Page 13 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)

SWORD AND SYMBOL

LEA RETURNED TO her room with a mind overwhelmed by thought. Myken’s words clouded her with a looming sense of danger and reserve, and yet she knew the afternoon would demand her attention in other ways.

Iris’s vague mention of heart exchanges in Dawn Field was now only an afterthought.

She retreated into her bathroom to bathe, discarding her clothes and dipping into the elevated bath that steamed with fragrance.

The servants had prepared it in anticipation of her return from the field.

They were doting and sometimes mischievous ghosts who often went unseen and yet anticipated everything.

Steam had already fogged up the tops of the mirror in her bathroom, and she looked across the water to see her face reflected in it.

She looked at her own reflection critically, her body mostly hidden beneath the water.

Curling her arms around herself, she felt the softness of her own skin, her breasts against the muscles of her arms, the callouses of her heels against the softness of her thighs, and in her body, she felt the conflict of her own high council.

Dae’s Aunt, Ivy, shouted in her mind, embodying the critic of her own thoughts:

Not enough. We aren’t prepared. We’re against forces that have laid siege to us for centuries! An alliance? You fool! How could you consider an alliance?

Fillip and Ignat manifested in calm but questioning voices.

Maybe there is a chance they are telling the truth? You didn’t sense deceit. These could be desperate times for them as well. Venennin also do not want to die. We have good news. The Virads have been defeated, and we didn’t have to do it.

Last, she could hear Catagard’s reasoning through her own.

Keep a calm head. You have allies and a strong force with you. You finished your campaign. You continue to exist as a symbol of hope, and your people will do the rest. Do not underestimate their power to carry the conflict forward.

“Clea?” Iris called through the door, startling her. “Clea, are you talking to yourself again? I’m coming in.”

Clea rubbed her face but didn’t object. The door burst open and Iris strolled in, hiking up the stairs to the bath as she pulled her skirt up around her legs.

“I can hear you arguing with yourself!” she announced, slipping her legs into the bath on the opposite side.

“Oh, this is nice, very nice! I’ve been waiting for you to get back. ”

Clea groaned, not caring how much of her inner council debate she’d likely said out loud. Her father had once told her she’d never be fit to lead on account that she spilled too many kingdom secrets merely by rambling off her inner dialogue.

She buried her head in her hands and silenced the voices.

Iris’s hand moved through the water, splashing it a few times like a child before swimming it across the surface as if she were stroking it into submission.

The golden bangles rattled softly on her tattooed wrists, and with hair loose in her face, she looked up at Clea.

In a soft, almost motherly voice, she said, “What’s wrong? ”

The two women looked at each other meaningfully.

Clea allowed her body to sink under the water, completely enclosed in the warmth before coming back up and wiping her face as she released a slow and steady breath.

She still wore the protective gold chains on her wrists and ankles but found them oddly comforting now.

On the off chance they did help somehow, she wouldn’t remove them yet.

At this point, she felt inclined to wear them forever.

Iris’s eyes didn’t rush her like Dae’s did. The woman never seemed to have any sense of time, and it was often such a relief. Clea wondered if Iris’s suitors often felt this way, lulled into the strange sense of focus that came with Iris’s presence, as if no other people existed.

Iris sauntered through the water, soaking the bottom of her skirt before curling up behind Clea and taking her hair in her hands, untangling it in gentle fingers.

“Iris,” Clea started as she looked into the mirror.

Iris followed her gaze to the large mirror, both of them visible in the reflection as Iris began to untangle her hair.

Clea wasn’t exactly sure where she could start; her mind was a jumbled mess only stirred by Myken’s daring proclamations.

She shelved those for the time being, trying to sort out on a grander scale why all of it bothered her so much.

“For most of my life, I’ve been dying,” Clea started.

She didn’t even know what point she would make, but she knew she had to talk to find out.

“In time, death was not a hostile being, but more how I imagined a lover would be, someone who would be there to comfort me no matter the pain I suffered along the way. I was waiting for my illness, and when it came, I waited for it to take over. When that didn’t happen, I risked my life again traveling back to Loda.

