Kinked (33 page)

He gathered his longbow, quiver of arrows and sword, while she did the same. Then he went to pick the lock one last time. By now he had an intimate familiarity with the internal tumblers, and he had the door open within a few seconds. They went up the stairs cautiously, but none of the
shadow wolves were in sight. For the first time since the witch had taken him, he took a deep breath and felt a real sense of freedom.

He turned to Aryal and said, “If we can, we need to use the element of surprise and sneak up on her.”

She angled her head, her expression tense, and rotated a hand at him. “Keep going. I’m still not feeling very rational or thinky at the moment.”

“Is your cloaking ability strong enough to cover a small sailboat?” he asked as he studied her.

She considered. “I think so. What about your cloaking? You were able to hide the fact that you’re Wyr, which is a pretty Powerful ability.”

“The problem is that I don’t know how far outside of my own body I can cast it,” he said. “We’re going to have to suppose a lot. She’s not a normal human so she might not sleep much, if at all, but the chances are that she will rest at some point at night, and it will be less likely that she would sense any nearby magic.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you willing to make an unknown water crossing in the dark?”

He shrugged. “I can swim. Can you?”

“Yes,” she muttered. “I’ll bet she uses the wolves as sentries.”

“Leave the wolves to me. Again, we don’t know enough about her, so this is supposition, but I’m guessing from here to the island is too far for most humans to swim. If she comes from the Russian Steppe, she’s probably not one of those rare humans who could make the distance.”

“I agree. So we’ll sneak up at night and disable her boat.” She paused, narrowing one eye at him in a squint. “Along with our own? How are you about swimming that distance back?”

“It’ll be uncomfortable but doable. You?”

“Same.” Purpose came back into her angular face. “So we leave at sunset.”

“I’m down with that.” He stretched his stiff back. “In the meantime we’ve got hours to sunset, and I’ve a mind to nap in an Elven lord’s bed. Come on.”

They traveled into the main part of the palace by way of the kitchens, and for a time they wandered in silence, looking at the precious gold and lapis lazuli inlaid in the high, wide walls and marble floors, and gazing out the windows at glimpses of the silent, abandoned city spread out along the shoreline below. Then they came to the throne room and stopped to stare.

A burned body slumped in an ornate chair on a scorched dais. More bodies lay in a semicircle, their throats cut. Scavenger birds had been at them. Other than that, the bodies remained perfect, giving a glimpse of ruined beauty.

After a long look, Aryal turned away. She said simply, “They’re dead and it’s awful, and I’m done. I’m full up. I can’t feel anything for them.”

He put an arm around her shoulders and led her away.

They climbed another wide, curving staircase and explored hallways. Quentin opened the large double doors down one hallway and walked into a room that was the size of his apartment at the Tower. A massive bed dominated the room with coverlets and pillows embroidered with gold and scarlet thread.

Wide windows the height of the room looked over the city. The far one faced the white, pillared Temple of the Gods, which stood outlined against the backdrop of the blue-green sea.

There was no doubt in Quentin’s mind whose bedroom this was. He walked around the room, looking in doors. One opened to a huge bathroom, with tiled steps that led down to a walk-in tub patterned with an intricate mosaic. The tub was large enough that a troll could bathe in it. Another door opened to a wardrobe filled with sumptuous clothes that were suitable for an Elven male.

Drawn by the dramatic view, he walked back to the far window. The temple was simple and open to the elements. The side facing the palace had steps leading up to the marble-floored interior. The gigantic statues of the gods on either side, interspersed with columns, provided the main support of the plain prop-and-lintel roof. On the farthest side of the temple, a single god faced outward to the sea.
Even though all Quentin could see of that statue was its back, he was certain that it was the god Taliesin, god of all the other gods, the prime mover of the universe.

The bedroom was at the same height as the enormous profiles of the two closest statues, one male and one female, their stern, strong faces looking into infinity. The male statue faced the city, and he held a book tucked under one arm. That would be Hyperion, the god of Law. The female was less easy to identify, but he thought she might be Camael, goddess of the Hearth, age and wisdom.

