“Did you truly have no awareness of the outside world?”
I slowly shook my head. “What did I become?”
Irian seemed at a loss for words.
“Everything,” he said at last. “A swan. A deer. A wolf. A serpent. By day, you seemed to sleep. By night, you took on the shapes of a hundred animals. Scratching, howling, pecking, screeching. And in the hour before dawn—”
He trailed off.
“Tell me,” I prompted, impatience chafing at my pleasant calm.
Irian would not meet my gaze. “Talah peered from your eyes and experimented with your body’s… pleasures. Or tried to.”
“Truly?” A tendril of sharp, searing horror threatened to pierce my calm. I stared at the deep, broad scratches marring the stone, then gazed at the rumpled sheets of the broad bed. Within the Deep-Dream, Ínne had defended my most profound self from Talah’s inward advance. But I suddenly recoiled from the thought of what a heavy burden Irian must have carried in protecting my physical self from her outward attacks. “And you? What did you do, while I transformed?”
“I held you,” Irian said, simply. “As I promised I would.”
His last words to me on the Longest Night settled, delicate assnowflakes, on my tongue.Not in a thousand lifetimes will I ever let you go.Affection rose in me, hot and fierce—the first complete emotion I’d felt since waking up. I longed to throw myself at him—to crush my arms around his neck and crash my lips to his and remind myself what it meant to have a body. Instead, I wrapped my arms tighter around my chest and willed myself to stop glowing.
“Irian,” I chided with a laugh. “Of all the things to take literally!”
“Did you mean it some other way?” His eyes were grave. “What does it mean to you to never let a person go? Should I have set you down when my arms began to tremble? Should I have dropped you when my back began to ache? I took you at your word. And I held myself to mine.”
Another deep pulse of tenderness surprised me. I did not have to look at myself to see I was glowing a little brighter. “I cannot fault you for that, mo chroí. But I did not intend for you to single-handedly carry me to the ends of the earth.”
“I did accept help when it was offered.” The smallest smile touched his plush mouth. “Eventually.”
For a long moment, we both looked at each other. Then he surged toward me—not with the heedless intensity of before, but with anguished precision. As if he had tallied every inch of distance between us and found each one intolerable. As if he were a lodestone drawn inexorably to me, his guiding star. Irian gazed down at me from a hand’s breadth away, energy searing the space between us.
“Oh, Fia. This is too cruel.” My light flared, fracturing his perfect face into shards of brightness and shadow. “This is worse than absence. This is presence turned to suffering. For months I have waited—I have wanted—” The words choked him. He lifted a fist to his mouth, as if to steady himself. “So many times over the past months, I believed you returned to me, only to have the press of your skin be a taunt, the brush of your hands a mockery. Yet now that you are indeed returned, I am denied even that.”
“Is that all I am to you?” The words emerged without the lightness I had meant for them. “A body to be held?”
My words conjured some horrified mordancy onto his features and, strangely, seemed to calm him.
“No. It is but a perverse irony that all the nights I held myself back from you were bitter practice for now, when I truly cannot touch you.” He lifted his still-healing palms toward my cheeks, cupping the air around my shining face. “Have we two not sacrificed enough? Death and pain and twisted magic and separation? When do you and I earn a moment of peace, mo chroí? I would trade a thousand years of torment for one day with you. But I do not know what we have done to deserve this fate.”
I gazed up at him, his desolation marring the veneer of eerie calm I’d carried with me from the nemeton. Thiswascruel. He was right to rage—right to seethe and storm over the injustices etched into our stars. But I could not join him in it.
I knew that if I started, I would not be able to stop.
Abruptly, Irian turned away, spinning the taps on the bath until water no longer gushed. Steam wafted temptingly from the tub. He scraped hair back from his face, visibly mastering himself. He forced lightness into his demeanor as he gestured toward the rows of vials and unguents.
“There is soap. I believe this one is shampoo? Whatever it is, it is heavily perfumed. And—”
“Irian,” I said gently. “I know how to take a bath.”
I stepped toward the large tub, dropping his cloak to the floor before sliding my thumbs under the straps of someone’s borrowed shift. Laoise, most likely. Irian turned on his heel, angling his head away from me.
“Really?” It was easier to tease him than it was to rage with him against our fate. I smiled up at him as I slid languorously into the warm water. “You have seen me without a scrap of clothing before, and in far more compromising positions. One might think you human with all this overwhelming modesty.”
“Just being considerate of your tender sensibilities,” he growled.
“Whatever my sensibilities are, I doubt them tender.” I lovedhim for making this easy on me. “More like well seasoned, to handle the likes of you.”
I leaned back and ducked my head under the water. When I surfaced, water sluicing from the crown of my head, Irian had moved to the floor. Propped against the tub, he dangled one arm over the side, trailing nearly healed fingertips in the warm water. He watched me as I wiped water from my eyes and smoothed wet hair down my back, his eyes golden and blue as an afternoon sky.
“How I have missed you, mo chroí.”
