Page 5 of Antiletum (The Nocturne #1)
I’m human and you’re a bird
Delaney
I mpossible.
That’s the only word I have to describe how I try to ignore the steadily increasing pain in my hand.
I hurry with Tabitha across the sunny grounds on my way to the infirmary.
Honeybees buzz about and laze against colorful petals perfuming the summer air as the looming manor comes into view, its facade hedged with immaculate shrubbery.
My tower calls to me. Its flying buttress like an arm that may swing out, beckon me forward.
I long to return to the circular room’s solitude.
Especially after the run in with my husband, causing a rearing heartache to flare back to life. Worse than any other instance since the night we wed. Close. Personal.
The urge to peel back the makeshift bandage Val provided to stop the bleeding is strong. The cloth my husband wrapped around my withering hand was pointless, as he very well knew.
Still, the gesture…
It was enough for me to lower my walls. Just slightly. A mistake. But it’s getting harder and harder every day, warring with my gut and my own fantastical mind, harboring a decade old grief that tries to warp my reality.
With utmost practice, I push those images to the back of my mind. Right where they belong. Where they can’t hurt me.
Grand ebony doors are already open for us. Physical pain from my poor decision is a wonderfully welcome distraction from my own mind beneath the ribbed vaults of the foyer. From all the unfamiliar faces surrounding me after a life of being cooped up and quieted.
I constantly feel like I’m being watched here.
Already, the short-lived profuse bleeding from my offering in the spirlinary has begun to crust, to fester, the exposed tissue on my hand drying and rotting towards necrosis.
My price has been rapidly increasing since the Ellden clock’s minute hand first twitched backwards and I’m eternally grateful that my trek to the infirmary is almost at an end.
Another thing I blissfully ignore (a skill that I have honed well): wondering what it will take to restore the upended balance, recalling the flow of blood from the priestesses at my wedding.
Wondering if the balm of antiletum I’m about to receive will right the Ellden clocks, as it once did.
Or if perhaps the newly reinvigorated thump of the Heartstone in the Strigi Forest might complicate matters.
It was foolish, calling on my necromancy today. I knew it was. But I couldn’t resist, as I so often can’t. Even with all the hardships and heartache it’s caused me. Necromancy is a part of who I am.
The dream I had of Rainah the night of my wedding, waking me from the comforting cage of my new husband’s arms, has haunted me, flipping my world upside down. Yet again.
In the last few months I feel as if my life is nothing but an hourglass, constantly being turned by a cruel hand at random intervals, shaking my sands and making everything start anew in a drift of disorientation .
Don’t trust him.
That death rasp of Rainah’s voice was like a pick of ice plunging into my heart, doing more than just literally waking me from sleep, but pulling me from a reality that now feels like it was the dream—too good to be true.
A short one, lasting only hours after setting eyes on my new husband, the full definition of tall, dark, and handsome.
The intensity of our wedding; of all that I saw and felt upon first seeing Val; of the ritual binding us and settling us as Lord and Lady, the heads of the Noctua faction, was a magic all its own.
I was a naive girl that night, lost in grief and longing, grasping for bright possibilities.
But Rainah’s warning from death immediately turned my skin cold where before it was warm in the embrace of the man I am bonded to. Forever. No escape. The dream of my departed sister was so much deeper than just a night time vision, crafted by the chemicals of my sleeping brain.
It was a premonition.
Somehow, Rainah’s clairvoyance found a way to connect with my necromancy from the beyond, two magicks that don’t often touch brushing together in warning.
Don’t trust him.
Slowly, I crawled from Val’s bed, spotlighted in silver moonlight.
I had to fight against my newly wed instincts, my desperation to believe that what I wanted was real .
I had to fight the urge to bring my lips to Val’s, freshly healed like mine from the salve we used; to wake him from his slumber in order for us to truly take each other for the first time, outside of a ritual and what was required of us.
Connecting our bodies, souls, and magic.
I wanted to keep living in my short lived delusions .
Scurrying quietly away from him, I looked back once to find a furrow between Val’s brow, sensing in sleep that my warm body was no longer molded into his. Leaving him cold and alone, I crept away into the night.
I had in mind to trek to the spirlinary , to find solace in the presence of the Nocturne .
