Promise of Dusk (Endings #1)

Chapter 18

“Your hair is turning white,” Fionn’s teases.

Treating me as though I was fragile had lasted all of one night.

“I may be aging faster. You do bring me closer to death with every asinine task you assign,” I respond, grinding my teeth in concentration.

The white-petaled flower, barely the length of one finger, flutters delicately in the sea breeze.

I want to crush the damned thing in my fist.

Fine trickles of power live deep inside it, running up its stem and webbing through its petals. They’re so small I can barely sense them. They flow and surge, the tiniest of flames. But I can’t grasp them; it’s like trying to grab onto the air.

“I’m not joking. Your roots are coming in white.” His breath rustles the hair on top of my head. He picks up a strand and tickles my cheek with it. “Or maybe extremely light blonde.”

I try to smack away his hand, but he just yanks on the strand.

I can feel the warmth of his body, his chest, brushing against my shoulder. I refocus on that trickle of power and try to touch it in my mind. Coax it to follow me.

Like a moth to a flame, I feel my shoulder lean slightly against his chest. His face leans into the side of mine, where I steadfastly furrow my brow and try to pull the power into me.

“Isn’t it so frustrating?” he asks, his breath sweet like the berries he was eating earlier. “Don’t you just want to hit me right now?”

I do.

Desperately.

But I close my eyes and block out everything else. The sounds of the others making camp a few paces away. Fionn’s antagonizing presence at my side.

I try again.

“You know, I like blondes. They’ve always been a favorite of mine. If your hair does keep growing in this color, maybe you’ll have a chance at sharing a room with me next time we stop at an inn.”

I hit him. Just once, in the stomach. Just to get him to stop.

All the force in my body goes into it. Somehow, he braces his abdominals and absorbs it completely, and the force shoots back up my wrist and shoulder. I grimace and shake out my arm.

For a second I think the shock has stunned him into silence, miraculously.

But when I look up at him, he’s staring at the ground, at my feet.

Frost covers the grass, creating a circle around us as wide as I am tall. The blades are brown and dead, husks clinging to the ground, and when I look back at the flower, it is the same. The light extinguished .

It reminds me of the first year my father was too weak to tend the farm. How I would spend entire mornings tending to crops only to come back and find them shrivelled and dying the next morning. No matter how diligently I tended to them, how carefully I followed my father’s directions, they always ended in that same state. Now I know it was me. Not just my terrible farming abilities, but my very being, actually sucking the life from them.

“You hold onto that anger. That’s how you can wield,” Fionn says. “However, I think I’ll stop making myself the bait before I end up like that flower. Or living in a block of ice.”

He’s smirking now, golden triumph.

I gingerly step outside the circle, disconcerted at the destruction I caused.

“I don’t see you killing every living thing around you when you channel your power,” I murmur, kicking the deadened ground. I already know it’s me. I do this. Death follows me.

He cocks his head at me, the movement lupine. “You’re just taking energy from where it exists around you. Plant and animal life is easiest, hence the flower. When you get better, like me”—he smiles and points to himself, not a shred of humility—“you’ll stop being a power leech and choose to use other sources. But seeing as you couldn’t even pull from a flower, I’m not going to have you move onto more slippery forms of energy.”

Elva walks into the conversation, face blank as ever, addressing me, “And if you’re not careful, you’ll turn out like the grass.” She stares pointedly at the graveyard of brown blades. “Be glad your luck did not run out before we found you, otherwise you would have found your death beside those Crows. Sometimes your power will isolate. Instead of reaching for other energy, it will drain your own. That’s why you feel so drained after those episodes. You also don’t eat enough, and you don’t rest enough. You need to change that. We have plenty of available food between the rations we buy and the food on the land. Putting muscle on should be one of your top priorities. Muscle will store extra energy; physical strength will help with your power stores.” She hesitates for a moment as she looks me up and down. “You’re skin and bone. I don’t know how long you were starving or why, but you’re done with it.”

