It drove her wild.Hedrove her wild. Being with him, the sex, yes, buthim. Impossible, rotten, perfect, necessary. And if she thought about it a second longer, she was going to scream or cry, and she didn’t know which was more humiliating, and she should turn back, run away, but there was no world, no sky under which she could.
So she stopped thinking. She gripped him by the shoulders and pushed him to the ground, into the spongy bed of flowers, and rolled on top of him, straddling his waist in her thighs. A startled smile slipped past his lips. Her own lips turned into a grin before she smothered his with a breath-stealing kiss, all thought fleeing at the helpless sound he made as she ground her hips against him. He didn’t want to wait any longer, either. Quickly and deftly, he maneuvered out of his trousers, then helped her slide out of hers. When she slid onto him, they both gasped, momentarily halted by the sensation. But only momentarily.
Tomorrow, they must part for the last time. Tomorrow, she must somehow return to the faded silhouette of life she had accepted before this delicious, excruciating, all-consuming vibrance. And after this, tomorrow, and all the days after, would be even duller than before. Worse than dull. Deadened. She only had the night, the one night with him, the one night to know this feeling, to know beauty, to know life.
She made the utter most of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The mystery of Anya Degen had been further unveiled, the shadow more illuminated.
The glyphs on her enchanted arrow were all on his hand.
While Anya slept, after he’d made them a fire, he’d copied them down and compared each of them to the mark on his palm. Every one had a place. In fact, if he arranged them in just such a way, he could remake the mark completely.
He did not know all of them; he’d never seen them before, but he felt a strange feeling, like in his dream, the knowing, the vast. Felt it in his heart; in his gut. He let it fill him. The shapes came naturally, grew from his mind to his hand, from his pencil to the paper, sprouting and curling like the form of a budding leaf.
He didn’t like to leap to conclusions. Time being of the essence – three days, by his count – a leap of faith was the only way forward.
He had to assume the arrow was meant to bind the phoenix to the witch. A familiar, Anya had said. If he recalled correctly, some kind of psychic as well as physical link. One which could only be broken by magic or death. Thought to be pure superstition.
A psychic and physical link, like the one binding him to his debt. To the king.
Superstition, indeed.
If one’s soul could be bound to another’s in such a way; why not their soul to another’s body? Say, Edgard’s to the phoenix’s?
Now there was only the question of the phoenix itself.
The phoenix, and Anya.
He refused to believe he couldn’t help her. If he got the phoenix before her, he could. Somehow. Probably.
Certainly, more impossible tasks had been accomplished. Such as Anya somehow managing to leave him, despite what she had said the night before.
That absolutely won’t do, he chided himself as he pulled his clothes back over his aching, scale-dusted limbs. He had known this would happen. They both had. It was better she had left without saying goodbye. Easier. And anyway, he certainly wasn’t one to complain that his bed was empty by the time he woke up, whether that bed was a third-hand mattress in a closet of an apartment, or a bed of flowers in an enchanted grotto.
So he ignored the pain like a dozen arrows in his chest, and he set to work. He had three days; he best make the most of them.
The Warbler River, as far as he knew, was still to the east, and the morning was clear and bright. After clambering out of the cavern, marking his way by the morning sun, and determining the vague sense of it, he set in that direction. He tried to embody Anya’s ease of navigation, marking the trees by their leaves, the ground by any odd-shaped stones he could identify, checking for signs and trails. To his subdued delight, he noticed he was barely stumbling.
It was because of this careful attention, less than an hour later, he knew had he ended up back exactly where he had started.
“Shit,” he hissed under his breath.
As if in response – or mockery – a robin chirped bright as sunshine on a branch to his left.
“And which way would you go?” he asked it testily.
The robin lifted from its branch. It landed on another, a little further ahead. On a nagging hunch, Sy followed it. Again, it lifted and landed further away.
“This way, I suppose,” he muttered, following it.
He followed the robin in this manner for several hours and seemed to make actual progress. It was windy, the kind of wind that signaled a coming storm. Under the trees, it felt wilder, more dangerous than it did in the city. The wind seemed toshift with every gust, sending branches creaking, the leaves shuddering and chattering, making the pines whisper and sigh. The forest was alive with anticipation.
Around midday, the robin left him. It seemed as good a time as any to stop and eat. He settled under the leaves of a beech, surrounded by exuberant ferns. As he forced the last of his salted mackerel down his throat, he listened to the rustling of the leaves. He had never truly stopped to listen to the wind, to register the different notes it made through grass, through leaves, through twigs on the ground. The wind was calmer, but still strong. As it slipped through the ferns, it almost seemed to speak.
Even a stagnant stone, given time in the ground, may grow, it said.Even a worm has the spark of life.
