Page 136 of The Concubine King
Vaire stares at him, lips parted in incredulous horror.
‘Please, my shelter—’
‘How could you suggest this?Betray ourselves?Betray the others?They murder us and the first thing you do is join them?’He cannot prevent disgust wrapping the words.
‘We cannot kill them but they can kill us.What other choice do we have?’
‘So you’d rather we kill ourselves and become what we’re not?’
‘It is balance,’ Kyarin pleads.
‘It is cowardice!’
‘Please,’ Kyarin whispers, voice strangled.‘I don’t want to be without you.’
‘Then stay!’
He stares at Vaire, eyebrows cinched in pain, lips parted until they press together to swallow down whatever words were on his tongue.He sinks to his heels, hands still clutching Vaire’s, and presses his forehead to their clasped fingers.Vaire stands over him, a choking dread filling the parts of him that are left to be filled.He yanks his hand away and steps back.
‘Sulan was right.’The ache inside Vaire grows, rushing in his ears, twisting his words to sharp disdain.‘Darkness is only absence.It can never have substance.So pretend all you want.You have tobesomething to become something else, and you were always nothing.’
Kyarin turns his face away, letting his hair obscure him.He does not protest or deny, but Vaire can feel the blows as if he were landing them on himself, every cut of the words, every sting of cruelty.It is fitting, somehow, as Vaire has always been the one to take blows for him.Vaire always stood against and fought back.Despite the hurt, the shame, Kyarin does not.What Vaire once saw as soft and heartrending is now pathetic and humiliating.He knows Kyarin can feel that too, and that’s what hurts most.
‘You’ll really do this?’Vaire asks.
He will.Despite everything, he will.
‘Pretend, then,’ Vaire says, voice as cold as the gripping chill rending his heart.‘It will not make you one of them.It will not make you worth something.’
Kyarin’s shoulders slump.Vaire steps back, pauses.There is no plea to return to the forest with him, to forgive, to forget.
Dihen moves forward in Vaire’s place, taking Kyarin into their arms, and Kyarin leans despondently into them.
Vaire turns and walks north, every step a new bruise on a wretchedly brittle heart.
He goes to Geom.
He had sequestered himself deep into the mountains.The embrace of earth brings him comfort, though it’s not what he truly wants.The earth, the sea, the sun, the air—the elements still exist, but they cannot fill the void left behind by the dead.
The cavern is dark.A drip of water echoes further in.He follows the burning agony.
Leave me be.
We’re all hurt, Vaire tells him.
Leave.Me.Alone.
I loved them, too.
You did not love them as I love them.You were not made of them.They were not your world.
And yet my world is shattered all the same.
Deep in the mountain, pitch black turns to the soft glow of luminescent gemstones.Geom is wrapped in a cocoon of crystal.Vaire sits beside him on the cold, damp ground.The prick of Geom’s anger and desire for solitude fades to simple grief.They sit together in it for a long time.Grief feels better than emptiness.
When Vaire returns to the forest, the waterlogged death had been reborn while he was away; dead plants replaced with fresh sprouts, washed-away moss returning to cover stone and bark, rotting trees replaced with growing saplings.His growth, taking over and healing the aftermath of Nuada’s devastation.
But the absence of her cannot be healed.
