Soulwoven (35 page)

“I know you won’t want to, but…” His voice was strained. The skin on his hands was colorless. “I mean, we could die, Dil.
Any time, and you—” His fingers clenched around hers.
“If you got hurt—”

She pressed her chin against his hands.
Tight.
Her mind ran in circles.

He had a point.

Even after her mind calmed down, she stayed silent. She stroked his hand, licked her lips, and swallowed the lump in her throat. When she looked up, she saw the fear in his eyes. His face was drawn tight. His arms quivered. His breath was erratic.

And a hundred things fell into place for her at once.

The Cole she’d seen on the
Rokwet
with his veins bulging and blood on his face merged with the Cole who’d been growing cold and distant and the Cole who’d been bright and warm and the Cole who’d been flustered and shy. Cole screaming-death-with-blood-on-his-hands became Cole please-don’t-let-me-lose-anyone-today-not-today-not-while-I-still-breathe trying not to be afraid. He didn’t want to get rid of her. He wanted to protect her.

She could’ve listened to him and stayed behind. She could’ve turned away and never seen him again and lived a long and fruitful life. She had the woods, her bow, her grandfather—a hundred things to keep her happy.

But as bright as her life glowed when she was alone, it shone a thousand times brighter in the presence of Cole Jin.

And of all the futures she could have, she didn’t want a single one that didn’t have him in it for at least a little longer.

She pulled her hands from his and wrapped them around the back of his head. His hair curled warm and soft around her fingers. She pushed his chin onto her shoulder.

“I’m staying with you,” she breathed.

His hands closed around her back. He pressed his face against her neck. Her shirt grew wet beneath his eyes.

After a moment, he mumbled something.

“Hmm?” she asked.

His head came off her shoulder. “But what if I lose you?”

After they’d fallen in the tunnels, when Dil had been ready to scream and claw her way through solid rock just to get out, Cole had put his hands over hers and whispered gentle, soothing words. He’d prodded her limbs with feather-light touches until she was convinced that nothing was broken. He’d found her a torch and cleaned the blood from her wounds. He’d made her feel safe again.

“You won’t,” she said.

He pulled away, and she grabbed his head with both hands and held his face so close to hers she could scarcely see anything else.

“You will not lose me, Cole Jin. Not ever.
Even if you want to someday.”

She tugged him close again. His breathing grew calmer. His grip on her back loosened.

Eventually, he mumbled, “Promise?”

And she whispered, “Promise.”

The afternoon sun struck her forehead. Cole’s face drifted closer to hers. She could feel the warmth of his cheeks, his nose,
his
mouth.

She closed her eyes and brought her lips to his.

They were warm and wet and salty and shaking and strange. Not at all what she’d expected, but somehow lovely all the same. Her teeth clashed with his, and he broke away and his tears rubbed onto her cheeks, but he was smiling and he kissed her again and squeezed her so hard she couldn’t breathe.

She dug her fingers into his shoulder blades, and then she felt like crying too, and in the midst of all that hurricane of strange, new experience she focused on the warm feeling of Cole’s body pressed close to hers. She held him tight, and she prayed to whatever had brought them together to keep them that way as strongly as she’d prayed to anything in her entire life.

She didn’t notice Ryse’s skin grow pale behind her. She didn’t see the soulweaver’s fingers dig into the bark of the Great Ildar or watch the expression on her face strain steadily toward desperation.

Those things happened, but Dil didn’t notice them until later.

She had more important things to worry about.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Ryse felt nauseous. Her fingers rested on the smooth, silvery bark of a tree. The air wrapped warm and soft around her. Leaves rustled in the boughs overhead. Green-gold light flowed over her from above. The scent of ildarflower filled her nose.

And she was cold.

She held a strong link with the soul of Reif Graywater. She shouldn’t have been feeling her body at all.

In her mind’s eye, the ancient soulweaver dripped with sweat. His broad hands gripped one another tightly. His brows slanted downward until they bled into the copper in his eyes. The soul of the tree hovered behind him in the darkness. Somehow, it had returned to him after she’d lost it in the tunnels.

