Page 18 of Angel in Absentia
Clea groaned, not caring how much of her inner council debate she’d likely said out loud. Her father had once told her she’d never be fit to lead on account that she spilled too many kingdom secrets merely by rambling off her inner dialogue.
She buried her head in her hands and silenced the voices.
Iris’s hand moved through the water, splashing it a few times like a child before swimming it across the surface as if she were stroking it into submission. The golden bangles rattled softly on her tattooed wrists, and with hair loose in her face, she looked up at Clea. In a soft, almost motherly voice, she said, “What’s wrong?”
The two women looked at each other meaningfully.
Clea allowed her body to sink under the water, completely enclosed in the warmth before coming back up and wiping her face as she released a slow and steady breath. She still wore the protective gold chains on her wrists and ankles but found them oddly comforting now. On the off chance they did help somehow, she wouldn’t remove them yet. At this point, she felt inclined to wear them forever.
Iris’s eyes didn’t rush her like Dae’s did. The woman never seemed to have any sense of time, and it was often such a relief. Clea wondered if Iris’s suitors often felt this way, lulled into the strange sense of focus that came with Iris’s presence, as if no other people existed.
Iris sauntered through the water, soaking the bottom of her skirt before curling up behind Clea and taking her hair in her hands, untangling it in gentle fingers.
“Iris,” Clea started as she looked into the mirror.
Iris followed her gaze to the large mirror, both of them visible in the reflection as Iris began to untangle her hair. Clea wasn’t exactly sure where she could start; her mind was a jumbled mess only stirred by Myken’s daring proclamations. She shelved those for the time being, trying to sort out on a grander scale why all of it bothered her so much.
“For most of my life, I’ve been dying,” Clea started. She didn’t even know what point she would make, but she knew she had to talk to find out. “In time, death was not a hostile being, but more how I imagined a lover would be, someone who would be there to comfort me no matter the pain I suffered along the way. I was waiting for my illness, and when it came, I waited for it to take over. When that didn’t happen, I risked my life again traveling back to Loda. I survived, and I spent the last year training every day to survive, prepared to die on the campaign. Here I am again. I’m still alive despite it all, now, for the first time, with the expectancy of a…life, maybe, and I just…” She trailed off.
“We are about to face the Belgears,” Clea said. “I had a hard enough time withdrawing from the battlefield with that in mind. It feels like things have only just begun, and already I—I just haven’t done enough.” She glanced up at Iris, Clea’s expression falling with an intense sense of concern. “It all just feels unfinished,” Clea whispered. “I can’t retire to a life inside the walls. I just feel like I can’t. The battle isn’t over.”
“Oh, by cien. Must everything be a battle?” Iris said, exasperated. “But since you’re still speaking Dae’s language, I will translate. I think once you put on your armor for this new battle, you’ll feel more at ease.”
“And what do you mean by that?”
“What I mean,” Iris said, taking a deep breath in preparation, perhaps, for a speech, “is that once you’re lathered in lotions and oils, your hair is restored to its honeyed luster, we clean and polish your damaged skin, and better expose the beautiful woman beneath all of this, you will feel more at home in the role you’re meant to fill next. Your mind has been toiling over offense and defense and strategy, not nurturing and giving life.Your body is used to callouses and bruises. It expects pain. Not pleasure. Your energy has been poured into building an army. Now you must build a family. Trust me, you’ll be plenty busy. I understand your mind is whirring, but you need to trust those around you to carry the burden too. You are like water, absorbing all that’s around you. Change your setting and you will feel the change take inside as well. Idan is handsome and charming. That will help things along, I promise,” Iris said with a wink in the mirror.
Even with Iris’s descriptions, none of it sounded very illustrious, and Clea wondered if Iris imagined it that way because she was unable to have children. It had the description of a faraway dream, despite Iris never seeming to suggest she regretted not having anything. Clea’s eyes flickered down to the water’s surface as a memory flashed in stark contrast to the future of refinement and life-giving pleasure that Iris described.
