“No, no. They’re just romantic like that.” Reeve rocked his head and chuckled but then settled into another pensive stare at the ceiling. “I’m happy for them too,” he announced suddenly. “I want them to…to figure out where they belong.”
“That’s kind of you, Reeve.”
His hand released her hair and dropped with a thunk. “No, it’s not. My heart feels…not kind about it. It’s selfish, but I don’t want them to go because then I’ll be alone.”
She watched his head tip back and eyes squeeze shut with the admittance. She laid her hand on his chest. “You won’t be alone,” she assured him. “Wherever you go, you’ll belong there. Your heart could belong anywhere.”
Reeve lifted a hand and placed it atop hers, squeezing lightly, eyes still closed. “May I ask one more question?”
“Yes, anything.”
She endured the next moment with held breath as his heart beat steady and slow beneath her palm.
Celeste leaned closer. “Reeve?”
He opened his mouth, and then he promptly started snoring.
“Well, crickets.”
It felt interminable, but it was only a short while later that Celeste found herself tucked into her own cot, alone. She pulled her blanket up to her chin and stared into the darkness of the low ceiling, mind foggy and on the verge of losing wakefulness. The day had been long and the night…strange.
She would pick some sailor’s fennel in the morning from the big patch that grew wild behind the temple to treat Reeve’s inevitable headache and fetch one of the old concoctions from the kitchen if his ailment required more. That…that was a good thing to focus on as she tried to will herself into sleep. Not his words, not the drunkenly slurred ones, not the melancholic ones, and not the ones he’d stuttered out to the nosy children in the tavern.
But as her eyes closed, she could see his face behind her lids, how he’d looked in the forest when the noxscura had cleared. He had been there, right there, so quickly, and he had been scared. She hadn’t seen that before, not actual fear on the holy knight’s face, and never had she seen someone scaredfor her.
She could still feel the warmth of his hand on hers, the bump of his shoulder against her belly, the pressure of his fingertips on her thighs. Her body melted into the stiffness of the cot, but the image in her mind dissolved into murkiness.
“You’ve had a busy night, pet.”
Celeste’s eyes flew open, heartbeat pounding. There was only darkness in the little room, darker even than it had been a moment prior, but she was alone.
Just a dream, surely—she hadn’t heardhim.
“Do you still have time, I wonder, for me?”
No, that voice was unmistakable.
“Syphon?” Celeste sat up, limbs heavy with ale. She blinked, but there was still nothing, though it was a stranger nothing, not even the shadows of furniture in her chamber.
“I’ve not been sleeping that long, and yet it is almost as if you’ve abandoned me.”
Sliding her legs over the edge of the bed, it was like dragging herself through murky water, her eyes refusing to adjust to the darkness. “Are you here?”
“Yes. I’ve come, as I said, to discuss your reward.”
There was a tickle at her face and across her knees.
Celeste pulled back from the nothing before her, ungraceful and slow in the disorienting dark. She pressed a hand to her locket, but it was immobile under her palm. There was a brief moment of dread with the noxscura inaccessible, followed by a brief moment of relief—had he already given her what she wanted?
“You were clumsy in that forge. Your command over the noxscura is too hesitant, too weak. You have much room for improvement.”
Celeste knew this, yet to hear it was always painful even when it was delivered with something like affection.
“I can make you better though. I can give you the strength you require. And then your power will be limitless.”
“Limitless?”
“That’s what I do.” Syphon’s presence was suddenly upon her like a cloud, settling in every direction, and it weighed her down.
