After posting a letter to Caliza to let her know I was safe and to update her on the fires, surviving crow eggs, and our upcoming itinerary, we set sail from Isair early that evening, half the town pouring out onto the promenade to see us out.
It took a little convincing to get Samra to agree that stopping in the other towns was for the best, but in the end, she accepted that Res needed the training. With just over a week of travel remaining and nearly two weeks before Belin’s Day, we could spare a few hours in each town for me to track down the riders and get their help starting Res on training regimens for the other powers.
It felt good to have an immediately actionable plan. Something to keep me busy through the days of travel and distract me from the immensity of what waited ahead. It didn’t stop that heavy feeling from seeking me out, but it helped.
When Caylus didn’t come to dinner again, I carried a bowl of stew and plate of bread to his room, my mind so engrossed in the latest Sella tale Darya had spun that I almost missed the sounds echoing from within. A sharp, heavy thudding. Rhythmic and bone deep, it made me shudder. I turned the handle and pushed open the door.
A dim sona lamp shadowed Caylus’s broad form. His back was toward me, his shirt gone, baring the crisscross of angry red and white lines. He’d pinned a pillow to the wall before him and wrapped his hands in strips of cloth, but neither had stopped his knuckles from scraping raw and staining both fabrics a bright, vicious red.
He drove his fists into the pillowed wall again and again, the strike of bone against wood turning my stomach. Caylus didn’t even flinch. How used to pain did someone have to be before bloodying their knuckles against a wall over and over again had no effect?
“Stop.” The word came out as a whisper, lost beneath his strikes. I swallowed hard, finding my voice. “Caylus, stop!”
He froze, arm half-extended, bloody knuckles metallic in the dim sona light. For a moment, he simply stood there, his shoulders heaving with his wild breathing, every muscle coiled like a knotted chain. Then he faced me, and the hollowness in his eyes nearly broke me. Tears tracked down his cheeks, his jaw a tight line.
I didn’t know what to do.
“Why?” I asked hoarsely.
He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head. Trembling, I set the bowl on the small desk and closed the distance between us. I reached for one of his damaged hands, still curled into an impossibly tight fist. He shuddered.
He’s spent too long fighting. Given too much of his life to it.
Samra’s voice beat a dangerous tattoo in my head.
Caylus has been forced into them again and again, and he is one wrong blow away from breaking.
An uncomfortable thought sprouted in my head. He didn’t want to fight, but he would for me.
He didn’t want to be here, but he came for me.
My hands looked so small beside his. I curled my fingers around his hand, cupping it like an injured bird. “I don’t expect you to fight for me, Caylus,” I said. His eyes widened, but I pressed on before he could argue. “You’ve done so much for me already. More than I had any right to ask, and I’m so sorry for what it’s cost you. I know how hard this is for you, and I know it isn’t what you want. You don’t have to do this.”
“You don’t understand,” he breathed, voice jagged. He stumbled through his words, not with his usual nerves but with an energy barely contained. “I want—I—” He stopped. Tried again. “There’s something wrong with me, Thia.” The words were half confession, half prayer, and they spilled out of him. “When I first met you in the Colorfalls, and then when we went looking for Malkin, it was like some other part of me took over. Iwantedto fight. I wanted to drive my fist into your opponent’s face until only blood remained.”
I drew in a sharp breath. He didn’t notice, his eyes trapped on some spot over my shoulder without truly seeing.
“There’s this—thisholeinside me that I fall into when I’m fighting, and I lose myself to it. I don’t know how to stop when I’m inside there. I don’t know how—how to find myself.”
What are you looking for, Caylus?
I don’t know.
“It becomes my purpose,” he said. “I want to help you. I want to stop Malkin and Razel before they destroy anyone else’s world like they destroyed mine. But I don’t want to fall into that hole again. I don’t want that to be my purpose.”
Malkin had made fighting Caylus’s life. He’d made it his survival, his everything. And no matter how much ocean we put between the Ambriels and us, those chains still bound him.
I still held Caylus’s hand, trapped between my own as if letting it go meant letting him go, as if he’d simply fade away.
“Your past doesn’t have to be your future.” Ever so gently, I pressed my fingers to the place where his nails dug into his palm. Carefully, I straightened one finger, and then the next, until the fist was gone, leaving bloody crescents in its wake.
He stared down at his damaged hand, his fingers trembling in my grasp. He tried more than once to talk before the words finally came. “Have you ever felt like no matter what you do, there’s no putting the pieces of yourself back together?”
“Every day.”
He swallowed, nodding. Caylus knew all about the pain that had plagued me for months, that still did. Hatching Res didn’t erase the loss of so much. Some cracks couldn’t be mended; they only became a part of you instead, forever places that left you unsteady.
“It feels impossible,” he said. “Like trying to repair shattered glass.”