My cheeks flush at her bluntness.

I’m aware of how I look. The sharpness to my cheekbones, how my ribs protrude and my stomach caves. I didn’t mean to get this way. There were just too many days when I could not get off the floor—when Diana’s stew tasted like I didn’t deserve it—the kindness and concern. Some days, I still feel that way.

“I’ll eat more,” I say, shrugging off the concern. Anything to stop them from looking at me like that.

“Good,” Elva says, with firm approval.

I meet Fionn’s burning gaze.

I look away. The three of us start walking back to the rest of the group.

“So why does my power always come out as ice?” I ask, attempting to distract them from thinking too deeply about my past.

Fionn responds, “I’m not sure. I’ve rarely seen this. Most Danaans have an aptitude for one or two elements. They may be able to do some basic manipulation of others, but they have a clear preference for one. Usually, that preference is evident from the beginning of ability. It seems like yours is water, though it is strange for it to come out so violently and so… particularly, with ice.” We come to stand amongst the ot hers near the beginnings of a fire that Dealla is still adding to, building and coercing the licking flames.

“Are there any who can manipulate all things equally well?” I ask, staring into the fire.

Silence follows for a moment. One tinged with grief for those lost.

Deri, surprisingly, is the one to break it. “Very few. I only know of our Queen and her son. Even her mate couldn’t wield as well as her. Though Elva’s people did not seem to be afflicted with the same limitations.”

“My people were from a different world, and wield many things differently than even your cousin, Deri,” Elva responds vaguely.

“Your cousin?” I ask.

“My mother was the Queen’s sister. The prince, you would say, is my cousin, Erron,” Deri says as he strokes his daughter’s raven hair. She stares up at him with unadulterated admiration.

“So you’re… Fae royalty,” I say in awe.

Everyone chuckles slightly at that.

Deri slightly rolls his eyes. “We do not view royals in the terms of humans. Queen Maica is queen not just because of her power, but because she has earned the hearts of the Danaans and the heart of the very earth we tread. Erron succeeding her is—was—not a sure thing. Even with him being an only child. He would need to prove himself fair and just, would need to earn the approval of Danu herself… I have no doubt he would have.” Deri looks away, gritting his teeth. “He was the best of her and his father. He was my best friend.” A hard swallow. Dealla leaves the fire, and drapes herself around her mate, running her thin fingers through his raven hair. It gives him strength to finish his thought. “I was no more royalty than Konan of the Scar over there. I had to earn my place like everyone else.”

“So did… did any of them get out? The Queen?” I ask hesitantly.

Tension reigns.

Fionn speaks next, “We have looked for evidence everywhere for them here. There was…” He shifts restlessly. “Right before we left there was a mighty wave of power; at first, I thought it was Danu herself, raging against the atrocities that were taking place. Elva said it was a tear forming somewhere. But if someone left, they did not come here. And if it was more of the parasites coming… There are surely none of our people left.”

My mom used to say the world rages. That Suri would make us feel her anguish, her loss. She would say that the seasons turn more punishing with each year as we grow more disconnected as a people, as we take and burn and destroy our world with no regard for the blessings given to us. We would watch through the glass windowpane, dappled with violent rains, as wind whipped through the Wynedd forest, branches tearing from their mother tree, as the torrents wash the sins of man to the sea in great violent currents. At some point my young mind would grow bored of watching. I would turn away from the window and walk away from her side, so certain we would see it again, so certain I would hear more of her stories of how things used to be, so certain I would feel the warmth of her at my back again. One day I left the window, and we never stood there together again. I used to think that the windowpane missed the two of us looking through it too.

It’s all I can think of as I plop my weather-worn body onto the hard bench in the ill-lit tavern somewhere along the southwestern coast of Suri. My cloak is sopping wet against my body. Rainwater from the midsummer storm drips along the bridge of my nose, from the long ends of my hair, off my pruned fingertips. The storm raging against the coastline drove us indoors, along with everyone else. We sit huddled together at the table, a matching group of rain-soaked travelers seated across from us, warming themselves over tankards of ale and bowls of soup.

