I went to fetch some and a glass of water, along with something extra, returning to Kessian sat on the edge of the bed, shaking out his legs. Something about the domesticity of finding him like that and placing the pills in his open palms made my heart trip. It seemed like the everyday, mundane occurrence of a couple co-habitating. I’d never had a boyfriend, let alone moved in with one.
The image made it hard not to think of what he’d said before.If you want me, you’ll have to come and get me.It got me asking dangerous questions like: What if this worked out? What if I found a way to live a normal life? Could I have this? Could I have him? Not for a night, but for as long as our hearts were in it.
A fearful part of me recoiled, not given easily to trust a notion of hope after nine years alone. Particularly not when Kessian could be so cagey about himself, hiding anything vulnerable behind a laughing, gregarious exterior.
He didn’t owe me all his secrets, but I wanted something real. I didn’t think I could handle it if the first time I opened myself up, it was to find myself in armored arms, cold and a different kind of lonely.
I placed a potion bottle on the nightstand next to him, the contents blue as his eyes. “This might help, too. It’s a sleep draft. It’ll knock you out for eight hours.”
“You’re an angel.”
As he downed the pills, and I got into bed, the hope crowded out the fear a little.
Come and get me, he’d said.
Take off your armor first, I thought.
Chapter 17
That night I dreamed of music.
A familiar tune, it drums into my marrow and plucks a few perilous notes from the lyre made of my veins. I know the song. I’ve heard it once before, and the fact this is a dream doesn’t make me any less afraid.
It’s different from the time when the song lured me from my bed and to the banks of the strid. Now, Kessian is by my side, hair damp and tousled, smears of dirt on his cheeks.
We move purposefully through the woods, not in the direction the music pulls me like a wayward child yanking on my hand, but in the direction of the sound itself. The closer I get, the less it sounds like rushing water and percussive heartbeats, the more it sounds like—
A flute. Sort of. There’s more resonance, like a flute with multiple chambers. Shrill notes slide into deep, haunting ones, layered over one another, played inexpertly, as if by someone who learned when they were little and has only picked it up on the odd occasion since. A tang of magic tinges each note and makes the air taste like metal.
We venture farther into the woods, Kessian careful to pick his way over a tree root with his cane, until the trees thin and the rush of the strid joins the chorus of the flute. This part of the bank is familiar to me, a rock jutting so far over the water it nearly forms a bridge. Movement disturbs the foliage on the other side, and a man with a thick beard walks out holding the hand of his sixteen-year-old son.
My dad. And me, nine years younger. We sightlessly walk toward the bank, and I don’t want to watch us go under, though already it feels as if I swallowed a lungful of water and silt.
Kessian’s voice compels me to open my eyes again. “Look.”
I follow the point of his finger to a spot in the trees on our side of the bank, in the direction the music’s coming from. It takes me a while to pick out the darker shape from the other shadows and trees. A figure—from its size, a man, though I couldn’t swear to it. The dark obscures its face, but in silhouette I can see the strange instrument in its hands. My blood runs cold looking at the shape—branching, hollow tines for multiple resonances, its fingers dancing along two. It has the hollow sound of a flute, but it’s shaped like an antler.
It’s enchanted, music and magic burning through the air, drawing us to our deaths.
I thought it had been the strid’s song, but all along someone else had been behind it.
On the crescendo of a shrill note, my father and I splash into the strid. I choke on the memory of how cold it had been. I might have frozen, locked up, but at the sight of this figure—the one responsible for all my misery—I rush toward him.
A branch snaps underfoot. In the nonsensical way of dreams, I didn’t think he’d hear me. Then I realize it wasn’t Kessian or I who’d made the noise, but someone else. The figure’s head snaps ’round, searching the trees. I hope he’ll flee toward us, but in a burst of magic, he opens a portal, stepping through and closing it behind him.
Wherever he’s gone, it’s too dark to see, and with his back to us, I can’t see a face illuminated by the spell. The strid’s poisoner, my grandfather’s murderer, is gone.
I think I hear a ticking clock chime the hour when the scene melts away, dropping me from one world into another, this one softer. It takes me a moment to register my surroundings, and for a second I think I’ve woken up because I’m in my bed. But it’s warmer, and a body shifts against me. Shifts very deliberately, arse grinding back against me, and it’s Kessian. I know it before he looks over his shoulder, a scratch across his cheek and his hair come loose from his plait. Not the Kessian I fell asleep beside, because this one is naked and smiling dizzily at me.
I count the freckles on his skin. “They’ve always reminded me of stars. We should make wishes on yours.”
“I wish this night could last forever.”
“We made the time we had count.”
He kisses me, grinds against my lap, and I clutch his hips and groan in his ear, half aware this is a dream, half confused because he feels soreal. The warmth of his neck under my lips, the taste of his sweat.
His tone shifts. “When I said ‘Come and get me,’ this isn’t quite what I meant.”
