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forty-four

Nilah Dune

Time had never crawled more than it did today. Each moment had lasted an eternity, but somehow, I’d made it. Sitting there in the middle of the gazebo, waiting for a bird made out of light to find me, I’d pushed the seconds with all my might, and they’d fought with me every step of the way.

But the wait was finally over. God help me, it was only a few minutes to midnight, and soon I was going to be unbound from Lyall. Soon, I was going to be free to walk out of this palace and search for Rune.

I’d thought about how to find him all day. I’d thought about where to go, and though every instinct insisted I stay away from Raja, I knew I’d have to go to her eventually. I’d search every inch of the Seelie Court first, but if I didn’t find him, my destination was Blackwater.

Just as long as Rune was okay, I wouldn’t mind swimming past the Eternal Water or running all the way to the Neutral Lands, too .

Just as long as Rune was alive.

The guards had brought me to the eighth floor again, only now not in Lyall’s office, but somewhere down the hallway on the other side.

Marble floors and gold-framed paintings, lanterns on the walls and lights floating in the air—every inch of this place looked the exact same to me by now.

My attention was elsewhere until they pushed a set of doors open and led me down a dark narrow corridor and through an arched doorway, behind which was a room that could have been separate from the rest of the palace.

It was round, the edges both around the floor and the ceiling glowing faintly gold, like they had LED lights buried somewhere underneath. It wasn’t electricity, though. Just magic.

In the center, what I thought was a mirror was actually a pool, shallow water ringed in thick dark stone.

On the right side of it, in the middle, sat the seer wearing her white dress, no tears of blood streaming down her closed eyes, her skin clean.

She had her hands in the water up to her wrists and she stood unnaturally still, like she wasn’t alive at all.

And across from the doorway was Lyall dressed in a white shirt and dark red pants, hands folded in front of him, his hair sleeked back like always.

I stopped in my tracks. His attention sent a charge of energy through me, and so did his looks.

The prince’s beauty was effortless, easy to admire, so perfect you were tempted to believe it was just your imagination enhancing whatever real face he wore. I thought I’d get used to it by now, but I never did. All fae were beautiful like that— too beautiful for my merely mortal eyes.

Except Rune. His beauty was the kind that might hurt to look at for too long, raw and real in a way that I hadn’t seen on any other fae I’d come across until now.

“Thread to thread, flame to flame,” the seer suddenly whispered, drawing my eyes to her, but nothing had changed. She still sat there with her eyes closed, which made me wonder if maybe I’d made it up.

“She’s preparing for the ritual, that’s all,” Lyall said, and he slowly walked around the pool to come closer to me, his eyes never leaving my face.

Swallowing hard, I forced my body to move and went deeper into the room, too. The guards who’d escorted me here remained outside the doorway.

It was just the three of us in here now, and Lyall was already in front of me.

“You’ve cried,” he said as he analyzed my face.

“It’s been an…emotional day,” I admitted because it would be foolish to try to deny it when my eyes not only looked but felt swollen almost entirely shut.

I hadn’t meant to cry so hard, I really hadn’t, but the tears had snuck out of me all the same, always for minutes and hours before I realized they were there.

“We can always postpone,” Lyall offered, and he looked…concerned, if I would dare to believe my eyes when it came to him.

“No,” I said, and the word was final. “I take it you haven’t… figured me out yet?” It was the reason why he’d asked me for another day.

A day which had pulled me apart and knitted me back together several times within every hour.

Lyall lowered his head. “Not at all, actually,” he said. “We haven’t. We haven’t found anything that could help us.”

Maybe it was only my imagination, but just then I could have sworn something flashed in his eyes. I could have sworn there was something there, something he tried to hide.

“Thread to thread, flame to flame,” said the seer again, and in the moment it took me to glance at her, Lyall composed himself.

“It’s definitely the life-bond. The seer couldn’t find anything else to explain… you .”

I raised a brow. “I thought you said mortals couldn’t be transferred magic in any scenario.”

Lyall shrugged. “We were wrong—which isn’t uncommon. Everything is possible through will and magic.”

Those words. I’d heard them before. From Maera and…

“Where is Helid, by the way?” His uncle, who’d come to get me back home had said the same thing while sitting at my father’s kitchen table.

“Away still,” Lyall said. “I assume you’ve cried for Rune.”

Stabs at my gut. “Have you ?” I asked instead.

A ghost of a smile passed over his lips. “A king would never admit to tears.”

“You’re no king, though.” I bit my tongue, but it was too late.

