SONG of EMBER

62

SONG OF SORROWS

🙜

"EMBER!” Ky wailed as they burst forth from the lake, dripping weeds and water.

There was no response.

The rest of her breath was taken by panting grunts as she dragged her precious burden to shore, his dead limbs trailing through the shallows. Her toes squished into the muddy bank and he nearly slipped from her embrace, but she gripped him firmly under the arms and stumbled over prickly reeds; she must not fail him.

Not again.

After considerable effort and the acquisition of many scrapes and bruises, they reached the sprawling roots of a leafy oak which sheltered the nearest spot of dry ground. Gasping, she lowered him to the grass and pressed her hands to his temples. “Ember?”

Dark water spilled from the corners of his mouth.

Ky gripped his face, humming a few encouraging notes. Come alive. Breathe again. But though his heart beat weakly, she felt no resurgence; it fluttered like the wings of a drowning bird, fainter with each passing moment. Her shaking fingers trailed across his jaw—and more water dribbled between his lips as his head tipped.

“No, no,” Ky muttered, rolling him to one side.

She shook him vigorously, and then pounded her fist between his shoulders.

“No, no!”

When the water stopped flowing from his mouth, she let his body fall back to the earth and leaned close, listening for breath.

“O, Ember,” she whispered. “How could I leave you, Ember? You must come back to me—I will not have it elsewise!”

He did not stir.

“Wake up!” she cried in his own simple tongue.

His shoulders heaved and he coughed raggedly, drawing a shallow breath.

“I am sorry,” Ky murmured thoughtlessly. “So sorry. Please, forgive…”

He pressed a fist into his side, eyes squinted shut; blood leaked between his fingers.

She stared at it, entranced as her spine stiffened against the scent—rich, fragrant, unsullied by the taint of the wildwood. As she wrapped his clenched fingers in her smaller ones, inky color crept across her pale skin.

Red.

A deep and lovely stain.

"All will be well," she assured him, breathless, and entirely unconvinced.

She carefully tugged the wet tunic up around the barrel shape of his ribs and bit her mouth in a fanged grimace, gazing at the wound. Ruddy liquid seeped from a thin, jagged rift, mingling with water droplets and wending its way down his ribs. It soaked the dirt and grass beneath them.

For one horrible moment, all thoughts faded into the crimson.

It was revolting—and beautiful.

She must have it.

It sang to her…

His blood.

A piteous groan escaped his lips and she gripped the tunic fiercely.

"Ember," she whispered. "Are you hearing me?"

He tightened his fingers around her knuckles, blinking—but he stared overhead, through the sheltering branches and beyond them to the stars. His mouth was tightly shut, the creases around his eyes deep with stress, and his skin was a frightening hue of bluish grey.

"You must be very still," she said, weaving strength and quietude into her words. The stress lines softened, but his eyes remained fixed on the stars. "I will mend this, if I can. But you must not move."

His gaze flitted listlessly and he did not offer so much as a nod. Did he know that she had never sung to such a grievous wound in all her days?

Sing to him, Little Fish.

Ky took a deep breath through her nose and placed her palm against his forehead. Before she could utter a single note, a few terse words hissed between Ember's teeth, garbled by pain. She flinched and quickly bent lower, pressing her ear to his lips.

"I would—do—it—again..." His heartbeat stuttered beneath her shoulder and he cleared his throat, lashes twitching against her cheek. "...for you."

Ky withdrew and patted his forehead with a sticky palm, leaving a smear of red human blood upon his skin and sniffing miserably. “Then you are a fool.”

"No fool." He grasped her wrist with bruising pressure, the knot of his neck bobbing as he swallowed hard. “I see you, Ky—I love you—I think—maybe I’ve always loved you—even before—I knew you. You promised—what… what are we? What am I—”

Ky's throat tightened and she pressed her palm to his forehead again.

But he continued to work his jaw, brows wrinkling under her fingers.

His eyes demanded hers.

She shivered.

He was splintered, perhaps beyond mending, and he knew it. If there had ever been any hope to spare him suffering by her absence, it had perished with the pretty sword. No further harm could come from such a simple thing, and Ky found she could no longer refuse him.

He wanted her to say it.

To hear it, before...

"You are my Ember," she gasped, her voice breaking beyond all doubt, "and I love you!"

