Page 18 of Moonstriker (The Summertide Chronicles #4)

Chapter 18

Aubrey

I was still lying there, covered in pine needles and dirt, head in Kit’s lap, when he loosened his pack and turned it so he could rifle through it, pulling out a length of slick white rope.

After replacing his pack, he set to...to tying the rope to my waist. “What are you doing?”

He paused the quick, efficient movements of his hands, turning those cool gray eyes on me. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Thanks, but I’m not really into that,” I said, trying to scoot away from him but still slow and sluggish in my own skin, so I didn’t get far. “I’d prefer to be the one doing the tying up.”

Slowly, so very slowly, he lifted one white eyebrow at me, and...it was odd, I’d thought him so cool before, so unemotional, but suddenly it was like I could see a thousand emotions behind those pale eyes. Oddly enough, not all of them were arrogant disdain. His face was still blank, but those eyes?—

“If we’re going to talk bondage, it’s going to have to wait until after we save the world, little Duskbringer,” he said, lips quirking up on one side.

Arrogant, I’d been thinking about that expression. And it was. He was the best at something and he knew it. But there was something else in there as well. Something dark and demanding and?—

Maybe interest.

Interest in . . . me?

The distraction of his fathomless eyes lasted until I realized he’d gone back to tying me up. Then, when he finished tying the rope around me, he gave a few feet of slack and wrapped it around his own waist.

“Wait a minute. What are you doing? I don’t?—”

“Seizures,” he said, sighing. When I didn’t respond, he looked up at me. “Battle plans and engagement, remember? I didn’t account for the seizures on this hike, so now we need to do that.”

“And it involves bondage?”

“It’s not a real climb, but there is a grade. There is some climbing. And I’m not going to have you die because I didn’t think this through. So from now on, you’re with me, literally. I’m not losing you sliding down the mountain because you have another seizure and fall at the wrong time.” He finished the knot around his own waist, a pretty thing with multiple loops that I couldn’t have recreated while I was looking straight at it. I certainly couldn’t have undone it with my seizure-clumsy hands.

The same as the one that secured the rope around my middle. I might have been able to slide out of it, but it was relatively snug around my waist, so probably not.

“You want to tie me up as recompense when this is over, we can discuss that then,” he said, cool and matter of fact, expression unmoving. “First, we have to save the world.”

My whole body shivered at that.

We have to save the world .

Him, sure. He was the beautiful rich important guy, son of the Moonstriker, who walked with a feline grace I couldn’t even understand, let alone duplicate. His eyes hid oceans of feelings he didn’t share aloud. He was the kind of person who saved the world.

Me, Aubrey Sagara, dirt poor nobody from The Banks? I was not.

“Is that the only reason you’re here then? The only reason you’re helping me? To save the world ?” I shoved up into a seated position, thinking I’d push right up to standing, but I had a moment of vertigo instead.

I wasn’t sure why it bothered me suddenly, that he was there to save the world, but it did.

He grabbed one of my arms, steadying me, pressing the other hand into my back. Supportive.

“We never even met before you arrived at the chalet, Aubrey. I don’t know you.” His tone was conciliatory, and the words almost too quiet to hear, like they were shameful, and for some reason, it made me downright mad.

I jerked away from him, leaning against a nearby tree as I tried to push myself up to standing. “I know that. But there’s always, you know, human empathy. Caring about people.”

For a moment, he just sat there in the dirt, staring at me and blinking rapidly. I’d have said it was like he was trying not to cry, but that wasn’t it at all. It was more like a broken computer.

His mind had gone strangely blank, and—how did I even know that?—he was trying to reset something.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said when he came back. “I don’t—I’ve never spent much time with a Duskbringer before.”

“What the heck does that have to do with anything?”

“You know, a Duskbringer. Sapphires. Emotions. Caring .” He said that last as though it was a bad word, almost whispered, like he didn’t want anyone to hear him saying it.

I shook my head vehemently. “No, that’s not me. I’m not a real Duskbringer. That’s Aunt Titania. I wasn’t raised like that, with—with sapphires and power and all that.”

“No, you’re not understanding me,” he interrupted my ramble, pressing up off the ground and damn him, even that was graceful, like his whole body simply flowed upward, while I was still leaning against a tree, panting like a dog. “I was raised by Delta fucking Moonstriker. The last time she saw an emotion in passing, she shot it down. With prejudice. I don’t—What I’m trying to say is that I—” He broke off and gave a strange, strangled noise, running his hands up his face and burying his fingers in his hair, then yanking at his long forelock with both hands. “I’m saying I have no fucking idea how to have emotions right, because I was never taught how. Caring about people? That’s not on Delta’s list of preapproved tasks for the rearing of small geniuses.”

We stared at each other like that for a long time, the moment feeling like it was inside a bubble, removed from the whole outside world. Me leaning hard against a pine tree, my hands gripping the rough chunks of bark as though my life depended on it, while sap seeped into the gap between two of my fingers. Him frustrated, raking his hands through his mussed hair, his chest heaving with emotion that...apparently he didn’t know how to deal with.

