The Songbird and the Heart of Stone (Crowns of Nyaxia #3)

Chapter 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

A sar led me deep into the belly of Morthryn, through paths so convoluted I didn’t even bother trying to keep track of where we went. With every step, Morthryn broke down further. By the end, it couldn’t even be called a hallway anymore. The stone was misshapen and uncut, like cave walls, with remnants of Morthryn’s structure buried into it—a patch of broken tile here, a lingering metal rafter there. The air, moist and cool, smelled like iron.

Eventually, we came to a creek of blood that ran through a crack gouged into the slab floor. It looked like it might once have been a much grander river, something like the ones we saw in the Sanctums. Now it was barely a trickle, nestled deep in glistening stone banks far too large for its current state.

Asar surveyed it with his hands on his hips, looking unimpressed.

“It’ll have to work,” he muttered at last. “Best we have.”

He helped me down the slick rocks leading to its edge, and then motioned for me to kneel next to him. He pushed his sleeves up to his elbows, revealing the ropey muscle of his forearms, one smooth and tan and the other a spiderweb of bumpy black, delicate as lace. I stared longer than I should have—not at the scars, but at the flesh beneath them.

Asar caught my eye and his mouth flattened. He pushed his hands quickly into the blood, hiding his bare skin.

I wanted to correct him— I wasn’t looking at the scars, I was looking at you —but the words died awkwardly in my throat.

He said, “Touch the bottom.”

I did as he said, pressing my palms down against stone.

Puffs of darkness slowly congealed over the surface of the blood, first around his wrists, then spreading, until dark swirls now engulfed the entire surface of the creek.

“Say his name,” Asar said softly.

The black surface of the water was now perfectly smooth, nearly a mirror. I stared at my reflection. My hair had grown past my shoulders, messy curls framing my face. Eomin had always liked it long. Had he found me so quickly down here because I looked just like I had back then? No lines of age, no features weathered by time. Both of us frozen on that night.

I whispered, “Eomin?”

The blood trembled. My reflection disintegrated. And when the ripples smoothed again, I was no longer looking at myself.

It was him.

Eomin.

He was perfect. No wounds. No death-black eyes. He looked just as I remembered him—youthful face, golden hair, dimple on his right cheek. There was no more pain in his expression, no more fear, no more hunger. He gazed peacefully off into the distance, a hint of a smile twisting his mouth.

I let out a shaky exhale. Tears burned my eyes.

“He’s healed.”

“No,” Asar said. “He’s dead.”

“But he’s?—”

But he’s already dead, I was going to say.

But no. That wasn’t true. Eomin hadn’t been alive, but he also hadn’t been dead. He had been stuck halfway between.

Not anymore.

A tear rippled his face, right over that dimple.

“He made it,” I whispered. I didn’t even want to blink. He looked as if, at any moment, he might turn to me and smile and say something mundane meant for another version of myself—the girl who was still the brightest star of the Order of the Destined Dawn, beloved by her god, with nothing but goodness ahead of her.

I wanted to stare at him and cradle this little precious shard of my past like a baby kitten. I wanted to hold on to him forever. I wanted to?—

“That’s enough.”

Eomin’s face disappeared, leaving me staring at my own reflection again.

His sudden absence was a devastating blow. I choked out, “No!”

“It’s dangerous to look too long,” Asar said gently. “Best not to give death too much time to call to you.”

Too late. It already had. For a moment, every shred of my soul longed to throw myself after my lost friend.

Instead, I sat up and stared at Asar.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

His gaze slid away. “Sometimes they’re able to make it through.”

I let out a cracked laugh. “You’re such a bad liar. You did this. I know you did.”

I fully expected him to keep denying it. But after a long moment, he said, “I help them. When I can.”

“Help them?”

“Sometimes, I’m able to lead them through the Sanctum back to their intended path. Help them on to the underworld.” He staunchly refused to look at me—gods, he almost seemed embarrassed. “It doesn’t always work. And it’s harder than it used to be. I can’t do it often.”

A note of shame imbued his voice.

Shame.

As if it weren’t the most compassionate thing someone could do for another being. As if even attempting to help those who were so helpless to all others weren’t such an act of bravery.

