“Oh, Hal . . . ,” I whispered.
“I wish I could rewrite taking you to Orzai. I wish we could have taken the Moth and flown past there. I wish we could keep going forever. See the world. Us, Iman, and the open sky.”
“I understand that wish.” If it hadn’t been for the sorrow I’d left behind in Amalska, the fear driving me forward, and the knives always at my back, traveling with him might have been the happiest time of my life—until he betrayed me.
“I knew when I heard you sing those vespers that they would change my life. I just never knew how much.” His voice was so tender it broke my heart.
“I knew when I heard you sing ‘The Tavern Lamb’ that you were the most ridiculous person I’d ever met,” I said, teasing.
He smiled, the slightest upturn of his lips.
I missed that mouth. I missed that smile.
“I just . . . I never expected . . . you,” Hal said. “I didn’t expect how special you are.”
I leaned on the railing of the bridge, burying my face in my hands. Heat rose in my cheeks, and I wanted to push it back down. The compliment was so bittersweet.
“Special is why your sister took my blood,” I said. “Special is why the king keeps me close and puts up with me having a girl and two babies in my room. I would give anything to not be special. I would give anything to be just like you or, better yet, to be human. Even one without a manifest. Someone simple. Uncomplicated. Someone who hasn’t been chased across half a kingdom for the power that runs in her veins.” Now that I knew what the world would do with someone like me, I longed to be something, anything, other than myself.
“I didn’t mean anything to do with your abilities. I meant the way you watched over me when I was unconscious in the Tamers’ forest. Mukira said you never left my side. I meant the way you look at Iman like he means the world to you, like he’s your own. I meant the way you’ve kept fighting even when it seems like all is lost. Even now. Most people aren’t like that. That’s what makes you special. Not your blood.”
Hal reached for my left hand, and I jerked it away before he could touch me. Letting him touch the broken part of me was still too intimate, still too much.
“How is your arm?” he asked quietly.
“There are some things magic cannot repair.” I tried to close my hand and was rewarded with the usual stab of pain through my wrist.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it will never be enough, but I am so, so sorry.”
“If it had been my writing hand, perhaps Nismae would have done me a favor,” I said bitterly.
“No. There is no light in which it was a favor,” he said.
“It’s fine. It’s just more damage to someone who was already broken, and a lesson in whom not to trust.” I couldn’t stop lashing out at him. The pain was too much.
“You aren’t broken, Asra.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what I am!” I said.
“You’re right, you don’t, but I wish you could see yourself the way I do. You are all goodness and light. You’re as bright and beautiful as a star—one I feel like I’ve been searching the sky for my whole life. I felt pulled to you from the very first time I heard you singing.” He could have used his compulsion to try to make the words more moving, but he didn’t. They were delivered raw and unpolished, simple as an ugly truth.
“Feelings are a terrible reason to do anything,” I said, but the fight was starting to seep out of me. I tried to cling to the knowledge that feelings were what had started the avalanche of disaster that got me here. It had started the moment I put pen to paper to help Ina find her manifest, and that had been about nothing if not feelings. Selfish, stupid feelings.
“I know I made a mistake,” he continued. “When we met, I didn’t know that you were the kind of person with whom I could have been honest from the very first breath and you still would have helped me. I didn’t know you would stay by me even when I collapsed in the middle of the woods and you could have left me behind. And while I knew you were the one my sister wanted me to find, I didn’t know that your gift was something she would injure you for, and I am so sorry for the suffering that my actions and choices have cost you. But I want to do better. I want to be better. Maybe I don’t deserve that chance, but I’m asking you for it because if I don’t, I know I will regret it for the rest of my life. And I know you now, Asra. I know you. I trust you. Please give me another chance.”
Somewhere in the middle of his speech, I met his eyes, daring him to try to use his compulsion on me, to try to touch me uninvited, to do anything to undermine his own words.
He simply waited for me to say something, his face tight with fear, but his eyes holding the smallest flicker of hope. I couldn’t cling to my anger with him looking at me so humbly. I let the last of it slip away like a bird released into the wild. It would still exist. It would still be part of our past, but it didn’t have to define our future.
In spite of it all, I had to face the truth I’d been denying for moons.
I loved him.
“Sing me that song about the tavern girl and the sheep again and maybe I’ll forgive you,” I said.
A slow grin emerged on his face. “Really?” He stepped closer, still cautious.
I slipped my hand into his and laced our fingers together, unable to help the sigh that escaped when I did. It felt so good to be connected to him again, and though the peace between us was still fragile and new, the rightness of it was undeniable.
“I missed you so much,” he said. “Every day, every hour, every minute—”
“Oh be quiet,” I said. Then I kissed him.
A spark leaped between us as it had the very first time we touched. I let my arms wrap around him, giving in to how good his mouth felt on mine.
When he broke away from me and smiled, this time his smile was my dawn, the sun returning after too much darkness.
He sang me “The Tavern Lamb” on the way back down to the castle. I tried to sing with him but always ended up laughing too hard to go on. And when we crossed the threshold of my room to find Zallie awake and more than ready to hand off Iman, I finally understood what my mother had been telling me when she said, Listen to your heart.
I knew how to find the Fatestone.
CHAPTER 34
IF LISTENING TO MY HEART WAS THE KEY TO ATHEON, my heart led me to Hal. That meant it was Hal who needed to listen with his Farhearing. Veric had been a bloodscribe like me, and Leozoar had been a wind demigod like Hal. Of course they’d have worked together to hide the Fatestone. Of course it would be impossible to find the Fatestone without both gifts. Once I understood that Hal was the answer, it all made sense.
Why hadn’t my mother just told me? It chafed a little that it had taken this long to figure things out when she could have given me stronger direction. But whose fault was that? I was the one who had stayed angry at Hal. I was the one who had been slow to forgive, and slow to admit my own feelings. My mother must have wanted me to find my own way to the answers, to be sure of my own heart. I understood.
“You’re the key,” I told Hal, who had sat down to hold Iman.
“What?” he asked.
Zallie nursed her own baby, Nera, not minding us. By now she was more than used to our odd conversations and arguments.
“It was something the shadow god told me that only makes sense now. I need you to listen. That’s how we’ll find the Fatestone. Listen for something out there that sounds like me.”
Hal closed his eyes, and I recognized the tilt of his head that meant he was reaching beyond his normal range. At the same time, I reached for the well of dark magic in me that I now knew had come from the shadow god. It wound through me in its familiar way, and I gently drew on it to brighten my Sight.
“I don’t hear anything unusual,” he said. “I listen to the city all the time. If I heard something that sounded like you, but wasn’t actually you, I would have noticed long before now.”