Suddenly, I was laughing. Not hysterically, necessarily, but also...not other than hysterically.

“We’re going to save the world,” I said aloud.

Nope, that didn’t make it feel any more real than before. He stared at me blankly, so he didn’t get the joke.

I tried again. “Me, the unbonded mistake of a human being, and you, the ice prince who doesn’t know how to feel things. Us. We’re going to save the world.”

His frustration turned into an outright scowl, and before I could worry about how I’d offended him by basically repeating what he’d told me, he huffed and crossed his arms over his chest. “No one is a mistake. Not being bonded to a stone is...it’s random fucking chance. It doesn’t say a thing about who you are.”

Me? He was defending...me? Not himself? Before I could jump in with all the arguments I’d ever been given on why he was wrong and I was, in fact, broken, he continued.

“And fuck yes we’re going to save the world.” He stepped in close to me, and when he did he had to tip his head up just a little to look into my eyes. How had I ever imagined he was unemotional? Those gray eyes roiled with a fury of emotions. “And not despite our perceived flaws, Aubrey. Because of them. Because I’m an asshole and too stubborn for anyone’s own good, especially my own, Nikka and I spent a decade finding the one way to do this. And because you’re unbonded, Aubrey. Because you’re unbonded and an adult, you’ve got room inside you to bond a whole fucking mountain. It’s not a failing, and it doesn’t make you weak or broken. It’s why you can save the world.”

I stared down at him, and when I started blinking rapidly, it wasn’t from confusion. It was because my eyes were stinging with emotion, and I had no idea what to think or do next. “The Gloom—ah—Duskbringer bloodline?—”

“Fuck that,” he spat. “It’s got nothing to do with bloodline. If it were that, you’d have bonded Verelle, and that would be that. You probably couldn’t do this anymore if you’d bonded Verelle. Nikka couldn’t see it, and that, among other reasons, was why we didn’t try to keep you at the castle when you first met Oberon.”

Before I could really process that he’d known who I was when I first came to the castle—when I didn’t even remember meeting him at the time—he reached out and squeezed my arm. “How are you feeling? Should we take a break?”

I scowled at him, shaking my head, and even though the motion gave me another moment’s vertigo, I pushed off the tree and straightened myself. “No. I’m fine. We should get moving. Like you said, this might already take longer than we want, and with how often Slate is rumbling, that can’t be good.”

He looked up at the mountain above us and gave a little shudder. “No. No it can’t. Frost’s estimations said we should have time yet, but I don’t think that’s right anymore. I think Nausa being broken changes things. And the fact that they’re here, and planning to follow through, but can’t actually give him what he wants. Not anymore.”

I frowned at that, because he’d just spoken to his brother a bit earlier. “Then why didn’t you tell him not to go forward with contacting Slate? You could have?—”

He laughed.

When I just watched him, waiting for him to stop, he did, cocking his head in confusion. “You’re...you’re serious. You think Delta Moonstriker would ever listen to me ? The woman doesn’t even listen to her favorite son half the time. That’d be Rain, by the way, because he’s both personable and didn’t have the poor taste to turn out smarter than her.”

I considered that a moment. Frost, then, must also be her son, of the people I’d met. The implication being that he, on the other side, had had the “poor taste” to turn out smarter than her.

My own mother had always said I was smarter than her. Whenever anything like that came up, she’d always said I was better than her at it, no matter what it was. That her whole goal as a parent had been to see me surpass her in every way.

Thinking of Rain, and even more so of Kit, in the light of a parent who wanted the opposite of that...well, it was eye-opening.

Not for the first time, I thought I’d been lucky to grow up in the middle of nowhere, without knowing anything about my family. I wasn’t smarter than Mother at all. She’d been a complete genius for getting away from Gloombringer court and leaving it far behind her.

Not sure how to respond to that without seeming incredibly smug about my own mother, I turned toward the barely visible trail up the mountain that Kit thought was going to be so very easy to trek. “Less than fifteen miles, you said?”

“Pretty sure,” he agreed. “It’s never taken me more than eight hours to get from here to there, even carrying a heavy pack and with the bits of climbing.”

So simple. I wanted to sigh at him because it wasn’t even close to that simple, but that wasn’t going to do us any good in the moment. We needed to get moving if we were going to get back to the chalet.

If he was right about everything, and Slate was going to be angry about Nausa and who knew what else, and...and somehow, I was going to be able to bond a whole mountain, even if that still seemed like something from a movie rather than reality...Well, either way, we needed to get there as soon as possible.

I took a step forward, and my ankle almost twisted out from under me. I’d hurt it when I fell during the seizure.

Gritting my teeth, I stepped down again, forcing it to take my weight even as it protested. We didn’t have time for me to whine about my ankle. The whole world was in danger.