He relaxed beneath her fingertips, some of the creases melting from his face, and sighed. The long breath hitched as his body spasmed, tears of pain streaking his temples.

I love you.

He shaped the words without a sound.

"Sleep," Ky begged, and she sang for him once more as he drifted into another world—a world she had glimpsed but once.

His hidden world of dreams.

Ky rolled the damp fabric out of the way and poked the rift in Ember's flesh, swallowing hard. She had glimpsed the insides of a man many times, seen their entrails unraveled. She knew each curve and contour of their inwards, every place where flesh met cracking bone. But never had she attempted to put it to rights.

She could dismantle him in the blinking of an eye.

To remake such a rift…

Cold fear swept through her as a soft breeze rattled the leaves overhead and whispered through the rushes. She traced the wicked wound once more, and then hummed a few experimental notes, wriggling her finger deeper into the crevice. Closing her eyes, Ky found the place where the many voices of the earth touched her waking mind, and anxiously licked her lips.

The sirens had no gods, and so she sent a prayer to Ember’s maker—for though he must despise her, in all her wretchedness, perhaps he would take pity upon a son of men.

❧

As the first word fell from Ky's tongue, time ceased to move forward in a steady measure. Hours passed in moments, yet each moment was its own encapsulation of eternity. His shape was constantly before her, and she crooned to it and fashioned it as best she knew, occasionally reaching back into her mind to recall what the form of a man should be within as well as without, remembering the touch of his soul when they embraced within a dream.

But there were other things which captured her thoughts—things which she did not have readily before her.

His wistful smile. His ready laugh. The way his eyes came alive when she tossed her hair, his huffed sighs when he was dismayed with her, or the careful, uncertain sounds of his earthy voice when he had once dared to join her song. There were moments when Ky would not have known herself apart from Ember, for her thoughts were so full of him, and her tongue prattled so eloquently of that which he was and must be again, that her self was all but forgotten.

Slowly, yet certainly, like the coming in of an evening tide, his inwards began to recall their proper shape—for as with every living thing, it never truly could forget what it was meant to be.

Nonetheless, Ky struggled.

Her fingers slickened with slime and gore and her throat grew hoarse with convoluted enchantments, for men were far more fragile than her kind; their bodies did not reshape themselves so quickly, nor so easily, and she did not know Ember so well as she knew herself in this way.

Only once did she pause her makeshift rites and rituals, and then only to assess what had been mended and listen intently to the song of Ember's flesh, that she might not err in her further shapings. The sundered place cried out in wordless agony, which grieved her so that her own heart spasmed with every twinge and flinch beneath her fingers.

When she returned to her siren song, she was startled to find that the melody had escaped her, and sat in a distant silence. The scattered flecks of moonlight seemed to brighten, and Ky shifted her gaze to Ember's chest.

Something glowed dimly beneath the cloth…

Faint, but present.

She pressed her palm against it, snuffling and blinking, and curled her claws. He shifted, eyelids twitching in dreams, and sighed quietly. The gentle light spread beneath her fingers, swirling outward from his beating heart and suffusing the surface of his skin. Soft. Warm. Familiar.

Ember.

The serene presence swirled beneath the frayed edges of his tunic, flowing through the delicate veins in the crooks of his arms and kissing his neck and temples—half-drowned by the dappled moonlight, but infinitely more precious and visible to her faltering senses.

She jolted awake at the memory of his naked soul wreathed in shadows.

Had she lost him already?

“Wait—don’t go!” Ky rasped, returning her attention to the sticky wound. “Do not go away from me, Ember—please, don’t leave me here alone!”

She brushed the thickening cruor away, cursing and praying in the siren tongue. Fresh blood oozed over her fingers, casting a reddish glow through the webbing of her palm. Her fingers appeared luminous beneath the stars; when she twitched them, little drops of phosphorescent blood spattered across Ember's tunic and the dry leaves of grass.

A swift shiver passed through her and was gone—like the wind in the reeds—before she could ascertain its meaning. As the light of Ember's soul receded into his chest, Ky clenched her fingers, watching the glow ebb from her bloody skin.

The gore shimmered in the moonlight, dark and ordinary.

She listened.

Ember drew one soft breath.

And then another.

Content in the assurance that he had not flown beyond her reach, Ky hastily gathered the fraying threads of magic in her mind and fashioned them into a fresh melody.