Children Of The Sky (The Scripts Of Neptune, Book 2)

Chapter 34

It felt like someone had reached in with a knife and scraped the edges of Ely's soul clean, leaving him tender and bleeding. His body was tired, and he ached everywhere, though mostly in his chest and head from sobbing. Darcy had let him come into her rooms after the duel, bribing the guards to keep them quiet. Later, she brought him hot tea, and that helped a little; whatever she'd put in it made him drowsier than he already was, and he soon fell asleep in the chair by her largest window.

She was reading in the seat across from him when he woke in the late afternoon. Her legs were curled beside her, under the swirling pattern of her green skirt, and her hair was down, glowing in the sunlight. Not noticing he was awake, or not bothering to acknowledge it, she moved her hand from where it'd been supporting her chin, turning the page and rubbing the tip of her nose. Ely found himself thinking, not for the first time, that she was rather pretty.

Shrugging off the blanket that'd been draped over him while he slept, he slowly sat up, and she stirred, smiling at him. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Ely set his chin in one hand and stared sideways out the window at the green-clothed branches of a tree in the garden.

"You slept nearly four hours," Darcy remarked, unfolding her legs and shutting her book. "Do you feel any better?"

Still drowsy to the point of not wanting to speak, Ely nodded absently without looking at her. She rose and brushed a hand over his hair, a fond gesture, before picking up his empty tea mug and leaving to go into the other room. Neither spoke when she returned; she picked up her book and resumed reading. Ely sat watching the birds for longer than he knew. Eventually he left to go to his own chamber, and Darcy let him walk out without a word of protest.

His room was deathly quiet when he shut the door. His desk was strewn with charcoal and drawings he needed to clean up, and some had fallen to the floor. How long had he spent there this last week, trying to press his pain into the paper with a pencil? Too long. It hadn't really worked, either; it'd just been a distraction. Darcy had somehow helped him feel what he'd been running from since she brought it back to the surface--and the strangest thing was, letting it tear him open seemed to have helped more than distracting himself ever had.

The drawing he'd done of her fell out of the pile with a few others he picked up to stack. Ely paused when he reached to put it back in the pile, looking at it, at her, seeing the mischief in her smile. He should've put more kindness in her eyes, softened them more. Or maybe not; she was as fiery as she was kind.

"Gods, Ely, get a grip," he muttered to himself when he caught all those thoughts in their tracks, dropping the drawing in the middle of the pile and stacking them neatly against the wall before rubbing his face and looking around. His eyes lingered on the balcony. The sun was shining for the first time in a few days, making the city shine and glow. The sky, blue as a sapphire, was so clear he could hear it hum in his bones. Shivering wonderfully, he walked to the doors, pulled them open, and launched himself into that great blue with a flurry of feathers. Not once did he look back as he threw himself higher and higher with each beat of his wings, until the people in the streets looked like ants and the buildings like a child's toys. Then he stilled, soaring, and shifted midair. The sky pulled the breath from his lungs as he fell, wind whipping at his body and hair and clothes, frigid cold.

He'd never felt so free.

***

It was strange how practicing at something, maybe even getting good at it, made it more pleasant. So it was with Ely and dancing.

Darcy liked to watch him while he followed her movements, and when she challenged him to go from memory. His steps were smooth now, not perfect, but controlled and careful. She was almost jealous of how quickly he'd picked it up, even if it was only one form; it'd taken her months to master. The combined frequency and aid of what she'd been teaching him in training had probably helped a great deal in that.