Burn of the Everflame — Chapter 62

62

DIEM

ven with my vision obscured by Luther’s shadows, I knew where weE were. The moment my lungs filled with the scent of sweet pine and damp, earthy moss, cut by the crisp brine of a seaborne wind, a tension I’d been holding on to for weeks, or months—almost a year, if I was really counting—instantly unspooled. In this beloved forest I’d grown up in, the worries of the world felt fenced off, waiting at the gate with gnashing teeth but unable to reach me as long as I stayed right here. It felt like some cosmic riddle finally found its answer. It felt the way Luther’s skin felt

against mine.

Home.

Just as he’d promised.

The forest was loud with the chirps and croaks of a cool summer night.

I’d spent thousands of evenings sitting outside on our family’s front stoop, listening to their song. When my feet hit the soft, peaty soil, their calls grew louder, as if to welcome me back. Why did you leave? they seemed to ask.

Don’t you know this is where you’re meant to be?

Sorae nudged my palm with a whine. Though we no longer shared emotions through a bond, I was sure she understood my conflicted feelings.

She’d been here the day my father died, and she’d felt my pain firsthand in the weeks after.

Luther gave her an order to leave, and she sniffed a resistant response.

“The best way to help Diem tonight is to be her eyes on the south,” he told her.

Her scales brushed against my hand one last time, then her wings ruffled and faded into the distance. He was right, as usual—knowing Sorae

was watching for Vance and his men from the sky was the only thing keeping me from running to the border and doing the same thing myself.

He took me by the shoulders and guided me forward. “You know where

we are?”

“My family’s old home.”

“Close, but not exactly.”

I rubbed at the shadows shielding my eyes, wishing I could absorb them away. Normally I adored the touch of Luther’s magic, but the darkness reminded me too much of things I was trying to forget.

My feet came down on something hard and solid, and I paused in surprise until he urged me on. With my vision obscured, my mind homed in on every sound. Creaking wood beneath my feet. A soft ripple of water.

“A bridge?” I asked, and he hummed to confirm it.

Odd. There were no bridges in this part of the forest. No one but my family lived this far out.

Luther stopped. His hands left my arms, though tendrils of his magic clung to me, keeping us tethered in the absence of his touch. I heard his heavy footsteps on the soil and the rustle of his suit as he moved, then a nearby crackling joined the burn of smoke in my nose. A campfire, I guessed.

Tightness snaked around my chest. He’d planned a night away, just for the two of us, in the woods he knew I loved. In another life, nothing would have made me happier.

“Luther . . . I appreciate this, truly I do, but we should—”

“Five minutes,” he said. “Give me five minutes, and then we’ll go wherever you want.”

The soft plea in his voice, and the delicate way he lifted my hand and wove his fingers through mine, caught me off guard. Luther could be gentle, but there had always been a strength that underpinned it, an assurance that he knew exactly what he was doing. Tonight, that confidence was trembling. I felt it in the emotions seeping across the bond, too.

Whatever he’d brought me here for, it scared him.

I swallowed down my protests and gave an encouraging nod. I wanted to be strong for him, in the way he’d always been for me.

I felt him shift to stand behind me and lean in close. I shivered at the caress of his breath on my shoulder, and my body tingled in response.

Luther mistook it for a chill, and after a moment of rustling, I felt him set

his jacket on my shoulders. Though it was much too heavy for the balmy summer air, I took the lapels and pulled it tighter. With him this close, the mating mark was getting dangerously difficult to hide.

“When we fought in Fortos, you told me there needed to be a Luther without Diem,” he said. “I’ve thought about that a lot. All I’ve ever been is a Corbois prince. I want to be something more.”

“I see the effort you’re putting in with the Guardians and the half- mortals,” I said. “Mother says you’ve been spending time in Mortal City, too.”

I felt his nod in the prickle of his bearded jaw against the curve of my neck. It sent energy sparking through my blood, and his body pressed closer.

“I could have been part of those groups myself, if the laws hadn’t forced me to hide,” he said. “I’m worried they’ll only ever see me as an outsider now.”

“They elected you to lead the council. That means you’ve earned their trust. That’s not something any of them give lightly.”

He was quiet for a while. “When I see the mortals singing songs or celebrating holidays I know nothing of, sometimes I feel guilty for wanting to join them. They’ve suffered in so many ways I never will. It feels wrong to share only their happy moments and not their pain.”

