My mind snagged on the word alive.
Yes, Reyker was alive. How could he not be?
“My kindhearted wolf.” I took his hand, trailing his fingers over the flame-shaped scar on my wrist, relishing the familiar tingle it sent through the mark.
“My brave deer.” He brought my hand to his lips, placing a kiss on the skoldar. “If I did rebuild Vaknavangur, would you come with me?”
“For how long?”
“Forever. Or as long as you’ll have me. I know it’s a lot to ask of you—to leave your island, your home.”
A flood of heat spread through me. Reyker had chosen me, not just as a lover, but as the person he wanted to share his life with. I could have pressed my palm to his chest to peer into his soul, so familiar to me now, but I worried over what I might find. What if it was shredded? What if it was empty?
Why would I think such things?
I looked back at him. He was still waiting for my answer. “I’ll come with you if you promise every day will be like this one.”
He plucked a handful of moonflowers from the cluster surrounding the thorntree’s trunk. “Every day, I will give you whatever your heart desires.” He tore the blooms from the moonflowers and shook a spray of petals from his fist so they drifted over me. “I’ll shower you with roses.”
“You know those aren’t roses.”
“Shh. Don’t ruin it.” He dumped the rest of the petals in my face. “I’ll stay up each night writing odes to commemorate your overwhelming beauty and sharp wit, and I’ll serenade you with them as you wake each morning.”
“If you’re going to serenade me, I’m definitely not going.” I shook the petals off and put my hands over my ears. “Your singing sounds like a sick gull.”
“It sounds like a drunken gull. There’s a difference.”
“Both squawk like they’re trying to make the sky fall.”
“Yes, but at least the drunken gull is enjoying himself.” He pulled me against him. “Fine. No singing. How about I stay up each night making you sing.” His teeth grazed the curve where my neck and shoulder met.
I ran my hands across his chest, down his stomach, brushing my fingertips against the sliver of skin just above where he most wanted my hands to be, smiling as his body tensed, as his pulse galloped.
His pulse. It was beating—not silent, not static.
A strange thought to have.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing. It’s just . . . You’re right here with me, but it feels like you’re far away.” I noticed the tightness in his jaw, the downward curl of his mouth. “You feel it, too, don’t you? That something’s wrong.”
“I am right here,” he said, lacing our fingers together. “I told you, I will never let anything take you away from me.”
“But what if you can’t stop it?” And then another worry crept over me, one I dared not voice: What if it’s already happened?
“I was dead before I met you,” he said.
Dead. The word was like a blade sliding into my chest. No—not my chest. His. I closed my eyes and saw a gleaming scythe, a gush of blood.
My eyes snapped open. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true.” He pressed our joined hands against his thundering heart. “The man who washed up on that beach in Stony Harbor was a corpse. But you found me. You brought me back to life. I am yours, Lira, and nothing will keep me from you—not oceans, or time, or the gods themselves.”
A breeze drifted across the valley, tousling our hair, scattering the moonflower petals, and making the thorntree’s branches creak. Beyond the branches, the sky overhead was an endless, perfect blue.
Too perfect. Colors only looked like this inside souls.
Or dreams.
I sat up with a start. “Is this real?”
“It is. It must be.” Reyker sounded as panicked as I felt.
Of course this was real. Why wouldn’t it be? What was the nagging fear, digging like thorns into the back of my mind, that something irrevocable had occurred? That everything was already broken?
“Reyker,” I whispered.
His name echoed across the valley, bouncing off the stone ruins, turning into a terrified scream. A grief-stricken sob.
A memory.
He froze, his eyes widening. “Lira?”
My name became a ripple of sound, stretching into an anguished cry.
We stared at each other.
In the distance, a rumble shook the earth. Around us, the valley began to crack apart. The ruins dissolved into the ether.
Understanding swept over us. The cold cruelty of it left me shivering.
“No.” I clung to him, as if I could hold on tight enough to keep him from being torn away. He did the same, and I knew then that the dream was not a fantasy. This was Reyker. I’d found him somehow, in the otherworlds. Or he had found me.
But it could not last.
The ground shuddered. A howling wind ripped at us. The moonflower petals eddied around us like a ghostly whirlwind until they were sucked out into the growing void.
“I love you,” he whispered fiercely, his forehead pressed to mine. There was sorrow in his gaze, but not a trace of doubt as he said, “No matter what it takes, no matter where you go, I will find you again.”
A moment later, my arms were empty, holding on to nothing.
CHAPTER 2
LIRA
I woke with a gasp, tangled in my blanket, cold sweat trickling down my neck, the smooth walls of a cave surrounding me. The floor was crowded with pallets, each one topped with the sleeping bodies of nomads. A few paces away, my brother grunted in his sleep, one arm slung across his face, the other resting on the hilt of his short sword.
Truth seeped in slowly. Painfully.
I am in the Green Desert with Garreth.
Stony Harbor has fallen.
Reyker is dead.
Pushing past the ache in my chest, I reached for my sword. Beside it were two large rats, watching me with glassy eyes.
This had been happening more and more often—animals being drawn to me, sensing the blood of Veronis, the god of all creatures, inside me. “Get away,” I hissed, shooing the rodents.
Strapping on my sword, I crossed the cave on quiet feet. As I passed the nomad guards standing outside the cave’s entrance, they edged back. They knew what I was. A soul-reader, a Daughter of Aillira. And now the vessel of the Fallen Ones—the girl who carried the blood of imprisoned gods in her veins.