It was easy for me to heal the hurts of others. I helped them strip back the bandages on the emotional scars they didn’t want anyone to see. It was harder when those wounds were my own. I didn’t know what to do with the weight of this kindness. It swelled up inside me, too big, too powerful, to distill into words.

I was still trying to find the right ones when Asar said, very quietly, “He doesn’t blame you. You should know that.”

The words pierced my chest.

“You—you talked to him?”

“Sometimes they just need someone to listen.” I could hear the amused smile in his voice. “He damned near worshipped you, Iliae.”

Eomin had seemed so much older, so much wiser, back then. Now, he looked like such a child. He had been so young. Of course he had worshipped me. I had been the chosen one. He’d loved me with all the innocent infatuation of a teenage crush, and I’d led him right to his death.

I drew my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around them as if they could protect my exposed heart.

“He was a good friend,” I said. “A good person. He didn’t deserve it. And I should have…”

My voice trailed off. There were so many should haves .

A good person, Chandra had called me. It felt like such a hollow compliment. Maybe it had been true a long time ago. Now I had a deficit, a debt taken out against my morality one too many times. All the wrong people had paid for it.

I had been barely conscious when I found what was left of them—him and Saescha. My body was still raging with fever. I remembered wondering if it was a nightmare, a hallucination. Praying it was.

It had been the first of many prayers that would go unanswered.

“What did he tell you?” I asked, even though I didn’t quite want to know.

“The dead aren’t the best at maintaining a logical conversation. He told me bits and pieces about his life in the Order. And…?a truly perplexing amount of information about boating.”

I choked a laugh. Yes, that sounded like Eomin.

“And he told me about your journey here.” Asar’s voice softened. “It takes a brave soul to travel to the land of vampires to preach the light, Dawndrinker. I will give you that.”

There was not even a hint of mockery in the words. He said it as if he truly meant it.

Once, I would have told him that it wasn’t bravery—it was faith. Now, the word that came to mind was stupidity, and I hated myself for even thinking it.

I gave him a weak, forced smile. “I told you I wasn’t a crusader. It took a conversation with a corpse to make you believe me.”

He let out a snort beneath his breath. “Five more minutes with you, Iliae, and I knew you weren’t a crusader.”

And then, when I frowned, he added, “That is a good thing.”

Was it?

I believed that all souls held the potential of light. I believed it even in my darkest regrets, even now. But if Saescha had taken that mission, she would have offered Atroxus a vampire heart with a sword and a stake, not with my sweet, soft, vulnerable words.

If Saescha had been Atroxus’s chosen, she never would have needed to buy back his love at all.

As if he could hear my doubts, Asar said, “We all have ghosts in our pasts, Iliae. We can’t give them the power to define our futures, too.”

It was an uncomfortable reversal, for someone else to offer me the comforts I was so accustomed to doling out. My eyes slid to Asar’s face. He stared down into the calm red waters below, deep in thought.

“Was she one of yours?” I asked. “The woman in Breath?”

He flinched, as if he’d been both anticipating and dreading this question.

“Not all the dead are so easily put to rest.” He said it with an air of finality, a firmly shut door to any further conversation.

Still, I thought of the way he’d looked when he held out his arms to her. An expression I knew so intimately, I could feel the knife of his regret between my own ribs. I didn’t need to know the details to know that the story, at its bleeding heart, was always the same.

“It doesn’t make the love worth less,” I said quietly, “just because you can’t help her the way you wish you could.”

Because I knew he needed to hear it. Because I believed it, in the end—or tried to, even if I couldn’t always make it true for myself.

His gaze slipped up to meet mine, revealing a fleeting, indecipherable tempest of emotions.

Then he turned away, clearing his throat. “We’ve lingered too long. You won’t see your friend in the Sanctums again. But there will still be other?—”

He started to rise, then let out a surprised oof as I threw myself against him.

The hug was awkward in every way, the angle making our bodies an uncomfortable mishmash of limbs, my arms around his neck, his knee jabbing my hip. Asar stiffened like a cat unexpectedly captured, debating if he should wriggle away. But I just tightened my arms around him. My face buried against his shoulder. The delicate scent of ice and flowers filled my lungs.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

He started to protest, but I said again, more firmly, “Thank you.”

