*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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Reality returns in a shuddering gasp, a breath after a break in the water, raw and cold. The old scar on her sternum twitches and spasms in protest as she half-kneels, half-falls, fingers on floorboards and dust, head bent low.
Her mind is stuttering through them, these memories that have been rifled through, and they're just flashes of feeling as her forehead presses against the wood grain.
She heaves, dry and choking, nails scratching on the hard surface, and her eyes shut against the way the room spins.
Mistake, is the only word she can formulate, even in thought. Mistake.
There's the sudden pressure of firm hands on her midsection, hands that haul her up even as she resists, pull her and grab hold of her face, her forehead.
"What did you do?" he asks, voice low to hide from unseen passersby but hissing in alarm. "What happened? Are you alright?"
Obviously not, she thinks but only heaves again, her body breaking out into cold shivers as he gathers her close, holding her upright when she would rather fall.
She can tell by the way his fingers grasp and dig that Lei is trying to decide if he should raise the alarm. If they should send a rider to a doctor, or to Ruben, and her hand grasps for his wrist, clutching at the bracelet dangling there and Skilling two dots on its surface. The hand in her hair tenses.
"I need you to talk to me," he tells her quietly, and she tries to nod, her clammy forehead hitting against his neck.
"F-found Is-Isati," she chokes, and his grip tightens.
The shuttering of images is slowing, the room evening out as she uses him as an anchor, a thread back to the present.
"Bad idea," she admits, her stomach still roiling as she bends her head down against the wave of nausea.
"You were supposed to wait until the morning," he hisses. "You were supposed to wait until I was here."
That is what she implied, what he had requested when he asked her to go to their bed. But the bed had been so small, and time had been seeping through their fingers.
"Bad idea," she agrees again, and she hangs over the ledge of his forearms, hand braced once more against the floor.
Lei half-carries, half-walks her back to their room, mouth curdled into a thin line. He bolts the door shut when they get in, and sets her down none too gently on the tangle of sheets and blankets, throwing some over her as she curls up on her side.
She hears the light sizzle out and then the creak of him settling down too, and it's only in the dark, after a long stretch of angry huffing, that she feels his fingers brush the hair away from her face.
In the morning he barely glances at her when he heaves out of bed, the bathroom door clicking shut smartly behind him. Allayria finds herself too worn and perhaps a touch too understanding to be irritated by this; the room continues to lurch oddly if she tries to sit up too fast.
When Lei returns his mouth is still pursed into a sharp line, and his face wears an expression of grim determination that has never boded well for her. He sits on the edge of the bed next to her, taking in a long inhale, and then saying:
"Explain."
"The first time I went in, I found something of Isati's," she admits to the ceiling. She has a forearm thrown across her eyes—only because the light is too bright from the window—and her other arm is wrapped around her stomach.
She tells him about the memory.
"When I went back in last night, she seemed to sense it," she says after a long stretch of silence. "And she—she did something."
"What?" he demands, and when Allayria lifts her arm she sees his hand fisted in the sheets, white-knuckled.
"I think," she says slowly, putting these vague suspicions into words, "she did to me what she had done to all the prisoners."
"You don't have the plates in your head," Lei quickly protests. "She shouldn't be able to—"
"I was connected to the network, even if it was through Spirit Skilling," Allayria replies. This too is where she had faltered, wondered, but the more she sorted out the nauseatingly fractured images the more she thought it might not matter, that her touch on the creature's forehead was all the contact needed. "But I think because of that, because I didn't directly touch the metal, the link went... weird after a while. She pushed back into my memories but the connection was fractured, like yelling through a windstorm. It was just flashes of things and then it sort of... broke and she threw me out."
Lei leans forward onto his knees, the line of his back a clean arch in the sunlight, and his head turns a little, almost tilting back toward her.
"Did she see anything sensitive?"
Ben's face flickers in her mind, and then the shapeless room that never existed.
"No," she decides, though this feels like a lie, but these are things Lei did not mean when he asked about sensitivity. He would be thinking of plans and strategies, not secrets of the heart.
There's another long stretch of silence, where he threads his fingers together, clasped, like in prayer, off the ledge of his knees.
"Do you think you could do the same thing to her?"
Something cold slices in her, frigid with the memory of what it had felt like, to have the last safe place violated.
"Of course I should be able to," she replies, as if this means nothing at all. "I am the Paragon."
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A/N: Hi everyone! Early posting as I will be off gallivanting around this weekend. Got to go pack, but wanted to drop this off for everyone before I did.
Next chapter is a new POV for this book and features some dearly-missed people... :)
Chapter notes: The bracelets are back! Allayria first gives Lei his in Partisan's "Map of Consequences" chapter.