Days have passed since Fionn told me to hold onto my anger to help channel my power. As we pick our way across the coastline, my days are ravaged with practice of drawing out power and reaching with the limbs of my mind. I become a psychic hand, reaching to touch and understand the world around me. I think of all the things that make my hands shake and teeth grit. Through my efforts, I can now grasp and hold, coax and move forms of energy from sources such as flowers and plants. It hurts to watch them whither under my influence, so I move quickly on to trees and heartier sources. Dispelling and manipulating the energy is a harder feat.

I keep to myself and try not to look at Fionn. At his broad shoulders and arrogance. His callused hands as they run a finger over his favored blades. His soft-looking curls against the tan skin of his forehead. I try not to notice the way the muscles in his back shift under the thin fabric of his shirt. And try to ignore the way he stares. How his eyes shimmer with gold and want when they run down my face. How he uses any excuse to resurrect the memory of his hands on my body: casual touches to my hand, my shoulders, my hair, the small of my back.

Yet he hasn’t mentioned what happened between us in Tristram. Neither will I. But the silence can’t stop the burning.

“If you’re trying to bore a hole into the table with your mind, you had better do it discreetly.” The feel of Fionn’s breath caressing my ear makes my eyes close and head tilt away.

Turning with narrowed eyes, I ignore his comment and swipe the ale sitting in front of him.

I’ve been doing my best to stop my wallowing. Eating things, at the very least, to dispel the assessing looks. I lift the cup to my lips as I hold eye contact. A slight tilt to his lips and the flicker of his golden eyes to my own are his only responses before he turns back to face the men in front of him.

The group of male travelers looks as rough as I do. The days without bathing have taken their toll. Dirt climbs my legs and is spattered across our faces. The group looks to be gossiping; one man’s northern accent twists his words, nodding to an ill-educated upbringing. Lack of schooling is common in the north, amongst the scant villages around Dun to the slave mines in the northwest, along the Ghael mountains.

I was lucky, being so far from wealth, that I received the extent of education that I did from my mother. I can read and write, and I know my numbers. It’s sufficient. I also hide the poverty from my diction. Firstly, I use words like diction. I use proper grammar and don’t “speak lazy” as my father had called it, referring to the dropping of letters from words. I always refrained from pointing out that he spoke “lazy” and that really, he should have said “lazily,” but that was an argument that would have taken too many words between us.

“What incident out east?” Fionn butts into the whispered conversation between the men sitting across from us. His arm curls around my shoulder, playing the part of concerned, protective husband. I try not to lean away from his warmth and the feelings it brings with it, to play my own part.

“’Dere ‘ave been whispers from outta da’ forest.” The filth from the road looks as if it lives beneath the man’s aged skin as he dramatically looks side-to-side, assessing his audience before he finishes, “Whispers in da’ form o’ smoke.”

“What do these whispers say?” Konan asks impatiently from down the table, his arm slung around a stiff and uncomfortable Elva. Her face is stony, hardness around her eyes. You would think she would get used to her companions’ proximity, but Elva tends to stay to the shadows—hiding in darkened alleys and rooftops as opposed to walking brazenly through streets with the rest of us. Like she can’t seem to stand the brushing of our shoulders.

My interest is piqued. I’m certain the Crows didn’t take kindly to what occurred that day Fionn and I went to get Diana’s journal. I’ve pleaded to distant stars that the iron fist they brought down on the town wasn’t too brutal. Hopefully this man speaks of another place. I hope he hasn’t already spread whispers of the Fianna’s presence along the coast.

“Wha’s it to ya’?” the man asks, blearily belligerent.

“Just need to know what we are headed for.” Fionn’s voice lowers. “Can’t be taking my wife and our family straight to a place on fire, can I?”

