Chapter Forty-Three
My city is burning around me.
I lie on my back, unmoving, in the ruins of my childhood home. Watching the flames lick at my body. Listening to the wood popping and crackling, waiting for the moment when what remains of the structure finally gives way and collapses and buries me. At least a hundred times, I've been back to this place since the night of Emberfall. A hundred times I've wished for it to end in death.
Take me, I silently beg.
But the fires never do.
I blink, and I'm awake, and the flames are gone. So is the heat. The light. I'm somewhere damp and cold and far away from every home I've ever known, with stone curving above me. Below me is a thin blanket, which does little to protect me from the hard surface I'm curled up on. Water drips somewhere nearby.
I'm in a cave, I realize.
Somewhere in the mountains north of Mouren, most likely.
A soft scraping sound echoes through the space. I know what it is after only a moment of closing my eyes and focusing on it, because I used to fall asleep to this sound sometimes, on nights when I stayed at Malachi's house. He was often up late working like this, always doing something with his hands and his knife. A lot of the methods I use for my own tinkering projects I learned by watching him—though he was always the neater artist, using only the smoothest chunks of wood, the sharpest blades, the most precise cuts.
I open my eyes again and try to sit upright…only to realize that my hands are bound together with chains. There's something around my right ankle, too, weighing me down. The horror of these things registers, but it lasts only a moment before I'm distracted by something else?—
By Malachi, who is sitting on a rock near the cave's entrance with a knife in his hand, carving something from a block of wood.
I stop breathing long enough that I nearly pass out again.
There's a small, nearly extinguished fire at his feet. He's blocking all of its warmth and most of its light, the red-orange glow reaching only far enough to occasionally catch and flash against his knife.
I try to speak but nothing comes out.
I've had far too many nightmares that start in similar ways.
A strangled noise finally escapes me, and Malachi's hands go still at the sound. He angles his head toward me, a soft smile spreading across his face.
“Owyn.” He breathes my name like he's releasing a secret, like it's a gift he's been holding on to for all these years. “It's been far too long. I've missed you.”
It's somehow more horrifying than anything yet—this greeting paired with the smile that still hasn't left his lips. Like nothing has changed and he never left. Like I never watched him die, never put flowers on his gravestone, and all the tragedies and vows I've built so much of my life upon are suddenly just…gone.
I make more of an effort to right myself, scrambling and slipping awkwardly to sit up, straining and twisting in my bindings. I start to lose my balance, but I manage to fall back against a broken stalagmite—to brace myself against it, so at least I'm still upright, still able to look Mal in the eyes as he turns to face me more fully.
“Relax,” he says. “You're safe here. And I apologize for the way we had to take you. It wasn't really my idea, but some of my soldiers were getting restless, demanding a move be made. Though I do have to admit that I was curious, too, about how you would react to her distress.”
“Her distress…” This snaps me briefly into full, furious clarity. “What the hell did you do to my dragon?”
“She's fine, now. Close by. Contained.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
“I don't think you want the gruesome details right now. You’ve had a rough enough night already.”
I'm suddenly shaking so badly I can't bring myself to reply.
“Are you cold?” He doesn't wait for my answer, just stands and removes his fur-lined cloak, crossing the space to drape it over me. His hands linger for a moment after he secures it around my shoulders, close enough that I can see the familiar rough edges of his knuckles. The emerald ring that belonged to his father. The scar that bisects the side of his left hand, which he got during the summer we first met, when hescaled the fence behind my house in the dark and caught the rusted iron edge at the top.
His cloak smells like smoke and cold metal. Not like him. Not like the pine and warm earth I remember. I want to rip it off me and throw it out of the cave, and I want to go with it, to run away and never look back and try to make sense of any of this.
But now he's close enough to me that I can fully take in his appearance, and so the only thing I actually manage to do is stare.
It's like coming home after a long time away, finding that everything is where I left it and yet nothing feels entirely the same. His deep brown eyes are familiar but harder. More calculating. His dark hair is longer, his face sharper within the soft curtains of it. He always carried himself with an easy confidence, but now the casual stillness feels like a trap lying in wait, rather than the openness that used to make me feel so safe in his presence.
He's recognizable, but more like a monument to the man I loved rather than the man himself. One sculpted by the hands of an artist who understood exactly how to recreate him without understanding what was worth recreating.