I didn’t mean to hold on so long. But it had been a long time since I’d hugged someone. I didn’t realize how much I’d needed it. I couldn’t bring myself to pull away because the tears just kept coming, rolling down my cheeks and sinking into the fabric of his shirt.

“Just accept it,” I murmured.

“Never.”

But his hand fell to the small of my back, and he didn’t pull away.

When I finally extracted myself from him, we made the long walk back in near silence. My body and soul were exhausted. I was eager for rest.

Still, right before the turn that would lead back to the others, we paused. Something had been weighing on me these last few days, and I couldn’t not bring it up.

“What Elias said when we got back,” I said. “About the relics. You can’t let anyone use them as weapons, Asar. Not ever. It would be?—”

I couldn’t even find words to describe something worse than what I’d witnessed in the House of Night.

“Bad,” I blurted out. “Very bad. So, so ?—”

“Bad?” Asar provided flatly.

“It’s not a joke. I saw what that magic is capable of. It’s the kind of power that would be paid for by thousands of innocents.”

Some might say it was pointless to warn a vampire prince away from power. Vampire nobles were raised to be vicious—they had to be, to survive in a world where they were born an inherent threat to creatures much stronger than them. Their lives only held as much value as the flesh they managed to carve out of the line of succession, and that meant being deadlier than their competition at all costs. The only thought they gave to the blood of innocents was to consider how much of it they could drink.

Asar was a disgraced second son, an unexpected bastard heir, with everything to prove. Maybe it was naive of me to think he wouldn’t want to— need to—seize whatever scraps of power he possibly could.

But his smirk had disappeared. “I’m no fool, Iliae. I have enough marks against my soul as it is before tampering with forces that destructive. I’m not here to grab whatever petty power I can and run.”

And yet, here he was, attempting to bring a murdered god back to life. Suddenly, I felt silly for even worrying about a tree branch and flower petals, when divine war loomed on the brink of fate.

What if we already are? I wanted to ask. But instead, I chose my words more carefully.

“So this is all about pleasing Nyaxia. This mission.”

“You doubt it, too?” A humorless quirk at the left side of his mouth warped his scars. “Egrette found it terribly convenient. Can’t say I blame her. A mission from a goddess with no witnesses, just when my father was deciding whether to allow his accidental bastard heir to keep his newfound title, and his life.”

Well, when he put it that way, it didn’t sound good.

But I shook my head. “No. I believe you.”

I knew, of course, that Asar’s mission was real. But even if Atroxus hadn’t told me so, I would have seen it. This wasn’t a cheap grab for glory. There was real weight to his voice when he had told those guardians of his intentions.

“Then what?” he said. “I don’t seem the religious type? I will admit, I’m not much for prayer.”

“She just must have offered you something incredible.”

Asar chuckled under his breath. The halls of Morthryn moaned with it, as if laughing along with him.

“All the typical rewards,” he said. “The greatest Shadowborn king in a millennia, history shall know thy name. Et cetera, et cetera.”

“You make it sound so compelling.”

He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. His hand pressed to the wall as he swept his gaze down Morthryn’s halls. I had never once seen Asar pray. And yet, I recognized the look on his face immediately—reverence.

“It’s a powerful gift,” he said softly. “To right a wrong.”

I heard the echo of Atroxus’s offering to me: Do you not want your redemption?

I twisted a curl around my fingers, pushing away a sudden awkward discomfort. I yawned.

“I need some sleep,” I said. “Before I need to get up and start listening to Elias complain again.”

Asar snorted. “Wise.” He straightened and tucked his hands into his pockets, looking me up and down. “I haven’t been able to travel this deep into the Descent in a long time. The gates will be poorly maintained. We’ll need to get back to work.” He paused, then added, somewhat awkwardly, “If you feel ready for it.”

I stared at him. A smile tugged at my cheeks, and I tried to fight it. Unsuccessfully.

His eyes narrowed. “What?”

“What?”

“Why are you looking at me like that, Dawndrinker?”

It even surprised myself that the real answer was, I missed fixing things with you.

But I just shook my head. “Nothing, Warden. Nothing.”