Good of him to blur the path, mislead any questions about where our group is headed.

“You lot would do well t’ stay away.”

Suddenly I have to know. Have to know what became of the village that grew me. A series of faces flash in my mind. The butcher and his wife, who used to throw in free portions when my father fell ill. The seamstress, whose daughter lived in Diana’s infirmary one cold weekend. Her terrified face turning to relief as I told her the fever had broken overnight and the bone-crushing hug she had bestowed on me directly after. She didn’t know, but that was the first motherly embrace I had felt in years, and the last one I’ll probably ever have. The baker, on the edge of town, her withered hands kneading bread day and night. She was one of three visitors after my mother “left.” She brought me some sweet cookies and sat in front of the fire with me, telling countless stories to the fire in the hearth, until my father came home from the bar. I pretended to be asleep on the floor, but I could hear her fury as she told my father what would happen if she saw him sitting at that bar one more night while I stayed home alone. I see Mariana, and her little seven-year-old face cheering for her slug as we race them down an old moss-covered log behind her father’s tavern. Her face as she shoved me off the road and into the woods, all terror and fiery determination. A debt to her inner child.

By the time my father died, there were no more outreached hands. The Crows had descended, spreading fear and driving people far into their homes. People do not know kinship when their every thought is consumed with survival. But despite their absence in my most lonely hours, it is their faces I see as I interrupt.

“What of the village of Comraich?” I try to keep my voice casual, staring at the wet ends of my hair.

“Aye, thas where te’ smoke was born. Dey say te’ whole place went up in a blaze big enough only te’ sea can stop it.”

All I can see is the water dripping from the end of my hair between my fingers. I cannot move, I cannot blink, I cannot breathe.

I thought that somewhere along the way, loss stops being so all-consuming. Stops feasting on your flesh in a room full of people. Is that not what all of this solitude was for? What was the point in becoming nothing and no one if I can still feel this way ?

Somewhere in the background I feel Fionn take my hand, lowering it into my lap while he keeps the conversation going.

I’ve already gone somewhere deep inside, somewhere far, far away from that shrieking raging part of me that still lives, still wanting to maim and freeze and end life. My body has a will of its own as it stands from the table, shoving Fionn’s arm off my shoulders. It isn’t until I’m in the room I share with Elva, pack slung over a shoulder, that the door opens behind me.

“You could not have drawn more attention if you tried,” Fionn says. “I don’t know if I was able to dispel the questions well enough. So thanks for that.”

I don’t bother responding. I don’t know if I can. I just shoulder past him and reach for the door handle. It only opens a fraction before a hand slams it shut.

“Let me the fuck out.” I don’t turn around. I sound different than I have these past weeks. I sound like I used to.

When did I start sounding like a real person again? Where had the wraith that spoke through my mouth gone?

How close had she lurked under the surface?

Fionn doesn’t seem to notice. He’s mad. Not more than I am though.

“No. I don’t think I will. What the hell was that, Alyx? I had to cover up every single track that you left on the way here. The fucking ale was frozen in its glass. The place where you sat had a frozen puddle under it,” Fionn hisses, getting in my face. “You’re reckless.” A slam of his fist against the wall beside my head. “You’re out of control. You will get us all killed. And you don’t even care.”

I don’t care? I don’t care. I wish he could see it. How much I don’t care.

They’re dead. All of them. All of it .

Whirling around, I grab onto whatever I can, grasping for every single scrap of energy in the room and shove it at him. I find it in the air, the candlelight, the blazing well of energy coming from him.

I can feel the energy I harness taking shape and unfurling in a wave of frost, spreading along the cage of this room, Fionn the jailer. It freezes and hardens, a blunt force lashing out in a lethal, bitter cold—anything to get him out of my way.

