“Have you started to hear it at all yet?”
Barloc’s question, though well intended, bristled. He asked me multiple times from morning until we retired for bed, and after four days of his intense scrutiny I was weary of it—and him. I knew he only wanted to assist me and our family, to help us try and get Zuhra back, but I was beginning to feel like one of his books that he studied at all hours of the day and night. When he wasn’t peering at me and asking if the roar had begun to manifest yet or not, he was deeply engrossed in one book or another. The citadel’s library had nearly been enough to bring tears to his eyes when we’d first taken him there.
“No,” I replied with a sigh, holding my frustration in check—or so I thought. Halvor, who sat in the chair next to mine, still glanced over at me, concerned.
“Soon, soon,” Barloc said, almost more to himself than me, it seemed. “I’m sure of it. Just another day or two, maybe.”
I nodded, partially to encourage him to get back to his books, and partially because he actually was right. Though I hadn’t begun to hear the roar yet, it was coming; the buzz of its impending arrival pulsed in my veins, making me jumpy and on edge. I could feel my power building within me, pushing for release, pressing at my mind, my lungs, my hands. Now that I’d experienced what it was like to truly use it, to tap into it to such a degree as to completely clear my mind, it was a wonder I’d never realized before just how badly it wanted out—how much it needed to be used. Trying to hold it in was like trying to hold my breath: easy at first, but growing progressively more difficult, more urgent, until not using my power was almost all I could focus on. If it grew much more insistent, I didn’t know how I would be able to keep from releasing at least a small portion of it, just for relief from the unbearable pressure inside me.
I jumped to my feet and announced, “I need to go for a walk,” feeling like I would claw my own skin off if I didn’t do something to distract myself from the urge to use my power on someone, something, anything.
Everyone in the room startled, even my mother, who sat by the window, her needlepoint lying unused in her lap, her face turned to the window—until that moment. Even she turned to look at me, but her eyes were bloodshot, her face gaunt; a mere ghost of who she was before.
Everything was broken into before and after. That one terrible night was the new focal point of our lives. Before, Mother had forced us all to eat together as if we were a grand family; after, Mother took all of her meals in her room, and Sami had confessed to me last night that every time she went to get her tray, it was almost always untouched. I’d gone to her room for breakfast, asking if I could join her to eat, but she’d turned me away, claiming she’d already eaten. Maybe next time, she’d said with a wan attempt at a smile that was more a contortion of her lips. I’d swallowed the hurt and chosen not to point out that I didn’t have much time left.
Before, she might have commanded me to stay. Forced me to work on needlepoint as she’d once made Zuhra do every day.
After, as I turned and moved toward the door, it was no surprise that she didn’t protest, but some small part of me still wished she would—that she would show at least a trace of the fire that she used to possess. How could one night have doused it so entirely, stripping her of all her strength and leaving her a broken husk that barely survived from day to day? If Zuhra and I had wondered why we weren’t enough to make her happy after our father left us, that was nothing compared to knowing that I, alone, was not enough to even induce her to want to live. Because, as near as I could tell, that was exactly what losing Zuhra had done to her—stolen her will to even try to survive. She’d retreated inside herself, slowly starving, wasting away from a lifetime of grief finally breaking open within her.
Hot, angry tears burned at my eyes as I stormed down the hallway, toward the massive entryway. The painted Paladin soaring on their mounts that had watched over us our whole lives followed my progress across the marbled floor with their lapis lazuli eyes.
“Inara,” a low voice called out from deeper within the citadel, a familiar, welcome voice, but I ignored him and yanked the door open, rushing out into the waiting embrace of the wind that whipped through the hedge and my fruit trees that I’d spent so many years healing, over and over again.
A healer, that’s what I was. Barloc had spent two hours one night explaining it to me: how some Paladin had extra gifts, beyond the most common ability to wield fire, taking the burning blue flames within—visible in our eyes—and using it as a weapon. But my gift was healing. He said I could probably learn to wield the fire too, if his research was right, but healing was my true strength. It was what had kept us alive all those years, my ability to heal the plants in my gardens no matter what the weather did—rain or snow or unabated sunshine—always coaxing vegetables and fruits to grow and harvest, year round. Tiny, paltry uses for my great power, as Barloc called it, never enough to clear my mind for more than a few minutes.
My great power—that I had been so ignorant about, that had made my mother hate me, that had brought destruction and nearly death to the citadel, and lost my sister to me … possibly forever.
She’s alive. She’s alive. She has to be alive.