She was glad for that, at least.

Ryse had told him what had happened in Du Fenlan and what had happened with Litnig on the
Rokwet.
She could feel the wrenching slick of his unease.

The Heart Dragons of Aleana are broken. You think little of your chances of reaching the Sh’ma.
Yenor’s eye.

Reif’s image jerked
forward,
and Ryse had the sensation of him gripping her arm. His fingers burned like river ice. His eyes shone wide and white with fright.

Ryse, you must not let the last two
break
. You cannot—the world cannot—

The tree shook.

The destruction, Ryse, you cannot imagine the destruction!

The coldness on her arm spread through her whole body. Fragments of his memories slipped into her mind like a hundred tiny knives. A metropolis of white marble and sandstone glittered in the setting sun, burning as the earth it sat upon slipped into an angry sea. An army of humans, Aleani, and Sh’ma quaked with terror on a wide, golden plain. Thousands of roaring barbarians charged through shield walls like they weren’t even there. Above the battle, a shadow—

Reif—stop.

—a black shadow raced through the sky almost too fast to be seen. It opened its mouth and screamed a scream like the shearing of iron that drowned out the sound of steel on steel and the shouts of the dying. There was nothing but that sound, that terrible, awful sound, and two crimson slashes deep in the shadow itself that saw her, saw through her,
began
to move—

Stop it!

The words tore desperately across her mind. She wrenched herself from the grasp of Reif’s soul, cold to the very core of her, colder than a winter night with no shelter and no fire, and she shook so hard she could barely stand.

Why? Reif, what—why would you—

But Reif was pale and shivering. His eyes were blank as naked parchment, and they weren’t looking at her.

His mouth worked open and shut, open and shut, and his voice came out as a croak when he spoke again.

I…I’m sorry, it’s just—

His sigh struck the tree like a great gust of wind. He wrapped his arms around himself, closed his eyes, and breathed deep.

But you know. You know my fear of that creature. There’s no more to say.

He touched his forehead with one shaking hand, and he began to move into the darkness that was his home.

Ryse watched him go. Her heartbeat felt heavy and erratic. She could feel a fever overtaking the cold in her bones.

Reif turned back to face her.

Your friend, Ryse—the red glow in his eyes. I’ve seen it only among the Duennin.

Fear tore like quicksilver through Ryse’s mind.

And as Reif faded, his voice echoed in her thoughts.

Only there, Ryse.

Only there.

The ancient soulweaver’s image bled away.

Ryse became fully aware of her body again. Her fingers had dug into the tree’s bark hard enough to break her nails. Her hands were cold and stiff. Her head was sweating. Her face was numb. Her legs buzzed and wobbled drunkenly beneath her.

The link between her and Reif had passed out of her control, and connections had formed where they shouldn’t have. He’d been inside her body, inside her mind, and his withdrawal had left her feeling empty and poisoned and shaky and feverish. A part of her remembered the warnings, the dangers of linking two human souls.

But she didn’t care about those things.

She’d known, somewhere inside of her, about Litnig. She’d known ever since his recovery in Du Fenlan.

Duennin,
she thought.
Born to burn the world.

She stumbled away from the tree. Quay clasped her forearm, his fingers warm where Reif’s had been frozen. He asked something. She tried to mutter a response.

Her knees buckled. The world spun.

Her body gave out and her mind let go, and then there was only darkness.

THIRTY-NINE

The warmth of sunset faded on Cole’s face. A plain of waist-high grass drowned in an ocean of blue shadows around him. The ground crunched hard and unforgiving beneath his boots.

His feet fairly flew.

Somewhere behind him, Ryse was lying feverish and incoherent in Quay’s arms, or being carried on the prince’s back over the rough, undulating paths of the Forest of Lurathen. Somewhere behind him, Litnig’s face was gray and pained because she shrieked any time he came near her. Somewhere behind him, things had gone very wrong.

And Cole and Dil had been sent ahead to see if Dil’s grandfather could help.

Cole ground his teeth. When he’d left the others, Ryse had seemed as sick as the plague victims he’d seen ten years before. Her face had been deathly white. Her forehead had been hot. Her fingers had been frozen. She needed
real
help, apothecary help, soulweaver help,
Temple
help.