Fionn is flung across the room, falling onto hands and knees, heaving visible breaths. He looks up at me with burning golden eyes, glancing around at the ice-scape I have created. Candlelight dies, casting the room into darkness. Only the moonlight filtering through the frosted window illuminates us.

“Let me up,” he demands.

“No, I don’t think I will,” I parrot his words back to him. I have no clue what I’ve done. His rain-wet pants are frozen to the wood floor. “I have to go. To find whoever…” My voice trails off as I wonder who is left. If any of them are. If they’ve all fallen to the Crows’ fury and fun. “I have to go.”

He’s shaking with anger, or is it exhaustion? Glaring up at me.

“For what, Alyx? Huh? For the people that would just as soon leave you to die? For those selfish, pathetic people that let the Fomorians prey on the old, the children, the sick? Are those the people you’re willing to risk it all for? And who would do the same for you? You have no family there. You have no friends. They’re probably all ash in the wind anyways. Give it up.”

His words hit every single mark.

“Some might have survived. I cannot just leave them.”

“You already did. You left. Knowing that the Fomorians would not just let this slide. You left and now what? You feel bad? You feel like a coward now, Alyx? Too bad. It’s done.”

Am I bleeding? I feel like I’m bleeding.

Drip, drip, drip.

All over the floor.

He doesn’t stop.

“I know what you’re feeling. I’ve felt it, I still feel it. Every time I think of them. Of my mother. Of my father. My neighbors and everyone I’ve ever known. They were stuck there, I could have stayed and fought for them. But I ran. I took the out I was given, not realizing that I would never be able to take it back, never be able to go back. And I will spend every second for the rest of my long existence looking for a way to make those reeking parasites pay. Taking every single opportunity to make those bastards suffer for their crimes against them. I have failed my people in every conceivable way, but I will not fail them in this. I will allow no one to get in the way of this Alyx, no one. Not even you.”

Not even you.

The silence stretches and I begin to understand.

“I won’t get in the way.” I turn to go once more.

But Fionn has had time to gather himself, un-stick himself from the floor. He has me pinned against the wall beside the door before I can open it. His warm body an even tighter cage than the room.

“I meant what I said, Alyx. This would be a mistake. One that would endanger everyone I have left. You could be caught and tortured. You could tell them about us. I couldn’t even blame you. The Fomorians, you have no idea what they would do to you...” I swear I feel him shudder against me. His next words are gentle but firm. “You can’t go. I mean it. ”

“Then come with me.” My voice is small. So is the hope. But as I say it, I realize how much I want it. How much I don’t want to be on my own again.

He would keep me here, against my will. Logically, I’ve known this. That I could not leave knowing what I know, but I thought things might have changed somewhere along the way. Somewhere between him and a wall, somewhere between longing glances.

“We would be headed straight to a trap. They want us to come scurrying back. Plus, the word of what we’ve done, our faces, have reached the capital by now. We need to be focused on laying low, getting out of here, that’s why we head to Raith. I have a way out, to Ashvynd.”

I can’t stay. I can’t go with him. Not yet.

I shake my head. “Please don’t make me stay.”

Mariana, she could be out there. The need to help her is a song in my blood.

Fionn ducks his head, squeezing his eyes shut, pain etched into the lines around his eyes and mouth. When his eyes open again, they look as raw and vulnerable as I feel. Looking straight into my soul. His voice drops to a trembling whisper, so at odds with this self-assured, vengeful man I have come to know. “Alyx. I cannot. I cannot. You need to stay with us. I need you… I need you to stay with us.”

“Because of my power? Because of what I know? I swear I won’t let myself get caught. I swear.” It’s a pleading whisper. I will die first.

He moves a tendril of hair behind my ear. “You know why, Alyx.” The words are so soft, it’s as if he is afraid the fates will hear it.

All that can be heard is our heartbeats, echoing in the frozen room.

Oh. Oh .

I can’t bring myself to break this holy silence. He looks like he doesn’t want to say it, like some part of him rages against the want in his eyes.

