I had to climb a tree. My first. I’d chosen a stout one, as many were spindle-thin, and still felt the lifeless, papery bark shred underneath my fingers as I sought careful purchase. But I finally reached a vantage that stretched on in all directions. Through the early morning’s wreath of snowy fog, I saw the ominous peak of Zhaeha against the brightening sky. There was an answering tug in my gut that I couldn’t have imagined. I could’ve guessed the direction of the mountain and done so correctly.
I had rations enough in my pack for a few days, but Antares had carried the bulk of our supply. I’d run before thinking of searching him—and was too scared now to consider going back. I had seen enough corpses during the war to know that even those you knew in life would be remembered by their lifeless faces. I had no desire to eclipse the man he had been with a mask of death. Perhaps the widow makers would find him when they came for Emine and bury them both. Or would they leave him to stiffen in the winter sun, to waste to blue skin and white bones on the forest floor? I swallowed the hiccup of a sob at the thought and started walking.
For three days, I feared encountering another living creature, but I was unsettled, too, by their absence. I felt I didn’t belong in this wood and didn’t want to think too hard about what did. I stopped each night before it got too dark to find wood for a fire, choosing a small clearing on the third night that seemed as good of a place as any. I wouldn’t have known a good spot from a poor one: we had survived in exile, but my survival skills were based on what I had been able to observe rather than on direct instruction.
The fire, when I finally got it going, was far from merry, but it was warm and kept the darkness at bay. The night beyond was impenetrable, the haunting quiet broken only by the crackling of dry wood. The flame called out to me, a kindred spirit in destruction. Fire could burn and maim and did so mercilessly. But it was also a comforting source of heat and light. How many travelers were preserved by its glow? How many homes were made refuge? It might not have been in Theba’s nature to recognize its full range of power, but it was in mine.
It should matter, that I cared.
When I finally slept, my dreams were fitful. The broken forms of Antares and Emine fell over and over again before me, my mind providing all of the grim details my bound eyes had not seen. Emine was in turn each of my sisters, then she was Morainn and finally Imke, and it was my hand that dealt the final, brutal blow. I licked the blade and felt my tongue fork. I tasted blood and tears when I woke, crying out against a gray dawn.
A dark figure was silhouetted before me, looming and featureless in the early light. I scrambled back, tangled in my bedroll, and flame leaped from my wrists, drawn from the embers of the meager fire. The blaze was momentarily blinding, but the voice that followed eliminated the need to see.
“Take care with that, Han’dra Eiren. Everything is kindling here.”
The lips quirked beneath the smooth plane of the half mask, a twitch of shadow on his pale face.
“Gannet?” I would not ask if it was really him, if he was really here. I could not bear the answer if this was a trick of the wood, a weirdness that preyed upon the weak.
Neither did his response need words. He crossed to me, taking the hands that were still warm from the quenched flame and lifted me to my feet. He met my eyes, and I sensed his caution, his desire, his fear. His touch was true, his mind open to mine, each of us troubled with recent horrors, seeking the comfort of the other.
I am here.
I am sorry.
I breathed the scents of his traveling clothes and he the tangled sweep of my hair, lips parted in an exhalation we shared as they met, sweet, urgent, mad. My hands skimmed his chest, fingers pinning in the folds of fabric at his shoulders and deeper, feeling the muscle there, the hint of bone. Gannet’s hands on my hips pressed me flush against him even as his mouth left mine, trailing down my neck and lower still, his fevered lips branding the slight swell of my breast above the collar of my stained traveling dress.
This was not the opera. Neither was it a dream. There would be no interruptions.
But Theba had twisted in me, shown me that I could not have this without acknowledging that she would have it, too. In the way she had manipulated my dreams, in the way she had perverted my perceptions of Antares. I knew that I couldn’t trust her, and now I wasn’t sure that I could trust myself. I clasped between us the hands that sought lower on Gannet’s lean frame. Was it Theba who hoped to conquer him, or me?
Which did I fear more?
I pulled away, only just, planting my forehead in the hollow between his shoulder and throat, arresting his own fevered journey down my body.
“How did you find me?”
Mine were not the sweet words of a hopeful lover but a repentant enemy.
“Adah,” he said, breath slowing. “He told me you had gone south with Antares and that he did not expect you to return.”
“And you followed us?”
“You, actually. I started going south, but then I sensed you, the way it was before we met. I could hear you, your thoughts.” His expression, already sober, darkened even more. “With Antares gone, you’re going to the mountain.”
Gannet had seen his death, then, too. I grimaced.
“I have to.”
“I know. I will go with you.”
“Even knowing why I go?”
He nodded. Rather than questioning him further, rather than conjuring an argument, I relaxed against him again. There was so much still to say, but it could wait for a breath or two. We didn’t even need words, and my grief for what I had done, my gratitude for being offered a way forward against the imposter and my resolve to take it, all of it passed into him through the places that we touched.
It went both ways. Gannet’s hands tightened where they’d come to rest on my hips. With that pressure came an urgent flood of memories.
We were in Jhosch, in the opera house. Gannet had dodged a heretic’s dagger as he turned toward the fire, not away, as everyone else had done. Knives of flame glanced away from him as he cleared a path through the fire and the fleeing, the flailing, the dying. He carved the air out of the chamber where his sister had fallen, suffocating the flame, but it was not soon enough to stop the tongues of fire from licking her cheek, her scalp.
This was not the greatest horror he offered me, though. Through Gannet’s eyes, I saw the black fury that was Theba, the wicked contortion of my face as I blasted down all who fled before me. Only when the fires had been extinguished was I the woman he knew, trembling from head to foot, ashen eyes empty as they considered the carnage before them.
I was shaking now, as I had then, and even Gannet’s arms girded tight around me could not still me. He tilted my chin to look at my face, giving me no choice but to look into his. His eyes behind the mask were as warm as the fingers that cupped my chin, the blank chill I’d once believed to be their only expression now absent. Gannet’s eyes held the warmth of secrets shared in the dark, the whispered heat of spent lovers in stories, their heads upon the same pillow.
“Is Morainn alive?” He hadn’t shown me, and I had to know.
“She was when I left. She is safe but—sleeping.”
Tears burned trails down my cheeks so hot that I wondered they didn’t boil off. She hadn’t awakened then. Would she ever wake?
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to. I would never have hurt her if I…if I had been myself.”
Gannet didn’t cradle me, didn’t coddle me, but he held me firmly before him and commanded my eyes.
“Eiren.” His voice was flat as a stone baked in the sun. “You cannot change what you are any more than I can.”
“You don’t even know what you are.”
“I know that I am devoted to you, every finger, every breath, every bone.”
I sucked in a shaky breath, searching his face.
“How can you say that? After everything I’ve done?”
“You’re not the only one who’s allowed to forgive.” His eyes cooled at my words, and he was again the icon I knew, disguising the fury of feelings from the man within. But he was irritated, and this familiar ground put me at my ease, at last.
“Fair enough,” I murmured. His declaration was something a woman in a story might have swooned for. I felt myself in danger of it with his hands on me still, his breath near enough to tease the loose hairs from behind my ears. “What do we do now?”
Gannet’s breath was audibly relieved. I felt the walls going back up around his mind, but I sensed now how necessary they were for him to get by, and how a word from me would bring them down again, if I wished it. He secured my cloak around my shoulders before stepping away under the pretense of rummaging in his pack.
“Now? Food, a fire. And then Zhaeha.”