Page 56 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

Melody

I wake up with small, cool, sticky fingers in my hair, on my face, and on the bare skin of my arms. Huge, round turquoise eyes blink back at me before a slick finger wanders against my lips. Behind this creature—female, I think—another one squats, gesturing for me to get up. Then those bluish and webbed hands grab mine and guide me along the brook, along another path that must have just opened up because it wasn’t there when I fell asleep.

When I cast a glance back, I see all three of the fae lords sleeping so soundly, not one stirs. I wonder whether the forest emanates some magic to make them sleep so deeply. My eyes rest on Caryan a moment too long. But seeing him so unguarded…

They tug at my sleeves and usher me on.

As soon as we are far enough away, the tiny little women start to giggle and pull me, more impatiently now, up to a clearing in the forest, where white moonlight meets the shimmering surface of a steaming pool.

The creatures dig at my clothes like Nidaw’s sirens, and I allow them to undress me and lead me into the water. The women or not-women—I’m not too sure since they don’t look too human—are naked themselves and seemingly unbothered by it. They reach almost up to my hips, but their bodies look like mine, with breasts and bellies, only their lower part is sleek like a frog’s, and small, round horns sprout out of their heads. Their eyes are larger, too, their lips full, and rows of tiny, sharp siren teeth shine at me when they smile.

When I glance up, I meet more eyes gleaming green in the dark. Emerald-skinned women my size, with hair in all sorts of impossible colors and graceful gazelle horns sprouting from the midst of it, step out, pearls and twigs braided into the strands. They’re also naked, save for bows and arrows around their backs.

They glare at me curiously and bow when a pale woman steps out of the dark after them. She has long, wavy, white hair that falls around her lush, curvaceous body, reaching down to her ankles. She glides into the water so she sits opposite me, her hair floating like white seaweed in the stream, matching the strange whiteness of her eyes.

White horns spiraling like those of a kudu, but only half the length, protrude from her head, beautifully curved and coming to a sharp end. A circlet of gold, wild vines, peonies, and pearls rests around them, completing a regal and frightening image.

“Soak yourself. This is healing water from the holy springs. It will wash away a lot of things. It will also leave you rested and well.” Her voice is clear as a bell, her words tinged by the slightest hint of a hiss. “I’m Calianthe, queen of the Emerald Forest,” she explains before I can thank her or ask who she is. “And those are my daughters.”

She gestures to the green-skinned women, some of whom have brought food and a goblet made of stone that holds some water with herbs in it, which they lay gently next to me on a flat stone.

“Eat,” the queen orders.

I’m too hungry and thirsty to care whether I’m being rude, so I grab the goblet and down it, then take a fruit similar to a fig, the flesh so ripe and sweet it drips over my chin like honey when I take a bite.

I swallow, then ask, “Why are you so kind to me?”

“Your soul is tied to someone dear to me. Your paths will cross.”

“Who?” I ask carefully, not sure what to do with this information.

Calianthe glides closer to me, so close her long hair brushes against me underwater like smooth, slick tendrils of kelp. “She was the one who changed the course of fate, Melody. You should have been her daughter. A daughter of light as you are.”

“Pardon? I’m not sure I understand.”

“We do not only believe in blood, but in the stars too. In the bonds that are written in the stars, you still are hers, only she didn’t bear you into this world.”

Calianthe lifts a pale hand out of the water and another stony goblet appears in it, filled with the same liquid as before. She holds it out to me. “Drink. You need it.”

“Thank you,” I mumble shyly.

A few of the little, blue-skinned women step closer and put a crown of fluorescent flowers on my head. I mumble another thank you, and they jump away, giggling.

“How do you know about the bonds? About fate?” I ask after I’ve emptied the new goblet too.

“We do know parts. There are some of us gifted with the eye. Seers, as we call them,” the beautiful queen answers.

“And how—how can you alter fate?”

