Chapter Fifteen

Your Sorrow Precedes You

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Kazia had stayed in bed for most of a day, by her best guess, before she began to feel stable again. Leaving the bed finally, she pulled aside the heavy draperies on the bedroom window to check the time of day, but found that the window had been bricked over.

Her clothes were folded neatly on a chair but she left them, unwilling to feel any restriction yet. She padded on bare feet out of the room into a hallway. The house was as quiet as it had been since she arrived, and she felt no other human presence.

She found a bathroom across the hall, where she cleaned herself up and brushed her hair out, then descended the staircase into a wide front hall. Gas lamps lit her way. She assumed that Kelvaran had lit them when he was here.

It was a beautiful house. The sort of townhouse that the aristocracy would keep in the city. The front hall was tiled in black and white checks, and the staircase curved on its way down, railed in ornate iron. A chandelier hung overhead, unlit now, and there were gas lamps on the walls between the doors to each room.

A finely worked side table sat near the front door, under a large gilded mirror. There was a coat tree beside the table with several pieces of outerwear hanging on it. She found a shawl there and wrapped it over her chemise, then went to find the kitchen again.

No longer delirious as she had been before, she noticed that the kitchen window was bricked over like the one in the bedroom.

She had finished all of the decoction, so she set about making more of it, a larger amount this time, and turned the heat down to a simmer after the boiling. It would be stronger if it were allowed to reduce. She used the time to explore the rest of the house.

Aside from the kitchen, the first floor was comprised of a breakfast room off of the kitchen, a formal dining room, sitting room, and library, all well appointed.

In every room, though, the windows had been bricked over, and she found the same true of the outer doors. There did not appear to be any means of exit.

She imagined that Kelvaran had prepared this house so that only he could enter, by means of a portal. It was clever, she thought, but she appeared to be stuck here until he came back for her, and what if something happened to him and he never came?

She vaguely remembered him saying that he would send someone, but she couldn't be sure. Who would he send? Kazia was uneasy with the situation.

There was nothing she could do, though, but try to trust that he wouldn't have put her in here without a way out.

There seemed to be plenty of food in the kitchen to last a while, and when her decoction was ready, she strained some into a teacup and placed it on a tray with some bread, fruit, and cheese.

She carried these into the sitting room and set them on the floor next to a thick carpet in front of the fireplace. She laid a fire, then scattered cushions taken from the furniture and lay down among them with a book she'd taken from the library.

She had just finished her little meal when she felt Kelvaran's presence behind her in the doorway.

Kazia never thought that his shroud of despair could be so welcome, even if it did make her a bit light-headed just now. At least none of it seemed to be directed at her anymore. She wondered when that had changed.

She stared at her book, waiting for him to enter the room, but he remained where he stood and said nothing. She could feel a new sense of unease added to his usual aura, but also a small, fragile bit of hope.

“Your sorrow precedes you,” she said without turning. “I first felt it before I ever saw you. It hurts my heart. I often wonder how you manage to bear such a burden.”

He came past her then and sat in a chair beside the fireplace facing her.

“You seem to have your own share of burdens,” he said quietly.

His compassion was clear, but Kazia could tell that he was struggling to restrain any emotion.

“Mistress Amelys said much the same to me, on Unity Day,” she replied “That if you had my ability, what might you feel from me?”

She closed her book and lay her head down on a cushion.

“How do you feel now?” he asked.

“Tired,” she said. “Still shaky at times, but better.”

“What did Yilina's Alchemists do to you?”

Kazia sighed as she considered how to answer.

“I feel others' emotions as if they were my own,” she explained. “Positive emotions are usually manageable, depending on their strength. Dark emotions, though - I resist letting them in. It's that resistance that makes me ill. It is painful and exhausting. Yilina and her men required all the resistance I had in me.”

“I'm sorry for that,” he said.

“You're sorry?” Kazia replied, confused. “She was right, I was stupid and reckless. I've disrupted your mission.”

“No,” he assured her. “I am managing the situation. In fact, you may have opened an avenue.”

“Still,” she said. “I shouldn't have allowed myself to get carried away. I was afraid for you.”

She felt Kelvaran's heart well up even as he fought to curtail any reaction. Without a word, he picked up Kazia's empty teacup and strode from the room.

She closed her eyes, and had almost drifted off to sleep when he returned and placed the cup, now refilled, back on the tray. She raised herself on one elbow and gazed at the cup.

“I hope that you can understand why I hide this,” she said. “It was never to deceive you. But that unease that you feel now... I don't know which is worse, what you thought of me in ignorance, or what you might think of me now.”

“It is disconcerting,” he admitted, “that you can know my inmost thoughts.”

“I can't hear your thoughts,” she corrected him. “I often wish that I could. Emotions are tricky, often misleading without the context of a thought. I try not to depend on it to think that I know a person.”

She picked up the cup and smiled in thanks before drinking.

“I should take you back to Elisaen,” Kelvaran said.

