Agni looks between the still-weeping gashes on my chest and the bloody dressing on Raeve’s brow.
“Her first. Please.”
She nods, tucking a lock of brown hair behind her ear before she peels the cloak away and examines Raeve’s battered body, clicking her tongue.
I look at Pyrok. “Can you find Roan? The extra pair of hands could help.”
“Can’t,” he says, twirling the piercing through his bottom lip. “He’s not here.”
“Where—”
“Bothaim. Trying to get a look at that book again. He’s certain there are more pages that haven’t been transcribed and released to the public.”
I sigh.
Pyrok shrugs. “You ask me, the place has been awfully peaceful without my nagging brother around. And you.”
I glare at him as he chugs his mead.
Agni lifts the dressing to inspect Raeve’s gnarly wound, shaking her head. “The bone is fissured,” she murmurs, poking at the gape of skin in a way that makes me want to vomit. “I’ll have to melt her skull smooth again before I thread her flesh. She’s very lucky this didn’t kill her.”
I would’ve split the world if it did.
Then split my fucking self.
She uses the dressing to blot at the wound. “Someone will need to get me a cloth and a pail of water, and fetch my kit. Pyrok, you look like you need a job. Is this all her blood?”
Surprisingly, Pyrok jogs from the room like something’s nipping at his heels, though not before casting an assessing stare between me and Veya—the latter standing over the other side of the table, gaze narrowed on me like an arrow notched and aimed.
“No,” I say, holding Veya’s stare. “A lot of it is colk blood, my blood, and the blood of another male.”
“You fucking bastard,” Veya growls, then launches across the table at me—arm swinging. I let her get three good hits to my jaw, gut, and the fucking wounds on my chest before I snatch her wrists and shove her toward Grihm, who’d silently eased off the back wall the moment she started speaking.
With a big pale hand wrapped around her wrists, he bands his other arm across her chest, looking at me through a flop of snow-toned hair that mostly hides his icy eyes, the tic in his square jaw pulsing. The only sign the male ever gives that he’s on edge.
Veya snarls, looking up at me with the ferocity of an uncharmed adolescent Sabersythe—eyes blazing, upper lip peeled back from bared canines. Failing to jerk out of Grihm’s hold. “How could you take her to that place?”
“The gorge took her to that place,” I growl, wiping a wad of blood off my lip. “I got there just in time.”
“She’s dressed in the garb of a Tookah Trial, Kaan. A Tookah Trial.”
“Well aware, Veya.”
“Who was the male?”
“Hock.”
Shadows cloud her eyes, and she stiffens. “Good,” she fires, no longer wrestling Grihm—not that he lets her go.
Not that she asks him to.
She lifts her chin. “How did she kill him?”
Rage crackles through my veins like crumbling embers as I fail to shake the image of Raeve sprawled on the sand, covered in blood, straddled by a male who had every intention of claiming her as his own. As I fail to shake the image of her laughing, like she was mocking her impending death.
You shouldn’t spend such lovely words on me, Sire.
Fuck.
I crunch my hands into fists. “She didn’t.”
Veya’s eyes narrow on the málmr around Raeve’s neck, then widen. “Creators …”
I grunt, another pulse of stone-crushing energy shooting through my veins.
My muscles.
I intercept Pyrok as he re-enters the room. Taking the pail, I use the damp cloth to clean around Raeve’s wound, then wipe the blood off her face while Pyrok helps Agni spread her tinctures across the table. When he looks up again, he stills, the jar that was in his hand dropping to the ground.
Shattering.
“Who in the Creators-damn fuck is that, and why does she look like Elluin Neván? She’s dead,” he says, looking from me to Veya to Grihm, his skin turning just as pale as the latter. “Am I the only one that thinks I’m going mad right now?”
No.
Agni looks between us like we’re all mad, dabbing some purple liquid on a piece of cloth and patting it over Raeve’s mouth.
“She doesn’t know herself as Elluin,” I mutter, slopping my cloth back in the pail and dragging both hands through my hair, pulling it back off my face. “To her, she’s Raeve, and she has no recollection of anything prior to the past twenty-three phases.”
My words echo through the hall, taunting me.
“Well … fuck,” Pyrok murmurs. “You sure they’re one and the same? That you didn’t just bring some poor stray home because she looks like Elluin?”
“You think I’d do that?” I growl.
He shrugs. “Seen some crazy shit over the past eon. Not gonna lie.”
I clear my throat.
Granted.
“It’s her. Any doubt I might’ve had was squashed the moment she told the High Chancellor of The Fade he has a microcock—and at her own murder hearing.”
There’s a stretch of silence before Pyrok chuckles, snatching some random chalice off the table. “I’ll toast to that.” He drains the vessel, slamming it back on the table. “Hate that dusty old piece of shit.”
“If she has no recollection,” Veya says with slow, steady precision, “how do you explain the fact that she calls herself by her middle name?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know, Veya.”
“Then how is she here? Alive?”
“I don’t know that either.”
A line forms between her brows—the stain of frustration I feel in my marrow. “Well, what are her first memories of this life?”
Another shake of my head.
Veya finally loosens from Grihm’s grip, the latter crossing his arms over his broad chest, gaze firmly cast on my sister stalking toward me with war waging in her bloodshot eyes. “Do you know anything?”
Fuck all.
“The only time I tried to pry, she compared my cock to the size of my brain,” I bite out. “Unfavorably.”
Some of the anger drains from Veya’s eyes, the corner of her mouth twitching as Pyrok chuckles. I slice him a glare, and he drowns the sound in another guzzle of someone else’s mead.
He won’t be laughing when she cuts those sharp teeth on him.
Agni hands Pyrok the purple-blotched cloth. “Wave this in front of her nose every few moments. I don’t want her rousing mid-etching, and your hands look like they need something better to do than drink everyone else’s mead.”
“Agni, you know perfectly well how good I am at multitasking,” Pyrok says, flashing her a grin.
Agni’s cheeks flush, and she shakes her head, muttering beneath her breath.
“Where did you find her?” Veya asks, seemingly immune to the shit coming out of Pyrok’s mouth.
“I stumbled upon her at the Hungry Hollow, but her face was half-hidden. I thought I was going mad.”
Still do.
“I later found her rotting in a cell.” I scrub my beard as Agni paints a bonding agent over the snowy flesh I’ve kissed more times than I can count. “A Truthtune confirmed she had no prior recollection of me before our chance encounter. None.”
“So she doesn’t know about—”
“No,” I say, cutting Veya off.
She opens her mouth, closes it, shaking her head. “And you’re certain you watched Slátra—”
“On her life,” I growl, my words bouncing off the walls like one of Rygun’s rumbling exhales.
Saw it. Lived with the bruising memory for the past one hundred twenty-three phases—while sleeping and awake.
I’ll never outlive the vision nor the jagged cleft of pain that broke through my chest at the sight. Even with her here, on this table, breathing …
I’ll wake up from this utopia eventually. I’m sure of it. I’ll jerk up off my pallet and realize it was all one vicious, beautiful dream.
Veya moves around the table and tucks Raeve’s hair back from her pointed ear—the one that’s clipped into. “She bears the southern mark of a null.” She frowns, inspecting both lobes. “No beads. Not even a hole for them to hang off. Do the Creators still speak with her?”