
I don’t dart away or try to hide. I don’t rush back to the surface. Instead, I swim closer, lower on the perch’s edge … filled with a quiet melancholy that threatens to shatter me. Because there’s a silence down here that tells a deathly tale. No deep, rumbling breaths.
No heartbeat.
She’s here but … not.Because I lost her, too.
I lost Slátra, too.
With that heavy stone lodged in my chest—a weight I realize has been there since the moment I woke as Raeve—I reach forward and drag my fingers along the leathery part of her tail.
The feel of her is so familiar that it’s like coming …home.
