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My heart twinged. “I’m so sorry, Solin.”
He kept stirring the oily ash. “I understood. We still cared for one another, but the hurt that our coupling didn’t produce younglings broke whatever happiness we once had. Tral has often tried to make me take another mate. To try for more offspring—an heir that will eventually inherit everything I did—but I know it wasn’t my mate’s fault we couldn’t have babes. It was mine.”
His voice roughened. “I had a bad case of fevers when I was young. Before our healers were as skilled as they are now, I danced with death for a full moon. I believe that sickness made me...fruitless.”
He stopped stirring, his eyes blazing with awed affection. “I’m telling you this because, for so long, Tral and I have feared that the linage of chief and Spirit Master would die out with us. I could produce no heirs, and his showed no aptitude for the flames. Yes, they carry the spark of fire, like all Quelis do, but they can do no more than conjure a simple flame.”
His voice thickened with gratefulness. “But the day the fire whispered about your arrival, I felt hope. True hope. You might come from origins unknown, Runa, and you might carry a power different from the one I do, but there is no mistaking that you were brought to me for a purpose. I might not have created you with my own flesh and blood, but you are mine in every way that matters.”
Reaching across the small space between us, he squeezed my fingers kindly. “It was a certainty when the fire told me your name. How the dead language that no one is meant to speak, yet you use so fluently, means bee. Life giver.”
He chuckled under his breath, looking at his own marking. “I carry the mark of a wasp,” he murmured. “The kin of a bee even if we are different.”
Letting me go, he dipped the thin awl into the stirred mixture and gathered up enough oily ash to fill the etched channel. Tapping it once, he looked up and held it poised in his fingers. “Tell me where, Runa. Tell me where I can scribe you with our link. So everyone in Quelis will know that you are my daughter. Even if our skin holds different shades and our hair couldn’t be more different. You will always have me as your protector and friend.” His eyes darkened. “And father...if you’ll have me.”
Tears burned my eyes, making him dance and shimmer. I swallowed hard, unable to speak. I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve such welcome and love, but it healed a savagely wounded part of me. The part that still bled inside, never healing, letting a river of my grief trail behind me wherever I went.
Without a word, I held out my right arm. The same as his.
His eyebrows rose as he caught my gaze. “You sure?”
I nodded as a tear rolled down my cheek.
With a heart-hugging smile, he leaned forward and swiped the droplet away with his thumb. “I’m yours, Runa. From now and forever. Please remember that when we step outside this lupic. Please remember that when you learn the rest of what comes with this gift and obligation.”
My insides tensed; questions crawled on my tongue to ask.
There was something he wasn’t telling me. Something big that made him hunch with secrets.
My arm twitched backward of its own accord, shielding myself from whatever unknown rules I might face, but with a quick groan of reluctance, Solin snatched my wrist and prevented me from pulling away. “I’m sorry for what I must do.”
With tight eyes and strict determination, he bowed over my hand and spread my fingers with his. Too fast for me to refuse, he pierced my skin with the bone and wood awl, pressing the ooze of ash into my body.
The instant he punctured me, a slashing burn licked through my blood.
I stiffened, my arm going rigid in Solin’s hold.
I tried to pull away, but the pain rendered me utterly immobile, frozen for him to draw on. “Solin, stop—”
It crested with hot, hot agony.
“Just breathe through it. I promise the burning will cease once I finish the tattoo.”
I bit my lip, drawing blood as I fought against the mind-consuming scorch. My vision scattered as if my mind walked in two worlds again.
Hotter and hotter, I gasped under the onslaught.
He kept drawing—kept slicing apart my flesh and feeding in the ash from the fire that’d given so much and tried to take so much in return.
My head swam.
I lost track of time.
I was sick and hot and feverish and shivery.
I sank deeper into myself, into the pain, into the empty space that suddenly existed between this world and another.
And as dusk settled outside, the lupic filled with a different sort of light.