Soak in the rose windows. Trace my hands over porous stone and engravings in the walls, the statues lining them.
Arc my fingers over bumps and lines and etchings of the owl, fox, and caracal: the breathers of life.
The spirlinary back at home was a place of peace and comfort for me.
The only one I often found. The only place I could bring myself to use my necromancy, expressly forbidden from doing so elsewhere.
Bare feet cold and soaking in the spring dew, that whisper from my sister came to me again as I was halfway across the grounds.
Fainter.
Farther away as the sky shifted from indigo to a harsh purple bruise.
But still…
Don’t trust him.
Breath halted in my lungs, fine hairs prickling in my pores.
And I turned heel and ran straight to a spare chamber I saw on my tour of the manor on the opposite wing from Val’s, high up in a tower.
Far away from anyone at all. I decided in the dawn hours to make it my own until we would go to Omnitas, to our true home at The Citadel.
Rainah’s gnarled whisper grates at me even now, hurrying through Greystone to see Nelda the physician.
The same one following me day in and day out, nearly driving me to madness.
That madness is what pushed me to fully practice my necromancy alone, hoping that the housing of the spirlinary and use of moonwater and flesh would help suppress my price.
A silly notion. My magic is tied to my husband now.
And the price is high for any paired wed person who dares to practice their gifts without the balance of their spouse.
Instinctively, I long to run my thumb over my vinculum band, but it’s out of reach under the fabric of my husband’s torn shirt, sticking to my exposed bones.
I can’t stifle the cold nervousness eating through my veins. The fear that I’m about to be scolded and ridiculed. Punished. Even after facing Val and seeing that his frustration was clearly more because of my willingness to harm myself, and not because I hold a magic to be ashamed of.
Not grower magic at all, as I was instructed to say for a lot of my life.
It was easy for my parents to convince everyone their more sheltered, younger daughter had a gift like theirs, both growers themselves.
That I spent so much time tucked away at the estate because I would one day oversee their antiletum fields.
The way my necromancy worked to make flowers and plants thrive was used to falsify records for the showing of my gift that was reported to Parliament.
No matter how many times I’m gently and kindly reminded here that I’m accepted, that my necromancy no longer has to be hidden and is nothing to be ashamed of, it feels wrong to be open about what I’ve been conditioned to keep secret.
My reservations aren’t so easily put to bed.
My falsified showing to Parliament is a terror inducing matter all its own.
One Val promised me the night of our wedding that I have no need to fret over. That he will keep me safe.
But it’s natural for me to be alone.
Tabitha’s hushed voice breaks me from my thoughts, the agony of my dying hand increasing with each step, beads of sweat born from pain dampening my hairline. “I thought Val didn’t know.” Her head whips back and forth, looking for anyone in the corridors on the trek to the infirmary .
Without Tabitha’s urging, I probably wouldn’t have attempted to reach Rainah today.
I pull a deep breath through my nose for composure before whispering back through a tight jaw, “Clearly Mallin is a liar.”
The way I begged him not to tell when he barely stopped me in time from making this mistake earlier in the week…
It was far too familiar.
Heavy thuds beating ahead stop our fervent whispers, and barely too soon. Mallin the Betrayer himself rounds a corner with a kind smile when he sees us.
“Delaney!” His friendliness makes me want to turn tail and run. “I’ve just left Nelda with what you need.” He nods politely to my cousin at my side, showing her much more courtesy than Val does. “Tabitha.”
I’m inclined to believe my husband will be most relieved when my cousin leaves tomorrow.
Mallin is decked out in Alter green, as always.
His garb causes another twinge of discomfort to eat at me.
Reminding me of Val’s Lord and Lady black.
The silver barn owl. The colors and symbol Rainah would have worn that are now meant for me.
I can’t bring myself to drape my body in the physical embodiment of my sister’s loss quite yet.
I scowl at Mallin. “It seems you’ve ratted on me after all.”
If he’s already dropped the antiletum at the infirmary, I can only guess Val sent him before coming to find me. Probably when he revealed my secret antics to my husband.
Mallin’s guilty gaze flicks to my bandage just as a lightning bolt of pain shoots to my elbow. I hunch over, facing the herringbone floor, cradling my hand to my chest and cry out. A wave of nausea churns my stomach .