“But I will be,” he said. “I will actually be announcing my preparation for the crowning ritual soon—together with the fact that I am…you know, alive .” He spread his arms to the sides as he smiled in triumph.

“I’m really glad it all worked out for you, Lyall.” And at least part of it was true. He had saved my life once, regardless of what his reasons were.

“I know, beautiful Nilah,” he said and held out his hand for mine. “Come. She’s ready. ”

I looked to see the seer had opened her eyes.

We had to take off our shoes and get in the water.

It barely touched my ankles, and it was ice-cold, but I found it comforting.

The seer didn’t speak, but Lyall knew exactly what to do.

He instructed me where to stand—in the middle of the pool, with my back turned to the doorway, while he stood right in front of me.

Our hands were outstretched, close but not touching. The seer sat at our side still.

And as I waited with my breath held, a golden thread appeared between our fingertips out of thin air, moving just slightly like a tiny snake.

“Your life-bond burns bright,” the seer said, her voice hushed, but it was quiet in the room. Easy to hear.

Then the water of the shallow pool began to move, too, just slightly, in rhythm with the motions of the golden thread.

“It is strong. It is complete,” the seer continued. I wanted to look at her just to see if she was still sitting, if she was the one making the water move against my feet, but Lyall’s wide eyes held mine prisoner. I couldn’t look away from him even when I tried.

“Thread to thread, flame to flame. What was one may now be two, ” said the seer, and the water moved faster, slammed against my feet, wet the edges of my pants.

The golden thread moved the same way, too.

Something rose in the air from below, from that water, and it took all the air from my lungs. Pressed against my skin. Coated my tongue.

Raw fae magic.

“Who comes to sever the life-bond?” the seer suddenly demanded .

Lyall’s voice was smooth, practiced, when he said, “I do.”

“Do you relinquish all claim to the soul bound to yours?”

The heaviness in the air increased. Lyall paused a heartbeat, and suddenly his eyes begged me.

“It’s not too late, Nilah. We can still stop, ” he whispered, so low I more read the words on his lips than heard his voice against the thundering of my heart.

Goose bumps rose all over my body. I breathed in, the air so thick I thought I might suffocate.

“Keep going,” I said, and my voice came out strong, the words crystal clear.

The look in his eyes shifted once more.

“ I do, ” he said again, this time with much more force.

Lyall no longer begged me.

The seer turned to me, though I wasn’t sure how I even knew, when I couldn’t see her. “And do you give your will freely? Do you accept the unbinding?”

Speaking again was like breaking through a fucking mountain. “ I do.”

The seer moved, stood up with the gracefulness of a young woman, her dress moving about her like it, too, felt whatever made the water and the golden thread move.

“By choice freely given and claim freely released, the bond is broken. May your paths now part or cross again by fate alone,” the seer said, and the heat in the air turned up.

The heat in my veins did the same.

Fear and panic suddenly fell over me like rain. I couldn’t look away from Lyall at all, like he was still holding my gaze locked on his on purpose—or maybe it was just the ritual. My mouth opened to scream because my body knew what was coming even if I didn’t, but no sound left me .

Something crawled under my skin, something powerful and fast and foreign. Something that didn’t belong to me—nor in me.

Then came the pain slicing through my chest, and a scream filled my ears, but it wasn’t my own.

It came from the seer.

She’d wrapped her fingers around the golden thread and I only saw it from my peripheral.

She let it go again and began to whisper other words, harsher ones that I didn’t understand.

She uttered them fast, each word slurred together as the pain in my chest intensified, and I couldn’t even look down at myself to see if I was bleeding.

I could only look at Lyall and see the pain reflecting in his eyes, too. He felt all of it together with me.

And just when I thought this was going to last forever, the golden thread between our shaking hands began to burn from the middle outwards, and fast.

The ashes fell into the shallow pool between us.

The water sizzled, hissed, turned warmer against my skin, and then all reflection on it vanished.

The scream finally ripped out of my lips.

My God, it hadn’t felt like breaking a bond at all. It felt like something being ripped apart from me, from my insides instead—and not the part that was new, that felt foreign, no. Not the cold, but the warmth!

The warmth that I’d once felt comfort in had frozen over the moment that thread had burned.

Everything in me cracked . A pressure I hadn’t even realized had been holding me together released. I gasped when no more voice came out of me, stumbling as something invisible continued to tear from my chest, leaving a void behind so cold it burned .

Someone called my name. The room tilted, my vision pulsed with light and dark and then light again.

My knees buckled and I fell forward, feeling my heart freeze over all the way. Within seconds, I was gone.