One pounding step on the ground for each word of the refrain that had almost become a prayer to me; little puffs of dirt to accentuate each syllable of my only hope at redemption.
“Inara—” Halvor drew up alongside me, slightly out of breath, his cheeks tinged pink from running to catch me. “Are you … That is to say, I’m worried that you … are not, ah…” He lapsed into miserable silence. With a slow exhale, I blinked back the tears I’d refused to let fall and turned to him.
“No,” I admitted, my first honest answer in … a while. “I’m not all right.”
Halvor’s eyes roamed over me. The shadow that crossed his face had nothing to do with the thunderheads coalescing above us, racing across the sky with low, throaty growls to announce their impending arrival. “Is it Barloc’s questions? I can tell him to stop. He just gets so eager and he doesn’t always realize—”
“No,” I interrupted him. “Well, yes, it’s that, but it’s not only that. It’s … everything.” I turned back to the rows of planter boxes full of thriving plants, bursting with all sorts of vegetables, heavy and ripe and glistening with the first few drops of rain that began to fall, landing on their jeweled skins and my face and upturned hands. I hadn’t touched my plants in almost a week, hadn’t so much as brushed a fruit with my fingertips. But the weather had been perfect, not too hot, not too cold, with a stray shower here and there to keep them watered, and they’d thrived, even without me.
“I never realized before just how much I needed to use this … this…”—I gestured at myself, from head to toe—“thing inside me. I didn’t know how hard it would be to hold back, now that I’ve experienced what it’s like to … to be … free.”
Halvor stood beside me, close enough for his arm to brush mine every time he inhaled, quiet but listening. He was so good at listening. He was the only one who truly did anymore. Barloc was too busy explaining—always eager to share his years of research with all of us. Sami tried, but she was distracted by Mother … and everything else. And who could blame her? It wasn’t just my world that had been turned upside down by before and after.
The villagers had given up trying to break through the hedge after the garrison had shown up and also been unable to break through. But the threat that lay beyond its protection was enough to keep us in the citadel, that and my promise not to use my power—and the hedge only responded to me, it seemed.
“I can feel it coming,” I admitted at last. “And … I’m scared.”
“Oh, Inara.” My name was a soft murmur of apology. “This is asking too much of you.”
“No, it isn’t,” I insisted. “I just didn’t realize how hard it would be. Something’s different now that I did … everything that night. It’s like … I was merely scratching the surface my whole life and I was so used to it, that made the feeling—the pain—of holding all that power locked inside bearable. It just … was. It’s what I was. But now … I’m not anymore. I know what it’s like to be free of it, to do what I was meant to do with it, and now … trying to hold back from doing it is … It hurts, Halvor. It actually hurts. It’s like trying to force something back into a place when there’s no space for it anymore, because now I’m in that space—the real me, this me—and there’s nowhere for all that power to go anymore, and it’s pulling at me and stretching me and it … it hurts,” I finally finished lamely, knowing I probably made no sense at all and sounded as weak as I secretly feared I might be.
Halvor put both of his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him, his gaze as intense as I’d ever seen it. “Inara, you are the strongest person I’ve ever met in my entire life,” he said, as if he somehow could hear even my unspoken words. “I know you can do this—for Zuhra. And as soon as you do, you’ll never have to do this to yourself again. I promise.”
“How can you make a promise like that? As much as you might want to protect me, you can’t always be—”
He lifted one hand to press a finger over my lips, silencing me. “I will be right here, at your side, for as long as you wish me to be. I can promise that. And as long as I’m by your side, I will do what I can to make you happy—to keep you from having to hurt like this ever again.”
The way he said it, the way he looked at me—it was as if he knew, truly knew, what I was feeling, what I was experiencing. Was it possible? Since I’d healed him, I’d felt as though I could sense him in new ways … amazing but somewhat alarming ways. The closer my proximity to him, the stronger it grew—that sensation that I could feel what he was feeling … that I was connected to him in some way. He stared down at me, his finger still on my mouth, and I wondered if he knew that a roar was building within me, rushing through my blood—but not from my power this time. A different, heady roar, made of heat … and want … and that pull thrumming in the small space between our bodies. I hardly knew what I wanted, only that I did, and that he was the cause of it.