I turned my head toward his voice, grieving the sadness in it. The unjust system we all lived within had caused Luther his fair share of pain, too. He was right, though, that the privilege he’d grown up with would always make him different, and I would not lie to him and say otherwise.

We’d teased each other once while eating apples. I had been sloppy and brutal, gnawing messily with my teeth to get the job done fast. He had been delicate, meticulous, slicing slowly with a sharpened blade to ensure not a single drop of juice went astray. Seemingly trivial, but it was a symbol of something that merely eating an apple differently would not change.

Food for me was a tool to survive, and one my family rarely had in excess. For Luther, food was an indulgence, something to be experienced, not simply consumed. I cared little for the mess my apple left behind because life itself was a mess. Fresh clothes and clean hands were luxuries.

For Luther, they were the standard—so commonplace that he couldn’t imagine them otherwise, even for a harmless piece of fruit. His upbringing affected the way he moved through the world in a thousand ways like this,

subtle and perhaps unimportant on their own, and yet huge in their collective impact, just as the mortals’ hard-fought lives shaped them.

But the bridge wasn’t uncrossable. Luther and I had found common ground. So had the army we’d cobbled together. It had taken time, patience, countless hard conversations, a willingness to forgive and even stronger willingness to change, and, most of all, compassion for those whose suffering was not our own.

For all of Luther’s gruff claims that mine was the only life he cared to save, I knew my mate, and those were values he had in endless supply.

“The mortals don’t need you to share their suffering, they need you to end it,” I told him. “I know how hard you’re working to do that. The more they see that commitment, the more they’ll embrace you.” I leaned my head against his. “I’m proud of you.”

His answering swell of emotions had me smiling despite myself. “Yes, well, about that commitment . . .” A hand swept my jaw, and the shadows over my eyes started swirling. A soft amber light began to peek through, though the details were hazy. “Taran suggested I imagine the life I would choose if I wasn’t serving the Crown. I knew I wanted to get away from Lumnos City. I wanted a home I felt welcome in, somewhere peaceful and quiet. I wanted things to do in my spare hours—simple things that life and death did not depend on. A picture appeared in my head . . . but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine that picture without you in it.” A shape took form in the darkness, boxy and large and glowing from within. “So I imagined it for us both.”

His thumb grazed a tender path along my cheek, and the curtain of shadows parted, revealing a simple wooden home tucked into a thick copse of trees. A blazing fireplace was visible through its open front door, a golden heart shining in the ink-blue night.

My entire body locked. Frozen. Unmoving as stone.

“It’s not finished yet,” he added quickly. “When you told me you planned to visit your father’s grave tomorrow, I feared you might see it and spoil the surprise.”

He fished a folded scrap of paper from his pocket and smoothed it open —a sketch of a house, modest but refined, with large wooden beams and a steep-pitched roof. A porch wrapped around one side, with a pair of shaded figures seated close together on a long wooden bench. The unfinished structure in front of me was no more than a few empty rooms, but I could

see the sketch in its bones—the large opening that would become a window, the beginnings of a stoop where we might sit.

“I hired a crew from Mortal City,” he went on. “The chief served with Andrei in the army. He let me pay his workers, but he wouldn’t take my gold. He said he owed it to the Commander to make sure his little girl had a home.” Luther hesitated, awaiting my response. I could barely blink, let alone form a coherent sentence. “I wanted to have a hand in building it, too, though I thought better of interfering with the house. We’d end up with the roof crashing down while we slept.”

He gave a short, huffed laugh that I met with silence. Behind me, I heard him swallow. He folded the paper up and tucked it away, then pointed at a fence bordering a nearby patch of grass.

“I built that instead, for the animals. Some chickens would be nice, I think.” I heard a smile creep into his voice. “And our goat, of course. Taran Junior.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the hearth. It was encased in a column of smooth white stones, exactly like the one in my childhood home. My father had gathered the rocks himself from the shore of the Sacred Sea. Water and fire, he used to say. A fitting balance, don’t you think?

Luther had only been to my family’s cottage once, the same day it burned to the ground. Had he noticed it? Had he done this on purpose, or was it a cruel, beautiful coincidence? I wanted to ask him, but my throat felt gripped by a fist.

He shifted to see my face, his gaze dancing between me and the house.

He raised a hand, fingers twitching, and the air rippled like a pebble dropped in a pond. When it stilled, the house had changed. A second floor appeared to sit atop the first, smoke billowing from a tall brick chimney on its shingled roof. Arched shutters framed flower-filled windows lit with a comforting glow that beckoned you in. A rope-hung bench swung to and fro in the evening breeze, two steaming mugs waiting on the floor below. It looked exactly like his sketch, but real enough to make my insides knot.

