Elloven hadn’t been out for long before she was conscious again, wide awake. The sleep serums were maddeningly inconsistent, as was often the case with anything purchased from the markets. One might get one drop of insanely potent serum in one try, and no effect at all in the next. It was especially frustrating when they were so hard to come by.
But the shrieks had stopped. That was something, at least.
She stretched her legs, careful to navigate around the cot’s exposed edge, but she wasn’t on the cot anymore. She was slumped in a chair large enough for someone three times her size. The last time she’d sat in something so ridiculous was?—
Elloven sagged. It was only a dream, but this one wasn’t real, and she was still struggling to understand why her mind would deliberately inflict such pointless pain—when she was still suffering so much—when she heard the only sound her heart had ever responded to.
“Elloven?”
She saw the dusty tips of his boots before she saw him, but oh, did she feel him. His aura, primeval and teeming with vitality, was like standing in the sunshine after weeks of rain.
Jesstin crashed to his knees at the knobby base of her unwieldy chair. “Is it really you?” His laugh was a mess of desperate sounds, but the one she clung to was hope. “Are you really here?”
He had come. Weeks later, but he’d come. The Night Soul wasn’t just a dream of a dream, and not even death had broken their link to each other.
Elloven couldn’t answer. Her thoughts were so scattered. She was all over the place, part of her mind filtering through memories in random order, the other taking stock of the present in the most clinical of terms. Like her chair, which was more of a throne, now that she thought of it, a queen’s seat, second only to the king of the Night Soul. Looking into her king’s eyes was the first important choice she’d made without wasting time overanalyzing. She’d spent so much of her life questioning everything, down to whether to wear brown or black boots, when no one was even looking at her damned feet.
“Jesstin.” She sounded so small to herself, as though a part of her still expected to wake up. But no, he was there. Jesstin was there. He might hate her, and the reunion might be pure mischance, but he was there. All the fortifications, the little boxes and bridges of her psyche, cracked wide, and for once it didn’t scare her, not even a little. “This is real then? This place? Tell me it is.” Elloven’s old tendencies to shrink and protect weren’t entirely gone, but as she observed the film of sadness glossing his eyes, she couldn’t recall what her last thought had been.
“The first time you came here, we talked and talked,” Jesstin said. He slid one hand over her bare foot and locked it around her ankle. “And then the earth shook, and I grabbed for you, but all I got was your necklace?—”
“And then we woke?—”
“In the carriage!”
“And we thought we were being robbed, but it was just...”
“The men you spared me the pleasure of killing.” His jittery, uneasy laugh echoed. “No, I was being reckless. You saved my life that day.” His thumb caressed the bone at the edge of her ankle in an act so tender, it surfaced the entirety of her loneliness. “I’m not going to question this. We’re here. You’re here.” He shook his head and breathed out her name. “Elloven.”
He sounded so incredibly euphoric to see her, so much so that he was struggling with his words, his breathing, but the intrusive thoughts had never been louder. He’s only here to assuage his guilt. He feels bad for you. Poor, pathetic little Elloven, who died bonded to a man who had controlled her for over half her life. Too stupid to see the betrayal coming, too weak to save herself.
Elloven pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes to shut out the internal noise. She didn’t know why it had taken weeks for him to find her, but she had to stop going backward.
“This isn’t how I imagined our reunion... though I’m not complaining. Not at all. I thought it would take so much longer, but here you are.” He sounded so nervous and awkward, like a young man at the start of a courtship. “Tonight is, ah, actually my first night in the Infinitum.”
She wanted to snatch the words from his mouth. “No, Jess. No, no, no.”
“Shh, no, I’m alive.” His smile soothed her as much as his touch. She was reminded how beautiful it could be when he meant it, like a hug from her favorite dream. “Whatever that means here.”
“Then how? How are you in the Infinitum? Were you still in Rivenholde all this time?”
“What do you mean, all this time? How long has it been for you?”
“How, Jesstin?” Her heart beat out of control, and she prayed for an answer that would return it to normal.
Jesstin released her ankle. “I know I wasn’t very forthcoming when you asked me about my necromancy.”
“Seems everyone but me knew about it.”
Jesstin didn’t hide his annoyance. “No, Sesto was the only one until recently. We didn’t know there was a whole cabal of dark wizards waiting for me.”
“Daire said it would save you in the maze. He said if I tried to help, it would distract you and you’d fail. You’d die.”
Visibly brimming with charged energy, Jesstin leaned against the leg of her chair as he looked through her, rather than at her. “The spirits in the labyrinth said I could walk into Infinita Mori without dying because I’m not just any necromancer but a special necromancer.” His laugh was performative and bitter. “They said a lot of other things too, but I think I’m on my own from here.”
How is this possible, she wanted to ask, but anything Jesstin might know had been fed to him by those who stood to gain from his compliance, not his understanding. “Oh.”
On the heels of a pensive silence came a request she wasn’t expecting. “Move over.”
