Page 17 of Heart of the Desert

I nodded and stood, dusting myself off to little avail. Then I reached down to help Aderyn to her feet. She clasped my forearm and let me pull her up. Despite the unease lit in my belly by the circumstances of our meeting, I was glad to see her again, and some of my guilt at not being able to help her retake Kelvadan immediately eased.

I smiled ruefully. “Let’s get away from the edge of this cliff before anybody else falls in.”

The fire crackled and popped as it consumed the tough brush I had managed to find for our campfire. With the scent of woodsmoke on the air, and the five of us all camped together, it might have been peaceful after the chaos of the day.

An itch lingered under my skin, though, that made it hard to be idle. It coalesced in my belly into a shivering sensation, right at the base of the tether I shared with Erix. I looked around for him, but he was not seated by the fire. Instead, my awareness of his magic drew me toward the patch of dried scrub where the horses all milled together.

I stood and made my way over, finding him with Alza’s face in his hands. He pet her gently, even as the set of his shoulders was tense. I walked up behind him and put my hands between his shoulder blades. He tensed even further for a moment, as if ready to flinch away, then relaxed.

I frowned, unease curling in my belly. It reminded me of how he reacted to touch when we first met, as if he expected every contact to cause pain. Now, I feared the pain came from within his own mind.

“We need to talk to the others,” he said. “Decide what to do.”

“I know, although I’m finding it hard to sit still,” I admitted, hoping I could share his burden. Since Kelvar appeared to him, the knots in the magic around him had grown tighter and more tangled. I did not know how to untie them, but I hoped simply staying near would ease his mind. Nobody benefited from being alone with such spiraling thoughts. “It seems easier to fight the elements than to figure out what the desert is trying to tell us.”

Erix’s muscles twitched beneath my fingers. “It’s my fault.”

My frown deepened and my chest ached at the pain in his words.

“I’m going mad, and I’m dragging you with me,” he said, his voice quiet but hard with frustration. “I saw Kelvar again. And the voices grow so loud, I can barely think.”

My stomach dropped and cold washed over my skin despite the heat. The thought of Erix being pulled away from me, lost in his own mind even when his body remained near, made bile rise in my throat. The image of him twitching on the ground as Lord Alasdar trapped him in the room beneath the palace in his own mind flashed behind my eyes. I could protect him from creatures and storms with my body and my sword, but this was different. The cold weight of helplessness settled in my limbs as I searched for an answer.

“But being with me… it helps.” It was half a statement, half a question.

Erix’s arms around me had contained the lightning storms that danced in my skin before.

“It does,” he admitted, “but I know it affects you. You nearly dragged me with you when you lost control halfway across the desert from me. Before you even knew what you were doing. Now, you feel the same restlessness that I suffer from. At least one of us has to be sane to restore the Heart.”

He was not wrong—my magic pulled against me like a willful horse, nearly painful in its power every time he appeared to be fighting with apparitions and voices. I would take on even more of his madness if I could, though, if it would give him a moment’s peace.

“We will both restore the Heart,” I insisted. “We’ve helped each other before. We can do it again.”

Even as I said it, panicked guilt panged deep under my ribs. I had failed Kelvadan and had squandered the chance for a home there I had been desperate to hold onto after so long alone. I ached to save the city, but after being so intimately involved in its destruction, I feared I would not be able to. Erix was my true home now—one I had promised in blood that I would not fail.

“I can control the visions. I can keep them from affecting you,” Erix promised, sounding almost as if he were trying to convince himself more than me.

“I’ll help you. We will fight them together.” My words were firm, but a hint of desperation twisted in my chest. I had lost Kelvadan, and I could not lose Erix too, even if I didn’t deserve him—even if I couldn’t save, only destroy.

Erix nodded, but the motion was stilted and jerky. “Let’s go back to the fire. We need to speak with Aderyn and Elion and figure out why the desert reunited us and how we should continue on.”

We turned back toward the warm flickering light, away from the shadowed darkness of the night. I slipped my hand into his and interlaced our fingers so the scars across our palms brushed. At the sensation, he squeezed, and I tightened my grip in return. He had bandages around his fingers—he must have injured his hand in today’s rescue when I was too distracted by helping Dhara to notice.

Aderyn looked up as we rejoined the group, and I didn’t miss the worried hollows under her eyes, exaggerated by the flickering firelight. Their journey must have been as harrowing as ours so far.

“Do you have any idea why the desert brought us together?” I asked her without preamble. It was the question we had all been wondering, but I hadn’t wanted to burden Aderyn and Elion with unanswerable questions about the desert’s will until they had a chance to recover from dangling over a canyon.

She pursed her lips. “We were riding every day with the intention of finding the remaining clans. The only logical explanations are that their encampment and the ocean are in the same direction—or that the desert wanted us together.”

“Would…” I chewed my cheek, fearing that Elion and Aderyn’s journey would be longer than I had anticipated. I had hoped the clans would be united long before Erix and I reached the ocean. “Would Izumi lead her clans across the desert to the ocean?”

It would be a horrible journey for such a large caravan and would cost many lives—the sick and injured. But we hadn’t seen the clans since stealing into Izumi’s tent to steal the missing pages of Kelvar’s journal several months ago.

“Izumi’s fervor for healing the desert was only outstripped by my own,” Erix said grimly, “And she did not know of the Heart. She would take any action, no matter how extreme, if she thought it were necessary.”

“If she doesn’t know about the Heart or the temple there, what answers could the sea possibly hold?” Dhara asked.

I scrubbed a hand across my face. “Perhaps there is an illogical answer for how we found ourselves together once more.”