He pointed to the top of the illusion. “There’ll be a reading room there, upstairs, with a view of the sea.” His finger shifted lower. “An armory closet by the front door.” He gestured to the side. “I considered a formal dining room in the rear with a table large enough for our friends, but I built a garden instead, for the medicinal plants you need for healing. I thought it

might be nice to keep the house small. Just enough for two.” He hesitated, eyes lingering on me. “With room to grow, should you ever desire it.”

Cracks opened in my soul—a broken mirror on flimsy backing, pressed too hard and splintering into shards.

His fingers curled, and tiny blue sparks emerged from the trees. They swarmed like fireflies to an adjacent parcel of land, bathing a line of saplings in their light. “Our orchard,” he explained. “For Sorae. I had a bit of heartbreak when the mortals told me apple trees don’t grow in this kind of soil. Enness and his magic saved the day.”

My brain screamed at me to answer, but I could not.

I could feel his hope begin to shrink at my silence. “We can change anything,” he said, quieter than before. “If you dislike it—”

A sound croaked out of me, something between a scream and a sob. I stiffly turned away, thinking I might combust if I looked at the house for one second longer. Thinking that I might burn so hot I’d turn to ash where I stood. I lurched toward the bridge we’d crossed, newly built and painted white. Floating beside it, a small rowboat had been tied off to a wooden

post.

I stopped.

My father’s boat.

The day he died, it had been docked near the sea, far enough away to escape my destruction. The only family relic to survive.

I stumbled to the water and fell to my knees, tugging at the line until the boat came within reach. My fingers brushed its side, rough from lack of oiling in my father’s absence. Inside, I caught a flash of red—his favorite fishing knife. The handle had cracked years ago, but he’d refused to replace it, insisting it was the perfect blade for cleaning a fresh catch. My mother had bound the handle with waxed crimson twine to keep it intact.

I snatched the knife and clutched it to my chest, running my fingers over the cords. It had been so long since my hands had touched something Andrei once held. Not since the twin daggers I’d laid in his grave.

“Don’t be angry,” Luther pleaded, crouching behind me. “The boat—it’s not for me. It’s Teller’s, by right. I’m keeping it safe for him here. He told me his fishing trips with your father were his happiest memories. I hoped maybe I could join him. I’d like to learn.”

I was so close to breaking. So dangerously close.

“Stop,” I whispered.

Luther didn’t hear me. “Teller helped me choose the land. He’s considering a home for himself a mile upstream.” He pointed south, closer to town. “I thought we might build something for your mother that way.

Close enough to visit any time, but far enough away for us to have . . .” He

cleared his throat. “Privacy.”

I shook my head. “I can’t do this.”

Luther tensed. Leaned back. “I thought . . . that day in Sophos, you said you wanted—” He stopped abruptly. “Are you worried that I’m only doing this for you? Diem, for years I wished I could walk these streets without a cloak concealing who I am. Mortal City feels more like home to me than the palace ever did. This is the life I should have had, if my mother had raised me. It’s what I want. What I’ve always wanted, even before we met. I just never believed I could have it . . . until you.”

My heart cracked with the worst, most devastating kind of joy. The kind that felt too much like despair.

“Good,” I managed to rasp out. “Good . . . you deserve that.” I looked around, searching for an escape that didn’t exist. I could run for miles, fly on Sorae’s back to the ends of Emarion, and still, the truth would catch up.

Luther slowly rose. “If this is too much, we can find something else. A

place for you to be alone.”

Alone.

I shuddered at the word. How could I possibly explain? Yes, it was too much, far too much—because it was also exactly right. I couldn’t have pictured a more idyllic home if I’d put the pen to paper myself. It made me believe that I didn’t have to choose between healer or wife or mother or Queen or mortal or Descended. Luther’s vision of our future allowed me to be all of those things and more, or none of them at all. My choice, not my fate. And I wanted it so very, very badly.

“This house . . .” Every word I forced out hurt like broken glass, set aflame and poisoned. “It’s . . . perfect. Everything about it is perfect.”

“But you don’t want it?” His head angled lower, trying to catch my

eyes.

I squeezed mine shut.

“I do.”

His bliss at my answer bloomed through me, and I’d never felt anything better—or worse. He took my hand and pulled me toward the house.