Clea’s memories of pleasure were anything but. She remembered ravenous heat and wanting, a lack of control, an exchange of hunger. Poised on the altar in King Kartheen’s castle, an altar likely once used for despicable things, immune to a room wrought with bloodshed, she’d thought of little beyond the promise of silver eyes that burned as harshly as her own body. There had been no refinement. Their clothes, hair, and bodies had been dirtied and torn, scratched and calloused. Much of their journey had been defined by the honest, rough cuts of a harsher reality, and in the culmination of it, she felt like she’d sold her soul, becoming a beast of the forest.
Maybe part of her journey since had been to redefine herself apart from that, apart from that wanting creature that would have surrendered everything for Ryson and nearly had. Ryson, too, had made his sacrifices on her behalf, but she wouldn’t letherself consider them. No. She couldn’t meditate on anything that justified her transforming into what she’d had in his arms.
“Yes,” Clea said simply, still watching the water, and not wanting to encourage any further questions from Iris. Iris was insightful and had already gleaned a bit more than Clea had meant to share about her journey back from Loda. Clea had barely mentioned the other traveler with her, and her people had been quick to omit and dismiss it for the sake of emphasizing her own power, but Iris had sensed a secret history between them. It had taken little more than a subtly raised brow in Clea’s direction to suggest what Clea had avoided saying all along. She was grateful Iris never asked about it, at least not directly, and hoped she wouldn’t raise the question of heart exchanges again.
Clea’s hand drifted to the necklace around her neck. She needed both the necklace and the hairpin attached to it. One represented a treasured memory, and the other represented the danger of it and the need to keep that part of her life at bay. Ryson would always be a memory, and it was best that way.
She realized then why the memory was so precious. After returning to Loda, she’d been thrust directly into royal responsibility. Every day had been a sprint to at last arrive at the quiet conclusion inside her that she now whispered without angst.
“I was never meant to rule,” she said, calm, collected, not in a rejection of her responsibilities but accepting that she might soon have to carry them anyway.
And therein she found her reason for avoiding her father. His sickness would have progressed. He was at the edge of death when she left Loda, and he would be closer now. When he died,Loda would be hers to oversee. A year of training, as grueling as it was, couldn’t prepare her for that. Nothing could, and it wasn’t that she didn’t feel capable of learning the responsibility, but it would never feel suited to her. She’d spend her days either battling the council or consenting to be their proxy, having children, raising children in the way of tradition. There would be visits between Ruedom and Loda, back and forth, all planned, all secure. For some, such a life would be suitable, even pleasurable, but for her, it simply felt like a role in a play meant for someone else. She would still play it anyway.
Iris continued after a brief pause, “You say all these things about how you love healing, and yet you limit yourself and push yourself toward weaponry, which you hate. Dae keeps saying you need to recover, but I don’t understand. Healing makes you happy.”
“He’s right,” Clea whispered, and the silence drew out between them for a long moment. She looked down at the water, and Iris maintained the silence as if sensing the gravity of her thoughts. Clea reflected back on Iris’s question about exchanging hearts and wondered what threat there could really be in being a bit more honest.
“Iris,” she started. “You said I am like water. There is a reason healers are often compared to such. I didn’t used to think healing had any limits. But I made a mistake. I healed someone I shouldn’t have,” she whispered and then paused.
Iris said nothing, seeming to sense that Clea wasn’t done.
“They say barriers and seals are the discipline of the body, weaponry is the discipline of the heart, expulsion the discipline of the mind, and healing the discipline of the soul. When I healsomeone, I—” She paused. “I open myself to them. Even with the forest, each time I heal it, I don’t force it to recover. That’s not possible. Healing is about asking something for an exchange, asking to be let in, and when they let you in, you bring the light in with you, becoming a channel for ansra in its purest form. My soul touches theirs. I am but a channel, and in that way, I extend through them. I expose my soul to things, and while in the forest, I healed someone. I don’t regret it, but—”
She remembered standing in the crater of Ryson’s soul and knew now, had his soul existed there, she very well could have been trapped by it forever. She’d heard about people exchanging hearts and losing minds, but to have her soul trapped by another, she couldn’t even fathom the consequences. She had felt his wounds, experienced them in her own way, and had she not regained enough power to withdraw, she might have been lost in that empty space forever.
“The necklace I wear, I wear perhaps to protect against that. His heart—” she whispered, and stopped short, realizing in that moment she’d shared the secret that perhaps Iris knew already.
But how?