Aryal joined him at the window.

He said, “Camthalion put himself on the same level as the gods. Can you imagine looking out at this scene year after year for millennia, while possessing Taliesin’s Machine? After all that time I wonder if there was anything recognizable of the original man.”

He glanced at her. As spectacular as the temple was, she wasn’t looking at it. Instead her face tilted up to the wide, cloudless sky, and her expression was filled with so much anguished yearning, it cracked something inside of him.

They were perfect.
Perfect,
which was insanity all on its own. After hating her so vehemently, experiencing this kind of emotional turnaround was enough to give him whiplash. That issue alone should have been more than enough to deal with for, say, five or six years, but on top of that he also knew what was going on in that spiky, passionate head of hers.

She was about to go into war without having enough to live for.

Gods, he didn’t want to say the things he was about to say to her. He wanted to shut the hell up, take a bath and go to sleep. Heart-to-hearts gave him indigestion. He would do almost anything to avoid them. Hearing the words “we have to talk about our feelings” was the surest way to get him out the door fast, and he had never looked back before, never up until this point in time, with this woman.

He could walk out of this door too and find another bedroom for himself, except that meant he would leave her alone with that heartbreaking expression on her face. And he would rather die than do that, which meant that somehow
he had landed himself squarely in the middle of the Deep Shit Zone for sure.

The thought that he was about to initiate a “we have to talk about our feelings” moment was laughable. But there was his internal whip again, driving him forward. With a sigh, he shut and bolted the double doors, and walked over to sit on the edge of the sumptuous bed. He started to strip off his armor.

“I think I might be getting close to mating with you,” he said flatly into the sun-drenched silence. He bent over to work off the leg pieces. “Believe me, I’m very aware of how that sounds. Feel free to laugh if you like.”

He sensed when she turned away from the window, but he didn’t look up. He started working on the other leg.

Still in that flat, matter-of-fact tone of voice, he said, “You’re nothing like anything I would have said I wanted, yet I think you might be everything I need. It’s too early to tell for sure. We’ve spent a week together. One week. Yeah, it’s been one week filled with high stress and intense exposure to each other, and I know this kind of thing can happen fast, but sunshine, we haven’t even really made love yet. All we’ve done is fool around a little. I’m sure you can understand the depth of my perplexity at finding myself in this situation.”

“Are you somehow going to make today all about you again?”

He tilted his head at her. The sun was behind her, rendering her expression unreadable. He said, “Of course.”

He bent back to his task. Elven armor was as light as it possibly could be while still being effective. Still, wearing it over jeans on a scorcher like today was a miserably hot experience, and it was a relief to strip the pieces off. After he took a bath, he was going to raid the wardrobe for something lighter to wear underneath.

She walked over and sat on the bed beside him. He thought he heard her mutter, “So that’s what the crowd in my head has been yelling about.”

He had been in the middle of pulling the breastplate over his head, so he couldn’t have heard her right. “Excuse me?”

“Never mind.” After looking undecided for a moment, she began stripping off her own armor. With her head bent to her task, she asked quietly, “If it’s too soon, why are you bringing this up now?”

Finally he was back down to his filthy jeans and boots. He took off the boots, then turned to kneel in front of her and began to work at the fastenings of her leg pieces. “You know how it goes. ‘Honey, I’m going to war, and I’ve got something I need to tell you.’ ” He leaned his elbows on her knees and looked up at her.

She stopped what she was doing and watched him with a wary, vulnerable look. He almost smiled. She handled her own vulnerability like someone else might handle dynamite, her eyes wide as if something were about to explode in her face.

He said quietly, “I want to know that you’ve got your head on straight when we go to the island tonight. I know you’re struggling with a huge amount of fear. You’ve been doing a good job, but I’ve watched it swallow you up a couple of times, and I’m concerned.”

“I won’t do anything that will get you killed,” she snapped. She yanked at the fastenings of her own breastplate and dragged it over her head.

