Page 21 of Angel in Absentia
Clea exhaled, trying to stay on task and not start a completely different argument. Her father was a brutish master of provocation, and he knew exactly which buttons to press.
“I want to try and heal you again,” she continued with steel in her voice, ignoring any other topic.
“Stubborn,” he said. “Stubborn when you riffled through the censored libraries. Stubborn when you demanded the campaign of Virday and then brought back the Golden Army with a Virdain general of all things! A barbarian general!”
There it was. It was still a surprisingly light scolding, though perhaps only because it paled in comparison to all of her other apparent abuses of power.
She scoffed, waving off his comment. “As if the people of Ruedom don’t say the same about us!”
“Stubborn,” he continued, his raspy voice louder as it gathered momentum, “when you insist on keeping company with that Ruedom-born woman who risks polluting you with her immoral ideologies and undisciplined, animal behavior!”
Clea rubbed her face. “I feel like Dae is in the room with me right now. Have the two of you been taking tea together?”
“He visits me to honor me before my very own blood and daughter,” her father grumbled back. “At least he has someinterest in the happenings of the royal estate and the future of our people!”
Clea threw a hand into the air. “I knew it! You were the one who told him about those rumors. The two of you are two of the gossips Catagard was so dismayed about. He thinks it’s the servants! Just wait until I tell Catagard. He will lose his head.”
“You will tell him no such thing!” her father roared, and Clea simply remained there, hands on her hips, an expression on her face that threatened to do just that.
Her father huffed, shifted in his bed, and then in a quieter tone added, “Catagard has been withholding information. He feels it’s been contributing to the rapid decline of my health, feeding the illness. Dae is passing along what he hears.”
“Witholding information. Doesn’t feel so good, does it?” Clea muttered. She hunkered down in front of him again, changing the topic. “Look, Father. I’m going to marry,” she insisted. “I’ll have plenty of children, hundreds of children, thousands of children. The streets will be full of children.”
His chest huffed with an empty dismissal at her teasing response.
“But I’m also going to try and heal you again. Tomorrow, after the Victas preparation performance. We try again.”
“You’d drag me into the pool if I kicked or screamed, wouldn’t you? I’m tired of crawling in and out of that water. Let me die in my own bed,” he snapped, arguing the truth of his resistance at last.
“Stubborn.” Clea sat back, arms folded. “I wonder who I get it from.”
“Your mother,” he replied gruffly.
She didn’t reply, and they sat in silence again for a moment. Their differences and past hurts aside, he was her only family now, and they settled back into a communal rest in each other’s company.
After several more minutes, Clea rose and looked out the window she’d stared out almost two years prior. She looked back over at her father, seeing the suffering that she too had suffered at the hands of that illness.
The curse was powerful, dangerous, and connected to Venennin of the likes many of her people had never seen.
She would shine a light on them, conquer the cast of their darkness with her own will, and then at last, she would return to these walls for good, relinquish the battle outside of her body, for the one she would then embrace inside it. The High Council and her Veilin comrades would handle Myken’s warnings. This was where she knew she could make a difference.
She saw in her father her own silence. He’d carried it with dignity, but she knew the illness was a kind of suffering that became a language no one else knew how to speak. It committed its sufferer to shrivel and die in isolation of the soul. She had been so close to that, and the curse had been defeated for her. Tomorrow night, she would defeat it for him.
CHAPTER 7
FACE OF THE FOREST
N THE DREAM, she felt completely connected to the world around her, which had been a common trend in all her forest dreams. Her eyes were the moon and sun, watching in sequence as day passed and then night, the transformation of the woods happening rapidly beneath her gaze, again and again, faster each time.
She experienced the same state of connectedness she visited in performing a deep healing, but this time she was not just reaching out into the world to provide a channel; it extended back into her. The roots crawled along her bones and pulled her out of the sky. They cracked her open painlessly until she was laid out within the woods, spread along King Kartheen’s altar, which stood alone. She became an entangled mixture of root and bone as if she’d been there for centuries, an eternal offering.
The moon rose above her now, full and gloating, the light spilling through her open ribs until it set again and the sun followed. With the sun’s light, living flesh crawled along her body as the forest transformed around her. The sun stopped at noon, and she was naked along the stone in full audience of the light. The vines of the forest still grew through her, but then they too changed in the light. No longer wrapped in vines, he was with her, his body wrapped with hers.
It was Ryson, perhaps by a different name, a name they shared in the coiling movement of his touch. He whispered in her ear words like a spell that she could not repeat, but they sank intothe deep recesses of her soul, tangling her soul with his. He kissed her as the sun began to set, and she relished it, his kisses growing sharp. He transformed—not into vines but into a beast. He sunk fangs into her neck, claws raking along her skin as he devoured her, every touch that should have been painful became a surge of electricity that urged her further into the throws of his hunger.
He clutched the gold necklace around her neck, begging her between breaths to hold it close, while she begged him to remove it. She knew that the gold around her throat was a final thread that, if snapped, would release her soul to him forever like a string of broken beads, replaced by the chains of his own will.
Panting prey, she urged and cried, eager to feed what he was and become a part of him forever, and then at last, her soul reached for a fragile tether. She grasped her necklace and screamed for release from the cliff on which her will so narrowly balanced.