Kazia put down her cup and nestled back into the cushions.

“Or I could just stay here forever,” she sighed wistfully. “The quiet is so lovely. Where are we?”

“Loranar. Derrow. It makes the portal trips shorter.”

“It was a bit frightening being trapped in here. What if you couldn't come for me?”

“You would have been found soon. There are a few operatives through here regularly. I'm sorry I didn't explain that fully before I left you.”

“I thought something like that,” she said, propping up again to finish her drink. “What you did back there, leaving an open portal... I've never seen anyone do that. It wasn't even on a door.”

“Doors are just props to aid focus and conserve energy,” he explained. “Leaving it open requires a lot of energy. Not something I could do regularly.”

“That you can do it at all is quite impressive.”

“Can you not tell anyone about that?”

“You wish to hide the extent of your abilities?” she asked with a coy smile.

“It's a tactical advantage.”

Kazia lay back in the cushions again with a drowsy hum.

“If I could cast a portal I'd build myself a house just like this.”

“Your medication suppresses ethereal energy?” he asked.

“Yes, but even without it I still can't,” she told him. “The Empathy uses up most of the energy I produce. I can only summon little sparks from what is left over.”

“I think I understand then, why you have the other ability, to draw power from-”

“No,” she said, steel in her voice.

She sat up as a flush of hot anger and fear spread through her.

“I don't do that.”

Kelvaran leaned forward in his chair as he was overcome with that excitability a maker feels when stumbling on a solution.

“Kazia, if you could learn to -”

“I can't!” she interrupted.

His oblivious enthusiasm only stoked her anger. She stared him down, and he stared back in confusion. Kazia turned herself around where she sat.

“You wanted to see,” she said hotly over her shoulder.

She pushed her chemise off of her shoulders and allowed it to drop around her waist. Kelvaran gasped as she exposed the crosshatch of scars that covered her back top to bottom, no quadrant left untouched.

“I did not endure this, resisting, to give in now,” she said through clenched teeth, squeezing her eyes shut to steel herself against his horror as it mingled with her own.

Kazia heard him drop off of his chair onto his knees. She froze, and then shivered when she felt his hands land on her back.

He spread his hands across her skin as if his touch could heal her. He was breathing through his teeth as he ran his fingers gently over the deepest lines.

“Gorvan wanted you to use that ability to kill for him,” he said, his voice a low growl.

“He would bring people he'd imprisoned, Dericians mostly. He wanted to watch me drain them. I never did, though.” She turned her head toward him. “I never did.”

Kelvaran drew her chemise up over her shoulders, then pulled her back to lean against him, wrapping his arms around her as she fought back tears.

A dam seemed to break open in him, and an overwhelming torrent of pure love poured out of him to fill Kazia with a dizzying warmth.

He wasn't fighting it. He wanted her to feel it.

She heaved a deep breath and relaxed into him.

“I need to know what he wants from me,” Kazia said. “What we saw, in that memory... what could they mean by 'This is how it will work'?”

Kelvaran's mood turned to a dark uncertainty.

“I am working to discover their plans,” he said softly. “Kazia, there are things I may have to do to accomplish this. If you knew...”

“I do know,” she said, pulling away from him. “Low tactics? Isn't that how you put it? With Yilina.”

“She is my mark.”

“She is more than that. You love her.”

“She betrayed me. She betrayed us all. She is betraying our country.”

“And yet you still love her.”

“No,” he protested.

He stood with a sigh and turned to stare into the fireplace.

“She wasn't always like this,” he said. “Or perhaps she was and I didn't see. When we were at the Academy together, she was sweet and generous, and I know that she did love me. That was a long time ago. Perhaps I will always love the girl I knew then, but that girl died when she went to Gorvan.”

“I think a part of you feels it wasn't finished, though,” Kazia said as she rose to her feet behind him. “I'm sorry if I'm speaking out of turn, but I think that you should do what you must to finish it.”

“It wouldn't turn you from me?” he asked.

She stared at his back for a long moment, then shook her head, laughing at herself.

“I love you,” she said softly. “I didn't want to, but I don't think there's anything I can do about that now. I don't think anything will turn me from you.”

He turned around and closed the space between them.

Pulling her into his arms again, he kissed her very, very gently.

At the contact of their lips, his emotional aura flowed into her, filled with a soft affection, bringing a sweet and mellow joy that seemed to patter softly down upon her like flower petals falling from the trees in springtime.

She returned his kiss, and he laced his fingers through her hair to pull her closer.

As their kiss deepened, though, Kelvaran's feeling slowly became more fervent, his warm affection fanning itself into passionate heat. In the center of it, all the pain he had carried these years crept upward, entwining itself with this newly blooming love.

Kazia pushed at his shoulders.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered as her head began to spin at this dizzying array of emotions now bombarding her perception. “It's too much...”

Her body began to feel heavy again as her vision faded, her knees buckled, and she felt Kelvaran catch her up in his arms before she could fall.

 

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