Calianthe looks down at the water, then back at me, but the softness in her stunning eyes has given way to sorrow. “You can’t always but remember—it’s all about choice. I need to leave you now. Just don’t forget that, when you’re lost in the darkness, the darkness is a part of you too—” She seems to hesitate, as if struggling with herself. “Your fate might have changed that day, young one, but it still might change ours too. It all depends.”

“Depends on what?” I ask, suddenly impatient. I’m fed up with all these cryptic hints and warnings.

She frowns at my tone before she catches herself and the perfect planes of her face smooth out again. Her pale eyes focus on mine with new intensity. “We cannot exist in total darkness. Your mother knew that too. She came here to search for the same thing you’re looking for now. One of the three relics that is hidden here.”

“She wanted the flute?”

“She wanted to destroy the flute,” Calianthe hisses. “It corrupts the body and soul with darkness.”

I swallow. “And why didn’t my mother find it?”

“Because he came, and she fled,” the queen whispers with a glance behind me.

Before I can ask more questions, she vanishes. One moment she is there, the next she’s gone, together with everyone else. Only the fruits on the stone are still there, glistening in their syrup.

A rustle behind me startles me. When I turn, I find Caryan between the trees, his eyes black as the forest without the moon. I know I only heard him because he let me.

He looks at the flower crown on my head, then at the fruit, but says nothing.

I glide away from him, to where the queen sat, as he steps up to the spring. He seems to sense my fear and pauses at the edge, his face unreadable.

I glance down at the tattoo on my wrist. “What you want me to find… I can’t… I can’t feel it,” I admit. I’d been too afraid to voice it, but he’d find out sooner or later. “It’s never been that way before.”

He squats down, touching the water with one hand, and I watch the tattoo on his skin slithering down as if it wants to touch the water too. He keeps his hand there, and I feel his magic mingling with the magic in the spring, his body drawing from it, while he looks back at me.

I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until he says, “The elves wove a spell around the relics before they hid them away. You have to get close in order to feel them.”

I allow myself a shudder of relief. “My mother searched for it,” I say then.

His eyes flicker, but he retorts, “She did.”

“And then you came, and she ran. ”

“The queen talks too much,” he observes darkly.

“How did she know where to look for it if she didn’t have my talent?”

“She found a book,” he says.

“Where is it now?”

“She destroyed it.”

This makes me pause. “She… my mother didn’t want you to find them, the relics, did she?”

His eyes are blacker than ever when he finally says, “She most certainly didn’t.”

The words hang between us. He closes his eyes and retracts his hand out of the water, clenching his teeth as if he’s suddenly in pain without the soothing magic of the spring.

I want to probe further, but an image hits me so hard I’d have stumbled if I wasn’t drifting in the water. I see a woman with a heavy black sword in her hand, silvery flames dancing along its blade as she plunges it into Caryan’s body, before drawing it up, tearing through his belly, splitting his ribcage right up to his heart…

What the hell? Where did that come from?

“My mother… she did that to you. Your scar,” I whisper, suddenly sick and breathless.

Caryan opens his eyes again, and I’m surprised that they’re now holding the pale blue color of the spring. Surprised at the cool way he says, “Yes. She did.”

“She… she tried to cut you in half.” The scar I saw, the maimed runes. My voice breaks. I’m still trying to get that image out of my mind. Still trying to somehow wrap my head around the unspeakable violence.

But I can’t.

“Maybe she should have, to see whether it would have killed me,” he answers. The serenity in his words alarms me. He means it . Means it with his whole being. I feel it somewhere deep inside me, along with a jolt of seeping, agonizing pain that isn’t in me and at the same time is .

“You—you are hurt,” I say, my eyes instinctively searching for a wound that’s causing his pain, but I find none.

He frowns at me before he puts his hand back into the water, the pain I just felt subsiding instantly.

“The runes. The destroyed runes on your body,” I gather, the knowledge suddenly there, just like that gory scene before. He’s in constant pain because of my own mother.

“Yes. They never heal. Even the healer couldn’t restore them because they are old. Older than I am.”

