He nodded.
“Why don’t you just stop healing? Live a long life and forget this great gift you have. It’s amazing, yes, but not at the expense of your life.”
He scowled at me as if I’d told him to drink poison. “But at the expense of others? I can save hundreds of lives in my lifetime, heal thousands, take pain from countless people. Why is my life worth more than theirs? It’s not.”
I realized then that Ayden wore his noble deeds out in the open, but Ariyon’s were just hidden, yet in a way much greater.
“It’s admirable, but…” I didn’t know what else to say, the thought of him one day dying early was horrifying. Especially because my father had played a part in it all and myself too—every healing he’d done for me had a cost. It made me sick to think about.
Ariyon sighed. “You don’t understand, Fallon, when someone is in pain, I canfeelit.” He moved closer to me and made a fist, pounding it on his chest. “When my aunt grasped your arm, Ifeltyour agony and I wanted to kill her in that moment,” he snarled.
I gasped and he leaned even closer. “And when you said that all you wanted was to be normal, to be loved, to be kissed… I felt that too, in my heart, like an invitation.”
He leaned forward and brushed his lips against my cheek, causing a heady rush of dizziness to wash over me.
I gasped. What was I doing? I’d just invited Ayden to the dance and Ariyon was drunk, kissing my cheek in the courtyard, whispering sweet nothings in my ear. He was going to the dance with Blair. This was all wrong.
“I just asked Ayden to the Winter Belles Ball!” I blurted out and Ariyon recoiled as if I’d slapped him.
He sat back, took a deep swig from his bottle, and nodded slowly. “Probably for the best.”
Probably for the best? What just happened? Silence stretched between us for what felt like forever and then Ariyon stood. “Want to see my art studio?” he asked and motioned to the building in the middle of the courtyard.
He was an artist? I had no idea. He played guitar, sang, and now art? I realized I didn’t know him very much at all. I still had a few minutes before I needed to be at class and so I nodded, grabbing my flowers and backpack before standing up.
I would have to get to the library another time.
Following Ariyon around the building, I watched as he chucked the liquor into a trashcan and then his palms lit up with swirls of magic as he seemingly healed his own drunkenness.
He walked over to the door hidden among the ivy that crawled up the black brick building and opened it. “Ladies first,” he said, completely clear-headed and without a single trace of a slur.
“How many days off your life do you think that just cost you?” I asked.
“Probably a week,” he mused as I stepped inside and then gasped.
The studio was a large open space about three stories high and every single patch of wall was covered with a painting. Flowers, animals, friends, the school, the queen, me…
I walked over to a painting of me, my eyes wide as I hovered over my father’s lifeless body back in our hut in Isariah. “You painted the healing?” I asked in amazement.
I didn’t know what I was thinking when Ariyon asked me to see his art studio, but it wasn’t this.
He just nodded. “Painted that little bastard too.” He pointed to another one and I grinned at the likeness of Yanric. In this painting his tail was on fire.
“He pooped on my guitar,” Ariyon confessed, and I couldn’t help but giggle. There was one of Eden: her bright red hair was enhanced in color, and she was staring, starry-eyed, across the courtyard at Hayes. Another painting was of Blair with a crown on her head and her nose upturned. Another of me, looking sadly at my bare hand as a tear rolled down my cheek.
They were hauntingly beautiful.
“Ariyon, these are amazing. You see the world…in a way I don’t,” I confessed. It was incredible, I had no idea he was hiding this talent.
“Thank you.” He said shyly and then I walked to the back wall. It was covered from top to bottom with white tally marks on charred black brick. Hundreds of tally marks had been crossed out.
“What’s this?” I asked.
Ariyon grabbed a thin paintbrush and dipped it in white paint. Walking over, he crossed out five tallies. “How many days or weeks I have eaten up with healing. It’s an estimate, of course. Curing the drunkenness was probably five days.”
My face fell when I realized that he was counting his own life span. Pain clawed at my heart at the mere thought of what he’d given up for others. For my father. For me. “You shouldn’t…count them like this. Or look at them so…openly. It’s depressing.”
I blinked and a single tear rolled down my cheek.
