Page 58 of Crown of the Dunes

“It’s almost as if…” Erix swallowed hard. “As if the desert wanted to keep me from you. Like she knew that you had the power over me to pull me away from my mission of healing her. The desert knows that just like Kelvar’s power and madness runs in my veins, so does his weakness. She formed this bond between us—whatever it is—so you could rid the desert of Lord Alasdar’s evil, and now she wants to cut us apart once more. But you are too deeply woven into the fabric of my soul, and I find myself following in Kelvar’s footsteps, even though I know where they lead.”

My heart broke so forcefully that I thought I could hear it crack at the fear I saw written into the lines of his face. With his mask on, wrestling a tricrith with nothing more than a chain, it was easy to forget the man underneath and the responsibility he burdened himself with. But he had once told me he feared the way he felt about me—that the world would not survive it. I knew what it was to fear oneself, and I ached to lift that weight from his shoulders.

I shook my head, my hands moving up from his chest to cup his face. “You are not cursed to the same fate as Kelvar.”

“No,” Erix agreed, “because I will restore the Heart he stole.” His gaze drifted up to the ceiling, and mine followed, imagining that just two floors above us, through the solid stone, laid the Heart that could heal the magic of the desert.

“We need to get to it as soon as possible. The tricrith appearing today is a sign that the desert is only descending further into her anger,” he said.

I hesitated, my throat tight. Trying to get the Heart had already cost me dearly, and icy fear pulsed in my veins at the memory of what had happened in that tower.

Erix seemed to sense my reticence. “We can’t afford to wait.”

“Thanks to storms and an earthquake, the grain harvest is likely not going to be enough to feed the city,” I conceded. “And the day that the clans attacked, another monster of legend appeared, like a huge skeletal bird. If not for Daiti’s help, I’m not sure I would have been able to kill it.”

Erix’s shoulders drew up toward his ears, and he appeared oddly sheepish before saying, “Oh, sorry about that. I may have ridden the gravehawk into the city.”

I blinked at him dumbly. “You did what?”

“Well, I had to get over the walls, and it was going to be easier than trying to blast the gate down,” he said, as if wrangling a creature of legend was a simple matter of tactics. But what he said about the gates drew my attention back to the matter at hand.

“We won’t be able to blast these doors down. The glass… it can’t be broken.”

My heart rose into my throat, the image of that horrible night when we had tried to break the glass burning behind my eyes as I closed them and took a deep breath. The way blood had trickled from Queen Ginevra’s lips as she stared lifelessly up at the ceiling—gone so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to beg her forgiveness for what I’d done. I was the reason she had died; my desire to get the Heart at whatever cost so I could bring Erix back had thrown Kelvadan into chaos. I hadn’t even realized what I was doing when I grabbed the queen’s power and shoved it against that impenetrable barrier, and it had killed her.

I shook my head, both at Erix and to expel the horrible vision from my mind. “The glass didn’t even crack. Even with both of us, it wasn’t nearly enough.”

Something dark passed over Erix’s vision, but then he set his jaw and squared his shoulders. The warrior I had fought back-to-back with returned. “I haven’t been suppressing my power for years. If anybody can get those doors open, it’s the two of us.”

I shook my head. “No. I—” I swallowed before I could find my voice again. “I’m the reason your mother is dead. I took her power and used it when we tried to open the door, and it broke her. I won’t lose you too. Not after I just got you back.”

He paused, and fear rose up to choke me. He was going to scream at me in rage. He would bring this palace down around my ears for what I had done.

Instead, he grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand back to his chest, placing it over his own heart so I could feel it beat.

Lub dub. Lub dub.

“You will not hurt me. Our magic is one and the same, and all my power is yours to command.” His voice was so calm and sure, where so often it crackled with rage or hurt, that my eyes burned.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

“Even when I shouldn’t,” I admitted.

“Then let’s go save the desert.”

Chapter fourteen

Erix

Itried to stifle my disappointment as Keera pulled on her pants and a loose tunic, hiding her sun-kissed skin from my view. Even with most of her right side bearing the shadows of burn marks, faded enough that you could only see them when you were close enough to touch, it was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It stretched out endlessly like the golden sand under the sun, full of promise and peace. Now, with the faint scars, the ripples even mimicked the way dunes formed waves under the shifting winds.

I wished I could spend the hours from now until dawn tracing my fingers over it, inspecting every inch to make sure she really had healed. I wanted to run my hands over the leg that had been broken, to satisfy myself that it was whole. I hadn’t missed the way it had given out under the force of the tricrith’s blow this afternoon.

But for now, there were more pressing matters.

I had made my sacrifices to get my heart back. Now we had to help the desert get hers.

I pulled my own shirt back on and draped my leather tabards over my shoulders before tying my sash back around my waist to hold them in place. Keera had traded out the ornate gold and green wrap from the funeral for a plain tan tunic, reminiscent of what she wore when we traveled together. After lacing on her brown leather boots, she tiptoed toward the door from the bedroom.