Page 51 of Crown of the Dunes (The Ballan Desert #2)
My thumb trailed gently over her cheekbone, remarkably unblemished for being on the side that had been burned.
She pushed her face into my touch, but still waves of terror and pain crashed down the bond in my skull, forceful enough that the currents of them threatened to pull me beneath the surface .
“I’m here, Keera. Wake up,” I murmured, pushing the words down the tether as much as I spoke them out loud. “I have you.”
Finally, her eyes fluttered open, almost luminescent as they found mine in the darkness. They shone overbright as she blinked the sleep from her gaze, a single tear escaping the corner of her eye to trail over her temple and into her hair.
“Erix,” she said, her voice raspy.
“It was just a dream,” I said, all too familiar with nightmares, and the way the terrors they brought tended to follow me into the waking hours.
“But it wasn’t,” she murmured. One of her hands came up to grip my wrist where I still gently cradled her face.
“I saw them,” she continued. “My parents. Just like it was the day they left me. But this time it wasn’t just them. It was all the people of Kelvadan. Kaius and Aderyn and—” She cut herself off with a shuddering breath.
“Kaius and Aderyn and even the people of Kelvadan love you,” I assured. “You’ve saved them already. You have a home here. And as for your parents, well. Either they are dead and gone, or they will be wishing they are if they ever cross my path.”
The creases of worry in Keera’s face didn’t soften. “The people of Kelvadan have only just started to see the consequences of my power. I was named the heir before the avalanche. Before I nearly cracked their throne room in half or put the entire desert at risk with my rage.”
I opened my mouth, but the words stuck. It was a nightmare that plagued me too often as well. The desert splitting open to swallow all its people whole, and it was all my fault. The blood of thousands on my hands because I could not control my own strength.
“It’s my fault.” My voice cracked as I said it.
At that, Keera’s fear turned to confusion. She sat up, curling her legs into my own lap as she did. I put my arm around her shoulder to cradle her, even as guilt made me want to pull away.
“How?” she asked.
“Ever since I arrived here, the desert… she’s been incessant.
Her voices in my mind have been barely tolerable except when I’m with you.
It’s this city, th e memories,” I explained.
“When you lost control before, I could feel you all the way across the desert. Now, I saw how you felt my turmoil when I approached as you were sparring with Aderyn. It almost forced you to lose control yourself. And just now, I was overcome by a nightmare of my own past, and that is when your dreams turned.”
Keera took one of my hands, moving to interlace my fingers with her own but stopped. Turning it over, she found a jagged cut along one knuckle It was shallow, but a few drops of blood still welled up.
“From the glass,” I said.
She nodded against my shoulder where her head rested.
“What happened?” she asked as she wiped away the blood with her own finger.
I knew she didn’t mean the lantern.
“In the library, I found a scroll that I remembered.”
She listened quietly about the day I had found it there, and how I had run away and not entered the city of Kelvadan again until now. Fear filled her eyes as I described the instructions in the horrible scroll, but it was overcome by an overbrightness as her eyes filled with unshed tears.
“You hate it here,” she whispered, sadness in every syllable.
My arms tightened around her. “I did, but I don’t as much anymore. I can’t truly hate a place that you made a home, even if being here plucks at the already fraying threads of my sanity.”
“Do you think it might be better when we restore the Heart? That the desert might be pleased and grant us some peace?”
I hesitated. Kelvar’s madness had claimed him before the Heart had been stolen, yet there was some sense in her words.
It had always seemed that the voices of the desert in my mind wanted something, and if I gave it to them, they abated.
Blood sated them temporarily, but the Heart was what the desert truly desired.
“We can only hope,” I said.
“If only we could find a way to get to it.” Keera sighed, frustration now tinging her words.
The memory of why I had been searching in the library struck me .
“I did find something,” I said, extricating myself from her hold. I glanced over the bed for the journal. I had dropped it on the covers, forgetting it completely in my haste to wake her. Now, I picked it up again.
“This likely holds the secrets to entering Kelvar and Alyx’s chambers, but some of the pages are missing,” I said, holding it up before her.
Equal parts hope and apprehension lit Keera’s features as she took it from me. “Where could they have gone?”
At that I grimaced, the vision of a familiar wooden chest filling my mind. One that had always sat near a low table in a dimly lit tent.
“I think I know where we can get them, but it won’t be easy.”