I could see the color pulsing on my eyelids, the heat from my blood. I was still using magic, couldn't stop. I forced my eyes open, and the space around me was a riot of color, blinding light pouring in through cracks above so my eyes didn’t work. I’d thought I had emptied myself of magic, but what if I hadn’t? What if I had broken the part of me that was able to control it? I felt around inside myself, found that heat, that pulsing, awful panic. I gasped out a breath, closed my eyes and pressed. Heat flushed across my skin, my muscles, and I lay there, panting, exhausted. Every movement was too much.
“You should sleep, Khal. Someone else will watch her.” The voice broke in on my mind, echoing around the chamber. I knew, instinctively, that this wasn’t Common, that something else was being spoken. The magic was twisting it, making it something I could understand.
“No. I have this.” Khal’s voice was heavy, his words in this other tongue lilting. “It needs to be me, if she wakes. She won’t…burn me.”
I wanted to curl in on myself, draw back away from the horror, but the most I managed was a twitch.
“She’s alive. She’ll wake up.” That was Vrathgar’s voice. Vrathgar’s voice without the malice. It seemed so alien. “This wasn’t your fault.”
“This, her being here, all of it. It’s all of it my fault.”
I was slipping. I wanted to stay, to cling to his voice, but I was losing my hold on the light, the heat, moving away. It was so cold.
“Wrongs can be made right. That is what all of us hope, Khal.”
The darkness took me.
When I wokethere was an arm under my head.
“Rowena! Rowena.” Khal’s face leaned over me. Concern etched his features. “Rowena, can you hear me?”
I tried to speak, and a dry hiss came out. My mouth was so dry. A waterskin pressed to my lips, dribbling slowly, and I caught at the drops. There was warm air against my face, darkness around us, barely lit by a rag lamp hanging above.
“I’m sorry to have to wake you. You were shaking again. I don’t have another blanket, if this one catches fire.”
I tried to sit up, and he caught me.
“Steady.”
We were in a building of some kind, various implements tied into the rafters close above. I saw a waterskin, knives and a few clay pots. Dizziness overwhelmed me, like the whole room spun.
“Easy. Easy.” He held me tight, and I focused on the sound ofhis heartbeat, too strong, too loud to be natural, and I clung onto his chest. “My father says this is normal; this happens to ones with the gift. He said the others recovered; it would just take time.” His voice was a little tight. Either he kept a secret or he was lying. But Khal didn’t lie.
Another wave came, and I clung to him, waited till the world stopped moving. This one was a little easier.
“Are you alright?”
Finally words came. “I am,” I rasped, “alright.”
He stared at me. I couldn’t read his face.There were bandages on his arms under this ill-fitting shirt, and his lip was still split, his brow swollen. I wanted to reach up, to touch his face, but I held back. “More…more water? Please?”
He got it.
I drank, wiped it off my mouth with the back of my shaking hand. “Where are we?”
“We are safe,” he said. “In the Drashik Enclave. Near my family’s home.”
“I thought…your people lived in tents.”
The side of his mouth lifted, not touching the worry in his eyes. “When you meet us, we do. Outsiders do not come here.” He hesitated. “Do you want to see?”
It was such a strange question that I couldn't deny it. “...yes.”
He helped me to my feet, his hands hovering as if I was going to drop or fly apart. I was so wobbly on my legs. Together we reached a thick door, and he pulled open the latch above my head, swung it clear.
We were in a cavern, but it was a cavern so large that my mind rebelled at calling it that, as if we were within a mountain, dark rock walls with lush greenery climbing up above us to a crater open to the sky, mists swirling through green treetops that reached for the white sunlight in those shafts of life. I caught a river flowing beneath us in a silver ribbon, and the ground was a riot of color, fungus glowing where the sunlightdid not shine. I started to see the homes worked into the nature here, the lights from houses in the trees, in the walls, the little courtyards down amidst the green, everywhere emerald life and glowing light.
“What do you think?” he said.