“Come, see the inside. We can choose the details together.” He paused at

the door and unfastened Sorrow’s Edge from my hip. “That can wait outside,” he muttered, tossing the sword to the ground.

“Luther, wait—”

He swept me into his arms, beaming down at me with that incandescent smile. “The workers told me to carry you over the threshold. They said it’s a mortal tradition.”

My hand shot out to grab the doorframe. “Wait.”

“You don’t want me to carry you? Or . . .” His smile faltered. “You

don’t want to go in?”

Neither.

Both.

He set me back on my feet. I hurriedly backed out of his reach, staring out into the trees to avoid seeing the home, or him, or the pain I knew this would cause him.

“Let’s go back to the palace,” I begged.

I felt the burn of his gaze deepen. The silence grew awkward, then pointed, though my head was unbearably loud with a fractured conscience, one voice demanding I tell him everything while the other warned of every dire consequence that might come to pass if I did.

When he spoke again, his tone was firmer. “Diem, this secret you’re trying so hard to keep . . . I already know what it is.”

The mating mark blazed hot on my chest beneath his coat. “What?”

“And I know why you didn’t tell me,” he continued. “You were worried about what I’d do. You were worried I’d try to finish it myself.”

Gods, he knew.

A voice of hope sang a bright note, louder than fate’s dirge. Hard as I’d fought to conceal that Luther was my mate, I’d desperately wanted him to know. If I was free of that burden, the others wouldn’t be so hard to bear.

He took my face in his hands and kissed me with all the ferocity of his conviction, a man who’d found his forever and wasn’t letting go. Slowly, I dropped my defenses and leaned my body into his, letting him feel the heat of my mark press against him. It built in intensity, spreading across both sides of my chest, growing hotter and brighter the longer we touched. It felt so right, I struggled to remember why I’d ever fought it at all.

“Tell me you love me,” he demanded.

“You know how I feel.” How could he not, with the proof of it scorching between us?

“Tell me.”

“I love you,” I breathed. “I’m yours.”

“This house, this life with me . . . you want it?”

“It scares me, what I’d give to keep it,” I admitted. More truths slipping free.

“Then you will. I don’t give a damn what that sword wants.”

I went still.

“What did you say?”

“That’s why you pushed me away, and why you gave up your power to the council. You think whatever magic is in that sword will take your life when you kill Ophiucae. You don’t have to hide it anymore.”

I blinked a few times as everything I thought I knew scattered into a new, unfamiliar order.

“In Sophos, when your blood touched the sword, it opened some kind of pathway,” he said. “Blessed Lumnos was there, and I could sense she wanted something from me, but I couldn’t understand what it was. Then I remembered what she said before—‘Give our gift to my faithful heir.’ I thought she wanted me to take the sword and use it on Ophiucae to spare you the consequences of the spell.” He frowned. “If it didn’t work, there must be something I missed.”

This new reality was even more horrifying than before. Luther didn’t know about the mating mark, he knew about the spell, and his reaction was exactly what I’d feared—he was trying to fulfill it himself.

“Luther, promise me you won’t ever touch that sword again,” I pleaded.

“You have no place in this.”

“Is that why you won’t go inside the house? You think you’re going to die, and it hurts less to lose something if you never let yourself have it?”

My eyes stung. “Swear to me you won’t interfere.”

“I’ll swear only this: if there’s a way to survive this, we’ll find it.”

I held his gaze, lingering in the certainty of his love, and I let myself believe that he was right. I let myself picture it—the future he promised.

Waking up in his arms, stumbling lazily to the kitchen to warm two mugs of tea, only to have him sneak up behind me and steal a kiss. Luther, humming a mortal tune I’d taught him while he chopped fresh firewood, and me, singing along as I worked in my garden. We’d deliver the herbs I’d harvested to the healers’ center, then we’d wrinkle our noses and laugh at a questionable bowl of stew at our favorite tavern. If the weather was good,

we’d follow the Ring Road to visit our friends in Lumnos City. If not, we’d stay in and curl up by a fire, stealing flirty glances across the top of our books.

We’d watch the sunset from our porch, where Luther would use his magic to bring the stars to our feet, just because he knew it made me smile.

We’d shed our clothes and make love in the moonlight, our voices rippling through the forest, then he’d carry me to bed and we’d make love by firelight, too. We’d drift to sleep in a tangle of limbs, smiles on our faces, knowing that everything we’d suffered, everything we’d lost and endured, had earned us this. Our happy ending.