“That’s not the point,” he said. He reached up to take her face in both hands and insisted that she look at him. “I don’t want you to do anything that will get
you
killed. You know as well as I do that a fighter who is struggling with despair is a danger to herself. I don’t want you to go into tonight without having considered everything—everything—there is to consider, and yes, that does include me.”

Her expression broke, and the anguish came out. She gripped his wrists. “I’m so scared.”

“I know you are,” he said. “I can’t imagine facing the kind of uncertainty you’re facing. That’s why I’m going to ask you to think outside of the box.”

She looked at him with such surprise he had to laugh. He rose up to kiss her. She put her arms around his neck to hug him with such ferocity, he wrapped her up in his arms too. They held each other tightly.

“Some people,” she said, “would say that I already think outside the box.”

“I don’t mean any regular old box,” he told her. “I want you to think outside
of your
box.”

She pulled back to stare at him. “I don’t understand.”

“You need to remember all the reasons you have to live, because if someone goes into a life-or-death fight without having those reasons firmly fixed in their mind, often they don’t make it out the other side alive. The fact of the matter is, you are not facing an either/or situation, where you either fly or die.” He held up a finger. “Here’s the first thing to remember. You may be healed.”

Her face clouded over. “I don’t see how. I—the bone crushed, Quentin. I felt it go.”

He flicked her nose, and he wasn’t gentle about it, so that she jerked her head back and blinked. “You are not a healer. You can’t diagnose yourself, and you don’t know what might happen. Say it.”

“Fuck you,” she said. But she didn’t put any heat behind it, and he could tell at least she was listening to him.

“Number two.” He held up two fingers in front of her face. “You may not be healed back to what you were before, but you may gain something back. Okay, this one is likely. This might mean you go for shorter flights than you’re used to, or it might mean you go parachuting, and you learn how to glide. Maybe we’ll need to build a brace for that wing. Don’t get me wrong, I know that would be terrible and it would suck, and you would have every reason to rage against it. But you’ll be in the air.”

“Parachuting?”

He could tell the thought had never crossed her mind, and why would it? She’d never had to consider it before. He lifted a shoulder. “Along with a version of paragliding. You can ride thermals. Eventually you would have to land, but that’s true now too. I know it’s not the same, and it’s not as good. The point is, there are ways that we can make what was done to you survivable. You just have to believe it.”

She gripped his wrists so hard he felt his fingers grow numb. “I can ride thermals.”

“You can as much as you need,” he said gently. Thank gods, she was listening to him. “You can free-fall and do somersaults in the air. Anything you like. I’ll go with you. I enjoy parachuting.”

“Do you?”

He nodded. “Reason number three. There’s your job to consider. You love being a sentinel so much you endured coming on this trip with me instead of throwing the job back in Dragos’s face.”

“True,” she said, very low. “But if I can’t really fly—if all I can do is ride thermals and parachute, I won’t be the same at my job.”

“You’ll have to rethink how you approach work and what your strengths are, but that is doable too,” he said. “I’m the first sentinel that isn’t an avian, but I
am
a sentinel. I won my position, and I deserve it. The same applies to you. Your wings didn’t make you a sentinel. You did.” He paused to make sure that sank in. Then he said, “Number four. There are people who love you. Niniane and Grym. Hell, maybe Grym is right, and Dragos does too. Graydon’s pretty mad at you, but you know he loves you.” He took a deep breath. It was time to throw himself on his sword. “Me.”

Her eyes dilated until they were mostly black. “You?”

“Yeah, don’t dwell on it,” he said. Okay, he was done now. He tried to pull back so that he could stand up and walk away.

She lunged forward and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Oh, no you don’t!” she said. “You can’t just throw a tear gas canister like that into the room and walk away when it goes off.”

“I don’t see why not,” he muttered. He tried to turn away, but her face was ablaze with so much emotion he remained on one knee just so that he could keep gazing at her, and soak up the sight.

“If anybody would have said I was unlovable, I would have thought it would be you,” she whispered.

Suddenly he had no desire to go anywhere as his face creased with silent laughter. He told her, “I would have said so too. Then I found out that, even though you are still the
most maddening creature I have ever met, you are actually quite lovable.”