Page 25 of Ash and Feather

He finally came back to life at this—maybe because he could see the fear he was causing me—and he mirrored my earliermovement, lifting his hand and pressing it to my cheek. His fingers trembled against my skin, but touching me seemed to give him strength. He managed a deep breath.

As he exhaled, the room warmed the tiniest bit.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, lowering his hand and trailing his fingers up and down my arm. “I just needed to be near you again. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind?” I whispered, mouth almost too dry to speak. “Of course I don’t mind.”

His fingers came to rest in the spaces between mine. He squeezed my hand tightly, holding it as though I was an anchor keeping him from drifting away again.

I squeezed back just as tightly.

He felt…strange. Like part of his magic had been drained. I don’t think I’d fully realized how in sync I was with that magic until this moment, when the waning of it made it feel like a hollow cavern was opening in my own chest.

“What happened?” I demanded. “Where did you go?” I had a sinking suspicion I already knew the answer to that last question.

He hesitated only a moment before he told me the details—how he’d gone back to his old kingdom just as I’d feared. How he’d witnessed death and chaos starting to build, confirming the awful warnings Halar had given us. How he feared war was unavoidable, and that, when it came, what remained of our respective mortal families would be standing on opposite sides of the battlefield.

As he spoke, Moth crawled out from under the covers and curled up in my lap. Within moments, he was snoring again.

“It feels intentional, the elves targeting my old city all of a sudden,” Dravyn said, absently scratching the griffin between its tufted ears. “As if they are trying to draw you and me into the fold, likely in hopes that we’ll also pull other divine beings downwith us. Chaos and complications—whatever it takes to undo the hierarchy of power as it is now.”

I should have been focused on the bigger picture as he was, perhaps.

But at the moment, all I could think about was the danger he’d put himself in. And the pain. The haunted look in his eyes, the way his fingers had trembled against my skin only moments ago…

“Did you see your brother when you were in Altis?”

His gaze snapped to mine as though I’d uttered some heinous, unforgivable curse.

“No,” he said, with obviously practiced indifference. “I didn’t see him.”

The words—and his obvious attempt to hide behind them—only made me more curious about what hehadseen.

I swallowed down the frustration starting to build in my throat and quietly said, “You shouldn’t have gone alone.”

“It was faster that way. Easier.”

“Not easier foryou.”

“I’ve faced far more difficult things.”

“That’s not the point.”

He stood, dropping my hand and making his way over to the fire. He rekindled the flame with a bit more effort than it usually took him; he actually had to kneel before it and shift the wood into a more deliberate position to help it catch properly.

“The past isn’t finished with either of us, as you said.” I got to my feet as well, gently placing Moth in a pile of blankets behind me. The griffin snored on, oblivious to the conversation around him. “But you don’t have to face that past on your own.”

He grabbed the metal poker and started stoking the fire. I’d rarely seen him use that poker, or any of the other tools on the hearth, for that matter; it wasn’t as though the flames burned him when he used his hands.

Maybe he just wanted an excuse to stab something.

“Next time you do something like this, we go together.” My words were firm. Unyielding. I felt bolder, stronger than I had in weeks. Maybe it was the balam potion—the fact that I’d finally managed to truly rest because of it.

Dravyn shook his head. “I barely made it back to this realm in one piece. If you had been there…”

“Then maybe we could have made it back easier.”

He didn’t reply.

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