But this wasn’t a daydream or some storybook I got to write. This was war.

And happy endings were never guaranteed.

“Diem, there’s something I want to ask you.” He took my hands, staring down at them as muscles worked on his throat. “Whatever answer you give, it changes nothing. I will love you just the same. Without condition.

Without end. For as long as love exists.”

The mark on my chest pulsed in recognition of his words—the promises of the mating bond, the vows we’d heard Taran and Zalaric speak hours ago.

“You’ve taught me so much over the past year,” he said. “Courage.

Kindness. Mercy. Patience.” He laughed lightly. “So much patience. You showed me that strength doesn’t mean being the loudest or the most powerful. Strength can be silence, or holding your blows in a fight. Strength can be knowledge—seeking out the things we don’t know and allowing our minds to change when we find them. I was always taught that love made you vulnerable. Then you came into my life, and you loved like an act of war. Loving you, and being loved by you, makes me the strongest I’ve ever felt. And though your strength outshines me in so many ways . . .” His gaze lifted to mine. “I hope I’ve made you stronger, too.”

Tears streamed down my face in drops, in rivers, in oceans, enough of them to sweep me to sea. He reached to brush them away, then stopped short, a crease forming on his brow. He set his hand on my cheek instead and let the tears spill over his fingers, and I knew it was his promise that, when he could not end my troubles, he would hold me and endure them at my side.

“You have humbled me, Diem. You saw things in me I never saw in myself. Then you gave me a gift: you let me see the you that you show to no one else. And when I look at you, I see the most incredible woman I’ve ever known. I see . . . my heart. Beating outside my chest.” He leaned down until our foreheads touched, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “You might never forgive me for asking this, but I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t.”

“We can’t,” I said hoarsely, knowing the question forming on his lips.

“Diem Bellator, daughter of Auralie, beloved of Andrei, Descended of

Omnos—”

“Luther,” I begged.

“—guardian of hope, redeemer of hearts, savior of the forgotten—”

My voice choked with a breathless sob.

“—healer of Mortal City, Queen of Emarion—”

He withdrew a step to see me fully, and he smiled.

“Will you do me the honor of becoming my mate?”

Only the threat of our imminent deaths in battle could have pushed Luther to ask, knowing how wary I’d once been. One word—No—and I knew he’d never, ever ask again.

One different word, and I’d be happy at last.

The mark seemed to catch fire on my skin, like it knew how close I was to giving in. So I sacrificed one truth to spare another.

“You were right,” I said, voice breaking. “Killing Ophiucae means I die, too.”

The light in his eyes shined a little less brightly, but his look of resolve didn’t waver.

I shook my head. “I heard how King Ulther changed when his mate died. Everyone says it destroyed him. He spent centuries miserable and alone.”

“I would trade a thousand years of pain for a single day as your mate.”

“That’s madness, Luther. If I die, I want you to be happy. To be . . .” My stomach lurched, these words harder to force out. “ . . . free to fall in love with someone else.”

“That will never happen,” he hissed, no trace of hesitation. His voice dropped, low and lethal. “Do you want to be my mate?”

“But what if—”

“Answer me, Diem.” He stepped toward me. “Do you want to be my mate?”

I staggered backward. “What I want doesn’t matter if—”

“It matters to me.” He kept advancing, seeming to grow larger and more fearsome with every step. He’d fought through an inferno to get here, and he wasn’t giving up.

Fear surged—not of him, but of how close I was to flying into the fire to burn and burn and burn with him forever. A strange feeling rose in my chest in response, the same one I’d been struggling to place all day.

An ember. A spark.

“Say you’re not ready,” he challenged. “Say you’re not sure your love is strong enough to form the bond.”

My spine hit the wall of the house, pinning me between my heart and my home. My chest heaved with a sob at the cruel reminder that fate had denied me both.

“Say anything, Diem, but make it honest. Don’t lie to me. Not about this. It’s too sacred.” His eyes narrowed. “And don’t lie to yourself.”

“Yes, I want to be your mate!” I screamed, tears overflowing. “But I can’t. I won’t do it. I love you too much to ruin you.”

He gripped at his collar, ripping the fine fabric of his shirt. A shredded line tore down the center as he pulled it away to bare his chest. The unscarred circle of skin over his heart began to ripple, and the magic of an illusion misted away, giving way to a blinding glow of golden light. At its center, a symbol appeared: two hearts, entwined into a dagger.

Luther’s mating mark.

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