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Screaming voids, what a bastard I am. What an absolute selfish bastard.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper again.
And I am. I’m sorry for everything.
Chapter23
Alindra
LET ME
Wherever I am, it’s warm.
I hold my breath for a heartbeat, feeling for magic. Trying to pull the various shards of my memories back together. And then I let my breath out slowly, listening to my body.
I ache all over with the dull pain of muscles that have been pushed too far. But it’s better than the way I felt when I first pulled my hand off the silver pipe in the Towers, when the old god’s magic first left me. Then I felt like my joints had been filled with broken glass, like my bones were trying to push their way through my skin.
And then I shoved Phaedron through a hole in reality, and together we crashed into a world that was colder than anything I’d ever imagined. That memory sends a shiver across my skin, despite the warmth of the air in my lungs and the soft press of heavy fabric on my chest. When I inhale, it smells like Phaedron, the subtle spice of illusion magic and the deeper, richer scent of his body.
Where in the stars many names am I? I move my fingers across the soft weave of warm, thick cloth that must be Phaedron’s cloak. That’s one of my last memories, Phaedron pulling his cloak around me as the cold sank into my aching body, making my magic-deprived muscles convulse.
Well, that and Phaedron screaming at me. My chest clenches; I make myself exhale slowly. In all the time I’ve spent with the man from the Lands Below, all the nights I slept beside the dying embers of a campfire with him an arm’s length away, I never truly realized how threatening he could look until he raised his hand, his eyes shooting fire, his lips pulled back in a snarl.
Suddenly, the air doesn’t feel so warm. I let my eyes flicker open. Roofbeams swim into focus above me, painted a flickering gold by the fire that crackles somewhere behind me. There’s a strange sound in this room, threaded through the crackle and hiss of the fire, but it takes me a moment to identify it.
It’s water. It comes again, the splash of a hand in a basin, followed by a soft hiss. I turn toward the sound and find Phaedron.
He’s sitting on the floor in front of the fire with his back toward me and a large basin of water beside him. And he’s not wearing a shirt. Firelight dances across his shoulders and tangles in his hair. He drags a handful of white cloth over his right shoulder, then down the tangled scar tissue that twists across his right side. My breath catches in my throat; Phaedron makes a low growl, like an animal caught in a trap.
Suddenly, the air shimmers around him, and the scent of his illusion magic twists through the smoke and heat. A perfect illusion arm materializes on his right side, its fingers flexing toward the fire. There’s something almost painful about the way Phaedron turns to look at the illusion he’s created, the arcing muscles of his illusion forearm, his long, delicate illusion fingers painted by firelight.
Heat rushes to my cheeks. This feels wrong, watching Phaedron’s naked back and the illusion magic that spreads to cover his scars. I close my eyes, turn my head back to the ceiling, and cough. Loudly.
By the time I open my eyes again, Phaedron’s illusion arm is gone. In its place, he’s wearing a loose white shirt that’s far too clean to be real. He smiles when our eyes meet, and my insides feel like someone’s just lit a match. How can he do that to me? How can I go from so furious I wanted to strangle him to…this?
“Hey,” he says, in a voice that could melt ice. “How are you?”
“Okay,” I reply.
I push myself up from the nest of Phaedron’s cloak, then wince as something deep inside twinges with the memory of pain. Phaedron frowns, and I wave my hand in the air as if dismissing a question he hasn’t asked.
“How are you?” I ask.
“Fine,” he says.
His smile doesn’t even flicker. There’s no hint of the hiss and growl I heard earlier, or of the look on his face just before I closed my eyes.
“Where are we?” I ask, taking in the little room around us. It seems to hold nothing but a fireplace, a bed, and shadows leaking in through the narrow window.
“In a place called Fringe,” Phaedron replies. “It used to be a town.”
His use of the past tense makes me feel like the shadows in the room are growing thicker, and perhaps moving closer. Phaedron smiles like he can’t feel it, that vague sense of threat, the thickening darkness.
“This is where we opened the portal to your bedroom,” he says. “You brought me right back.”
Something in my gut tightens.You can’t be here, Phaedron screamed when we first landed, when the agony of losing the old god’s magic was still ripping my insides apart. And he wasn’t wrong. According to everything he’d told me, the Lands Below will kill me. Me, and the life I’m carrying.
I look down at my hands, which wrap around my waist as if they could protect what’s there, the little spark that might, over the months that follow, become a new life. There’s so damned much that can go wrong between now and then. My own mother refused to even speak of a pregnancy until she was well into her second year.
