Page 120 of Heart of the Desert

Finally, I pulled back to look at his face in wonder. My fingers drifted up to brush his cheekbone. I had memorized these angles just minutes ago, thinking it was my last chance. Now, I stroked them with the intent of doing so every day, filled with the hope for the first time that I would get to watch them change and soften through the years. Although, with his strength in the desert’s magic, it was likely to be decades before he showed any signs of age at all.

“You healed me.”

“Alyx helped,” he admitted, pushing my hair back from my face, several curls having escaped their braid in the chaos.

“But the power was yours.” I spoke with certainty. “I feel it.” I laid my hand over my chest. Now, the tether between us was different, but stronger and brighter than ever. It ran directly from beneath by breastbone to his own chest. Our hearts beat as one. They were one.

“I gave you my heart in every sense possible,” he admitted, putting our foreheads together. “I can only hope we do not pay for it the same way Kelvar and Alyx did.”

I shook my head. “We won’t,” I promised, before telling him what the desert had told me while I lingered between life and death. It was not my death, but our willingness to sacrifice that had healed her.

“So, it worked?” Erix asked. “The desert is whole again, even though the gem remains broken?”

The world seemed quiet and bright around us, and while screams of horror and the cries of desert beasts no longer came from outside, I began to hear voices and activity again.

“Let’s go see.”

The walk down through the palace and into the courtyard felt like something out of a dream, as if I were seeing everything with fresh eyes. Perhaps I was, having been born anew after being brought back from death. And with this rebirth, I was not the child of parents who had abandoned me. I was a daughter of the desert, and she loved me as fiercely as I loved her.

Erix kept his hand in mine, and we found ourselves leaning on each other for support as we stumbled down the stairs, side by side. The exhaustion of a long battle had caught up with us. We had fought from dawn until late afternoon, and then Erix had dragged me back from death by the heel.

I couldn’t bring myself to regret the bone-deep exhaustion that made my limbs feel like they had been filled with wet sand. The relative quiet told me it had been worth it. No gravehawks wheeled outside the windows and I could not hear the clattering of bone spiders climbing up the stairs.

I shuddered. With any luck, I would never hear the approach of another bone spider in my life.

I was doubly sure that it had all been worth it until we got to the courtyard and saw the evidence of our victory. Calix was dead, the Heart healed, but a great battle had been waging on when we dashed into the palace.

Finally, we shouldered through the double doors into the palace courtyard, and I squinted in the burnished-golden light of late afternoon approaching evening. The angle of the sun cast elongated shadows across the courtyard, exaggerating the statue of Kelvar until it looked like he overshadowed the whole space.

But now, it was just an illusion. His sins had been cleansed, and his spirit no longer lingered, haunting Erix in the recesses of his mind.

A sigh of relief escaped my lips as I took in the sight of relative peace. The clash of swords and the cries of battle no longer filled the air. People still milled and hurried about, but I spotted riders of Kelvadan standing over knots of soldiers from Viltov, disarmed with their hands bound.

The reversal of the way this courtyard had looked when I was dragged from it, delirious with poison, made my new heart sing.

A cry still split the air. Not the angry shout of one engaged in battle, but a pure, almost joyous sound.

My eyes widened, and suddenly I was stumbling forward, my body trying to run before my exhausted legs could respond. Erix ran beside me as we followed the sound to an outbuilding to the side—a rider’s barracks right beside where we had left Aderyn, guarded by Badha and Izumi.

We crashed through the door, and immediately I was greeted by a sight that assured me that every bit of my sacrifice had been worth it—the scar on my chest and the tear tracks still staining Erix’s high cheekbones.

Aderyn was propped up on a nest of pilfered pillows, and in her arms, wrapped in mismatched blankets was a squirming bundle. The source of the screaming. Badha and Izumi bustled about her, as if they were consummate healers and not fearsome warlords.

I stood there, my mouth hanging open, finding absolutely no words. Aderyn looked up, gleaming with sweat and eyes looking heavy with exhaustion. Still, the beginnings of a smile were spreading across her face—a true smile, the kind she usually only reserved for Neven—only for her face to twist in horror.

“Keera.” Her voice was a rasp of terror, and for a moment, I was confused why she would be anything but overjoyed by this miraculous moment. Then, as Badha and Izumi rushed toward me, I looked down at my clothes. The entire front was coated with a waterfall of blood that had poured from the wound in my chest.

Hurriedly I waved them off. “I’m fine.”

“You look like you should be dead,” Izumi commented.

“It didn’t take,” I admitted.

The trio looked confused, but I shook my head. It was a story for another time. One I wasn’t sure I would even know how to tell.

The bundle in Aderyn’s arms renewed its screaming, as if upset the focus had moved away from him, even for a moment, and she looked back down to coo at it gently. It was such an odd noise coming from Aderyn, who usually only barked orders, that a short laugh of pure joy escaped me.

“You did it,” I said in awe, carefully approaching her side. I looked down to find a perfect, scrunched face and waving fists.