Looking between our bodies, I caught the edge of something black, slumped on the floor next to the table.
“Oh,” I whispered.
“Hmm?”
“The book,” I said. We must’ve knocked it off when Kythel had laid me back on the table.
He lifted his head. “You still have the book?”
Drawing in a steady breath, I admitted, “I still haven’t read the passage on Ruaala.”
“Why?”
“It’s silly,” I said. “And it doesn’t even make sense. But I’m scared of what I might find.”
“I’ve read the passage myself, Millie,” he said. “There’s nothing frightening. There’s not a lot of information in there regardless.”
“That’s what I’m scared of,” I admitted. “That it will be another dead end in finding her.”
Kythel stiffened.
“That it will be one more disappointment. I won’t feel like I made good on the promise I made to my father until I know where her soul is tethered. Sometimes I feel like it’shere—because sometimes I swear I can feel her, though we’ve never met. That makes me worry. It makes me worry that she’s in Zyos. That she’s lost.”
Kythel was quiet. I hadn’t meant for the admission to bring an air of sudden solemnness between us, but I felt it drop like a heavy stone nevertheless.
“Sorry,” I said, mustering up a smile. “Let’s not talk about it. I just want to lie here with you, all right?”
But he was pulling away from me, rising from the floor again.
“Kythel?”
He reached out his hand, and I took it without hesitation.
“Get dressed,” he murmured, pulling me up from the floor, my legs still a little wobbly.
“Why?” I asked, incredulous.
A deep sigh escaped him. His blue gaze went out the window, the sill of which I still needed to repair.
Finally, he said, “There’s something I need to tell you. And show you.”
CHAPTER30
KYTHEL
There was an eeriness about Stellara, especially late into the night. It was why I didn’t like the thought of Millie out here past nightfall. I’d blamed it on thelyvins, but even I knew those creatures stayed far to the northeast of the forest, that one hadn’t been seen near Erzos in years.
Millie was holding my hand, her warm grip keeping me anchored, though I wondered how she would react to what I was about to confess. Would she be angry? Disappointed? Melancholic?
Likely all three,I thought. I could have saved her a lot of time and worry if I’d just been honest from the beginning, when she’d asked me about Ruaala in Erzos’s archives.
But no one knew what I’d done. Not even Azur, which was illuminating in itself. I’d buried the truth so deep because it was what Ruaala had wanted, what she’d asked of me in her letter, though we’d barely known one another.
Guiding Millie around the back of the cottage, I pulled her closer when she shivered. There was no wind tonight, so it was likely a tendril of a soul, tracing its way across her skin. She seemed more sensitive than most, and I inspected thezylarrwhen we got close, already noticing it needed to be replenished with another crystal. The souls were hungry here. I would likely need to install another within the clearing to keep them satisfied.
“Ruaala went a little mad,” I told her, my voice quiet in the silence of the back garden as we came to stand beneath the bleeding tree, “toward the end of her life. Truthfully, she was lost after her child died. She never recovered from that. And if your father and she were blood mates, it would have only added to the grief.”
Millie jolted. “What do you mean? She had a child?”
