For the second time since arriving in Aethralis, I climbed the stairs to the Temple, built to house the Aetherian Gate. Though Kael was accustomed to being here, having served on the Council which regulated entry into Elydor from The Crooked Key on the other side, I was most certainly not.
It was a symbol of death, and hate, and the beginning of an instability that had lasted since the first human came to our realm. Even before Mother had died, there was much disagreement about who, if anyone, should be allowed entry. My father fought Galfrid every step of the way, exacerbated when the Aetherian king carved out land for what became the Kingdom of Estmere for the humans too.
And now, we were betraying him to reopen the portal to the human world once again.
“You’ve been quiet today.”
Lyra.
She hung back, presumably, to speak to me. Since the Thalassari queen and her king had arrived, Lyra and I had been mostly separated. Meetings and hushed conversations, a meal during which I said little and now, as dusk fell, the reason we were all assembled. Two of the three most powerful Elydorians, a princess and two princes… a delegation that had everyone who wasn’t previously aware of what was about to happen speculating.
Or so Kael had told me.
“There is much to distract me.”
I’d not stopped thinking of her for even a moment these past days. But giving into temptation—reaching for her, touching her, getting close to her—would serve only to make it more difficult when we parted.
“Much that does not,” she said as the others disappeared into the Temple. “Including me.”
“This is hardly the time to discuss… us.”
As I expected, my words angered her. Though it would have been difficult to tell before, I understood the nuances of Lyra’s expressions even as most would have thought her features unchanged.
“Of course,” she said, taking a step away from me, toward the others.
Grabbing her wrist, cursing myself for doing so, I stopped her.
“You lied to me. From the start.”
She didn’t attempt to pull away, though I did resist the order to tug her closer.
“I never lied,” she began, but I stopped her.
“Half-truths are lies still,” I clarified. “At least, in Gyoria. Here?—”
“I thought we agreed that maligning each other’s clans would further neither of our causes?”
I wanted to kiss her. Make love to her.
Make Lyra mine, fully and completely. The ancient words I’d spoken to her, more than once, weren’t given lightly. But there was still much between us making such a thing impossible.
“You stand before me and claim no mistruths between us?”
Deny it. Go ahead, Lyra. Deny it and push us even further apart.
“I could not tell you.”
Could not.It was marginally better than denying she’d lied.
“You thought me dense enough not to suspect?”
She did pull her wrist away then.
“Perhaps you two,” Kael called to us from the Temple’s entrance where the others had disappeared, “might continue your conversation after we open the Gate to the human world?”
He said it with so much sarcasm in his voice that Lyra smiled. I nearly did as well but remembered that the woman beside me had come to Gyoria and stolen my heart under false pretenses. So instead, I followed Kael inside.
With the sun setting outside the Temple, it was awash in a glow that seemed to underpin the weight of this moment. Kael and I spoke at length about what was about to happen: the repercussions of allowing the Stone to be used in this way, without our father’s permission… against his will.
