She didn’t see what exactly these mood swings meant. Or maybe she just didn’t want to deal with them. For an elf, he had so much emotion, it was overwhelming. Why couldn’t he focus?
She put her hand out between them and stopped him in his tracks, pressing her palm to his chest where his sluggish heartbeat pressed against her fingertips. She narrowed her eyes. “This isn’t amusing! You’re dying, and all day I have been unable to escape that fact. I have been climbing up the walls, tormented by the image of you bleeding out, trying to understand what it is that’s killing you. You promised to tell me, so tell me.”
He stilled at her hand pressed against his chest, but he didn’t pull back, just let her rest her hand over his heart. The intensity faded from his eyes once more. “You want to know what’s killing me, sunshine? It’s the same thing that’s killing the irises.”
“What?”
“I’m rotting from the inside out. That’s why my blood is black.” Taiyo reached up and wrapped his hand around her wrist, pressing her palm closer against his chest. “The rot hasn’t been plaguing us for the last five years, or even the last ten. I’ve been taking on the rot threatening my country and people for years, using myself to slow the damage and decay and buy time to try to find a way to save the irises.”
The sludge his blood had become… The pain he was clearly in every day… All to buy a little bit of time. She looked up from their hands and whispered, “How long do you have left?”
“The eclipse.” His thumb brushed over her pulse, smooth and steady compared to his. He nodded toward the last few rays of the sun. “My magic is the only thing that has kept the rot from killing me already. When the eclipse occurs, all the Sun Elves will be without any connection to our magic, even me. If the Moon Elves attack, even without their magic, my people will all be fine afterwards as long as our defenses hold and you stop the rot from spreading further and save the irises for the future. Without my magic, I will be dead.”
“That’s why you came to us. You’re out of time,” Hellebore whispered.
Taiyo gave her a pained, bitter grin. “My apologies again, for how we got here, taking you even when I thought you were running away and forcing this on you, but now you see, I knew this would always be temporary for you. I wasn’t condemning you to me for the rest of your life. Just the rest of mine.”
“Wait, hold on,” Hellebore said, mind spinning. “No matter what I do, you still die?”
He nodded, a strange peace in his eyes. “My blood is too far gone. My heart will be unable to handle pumping my blood in a few years even if the eclipse wasn’t coming. My healers have already tried to use the healthy ones, when we still had them,and all it did was just infect them and destroy their magic. All I ask is for you to finish your work, and ensure the land is cleansed of the rot even if I die before you finish. I know I have no right to ask of you anything, but do you see now all I’ve done was out of desperation and a desire to do the least amount of damage?”
“Four months. I have a little under four months.”
Hellebore ripped her hand off his chest and out of his hand as she started pacing, running a hand through her hair. “You couldn’t have told me from the beginning? Now I only have four months!”
“I didn’t know if I could trust you.”
“Ugh. Right. Alchemist. Palladia’s niece—whatever she did to make you think so poorly of her. Still, even with my head start on the rot affecting the plants, it would have been far better if I could have had more time to get started on this too. There’s a massive difference between an elf’s biological makeup and plants, so there’s the strong possibility the cure for your blood is going to be different than the one for the plants—”
Hands grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face Taiyo again as he gaped at her. “What are you talking about?”
“Was I not clear?” Hellebore tilted her head. “There’s nothing to be done for the loss of time now. So first thing in the morning I expect you to march yourself down to my lab so I can collect my first round of samples so that I can make up for the lost time. I’ve only got four months to save your life in addition to your whole country.”
“You—You—Hellebore, I didn’t marry you for you to save my life. The only reason I married you was because I knew that upon my death, you would be free.” He was leaning down, much closer to her eye level than normal as his voice lowered. “I’m not asking you to save me.”
“That’s part of your problem. You didn’t bother asking, which means I’m on a tight timeframe.”
“No. You don’t understand. Frankly—I don’t understand. You’re acting like you have to save my life. That couldn’t be further from the truth. You have no obligation to me to do so. You should be relieved to hear that in a little under four months I’ll be gone. You should want me to die. When I die, you get to go home, back to your people, your life.”
The echo of what she’d accused him of was now haunting her.
And if she was being honest…
“I don’t think of saving you as an obligation. The thought not to never occurred to me. Saving you was my instinct.”
Taiyo straightened back up, taking a slow step backward, stumbling and falling to sit on the bed. His hands slid from her shoulders to her hands, accidentally pulling her a few steps with him as he landed on the mattress, now looking up at her.
The intensity in his eyes was so much stronger than what she’d seen at the start. This was so much fuller, so devastatingly full of emotion and something she couldn’t name. And this frightened her even more than before. Emotions usually did.
But she didn’t pull away. She just needed to be clear what this was about.
“Why?” Taiyo’s whisper cracked on the word, hands clutching hers.
Why indeed?
She wondered what his answer would have been if she had managed to ask him the same the night before. But the moment was long gone, and that was for the best. His answer to such a question could only bring more agony to his already failing heart.
“I have no desire to go back to Chymes. I can’t.” She took a deep breath and stepped closer. “And they don’t want me back. Even if the threat of treason wasn’t over my head, returning after your death… If my brother truly wanted me to act as his King’s Alchemist, he would never have agreed to the betrothal. If myfather thought I was capable, he wouldn’t have used me as a pawn to bargain with. They didn’t know what you wanted with me, even if you were asking for their best. But they wanted an alliance and were happy to get rid of me.”
