“I will not allow you through.” The light shudders. “You asked me to live. Now come back and live with me.”
Another sob.
I turn toward it. Toward the endless, terrifying vastness of black unknowing. As unpredictable as life itself, and yet I take a blind step toward it. Cold rushes in from below, biting and rough. It yanks me down, making me plummet back into weight, into breath…
…into the raw uncertainty of life.
Chapter
Twenty-Two
Elara
Warmth.
Not the sharp, immediate warmth of a hearth or a hot bath, but something deeper. Slower. The kind that seeps into your bones from a body pressed against yours, steady and unhurried, as if it’s been there for a long time and has no plans to leave.
My cheek rests on something solid. Rising. Falling. Rising again. A rhythm so slow and heavy it barely qualifies as breathing, each exhale a low, rumbling vibration that hums through my skull like a lullaby.
I know this chest.
My fingers twitch against soft velvet, and beneath it, the unmistakable beat of a heart. Rhythmic. Strong. Whole.
My eyes flutter open, awareness settling on the lightness of my head. The crown is gone. My scalp bare. Naked. No hum, no bite, no cold metallic gnaw. Just skin and hair and the faint ghost of something that left not long ago.
I turn my head.
Vale’s eyes are firmly closed. He’s asleep. Truly, deeply asleep, his lips slightly parted, his lashes dark crescents against skin that looks less pale than usual. Less drawn. The shadows beneath his eyes have not vanished exactly, but thinned.
I’ve never seen him like this.
Still, yes. He can be still as a headstone when he wants. But this is different. This isn’t the coiled, watchful stillness of a predator deciding whether to strike. This is surrender. The deep, boneless collapse of a body that hasn’t properly rested in longer than I can fathom, finally given permission to rest.
A soft, rhythmic clicking draws my ear sideways.
Mother sits in a chair beside the bed, a ball of gray wool in her lap and two wooden needles working a steady, unhurried rhythm.Click-click. Click-click.The sound is so domestic, so absurdly normal that, for a disorienting moment, I think I’m back in our old house, small and feverish, waking from some childhood illness to find her keeping watch.
“There you are,” she whispers, her needles pausing mid-stitch. Her eyes are red-rimmed but dry, the kind of cried-out that comes after the tears have simply run their course. “Thought you were going to sleep through the whole week.”
“How—” My voice comes out gravelly, making my hand go to my throat, but all I find is smooth skin. “How long?”
“Two days.” Mother sets down her knitting and leans forward, pressing the back of her hand to my forehead in that instinctive, ageless gesture. “Strange faint, this was. You are not…with child, Elara. Are you?”
“No.” It’s a simpler answer than the truth of this entire ordeal. “I don’t think so.”
“Miss Hampshire nearly wore a trench in the floor with all her pacing.” She glances at Vale beside me, her expression softening into something almost fond. “That husband of yours hasn’t moved an inch. Slept through most of it, always holding, always keeping watch.”
I look back at Vale. At the slow, easy rise of his chest beneath my hand. She doesn’t know the half of it. It’s better that way.
“He needed it,” I murmur.
Mother hums, picking up her needles again. “I can see that. A man that tired has been carrying something heavy for a long, long while.”
The clicking resumes. I watch her hands work, the wool sliding through her wrinkly, calloused fingers with practiced ease, and that’s when I see it.
Her neck.
The dark veins, those black-purple threads that had spread beneath her skin like cracks in old plaster, are gone. Not faded. Gone. The skin there is smooth, a little loose with age as it should be, but clean. Untouched. As though the rot simply…retreated.