He looks tired as he says the words, and I sense the burden of his endless existence like a dead weight on my shoulders. Along with the searing pain he carries constantly, I realize, an echo of it still reverberating in my own body.

“This water soothes it,” I whisper.

He frowns again, irritated, before he relents. “Yes.”

“It’s the same water that…” I can’t bring myself to say it after last night, so he does it for me.

“The same water that runs through my court, yes. It’s water from the seven rivers, laden with healing magic.”

Suddenly, I’m aware that the only reason he doesn’t come in is that I’m there. “You can… you can come in,” I say quietly. “I’ll get out.”

“It’s alright,” he says.

I get up anyway, ignoring every instinct to cover myself when I step out of the water naked. He doesn’t look at me, though, keeping his gaze politely away to give me privacy until I’ve wriggled wet into my clothes. I want to walk back to the others to give him some space in return, but suddenly the idea of being alone with Kyrith and Ronin doesn’t feel too appealing, so I settle down on the stone next to the fruit.

“You want one?” I ask, offering a piece to him.

“Eat. You need it.”

“You do eat, don’t you? Generally, I mean. You have a kitchen.” The words tumble out before I can take them back. Apart from drinking blood , I want to add but don’t .

“We do, but we can go for a long time without food,” he says, but gods damn me if he isn’t looking at me with a sudden hunger that startles my heart into an uneven beat. It reminds me of the voracity of a predator.

But it’s gone in a heartbeat, and his face shifts back into its usual, bored austerity.

My heart still races, though, as I look down at my hands.

I shove the piece of fruit into my mouth, looking away as he strips down, only looking back when I hear him sliding into the pool. And hells, I know it’s wrong, but I can’t resist. Can’t resist seeing him, seeing more of that body the water hid from me that night, as if it’s a secret I crave to learn about, despite every better judgment.

I want to see more of that tattoo that’s much larger than the tiny tails I saw running over his fingers and wrists when he touched the water. There’s no denying that it’s marvelous. There are so many symbols shifting and intermingling, gold and black, it’s hard to make out a single one, especially from a distance.

And the rest of him…

My mouth goes dry. The rest of him is utterly beautiful too. I can’t help but stare, admire the defined muscles of his too-perfect body, no doubt honed by hundreds of years of fighting.

The sight of his naked skin changes me all over. Violently. He’s a pure angel, his absurd beauty a brute force of nature, hitting me in the back of my throat.

He catches me looking.

I feel myself blushing deeply. “I’m sorry,” I murmur and quickly look away, but the aftertaste stays, humming in my blood like a burning longing. A longing for what we did and didn’t do in that hot water. To distract myself I ask, “Where do we go from here?” I don’t dare to look at him again, afraid of what I’ll find in his eyes, what he will find in mine.

“We will try to get closer.”

“Closer to where?”

“You tell me,” he retorts, unperturbed. So sure of me I blush all over .

But this sense of surety seems to spark something in me, because suddenly, the image of that flute fills my mind again. This time it comes into clearer focus, and I can make out details. It’s frozen by eternities of snow, surrounded by relentless storms.

Instinctively, I turn my head to the mountains I glimpsed in the distance. “It’s on one of the mountains. Buried under a glacier,” I say, knowing in my blood it’s true. As true as if I placed the flute there myself, the relentless ever-cold shielding it from being tracked down, the Emerald Forest like another ring, isolating it. “Someone was very careful to hide it away from the world.”

“Clearly,” he agrees. For a moment, we just look at each other. His eyes are dangerous though.

“Why did my mother not want you to have the relics?”

“Maybe she wanted them for herself,” he offers. I watch him very closely. His aura is veiled behind that mist again.

“Why?” I ask to test him.

“Because this is what power-hungry people want—more power. Your mother, as you already know, was a very ambitious woman.”

I freeze. His face is still blank as he delivers the twisted truth.

