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He closed his eyes like the act might shut her presence out.
Look at her, he thought with a twinge of jealousy.She’scompletely devastated, and you’re fine. You don’t feel anything.
There was no answer to his thoughts, only a silence he hated, and for once he wished his dark likeness were there to tempt him back into contentment again.
Chapter 13
Scars
CLEA RAN HER hand between the tattered pages of Althala’s folder and divided the stack down the middle. Ryson still clutched his shoulder, as he now often did. They hadn’t spoken much since the attack on the village two days ago.
Althala had included a diary with lots of information about the Kalex, and Clea lived there. She strolled between the pages, walking through the lives recorded within them. She memorized names, stories, legends, and facts. She attempted to decode Althala’s writing, and failed, but tried consistently.
The folder’s contents built a thin wall of paper between Clea and the reality in which the village no longer existed. On the other side were tiresome and familiar feelings of loss, fear, guilt, frustrations with her burden of the medallion, and then there was Ryson. She couldn’t start to decipher stirring, uncomfortable feelings that he incited simply by being there in front of her. He was the enemy who’d held her back from fighting, and the friend who’d pulled her close for comfort.
He’d been there when she’d healed the Kalex. He’d seen their faces too. She’d never witnessed a monster of the likes that had attacked the village, and any dreams that those faces had survived were short-lived.
Could it have been her fault?
How could Ryson, seeing all those people just as she had, make such a quick and sharp decision to leave them behind?
It was a widely known fact that the experience of healing connected people. She’d been warned against it in Loda and Virday any time she’d offered to heal Kalex or criminals. She’d readily dismissed such warnings, lumping them in with the slew of other rigid and foundless rules and biases they’d tried to teach her.
She knew what they were afraid of.
In healing someone, you had to see their potential for wholeness, and that required empathy. Empathy required connection. Connection, in their minds, led to contamination.
She’d healed plenty of Kalex and criminals and still hadn’t seen what there was to be so worried about. If anything, exercising such healings had broadened her understanding of the world.
The attack on the village had shown her a different risk of healing that she hadn’t anticipated. She’d completely lost any sense of herself as the Kalex died. It had been as if she were dying. She’d felt so connected to all of their wounds and thus all of their fates.
Even Althala had the mind to give up her folder from the beginning, tuned in, perhaps, to Ryson’s reasoning, but still. The reasoning was cold—heartless even.
Now the only evidence she had of their existence, perhaps the only evidence anyone would have, was the folder in her hands.Forest deaths were unmarked, the vast expanse of trees serving as a nameless mass grave. She resolved to be their marker.
Clea closed the folder for the fourth time that night. She waited to speak; the silence between them was a closed floodgate. Ryson was watching her expectantly from the other side of the fire. She didn’t understand why he seemed so intrigued until she remembered that she’d talked often during the first part of their journey.
To him, her silence must have seemed like an absolute miracle, but she was reluctant to dwell on his emotions. She’d never felt so indebted to and angry at the same person at once, and the intensity of the combined feelings left her perplexed.
Clea leaned back against a tree, placing the folder in the bag on her lap.
“What?” Ryson said, jerking her from her thoughts.
She realized she’d been glaring at him and averted her gaze.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Thank you.”
Thank you was always a safe option, whether she felt it in her heart or not. She did. Somewhat.
“I could only think about the people in front of me,” she continued, folding her hands in a controlled and polite way in her lap. “My emotions got the best of me.”
“You’re human,” he replied, surprising her. He almost sounded sympathetic until he followed the words with, “Emotions are the bane of your existence.”
Clea was surprised to find comfort in his callous response—relief even. Inwardly, she laughed at herself. Days ago, she’dbeen trying to convince herself that he had a heart, and now she was struggling to convince herself that he didn’t. Assuming he was the disgruntled, closed-off Kalex she’d started her journey with somehow made everything easier to digest.
He’d held her the night of the attack in the same way he’d given her his cloak. It wasn’t a heartfelt gesture. It was a cold and calculated practice to help support her as she fought off the strain of the medallion. He was just trying to make the journey easier for them both.
“How is your shoulder?” she asked.
