“No need for either of us to be cold,” he said quite logically and gestured to the bed.
Amma had taken off the velvety outer dress she’d been wearing, a shorter, linen dress beneath. It wasn’t the tiny chemise that had been burned into his mind, but her legs and arms were bare and would need to be kept warm.
She finally nodded to mostly herself and climbed onto the bed, hugging the far edge as Damien went around to the other side. Settling in, even beneath a shared blanket, there was enough room between them for a whole pantheon of gods. If only he could remind her of how bold she’d been not so long ago. The Chthonic word would do it, but he had promised her he would not use it again. As they lay there, the lights of the room seemed to know, dimming themselves.
“Damien?”
“Yes?” he answered too quickly in the dark.
“I’m sorry that I got us stuck here in the Everdark when we could be out looking for your mother instead.”
Damien’s breath caught. He had put that thought completely out of his mind. “This was our only alternative,” he struggled to say.
“I’m also sorry for what I implied about your father.”
“Please, don’t be.” He stared up at the chandelier above them, the only source of light in the room gone shadowy and blue, reflecting over the icy ceiling like stars. “I requested your honesty, and you gave it.”
“But it upset you, and I don’t want—”
“It’s all right.” He couldn’t think on it: there was no forest for him to storm off into this time with spare trees to accidentally infect. In fact, just the opposite—there was a room with what amounted to tiny bottles of unholy arcana that he could…bloody Abyss, he had no idea just what he could do with them, but it would be nothing good. His stomach balled into a knot. “I do believe we should leave here as soon as possible though.”
“You don’t like it here.” She shifted in the darkness. “And you really don’t like King Wil.”
“No,” he answered earnestly, “but I would also like to return to other business.”
The quiet lingered, as wide as the space between them, and then Amma’s voice peeked into it with a slight rasp. “I have a confession I need to make to you.”
“About the fae?” He heard his own voice, uncomfortably flat with barely contained jealousy.
“No.” She displaced the blankets, fidgeting. “It’s only about me. Something I did that may have been sort of bad.”
Damien silently thanked all the dark gods and demons and basest beasts and may have even sneaked in a gracious prayer to that Sestoth Amma admired so much that the chamber was dark and they were far apart so that she could not see how his interest, among other things, had suddenly piqued. He cleared his throat. “Oh?”
“Yeah, um, so.” Amma rolled toward him. There was still an ocean of mattress between them, but it felt like the tide had just gone out. “Lycoris offered to take the talisman out of me, and I turned her down. I know I shouldn’t have, but—”
“No,” Damien stopped her. “I hoped she might have had another way besides changing you, but it would not have been acceptable to trade your current life for the talisman. I never intended for you to stay there with them, unless you wanted to, of course, but that decision was…” Damien rubbed his face. “I am sorry I even placed it before you.”
“There’s something else,” she said, tracing a finger along the blankets. “I had this dream.”
Damien nearly sat straight up, but he bit down on his tongue and kept himself flat on his back. He could scarcely believe she was about to tell him.
“It was about a tree.”
Death could have come for him right there in the form of disappointment, and Damien wouldn’t have known the difference. “I imagine you have a lot of dreams about trees, Amma.”
She sat up then, and he watched her pull her knees to her chest and wrap her arms around them in the dark. “Well, I ended up meeting the tree from this dream, and it told me how to get the talisman out.”
Damien’s brow shot up. “It spoke to you?” He too had talked to a tree recently. Sort of.
“It said removing the talisman was something I should be able to do to myself, and it offered me help to do it right then.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “But I’d dreamt about purging the talisman before, and it hurtsomuch, Damien. I didn’t know dreams could do that, make you feel pain like that, make you think you were dying, but it was like being cut open and having my heart torn out, and I couldn’t go through with it. I want to help you—I mean, I don’t want you to unleash a demon on the realm and destroy it—but Idowant you to have your father back. But I just couldn’t.”
Damien swallowed back a lump in his throat, shaking his head. For all Amma had been to him and all she had done for him, it was the thing she hadn’t that suddenly struck him so deeply. Damien had been privately glad to not have the talisman readily available—it meant he could not follow his father’s orders just yet—but more than that, unburdening Amma of the talisman so that she could make choices based solely on what she wanted also meant dissolving what tied the two of them together. What had at first been a hateful and cumbersome chain had grown into a tether he desperately held onto, an anchor he relied on in an arcanely dark sea so easy to become lost in, and as selfish and terrible as that was, the thought of severing it pierced him deeper than any blade ever had.
But he couldn’t tell her any of that, no matter how reassuring it might have been in the moment. She was so concerned with him, with his pain, his worries, hisfeelings, that she didn’t need yet another reason to not make a decision that she wanted to make.
Her voice broke back into the quiet. “I’m sorry I was weak.”
“Do not be sorry, Amma,” he said with none of the usual exasperation of that sentiment, pushing himself up to sit as a distraction from the other things, the syrupy, heartfelt things, that he wanted perilously to say.