“You said if I wanted truths you would give them to me,” I whisper, more hurt, more betrayed than I should feel. “Calianthe said my mother wanted to destroy the flute. So no one could have it.”

“The truth has many faces, Melody,” he retorts, not at all surprised that the relic is a flute. So he knew this already. “But did she really? Want to destroy the flute—so no one else could have it?”

“She couldn’t lie, could she?” I ask.

“No. But in order to consume the flute’s magic, she would have had to destroy the flute indeed. In one way or the other.”

“Calianthe said the magic corrupts the mind and soul with darkness.”

His eyes flash. “It’s stolen magic. Impossibly powerful, stolen magic. Of course, it corrupts anyone who’s not its owner. Anyone who wasn’t made to hold so much.”

I startle. “Stolen… I thought the high elves bound their magic to the artifacts. Out of their free will.”

He just looks down at the water, his eyes reflecting its milky surface like a mirror.

“So you would allow the magic to corrupt you? What does it mean? That it drives you mad? Or kills you?”

He lifts his head, but he doesn’t answer me. I scrutinize his face. It’s so dangerously blank. There’s so much he’s not telling me. I feel it. Know it. Know it from a dark thing shimmering inside me, black and velvety and streaked with starlight. Something like a ribbon of pure night. Before I know what I’m doing, I yank at it.

And tumble.

Something in me opens up then. A connection. A door to another world through which I just slipped. Purest night engulfs me, dewy on my skin. What is this?

I take another step in and a heavy weight settles on me, in me, old and archaic the further I probe into the foreign blackness. A weight amplified by the thousands of years that lay on my shoulders, so strong it takes everything to fight it.

What is this?

I’m still trying to get to this feeling I can sense, hidden within all this darkness that threatens to pull me down, consume me, suffocate me. Crush me. It gets worse the more I fight it. Yet I keep probing further into the darkness, trying to reach for the silver light that shimmers on the horizon like the evening star. But every time I’m close, it seems to slip away again, just out of reach. As if it’s not ready to be seen, acknowledged, recognized yet.

I shake my head, then realize that, to get to its core—to the darkness’s black heart—I must immerse myself in it first. To understand it, grasp it, face it.

Without another thought, I plunge in, headfirst, and down. The darkness changes then. It turns into an abyss, vast and endless. It gently pulls me along when I let it, when I no longer fight it.

The blackness starts whispering to me then, whispering its secrets .

Desperation. Heaviness. Years and years and years passing by. I can make out blurred scenes, faces, people, voices.

“Stop it!” Caryan’s voice is like a slash laced with ice, somewhere, cutting through all of it.

I startle, meeting his gaze, wide-eyed, as he growls in a way that makes every instinct in me scream.

“Whatever it is you are doing, let it go. This is not your mind.”

Not your mind.

As if on cue, walls of adamantine onyx slam down in front of me, a black phantom wind pushing me out of that black sea. I’m hurled ashore, the brute force of it so strong, so powerful, I briefly sway like before, or would if I were standing.

The blackness still hums through me, though—fatigue. Exhaustion. Bone-grinding, never-ending weariness that permeates everything, only fought off and kept at bay by cast-iron will. But glimmering within it, there’s still that silver star I glimpsed, the only guiding lantern in this ocean of blackness.

A rush of water tells me that Caryan has left the pool. When I glance at him, he’s already wearing his clothes again, his hair perfectly dry. I’m still on the ground, still waiting for those dark feelings to ebb out of me. Still shaking, I realize.

When he steps in front of me, I ask, “What… what was that?”

“Nothing pretty.”

I look up at him, my eyes trained on his as I get up. All warmth has leaked out of his expression.

“I saw that. But what was it?” My voice is sharp.

He licks his teeth, his upper lip curling slightly back. “Let it go.”

“No. You said not your mind . It was your mind,” I blaze on, the truth hitting me while the words tumble out. I had been in his mind. Is that part of my talent too? To be able to flit into his mind? It scares me.