And because they were in Eldan, they couldn’t get it for her.

His stomach twisted. He hadn’t thought about what it would be like to return home in secret when he’d agreed to leave.

He hadn’t honestly thought about what it would be like to return home at all.

The grasslands he and Dil were running through jutted out from the Forest of Lurathen and plunged off steep cliffs into the river that nourished the city itself. Just far enough from the cliffs to be safe, a wattle-and-daub cabin sat in a pit dug a few feet into the ground. Wood smoke drifted from a small chimney that poked through its roof.

In front of Cole, Dil was moving through the high grass toward the cabin like a lion. Her hair drifted in the breeze. Her skin shone dusky and sun-kissed in the fading light.

Cole’s mouth dried up. He remembered the sticky warmth of her lips and the softness of her body in his arms.

Focus,
he told himself.

Dil reached the top of the steps that led to the cabin. Its wooden door opened so quickly that it should’ve banged.

It didn’t.

A hand snaked out and caught the door, and a tall, gaunt man with white hair and a severe expression emerged from the cabin’s firelit innards. He thrust his chin into the dusk as though he was sniffing for something. The last few rays of sun caught his eyes.

They were the same liquid gold as Dil’s.

Cole had once seen a tiger, caged in a traveling menagerie in Eldan City. He’d stared into its eyes, and he’d known when he did that it saw at a glance whether everything beyond the bars around it was its better or its equal or its prey, and that he had ranked as prey.

The old man’s eyes looked the same, and this time there were no bars.

Cole stopped at the top of the steps to the cabin.

“Grandfather!”
Dil shouted. She jumped down the steps and threw herself into the old man’s arms.

Her grandfather pulled her close and smiled. His leathery skin creased into a hundred wrinkles. The predatory stare disappeared.

Just my imagination,
Cole told himself.

But he didn’t believe the words.

Dil said something about Ryse, pulled out of the old man’s embrace, and pointed toward the forest.

Her grandfather nodded. He tousled Dil’s hair fondly and spoke in a voice that was soft and hoarse, like it had been stretched out over many years. Cole didn’t catch what he said, but it sounded loving.

Cole inched down the steps until he reached the hard-packed dirt that lay before the cabin door. The pots and pans in his pack clanged as he moved. He felt like a clown.

The grandfather’s eyes landed on him.

“This is Cole, Grandfather,” Dil said. “He’s one of the people I’ve been traveling with.”

Cole swallowed.

“Cole, this is my grandfather.”

The old man’s smile faded. The tiger stare returned.

Cole’s legs turned to jelly.

“Happy to meet you,” Cole said. “Our friend—”

“Will be taken care of.”
Dil’s grandfather rubbed a patch of rough, snowy stubble on his jaw. Inside the cabin, a fire crackled and spit in a brick hearth. “You have my word.”

The old man’s eyes flashed. Cole told himself that his fears were stupid and childish, and that Dil’s grandfather was just a man like any other.

Focus.

But his mind wasn’t having it. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the ground was sliding slowly out from under his feet.

Dil’s grandfather offered him a hand. A long-toothed grin seeped over the old man’s face.

“My name is Alain,” he said.

Cole grasped the hand. Its grip was much stronger than he expected.

“Happy to meet you,” the old man continued, and Cole’s stomach wound itself in knots.

An hour or so later, Cole was pressing two fingers surreptitiously against the small of Dil’s back. Alain squatted in front of him, crumbling herbs into a teakettle on the floor before his hearth.

“It’s not her body but her soul that is sick,” the old man said. “In time, she’ll recover.”

The others had arrived as Dil was explaining the circumstances of Ryse’s collapse. Alain had directed Quay and Cole to lay the unconscious soulweaver onto a straw pallet near the fire, taken a brief a look at her, and then walked into his kitchen and returned with five or six different dried herbs.

“Luckily,” the old man grunted, “nature gives us what we need to speed the process, so long as we have the knowledge.” His golden eyes flicked briefly to Dil.