The Nightborn by Isabel Cooper (howl and other poems TXT) 📗

Chapter 42

If not for Tanya, Zelen would likely have lost the struggle to keep his eyes open on the way back to Heliodar. The rain and wind wouldn’t have sufficed, nor would his own sense of self-preservation. He’d never been so weary—not only from lack of sleep and physical activity, he recognized, or even from the aftermath of Letar’s presence, but as a result of days of tension that his body now recognized it could let go.

Looking back at the house, unable to see it against the darkness but knowing it was there, he corrected days to years.

His lids kept drifting closed as they rode, Jester’s steady walk lulling his mind deeper into the silence that had already started to fill it. Tanya was perched in front of him, though, her whole form stiff with wariness about large smelly beasts as a method of transportation. If Zelen fell, he’d almost certainly take her with him.

That, and occasionally biting the inside of his cheek when matters got too dire, kept him awake until the familiar structure of his own home emerged out of the darkness.

Feyher was there among the grooms, helping Tanya off Jester and handing her over to one of the maids—gods, had the entire household turned out?—and then standing nearby as Zelen practically oozed out of the saddle, ready to catch him but not being too obvious about it. “Bless you,” Zelen said, or intended to say.

Very little was clear after that. He was fairly certain he got to his rooms under his own power, and even that he stayed in motion long enough to wash off the blood and the worst of his sweat. For one instant, he saw his hands clearly, and the water in the basin below them turning red.

That was his blood, Gedomir would have said, Verengir blood on Zelen’s hands, a sin and a crime.

The presence in his head examined it and said, without saying: All blood is blood.

And he’d never seen a family crest in it, he had to admit.

Zelen laughed and swayed backwards with the motion. Branwyn caught him. She smelled of soap, and her hair was wet. “Be easy,” she said, “or your people will have to carry both of us to bed.”

“I don’t much care how I get there,” said Zelen. “The floor’s seeming quite hospitable, to be frank.”

They made it, though, through force of will and the allure of feather pillows. All became darkness of an extremely welcome sort.

Occasionally he woke, prompted by his body’s needs, but only for as long as it took to stagger down the hall and back. On other occasions, after the initial long spell of sound sleep, he dreamed. He saw blood in the hallway and Branwyn on her hands and knees, struggling for air, or the demon seizing Tanya in its massive claws, or Hanyi’s bloody mouth forming his name.

He held Branwyn tighter following those moments. At other times, as he dozed, he heard her quick inhalation and felt her turn toward him, burying her face between his shoulder and neck. Zelen stroked her back gently.

We’re here. We’re both still here, he said to himself, and they both slid back into sleep.

Branwyn wasn’t in bed with him when he woke fully. She was sitting by the window instead, sipping wine and eating small things out of a porcelain dish. As Zelen focused, he saw that they were candied nuts, and that she was reading Five Years in Semele. She closed the book before Zelen had made a sound, though. Yathana’s fire opal sparkled in the sunset light.

“This,” she said, glancing down at the small red-leather volume, “is either desperately inaccurate or written by a man with more leisure than I ever had. Wine?”

“Please.” He couldn’t remember his throat ever feeling dryer, and he gulped from the glass Branwyn poured in a way that did no justice at all to a good vintage. “How long were we out?”

“You’ve been asleep for the better part of two days. Me? Half a day less, or roughly.” She watched him rise with an appreciative eye that Zelen felt his collection of bruises and sore muscles didn’t merit. He wasn’t going to object, though. “I’m not surprised. For one thing, I didn’t play host to a goddess.”

“I’d have presumed you would, out of the two of us,” Zelen said, shrugging on a robe and then taking a chair across from her. “More in the way of firsthand experience and so on.”

“Not with Letar. Her brother and mother, yes, but even there…” Branwyn shook her head. “They lent their skill to my reshaping, but that was acting from the outside, and if it touched my soul, it was by way of my body. The opposite happened with you. From what Yathana says, the two don’t blend particularly well.”

She has too many lines to break along. The sword was clear now, and he blinked. She might have closed the rift. She wouldn’t have survived. I was pretty sure that you could, and that you might live through it.

“I can’t fault your logic,” said Zelen, reaching for his wine again. “Tanya?”

“Cleaned, fed, and back with her family.”

“And—” He tried to frame a more specific question, found that words failed, and fell back on vagueness. “Everything else?”

Branwyn set down her glass. “The knights intercepted your parents and your sister on their way here,” she said, and her voice became gentler, though still matter-of-fact. “Your father was badly injured, your sister somewhat so, and your mother got off lightly. Their coachman was freed at the same time as the other servants. Their personal attendants were in another carriage, which is likely all that kept them alive.”

In the silence that followed, Zelen heard Hidath’s screaming again. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I’d bloody well think so. Are the servants…recovering?”

“As well as the ones back at the house. Lycellias says Tinival might be the best god to tend to them, since his domain is generally affairs of the mind.