“No,” he replied, voice so soft he all but mouthed the word.
Calya’s legs slowly hooked around his sides. Lowe didn’t resist when her ankles clasped together behind him. He bent toward her, his free hand bracing against the tabletop.
She grasped his shirt and pulled him to her, and he came willingly, his mouth covering hers. She moaned appreciatively, lips parting for him. His tongue swept into her mouth, stroking over hers again and again. When Calya let her head tip back, he rained kisses down her throat. Sucked gently at her pulse point until she shivered. Smiled against her skin.
When she dragged him up for another kiss, he leaned into her, cradling her face with his palms.
The table creaked in warning. Lowe removed his weight, forehead resting against hers. “When you fell, I thought—I thought…”
Calya hummed softly. “Worried about me, ranger?”
“Yes,” he replied, tone solemn. “Too damned much, and I don’t know why. I don’t form attachments, either, Lady Heartless, not anymore. We hardly know each other, but you… you scare the fuck out of me.”
The wind whistled through the broken doorway.
Calya stared at her reflection in his eyes. “What does the wind tell you?”
“I’d rather hear it from you. What is this?”
“We might not know the minutiae of each other, but you know me to my core,” she said.
Calya was single-minded in her drive. Determined not to be derailed as the rest of her family had. Distractions had never stood a chance against the prize that was her company.
Until him. Until she’d bumped into a Sentinel and thought of him only as a conveniently placed tool for her use. How wrong she had been. Fighting the whispers that had started as mere intrigue and flirtation and a superficial attraction. Convinced herself that was all the silly feelings were. Nothing more than a product of her own impulsive desires. But they weren’t, couldn’t be, because impulsive things didn’t linger, let alone build.
But he had shared with her, and she with him. They’d let themselves be vulnerable with each other. Never before had Calya felt confidence in a lover. Not like this. True feelings that had only continued to grow, even if she’d tried to ignore them. She couldn’t claim ignorance any longer, to herself or to him. Lowe could be her mortal peril, the thing to finally knock her off her chosen path.
Only if she let him. If she spoke the words into being.
“I want Helm Naval. And… I want you. For a time,” she said, tone playful even as her heart thundered in her chest.
“Diviners aren’t meant for romance. For relationships,” Lowe whispered. “And I won’t use my wind for people. Not like in the past. Not if it could do damage.”
He was the first with such a gift that Calya had ever met. Though she didn’t know the pain of it, his confession left no doubt as to how it could poison love between people.
But this wasn’t love between them, only a mutual interest. Relationships had never held much appeal for her, and Lowe’s mouth, delectable as it was, didn’t expel HNE from her mind. Didn’t make the hole in her chest where a heart should reside suddenly feel any less cold. Lady Heartless she would remain. As for his other concerns…
“I said I wanted you, not your wind. And it’s not a relationship.” She nudged him back so she could stand. “It’s enjoying each other’s company while we’re stuck out here at the edge of civilization.”
“What happens once we’re back in civilization?” A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, though a note of wariness remained in his tone.
“We reevaluate. Perhaps it’s your turn to proposition me this time.” Calya smirked at him before picking her way through the mess left behind in the building. “Come on. If I fell down a mountain, it had better be for a reason.”
Lowe snorted but held his tongue. They split up, digging through the scraps, emptying desk drawers that were little more than the slats of crates nailed together. Though the site had clearly once been heavily used, little in the way of identifiable material remained to suggest what work had been done. Some broken glassware, an old ledger missing most of its pages. There were several rotten stakes left in the field that cordoned off an abnormal, circular bit of swampland. The ground was murky and stinky, but it didn’t match the descriptions of the Eyllic poison so far as Calya could tell. She took a sample, using a shard of glass to scrape a bit of the dirt into a bandage remnant and storing it in her cloak pocket.
After having retrieved his staff, Lowe came back in, a scrap of fabric in his hand. “Look at this.” It had been torn from one of the marker stakes, the weathered cloth faded and stiff. “I found the real road, too. It’s at the end of the field. A few more steps to the left and you’d have gotten there.”
Calya held the scrap up to the light, trying to make out the faded words written on one side. It was a list. Numbers and ingredients, mostly, and what might be a date, though the writing was too washed out for her to be sure. The hand was slanted, the lines cramped like having any space between them was the enemy. Rossala’s Tears. Glimmergum. Blight of Vervain. She’d seen a list like that before. The handwriting, too.
Fortunately, the contents of her cloak’s pockets hadn’t been lost in her fall. She flipped open her pocket notebook to the crumpled paper found in Matthias’s desk, which was tucked next to the faded list she’d taken from the box of Brint’s old documents back in Renstown. Potions, and the same written ingredients, though the numbers were different.
Which was interesting and all, but Calya was far more intrigued by the similarities in the handwriting. Matthias wrote with tiny letters that had a distinct lean. The words weren’t complete, some faded away to nothing on the scrap of fabric, but enough remained for conviction to harden in her mind.
“What do you think?” she asked, giving the papers to Lowe.
His brow furrowed as he compared the writing. “Our missing mage?”
Calya nodded. “Looks like it.” She carefully tucked her notebook back into her cloak pocket, then added the stake marker as well. “He’s been writing to Brint.”
