Black metal hooks that would have once held lanterns to light worshippers’ way jutted out periodically. A shiver prickled my skin.
This had once been a Sella temple.
Ericen’s warning pulled at me, but I shoved it aside. I couldn’t trust him.
The doors opened into a narrow hall with rooms shooting off on either side. People bustled about, and I pulled one aside to ask after Caylus. They directed me to one of the small side rooms, where I found a healer finishing up tending to the cut from the guard’s blade.
The healer bowed to me as I entered. Caylus didn’t even look at me. He sat on a small workbench, eyes trained on the floor.
“Can I have a moment with him?” I asked the healer. The girl nodded and slipped from the room, closing the door behind her.
Caylus’s hands tightened about the edge of the table, and I knew he did it to keep them from shaking. A flush filled his cheeks.
“What is it?” I asked softly.
He shook his head, bringing his hands to his face. “Malkin,” he whispered. His fingers curled in as he dragged them along his face and behind his neck, lacing them tightly. His elbows pressed together like a cocoon to hide in. “You shouldn’t have to fight my battles for me.” His voice came out hoarse. “No one should. But I—I just…”
His words scraped at raw memories. Hiding under the covers. Craving darkness, solitude, quiet. A place where I couldn’t fail, and I couldn’t lose. Even now, I worried I’d slip, my past my constant shadow.
I stepped closer. Gently, I wrapped my fingers around his wrists, his skin warm to my touch, and pulled his hands from his face.
It felt like reaching for a drowning man.
“I understand, Caylus,” I said gently. “I know what it is to feel useless. Powerless. Weak. But you are none of those things. Sometimes, we need a little help. That’s what I’m here for. To help fight those battles.”
Finally, he looked at me, and what I saw in the depths of his eyes trapped my breath in my throat. From the day I’d met him, Caylus had always been quiet, a little nervous and a little awkward. He didn’t trust easily, and he’d always seemed uneasy, like he expected the world to crumble around him at any moment.
He was broken, and it was Malkin’s fault.
My skin warmed, a trace of heat rising from my stomach to my throat like a tendril of smoke from a growing fire. Suddenly, I regretted my decision to let him go free. He hadn’t deserved my mercy.
Malkin had done this, and he went unpunished because of Illucia. Because of Razel. She’d destroyed so much more than I’d realized, hurt so many people.
Caliza. Kiva. Caylus. Auma. Samra.
Even Ericen.
I wrapped one of Caylus’s large hands in both of mine and silently made myself a promise. Before all this was over, I would make Malkin Drexel regret ever laying a finger on Caylus.
And I would tear Razel down.
His lips parted, then closed, then pressed into a firm line.
“There’s a story about an Ambriellan sailor,” he began at last, “who sailed the world alone. When he didn’t return, his friends assumed he’d died. Then one day, a merchant ship came across his boat, floating off the Illucian coast. When they asked him whether he was lost, he said he was. When they offered to give him directions, he said he knew the way home.”
As he spoke, his fingers flexed in and out, the white scars stark against his golden skin. “‘Well then,’ the ship’s captain asked, ‘how can you be lost?’ And the man replied, ‘Because no matter where I am, it’s never where I should be.’ And when the captain asked him where that was, the man said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t find it.’ Unable to help, the merchants left him there. They say to this day you can spot the sailor’s dinghy floating in the mist, still searching.”
Maybe it’d been his detached tone as he told it, or maybe it was the way he stared at the wall before him, but the story left me uneasy, the room crowded with his words.
“That’s not a very happy story,” I said.
“No, it’s not. But I understand him, the sailor. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll spend your whole life searching for it.”
My throat felt dry. “What are you looking for, Caylus?”
He leaned his head back against the wall. “I don’t know.”
The words settled heavily. When I first met Caylus in Illucia, he’d only just escaped Malkin weeks before. His wounds, both physical and invisible, had been so raw. Just like mine. Together, we’d helped each other heal.