“You keep overstepping boundaries. You’ve continued to push your luck since the moment you came here.” He bares his teeth now, those frightening fangs .

I don’t retreat an inch. “Well, you probably should have put a lid on it from the very start. It’s a bit too late now. And if you didn’t like me in there, why didn’t you kick me out straight away? I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask to be… sucked into your mind, to see all that terrifying, never-ending blackness.” My words come out breathless. Suffocated. Directly into his face, that is now mere inches away.

A black flame springs to life in his eyes then. His voice is lethally calm when he says, “Do you think I liked it? Being torn from sleep by witnessing your panic and diffuse fear night after night? Wading through this… necropolis of your feelings day after day, year after year? When I wasn’t able to distinguish your recalled pain from a real threat, or whether it was just your nightmares again.”

I have no words for what he just told me. He has been in my mind. For years.

Not just when he drank my blood. He… for years …

“Why…why didn’t you lock me out if you hated it so much?” I try to sound angry but fail. If anything, I sound broken and miserable. Hurt. Embarrassed. Lost.

“Because I—” He starts, but catches himself, the words reverberating in me anyway, as if his mind continues to speak to me.

Because I didn’t want to .

Instead, teeth flashing with every word, he says, “Because that is not how this works.”

“What do you mean by this ?”

“This conversation is over,” he growls back.

He turns when I grab his wrist. He stares at my hand on him, then back at me.

I know he could just pull free, send me stumbling, but he doesn’t. Instead a growl works its way up his throat, so menacing it takes all my will not to flinch. To run. His eyes are a black wildfire, his lips are fully pulled back from his teeth now, but I don’t let go. I flash mine right back, ready to rip into his flesh.

As if he could read my mind he seethes, “I dare you!” His eyes glitter dangerously .

“It is you who wants something from me. Tell me what this is. Why? How is this possible? How could you see … me?”

“You think you have a choice.” He laughs, but there is no humor in the sound. “Do you really still believe that I need to be polite and ask? I could force you to reveal the location, break you, and leave you shattered when I’m done. It wouldn’t even take much. I see it all over you, in your eyes. You are so tender a breeze startles you.”

Every single word feels like the stab of a knife plunging into my soul. He leans closer, towering over me, speaking right into me, his breath mingling with mine, brushing my lips.

“Then why not just get it over with? Why bother?”

I try to ignore his dark power gathering around me, swirling and pulsing like a dark storm. My own magic is cowering and frightened.

“You would be useless to me broken. And you were too many nights on the brink already.” He says it ravenously, cruelly, his eyes on my lips.

“Why do you know that?” I push. My eyes are searching his for anything . Warmth. Truth. Malice.

“A bond, born into our bones,” he spits as if the sheer words disgust him.

A bond . I don’t know what to do with this information. What to feel. “But… why? What kind of bond?”

“Oh no, it is your turn. You’re going to lead me to the flute. Now .”

“No. It’s dangerous,” I say, ignoring his magic sizzling through the air around us. But that artifact is suddenly whispering to me, right into my heart. A warning. It’s warning me about its cataclysmic magic, its sinister nature. Its unholy power.

“I will not ask again,” Caryan says.

I feel the last string of his patience snapping. I make myself look at him regardless. He’s gone utterly still, only his power licks along my skin like hungry flames.

“Its magic,” I say, “is not from this world.” I shake my head, retreating as the flute keeps whispering to me in its foreign yet familiar tongue, clearer now that I’m close to it. “It might kill you. It should be destroyed.”

“Careful. I might just have the same thought about you.” At that, he turns on his heels and walks away.

“It says that only death is waiting up there, Caryan!” I call after him, my voice coming more desperate than ever.

At the sound of his name, he pauses and turns to look at me.

“Oh, I’ve been waiting to meet death for a long time,” he says. And I shudder at the bottomless pitch that yawns in his eyes. A reflection of what I just waded through. An ageless dark. “Let’s see what it has to say.”

On that, he strides away.