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“I need my blades. Give me my blades.” The snarl that I put on so often was barely more than a whisper. He didn’t even flinch. He put the cloth on my abdomen again and sat back, the muscles in his arms bulging and flexing as he crossed them over his chest.
“Don’t you worry about them. They’re kept safe until you have need of them.”
“I have need of them now.”
“You can barely move. Why exactly do you have need of weapons for at this moment?” he mused, rubbing his jaw as his smile finally faded underneath the intense look he was giving me. I opened my mouth to respond, but he and I both knew I had no answer.
“Tell me, stranger, what is your name?”
“Caspyn.” I spoke the word before I could think better of it, my true name out for the first time outside of my Qit. I had never given it, not once. Perhaps he had laced the water with something.
“Good name. Strong name. Do you know what it means?” He leaned in. I refused to answer no, even if something was pulling me to do so.
“It means nothing,” the words growled out of me as though they had truly been pulled from me. “Names are just names.”
A pain lanced through my gut that wasn’t from the hole there. I had used that exact phrasing with Tilny just the other day.
“All names have meaning, yours has more than you know, in fact.” He paused, those dark eyes still looking me over as though he was going to find some answer on my flesh. “Your name means Light.”
I nearly laughed at that. Lightens were truly delusional. Did he see me? Nothing about me was light. Nothing about me would ever be light. Well, unless you counted the fact that I planned to snuff out the light of the Queen, destroy that power of Lôt that they all had. That was the closest I would ever be to light.
“I was named after the lilies that grow on the river's surface,” my voice caught as saying her name snagged something in my chest.
For the first time, the man didn’t smile, it was as though he somehow understood. As though I admitted more than my attachment to the damn flower. Shifting my weight, I tried to escape the gaze that was digging into me, if only there was somewhere to go that wouldn’t cause me extreme pain.
“Gorgeous flowers. Legend says that those flowers swallowed the sun on the night the sister faced the Goddess to destroy the world, and it is only because they saved the sun that we still have light in our world.” He waited for me to answer. I gave him nothing more than a snarl in return.
“Have you seen them?” he said after a moment and I forced myself to shake my head ‘no’ in response. “You will. I have a feeling you will.”
I was sure he wanted me to say something, to give some response, but I laid there, a twist of warning coiling up my spine as I stared at him and his damned smile.
“You know, we have a story about Light–”
“I don’t want to hear it.” I cut him off with a snarl. If I had thought that would stop him, I was a fool. He sat back in his chair again, those tattoos glittering as he folded his arms over his chest.
“There is a story that was told by an old woman, about how three pillars of light will rise up and face one another to make a new world. About how one pillar will banish, one will fall, and one will save.”
“Let me guess, you are going to tell me I am one of those pillars.” I nearly spat the words, not even bothering to hide my laugh. “My name meaning light means nothing more than that my mother liked a pretty flower. Names mean nothing.”
I used a different phrase that time, but that twist of loss still sprang through me.
“If you say so.” The man needed to stop smiling. “But I think you will find out the truth of that on your own.”
There was no pull of magic or Fae from him that would warn when danger was prowling closer, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous. Something was off about him, but not just him, all of them. Anytime I had gotten close to the Lightens I had known something was off. That feeling was only stronger now.
Damn Lightens.
How could I have let this happen? I never got injured, in all my years I have never been cut any deeper than bone and thanks to my magic had healed within days. But this… I tried to move again, the man shaking his hand and replacing the cloth as I yelled out in pain.
“Rest, you cannot heal without rest…”
“You don’t understand….” I grit the words out as I tried to sit, he placed his hands against my collar bone and pressed me back down. He didn’t place more than a pinpoint of pressure, but even with that slight touch I couldn’t move.
“Tell me what I don’t understand,” he said, that friendly tone deepening as he leaned over me, that light touch still against my collar bone.
“I need to reach the princess; I need to see the Queen.” Again, it felt as if the words had been pulled from me.
“You need to reach the princess. Interesting.”