I survived, and I spent the last year training every day to survive, prepared to die on the campaign.

Here I am again. I’m still alive despite it all, now, for the first time, with the expectancy of a…

life, maybe, and I just…” She trailed off.

“We are about to face the Belgears,” Clea said.

“I had a hard enough time withdrawing from the battlefield with that in mind. It feels like things have only just begun, and already I—I just haven’t done enough.

” She glanced up at Iris, Clea’s expression falling with an intense sense of concern.

“It all just feels unfinished,” Clea whispered.

“I can’t retire to a life inside the walls.

I just feel like I can’t. The battle isn’t over. ”

“Oh, by cien. Must everything be a battle?” Iris said, exasperated. “But since you’re still speaking Dae’s language, I will translate. I think once you put on your armor for this new battle, you’ll feel more at ease.”

“And what do you mean by that?”

“What I mean,” Iris said, taking a deep breath in preparation, perhaps, for a speech, “is that once you’re lathered in lotions and oils, your hair is restored to its honeyed luster, we clean and polish your damaged skin, and better expose the beautiful woman beneath all of this, you will feel more at home in the role you’re meant to fill next.

Your mind has been toiling over offense and defense and strategy, not nurturing and giving life.

Your body is used to callouses and bruises.

It expects pain. Not pleasure. Your energy has been poured into building an army.

Now you must build a family. Trust me, you’ll be plenty busy.

I understand your mind is whirring, but you need to trust those around you to carry the burden too.

You are like water, absorbing all that’s around you.

Change your setting and you will feel the change take inside as well.

Idan is handsome and charming. That will help things along, I promise,” Iris said with a wink in the mirror.

Even with Iris’s descriptions, none of it sounded very illustrious, and Clea wondered if Iris imagined it that way because she was unable to have children.

It had the description of a faraway dream, despite Iris never seeming to suggest she regretted not having anything.

Clea’s eyes flickered down to the water’s surface as a memory flashed in stark contrast to the future of refinement and life-giving pleasure that Iris described.

Clea’s memories of pleasure were anything but.

She remembered ravenous heat and wanting, a lack of control, an exchange of hunger.

Poised on the altar in King Kartheen’s castle, an altar likely once used for despicable things, immune to a room wrought with bloodshed, she’d thought of little beyond the promise of silver eyes that burned as harshly as her own body.

There had been no refinement. Their clothes, hair, and bodies had been dirtied and torn, scratched and calloused.

Much of their journey had been defined by the honest, rough cuts of a harsher reality, and in the culmination of it, she felt like she’d sold her soul, becoming a beast of the forest.

Maybe part of her journey since had been to redefine herself apart from that, apart from that wanting creature that would have surrendered everything for Ryson and nearly had.

Ryson, too, had made his sacrifices on her behalf, but she wouldn’t let herself consider them.

No. She couldn’t meditate on anything that justified her transforming into what she’d had in his arms.

“Yes,” Clea said simply, still watching the water, and not wanting to encourage any further questions from Iris.

Iris was insightful and had already gleaned a bit more than Clea had meant to share about her journey back from Loda.

Clea had barely mentioned the other traveler with her, and her people had been quick to omit and dismiss it for the sake of emphasizing her own power, but Iris had sensed a secret history between them.

It had taken little more than a subtly raised brow in Clea’s direction to suggest what Clea had avoided saying all along.

She was grateful Iris never asked about it, at least not directly, and hoped she wouldn’t raise the question of heart exchanges again.

Clea’s hand drifted to the necklace around her neck.

She needed both the necklace and the hairpin attached to it.

One represented a treasured memory, and the other represented the danger of it and the need to keep that part of her life at bay.

Ryson would always be a memory, and it was best that way.

She realized then why the memory was so precious. After returning to Loda, she’d been thrust directly into royal responsibility. Every day had been a sprint to at last arrive at the quiet conclusion inside her that she now whispered without angst.