The pain is almost like a noise.
High-pitched, ceaselessly ringing, it shimmers down locked limbs and over frozen fingers.
And then he lets her go.
When she lifts herself from her rubble she stands, sweat slick across her face, arms shaking in the pale candlelight.
"Again," she orders.
It's her turn to take the advantage, her turn to seize the edge and chase it, burrowing in quickly, savagely. There is no violence on the surface, just outstretched fingertips, but beneath it all is ruin.
It's like punching steel, like launching into rock, and she presses harder, hits harder, Skilling at this invisible wall, narrowing down in a pin-point of command, a needle thread of dominion:
Kneel.
On the outside his knees are quaking—this is the shimmer before the fall. On her end, she can feel the clamming shivering over her, the slow locking of her limbs. She hits harder.
Kneel.
He's trying to yank the hand away, trying to tell her blood and bones and muscle and skin to disobey her mind, to falter, fall aside, but she's burrowing harder and, even as her hand starts falling, her fingers are still pointed at his face.
KNEEL.
It's a pop, a crack in the wall, and he doesn't yield so much as crumple, thrown back as if the blow hit his forehead.
And then Allayria's knees hit the floor.
It's gasping that toes the line of sobs, soft and hitching to the beat of the trembling, flinching fingers on the floor. He's always a bundle of nerves when he loses, a shuddering mess of messages.
She is always quiet.
It takes a while for her to truly come back; him, longer.
When he does, when he sits up, he is wan and peaked, like someone has pressed thumbs underneath his eyes and left a bruise.
It didn't start out like this. They were much more hesitant at first, the fear of harming, the fear of damaging at the forefront. But the time to fear damage has long past, the time to spare feelings is gone, now that they stand in the shadow of Vatra.
"You need to be faster," Allayria tells him. "You will be faster next time."
Finn nods, all thin limbs and wide eyes.
The time for innocence has long gone.
They are sock'em figurines, sharpening their edges on each other in the moonlight. Allayria practices very little with swords and clubs and knives and bows these days. Her exhaustion, her bone-deep weary comes from nighttime sparring consisting of pointing two fingers at a small face and whispering into it.
Her days are spent wrapped in preparation, plans, schemes, and devises hewn out of an absentee dynast's strange devices. When Dost showed her the sleek bolts and self-shooting bows she was intrigued; when the Beast-caller had presented the hulking, mechanical device that purportedly launched rock and stone into the air, Allayria was amazed.
"The trick of this—the real magic he's sent—is this," The Chieftainess had said then, and she pulled out a small, brown box.
Inside was shifting gray powder, like dust or fine gravel.
And then she set it on the ground and, from a distance, a Smith Skilling soldier set it on fire.
In Lei's eyes, Allayria saw the reflection of the explosion's golden glow and wonder; in Hiran's was alarm; and something deeper, unsettled, lurked in Ruben's.
The time for comfort is over.
They take their meals with the Chieftainess now—her and General Jin, and Marron. They sit, and talk, and laugh. The Chieftainess laughs a lot, Allayria learns. She makes Ruben laugh too. It's almost as if Vatra does not loom in the distance for them. As if it does not wait.
It's one of these nights when the woman recounts a journey off-land, to an island in the southernmost reaches of the world, and she talks about simians, creatures whose faces are on the edge of human, but are more limb than torso, teeth than nose.
"Cleverest little things," she tells them over a flagon of mead, the gray tendrils of her hair falling down across her face as Finn, eyes wide and luminous over his tea cup, follows her every word. "They swing from vines, pick locks, and jabber so much I started to think they could nearly talk."
"Oh, I would like one," Finn says, and some of the shadows beneath his eyes recede. "It could be my friend."
He half glances at Tara's bird when he says it, and the Chieftainess follows his gaze.
"You can't Skill a simian," Aren Dost scoffs, her brow half quirking in question, her own gaze flickering toward Ruben's for a half a moment. "They're far too intelligent to be called, kid. They won't cede control."
None of the four friends look at Finn, but Allayria sees them all stiffen and it's less that they're looking at Dost, and more that they're not looking at him.
It's Tara who breaks the moment, Tara who leans back, hand reaching out to lazily pat her hawk, and says: "Their minds are too strong to dominate, Finn... Just like people's."
The boy stares at her a moment, but he seems to understand enough not to say anything to the contrary, only murmuring into his cup: "But maybe I could talk to one."