I’m so utterly taken by surprise, that the look he gives me sends every other thought flying from my mind. Somewhere in the shocked haze, my hands rise up to his face, feeling the rough stubble on his sharp jaw.

His stunning eyes flutter closed.

His head falls closer, pulled by some force beyond the two of us. His nose runs along the side of mine, breaths curling between us.

My fingers shift to his hair. So unimaginably soft are the curls, a million shades of fair and honey. They settle at his nape, where they curl more tightly.

Our lips meet. The first kiss we shared was burning, this one is soft; exploring and languid. His hands aren’t urgent, now that they’ve left my wrists. They are soft and sweet, caressing barely over my cheeks, brushing away the tears I only now feel.

I’ll never know how long we live in this moment. How long we bask in the feeling.

The look in his eyes says he feels it too.

“I was a fool to leave so much unsaid between us after Tristram. I was a fool not to claim you then—to let the days go by and say nothing when all I wanted was for you to look at me like you did that night. I won’t be a fool again. You’re mine. I want you to know it. I want the others to know it.” His heated gaze runs over my face, proprietorial and masculine.

I’m spinning and I don’t know how to make it stop.

“I didn’t know you were serious. I wasn’t sure if… if you were just, taking what you could get.” I sound so young and insecure. I twirl one of the curls at the nape of his neck ar ound my finger. He shivers.

His face takes on a cocky smirk that I don’t miss. Never one to leave a moment unsullied.

“So you’re saying… I could get you?”

I roll my eyes and shove him away lightly, not really budging him. “You’re what? Seventy years old? You’re just like every teenage boy I’ve ever met.”

He gathers me up again, accepting not a breath’s space between us. He whispers in my ear, “I’m not sure if I can let you go. I want you to stay with me tonight. We don’t have to do anything, not if you’re not comfortable. But I just don’t… I want you with me, always.”

For the first time he looks vulnerable and embarrassed for asking. He shifts slightly, the only sign of human restlessness I’ve seen from him.

My heart stutters, then bursts, then dies and comes alive again.

I’m so distracted by the feel of him, by the feeling of being held that I think I may just stay here for the rest of my life. But even with the sheer perfection of being in his arms, I begin to remember. To feel that tiny niggling thought that grows with every heartbeat.

I shove it away, for just one more moment.

“Does this mean Elva has to bunk with the boys now? Because that makes me feel guilty.” I grimace.

Fionn tosses his head back, laughing.

“She’s done it before. And I think she’s unaffected. Does this mean…yes?”

I memorize that hopeful look, draw it over and over again in my mind. Take in the exact tilt of his lips and the slightest crinkle around his eyes, take the scent of him deep into my lungs. I carefully put it into a place where it will never get lost. Where nobody can ever touch it or take it away from me.

Dread and sorrow twine at the edges of this memory as I preserve it, at what I know I have to do.

“Yes, it means yes.” I do my best to look happy about it. I let my eyes make promises my body and my soul cannot keep.

The silence is as golden as his beaming smile, full of promise and prose.

He places a kiss on my lips and lets me go.

It’s sweet and quick, like we will do it many more times.

“I’ll go tell her. We will take this room, it’s smaller.” He closes the door behind him as he leaves.

I’m so cold now.

I only have a few minutes.

I dart to the door, the pack still slung over my shoulder.

Mariana might be out there. And as much as I meant everything with Fionn, I have to go find her and whomever else may be left. Because maybe, just this once, I’m better than nobody.

I shove open the window, the frost having dissipated in the time we stood clasped together in passion. I look down. Why did we have to be on the top floor? I drop my pack to the ground, holding it as far down as I can. It makes a hard sound as it hits the ground below. I wince.

I take a deep breath and sling one leg out the window.

I take another deep breath. I can do this. I can try to heal myself if I break something. I turn to throw my second leg out, the move turning me to face the door on the other side of the room.

Where a shadow now stands.