Page 64 of This Dark Descent
“You came,” she said.
Mikira eyed the stem. “What’s that?”
Quinn held a flower out to her. It was a red carnation.
It was such a small thing, a flower, yet it brought Mikira crashing to a sudden stop. That feeling of familiarity that had haunted her for weeks enclosed her, immobilizing her with the threat of understanding.
A vase of red carnations. The sound of a gunshot and shattering glass.
Quinn gently tucked the stem of the flower behind Mikira’s ear, the scent of sugar and cloves clinging to her skin. Mikira seized her hand, her thumb tracing the scar tissue on the girl’s wrist, etched there by shattered glass.
Quinn didn’t pull away. She simply watched, her eyes dark and resolute, as Mikira slid off her mask.
“Talyana,” she breathed.
Her childhood best friend gave her a small, sad smile. “Hey, Kira.”
Then they were wrapped up in each other’s arms, and Mikira was squeezing her tighter than she’d ever held anyone in her life, and Talyana’s shoulder was pressing the satin petals of the flower against her cheek, and she was hating, hating herself for having taken this long to figure it out.
“I don’t understand,” she rasped into Talyana’s shirt.
Talyana leaned back, brushing the tears from Mikira’s cheeks. “It’s a long story.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me? Why pretend?”
Talyana gave her a sheepish smile. “I thought if you knew it was me, you wouldn’t let me help you. Not after I…”
“After you left.” Mikira didn’t say it coldly, just plainly. One moment Talyana had been her strength; the next she had been gone, the last break against the storm that had consumed her. She’d always blamed Talyana’s parents. After Rezek shot the vase, scarring Talyana’s arm, they’d never let her return to the ranch. When Mikira had gone looking for her at their house days later, they’d moved.
Mikira dragged the back of her sleeve across her eyes. “But that night in the tunnels. You knew it was me. How?”
She laughed. “Really, Kira? Nightflyer? Your dad’s racehorse was your favorite as a kid. You never stopped talking about him.”
“You remember that?”
Talyana’s expression grew solemn. “I remember everything.”
And Mikira had forgotten. Had she really buried Talyana so deep that she hadn’t recognized her best friend, mask or not? It’d been nearly eight years, and she was a far cry from the short-haired, round-cheeked girl Mikira had known, but her eyes—they’d been the thing that unsettled her from the start.
Mikira just hadn’t wanted to see it.
Talyana slipped her arm through Mikira’s. “Why don’t we walk for a while. We have a lot to catch up on.”
Talyana told her everything as they walked. The day after Rezek, her father had packed her bags and sent her to a military academy at the edges of the kingdom. She’d trained to become an officer, a position she owed to her father’s history as a royal guard.
It pained Mikira to think of Talyana trapped into the rigidity of military life. It was everything she’d never wanted. The schedule, the structure, the repetition. Talyana wanted untraversed seas and forests that had never seen a human hand. She wanted to see desert lizards and scarlings and northern Vynan rivers that froze so deeply in the winter you could go sliding across them on skates.
Yet it also healed something in her to know that Talyana had not left her willingly, and she had never forgotten her.
Talyana told her how she’d spent several months fighting, before being honorably discharged when a blast left her mostly deaf in one ear. How she’d entered the Illinir for a last burst of freedom before she intended to join the Anthir, and how she’d agonized over finding Mikira after she returned, and upon seeing her in the tunnels, had been unable to resist talking to her.
“But when you didn’t recognize me, I was too much of a coward to say anything,” she finished. They sat on the edge of an enchanted fountain in Canburrow Square. The water was filled with sparkling gold dust that caught the light as it leapt into new patterns, forming ribbons that spun and danced.
She squeezed Mikira’s arm. “I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner.”
“It’s okay.” Mikira squeezed back. “I’m just glad you’re here.”
A silence fell between them, at once as uncertain as it was familiar. Then slowly, in bits and pieces, they started telling each other the little stories they’d missed. They talked about the ranch and everything Mikirahad learned about breeding enchants, about the friends that’d rejected her, about Talyana’s first time firing a gun, and when she’d accidentally gotten drunk on cheap whiskey.