Dost's laugh is quizzical, a bark of harsh surprise, and Hiran, ever quick, ever smooth, joins in with her and Ruben, leaning forward to slide, oh so deftly, another flagon their way. There's an indulgent look cast Finn's way by the older crowd, and when Tara asks another question their attention drifts away, mollified.
It's when they turn in for the evening, when the chairs scrape back on the dirt floor and Dost is slapping a hand on Ruben's back, talking animatedly with a worn-looking Jin, that Allayria sets a grip on Hiran's sleeve and he hangs back.
"Why's it always me?" he grouses as Lei, a pace ahead of them, glances back, his eyes flitting to both of them as he hesitates at the tent doorway.
"Ruben doesn't know," Allayria murmurs, more of a statement than a question, though asked anyway.
Hiran follows the flicker of her eyes to Finn and cottons on quick enough.
"No," he answers. "Just about the nightmares. Not about... why. How."
"Good," Allayria says in a low voice, turning away from the dispersing crowd to hide how her mouth moves. "Let's keep it that way. Let's keep it so no one else knows. Just us."
The Solveig man's hazel eyes follow the small form tottering outside, tiny against the black sky.
"I think we are in perfect agreement," he responds, a small crease forming between his brows. "Speaking of the little oddball: have the lessons helped?"
Her face is a mask and she wears it well, letting it sit smoothly across her brow and eyes, let it crinkle convincingly as the voice that issues out of it is low and warm:
"A little. We'll keep up with it and see if things improve more."
And Hiran Baulieu, a golden son of a golden house, more often occupied with the glint of his own reflection than the state of the man next to him, sets a warm hand on her shoulder.
"Can't say how much we appreciate it. He's been worrying us both, especially Tara."
"I see them in my dreams," Finn murmurs in the past. "I can't get it out of my head, I can't get it out, it won't come out, it won't—"
Back at the tent, Lei is unfurling the extra blankets from the trunk when she enters. Neither of them argued when Jin gave them the regent and adjoining guard tent this time.
"What was that about?" he asks now, his back to her.
Placing pieces on the board.
"Finn."
Lei glances back at her, questioning, but he too needs to remain in the dark. He's never been a good actor, and thus never a good liar.
He doesn't deserve this burden. There is already enough weight on his shoulders.
So she doesn't answer the unsaid query, pulling off her shirt instead, slipping out of her trousers, moving, amongst the flickering candle lights, to the bed. She slips under furs, into the woven heat, only leaning over the side to flick open her top of bag.
She's rummaging through it when he slides in on the other side, settling down after dousing the lights and shifting more blankets over them. He's not, she has learned, good with the cold.
"'Llaryia," he murmurs in the darkness.
She turns back toward him, even if she can't see him in the black, and she hears him rustle.
It's the press of a hand on her cheek, and then his mouth, warm and soft, against her own. He's there for a moment and then gone, settling back down on his side of the bed. As usual.
It's become a nightly routine, this thing. As has the bed. He's taken to doing it since B—
Well, since.
And it's not so much the gesture that plucks mercilessly at the thing pulsing in her ribcage, but the way his hand shivers against her face when he does it. The way he fights to stay soft and never linger long.
"You are alive as much as I am alive. And as long as I am alive, you'll stay alive."
There's not much room left in that shrunken, cracked thing beating against her bones.
Another thing given up. Another piece chipped away.
But there might be enough for him.
Just him.
She had told Hiran the lessons with Finn were to banish the nightmares, to melt the ghosts away. Precious time taken, donated away to piece back together the shattered innocence of a young, painfully naïve boy.
She lied.
Finn seemed even smaller than usual when she told the truth, almost as if he was diminished by her words alone, the realization of what these lessons really were.
My codebreaker, she thinks now. My ace, unseen.
It's just us; no one else can know.
Sleep comes in a lull, a soft pull and, sinking into it, she turns over again, shifting, settling her hand over the bed's edge in the dark.
As she fades her fingers drift down, inside the opening of the bag, and brush a sliver of something hard and cold.
A/N: Hello, friends. Welcome to Part 4. 🙃
It's been a hot second—I hit a two-chapter snag in this part that I've been untangling, which is why this chapter was delayed from when I had hoped to post it. My buffer of chapters has kind of reduced over the past year, and this gives me anxiety sometimes. 😂 That said, the snag has been untangled enough that I can release this, so full steam ahead!
Random poll time: what's your favorite book/chapter/scene (any or all) from the series so far?