“Aerax.” Her voice was a ragged whisper in his ear. “To the end of my days, I will love you. I promise you that.”
No sweeter promise could she have made. But pain filled his chest, because Aerax heard what else it was.
A farewell.
“Not yet,” he said, voice raw. Tomorrow they would be strangers. But not yet. “Stay a little longer.”
With her cheek pressed to his, she nodded, her arms tightening before she drew back to kiss him.
Aerax had wondered how many times a man’s heart could be ripped from his chest. Now Lizzan did with every kiss, each one sweet and hot and quick, as if she meant to fill up a lifetime of kisses, as if she knew each one might be their last, as if it were too painful to stop because that meant she would go.
Until it became too painful for her to stay. With a sobbing breath, she pulled out of his arms—and it took all of Aerax’s strength to let her leave. She kissed Caeb, and then, slinging her red cloak around her shoulders, she vanished through the steam.
Aerax closed burning eyes, jaw clenched against the howl of agony building in his chest. Not even an eternity spent soaking in these healing baths could repair a heart in shreds. The only remedy was being with her again.
Voice hoarse, he told Caeb, “Recall to me again why we do not go after her?”
The cat only rubbed his head against Aerax’s, so it was he who had to remember the thousands in torment, whose pain was the foundation of all that Koth pretended to be, and who must be freed.
But there was hope. She had given it to him.
“This may end in separation now, but when it is done, we will find her,” he vowed to Caeb. “There is nowhere she can go that we will not follow. To the ends of the world, we will hunt her.”
With a rumbling purr and a rough lick to Aerax’s cheek, the cat agreed.
CHAPTER 14
LIZZAN
After her exile, Lizzan’s first destination had been Oana. She’d had no true desire to go. Heartbroken, she’d had no true desire to do anything. So when a fellow traveler had said the baths might heal the wounds on her face, Lizzan had not cared—but Oana had seemed as fair a place as any other.
The journey south by the mountain road had taken two full turns of the moon. By then the scabs had cleared, leaving behind livid and painful scars. By then the marks had been mistaken for Vela’s curse often enough that she’d wanted them gone.
But the baths had not healed her wounds. The journey had taken too long for that. Instead the baths had healed the scars, and Lizzan had emerged from the water with the white marks she still bore.
It seemed that everything she’d ever done had taken too long. She had waited too long to pledge herself to Aerax, and so the red fever had separated them. She’d spent too long serving Koth and believing that their future together would sort itself out. And she had spent too long running from him, because his betrayal had still been an open wound, and she hadn’t known he could heal it.
Now there was no time left. And only scars remained, still livid and painful, in ragged slashes across her heart.
Once, Lizzan might have dulled them with ale. No more could she. Still, she spent the hours before dawn in a dark corner of the inn’s public room with the comfort of a drink in her hands—and except for the ache in her chest that kept clogging up her throat, she felt finer than she had since leaving Koth. As if the baths had erased from her body the years she’d spent on the road and sleeping in whatever spot she could find.
She could have done without the clarity of mind that came with it. Especially now, in the quiet and the dark while everyone else slept. Never did Lizzan like to be left to her own thoughts. Too quickly they became jagged knives trapped within her skull, sawing away at everything inside her.
Relief and distraction came near sunrise. The innkeeper began flitting between the tables, where the guests who had not taken a room—or had not made it to their beds—snored away the night’s revelry. They awoke with groans and complaints of pounding heads, and at the innkeeper’s suggestion, most abandoned the public room for the