Séverin reclines against his cushions. He has not felt so light in ages, so untethered from sorrow. “Are you asking for a demonstration?”
“Or two,” says Laila, leaning over to kiss him fully. After a moment, her lips move to his ear. “Or three.”
Séverin does not waste time. In the back of his head, he knows that this heaven cannot last. That, eventually, the reality he has left behind will assert itself once more, inevitable as the dawn. He thrusts his hands into her hair, holding her against him, savoring each quick gasp and each small sigh. He kisses the line of her neck and traces her every curve with wonder and frustration, as if she is holy calligraphy in a language he cannot speak but longs to decipher. Eventually, Laila pulls him down to her, slinging her leg over his hip, guiding him to her. The world falls away. They come together like a hymn, the sacred set to song, and though Séverin knows he is not a god, their brief possession over the eternal makes him feel infinite.
Later, much later, Laila curls against his chest. He reaches for her hand, kissing the henna on her wrist. The city below is silent. A seam of gold touches the sky, and Séverin cannot account for the slow dread working its way through his body.
“You know, don’t you?” asks Laila softly.
There is a lump in his throat. Yes, he has guessed, but he cannot make himself say it.
“It was the only way, Séverin,” she says. “Once the lyre was played, the world changed. The temple was both the beginning and end of Forging, and as I am both Forged and human, the temple asked me to stay and guard it. I will oversee its power as it removes Forging from our world. In return… I will heal. I willlive.”
Séverin has always been in awe of her, but in this moment, his awe borders on reverence. The temple can indeed grant powers of godhood, but it has not chosen him. It’s chosen her. He reaches for her hands, kissing the pulse at her wrist, and they lie like this for a few moments longer until Laila speaks once more.
“You promised me miracles,Majnun,” she says, stroking his chest. “Tell me of them now, so I have something to dream of.”
For a moment, Séverin cannot speak through his pain, but dawn is swift, and time is finite, and he must make use of what has been given to him.
He curls her hand to his chest and thinks of miracles. Once, he had promised her glass slippers and apples of immortality. Now, he wishes to show her something else entirely.
“I’ll… I’ll learn how to make cake,” he says.
Laila snorts. “Impossible.”
“No!” he says. “I will. I’ll make you a cake, Laila. And we’ll… we’ll have a picnic. We’ll feed each other strawberries to the utter disgust and repulsion of our friends.”
Laila is quietly shaking, and he hopes it is from laughter. Night fades quickly. A poisonous tinge of blue touches the sky.
“Do you promise?” she asks.
“I promise that and more, if it will make you come back,” says Séverin. “I promise to take you and Hypnos to the ballet in winter. We can stand in line for smoked chestnuts and try to stop Zofia from recreating such a delicacy at home with an open fire in thelibrary. We can spend a whole day by the fireside, reading books and ignoring Enrique reading over our shoulders—”
“Majnun,” she says.
But he is not done. He grips her hand tightly.
“I promise that we can waste time as if we were gods with endless troves of it.”
The light grows brighter, and Séverin turns to her. He kisses her fiercely. Her tears wet his face.
She splays her hand against his, and when the light touches their joined palms, it is as if they have been knit together by a thousand dawns.
“You and I will always be connected,” she says. “As long as I live, so will you. I will always be with you.”
Séverin can feel it—this new interweaving between their very souls—but he does not understand what it means.
“Laila… wait. Please.”
He knows he will never forget her, but he memorizes her all the same: sugar and rose water, the bronze line of her throat, her ink hair, such that only poets may write in its shade. When he kisses her again, her teeth hit his, and the moment is so achingly human, it nearly moves him to tears.
“I will come back to you,Majnun,” she says. “I love—”
Dawn arrives.
It steals the night and her last words in one breath, and then—as ceremoniously as it brought him to the floor of heaven—it unceremoniously releases him back to his reality.
38
