Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter Fifteen

~15~

Eighty-seven days before the destruction of Eldan City

Ryse stared at the ceiling. A candle flickered in a brass dish next to her head. She had shut her window, but she could hear the hiss of rain falling against it.

She ought to have been able to sleep.

But her thoughts refused to calm long enough to slip beneath the surface of the night. Memories rolled through her mind in loops—Leramis’s face, the last time she’d seen it before he left the Academy; Litnig’s when she tumbled through his window; Cole’s as he fell from the Skellup into the cold jaws of the North Sea.

Leramis and Cole came back, she reminded herself. Against the odds.

Still, Litnig was gone. And she missed him, despite all the reasons she shouldn’t have.

Someone knocked at her door.

“Yes?” she called. She sat up. The door to the hallway stood a few feet away, a solid, dark rectangle in the candle’s dim light.

“Can I come in?” Dil asked.

There was a thin, wavering quality to her voice. It reminded Ryse of the way Dil had sounded under the mountains of Aleana.

When they’d been lost and she’d been completely, utterly terrified.

“Of course,” Ryse said.

The door creaked open. Dil slipped through and eased it shut behind her. She hovered next to it and ran a hand through her hair. Her fingers, Ryse noticed, were shaking.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Ryse asked.

Dil shook her head. “I saw the light…”

Ryse beckoned her over. “I couldn’t sleep either.”

Dil walked toward her and sat down, then leaned against the bed. Almost without thinking, Ryse reached for her hair and began to comb her fingers through it. It was an old ritual. One of the oldest things she could remember. She recalled sitting in hovels in the slums, fingers combing the hair of girls who were younger than her while older girls combed hers. She’d done the same with Jen Ryddych in the darkened dormitories of Temple Complex, whispering and braiding and whispering some more.

And at the deepest edges of her memories, she thought she remembered other fingers stroking her head. Thin but strong fingers, with more love in them than she could bear to think of.

Dil shut her eyes and leaned into the massage. Outside, the rain picked up a little.

“Anything on your mind in particular?” Ryse asked.

Dil hesitated. “No…I mean, not really.”

It was a lie. Ryse felt it in the way she tensed up as she spoke.

But she didn’t call her on it. That was part of the ritual. Lies were allowed, sometimes.

“You’ve been in love before, right, Ryse?”

Ryse let her fingers pause. She picked them up and rubbed them absently together before continuing.

“Yes,” she answered. “I think. Or thought, anyway.”

Dil craned her head up and back, so that their eyes could meet. Exhaustion and fear floated on her face, but there was curiosity there as well. “With Litnig?”

“With Leramis.” Ryse frowned and started massaging again. “Or so I thought. I was young.”

“How young?”