“Inara.” This time my name was not an apology, it sounded like a prayer … like a plea. His eyes were molten and it didn’t take any Paladin power for them to burn through me as we stared at one another. His finger moved at last, but only to allow the rest of his hand to slide across my jaw, his thumb brushing my cheekbone, sending a ripple of heat through me. The power building within, that I’d held trapped for so long, leapt inside me, flames igniting everywhere—in my chest, in my belly, in my hands that burned to reach for him, in my skin where he touched me, in my lips that ached for him to touch them again—
“Inara.” This time my name was a low groan that somehow vibrated straight into the deepest part of my belly and then he did touch my lips, except he didn’t use his finger this time. He bent and his mouth brushed mine and the flames exploded and everything was white-hot heat and I was consumed—
And Halvor was blasted off of his feet with a howl of pain, to land flat on his back.
I stood unmoving for one long, terrible moment, in petrified shock. Then I rushed forward.
“Halvor!”
I dropped to my knees at his side, terror pulsing through me. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken—
He was staring up at the sky, touching his lips—lips that were bright white with thin ribbons of red—and when he saw me he laughed. He had the audacity to laugh.
“I … I don’t know what you think is so funny,” I mumbled, unsure if I should be concerned that whatever had just happened had affected his brain, or if I should be humiliated that he found it funny. That kiss—I knew that’s what it was called from some of the stories Zuhra had read to me—had touched me to my core, had done something to me that I didn’t even fully understand, but I did know it hadn’t made me want to laugh.
“Apparently you can do more than just heal with your power,” Halvor managed between great, gulping, shuddering gales of laughter. “And that will teach me to kiss you when you are trying to hold it all in.”
“My power…” I hesitantly touched my own lips that still tingled—from his kiss or from the explosion of power that I’d had no control over, blasting him off of his feet? “Your mouth … I hurt you,” I finally pointed out, a riotous mess of emotions swirling within me like the clouds above us. Somehow I’d failed to notice it had begun to rain in earnest until that moment. My hair dripped down my back, raindrops sluiced down my face and landed on his wounded lips.
“Yes,” Halvor agreed, finally sitting up with a wince. “But you didn’t mean to.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that I did!” I reached out toward his face. “Let me heal you.”
“No.” He jerked his face away, clambering to his feet. I quickly did the same, but he backed up. “You already used some of your power unwittingly just then—if you heal me, it will be too much. It will set you back days. Zuhra is more important. I’ll heal on my own.”
“But … your mouth…” I flushed even as I said it, as I thought of the delicious, heady heat of that kiss—for the instant it had lasted before I’d exploded and done that. His mouth was obviously injured—and no ordinary injury, either. How would he explain it, if he refused to let me heal him and hide the evidence of what we’d done?
“How bad does it look?”
Lightning carved through the tumult of clouds overhead, as white as the skin of his lips. “Pretty bad.” I grimaced. “Does it … hurt?”
He paused a half second and then nodded. “I think you burned me,” he admitted. “But luckily, I think it’s just my lips. It didn’t … go inside me or anything.”
“I’m … I’m sorry,” I mumbled, my cheeks the only part left in my body still hot. Everything else went cold with guilt, with shame. He’d touched me, offered to stay by my side for as long as I wished, had kissed me, and I … I’d attacked him—hurt him.
“Inara, don’t.” Halvor finally stepped toward me, reaching out and gently taking my hand in his. “You didn’t mean to. And now we know—when you’re holding in your power, that’s not a good time to … do other things.”
“Like kiss?”
Halvor blinked, then laughed again and I flushed even hotter. “Yes, like kiss,” he agreed, pulling me toward him, until he could wrap his arms around me. “But I think this is safe.”
Thunder crackled across the sky, and Halvor just held me, until the wild thrumming of my heart calmed and I relaxed into his arms—even hesitantly lifting my own to encircle his waist and hold him back. He’d been right. Even that one accidental expulsion of my power had been enough to release a bit of the pressure building within me … which meant it would take longer before the roar overcame me and I could try to open the gateway and get to Zuhra. As much as I wanted to heal the damage I’d done to him, his selflessness in choosing to deal with the pain so I could get to my sister sooner was only further evidence of … of what? How much he cared about her … or me?
I wasn’t sure, but as I stood in the circle of his arms, with the memory of his hand on my face and his lips on my lips, my eyes closed and I let myself dream of a future … a future with him.
A future where I could use my power daily, and always be me, and kiss him again—and this time keep all that heat and power inside, where it belonged, so I could find out what happened next.
But first … I had to get to Zuhra. And that meant no more accidental slipups.
“We’d better get back inside.” Halvor finally pulled back enough to look down at me, the sight of his lips—ghost-white and cracked—enough to make me wince. “We’re getting soaked.”
“What will you tell them?”
“Maybe I won’t say anything and just let them guess.”
This time I laughed as we turned, hand in hand, and ran back through the rain toward the safety of the citadel.