Oleander

XVIII. Chosen (part one)

The sun carried her.

In its bright hold, pain returned.

Her head. Her chest. Her arms.

And then sound.

Voices as if underwater.

She opened her eyes.

It was not the sun that cradled her, but Andar of Tyr. His face was above hers, furious and burning and shouting. His bronze armor gleamed in raw daylight.

No. She watched orange and gold flicker upon it. Not daylight.

The world was on fire.

But that was wrong too.

For it was not aflame, but aglow. Her sight was slow to focus. In the street that should have been empty and dark, hundreds held candles and torches. Flaming tongues of bright light illuminated the doorframe. Mathais was before it, poised with a spear as if waiting for monsters and beasts to break through its threshold. In his guardian's shadow, her priestesses cowered, prayed, and wept as they moved through the routines of healing.

Andar's shouts became words. A word.

"Yalira!"

Yalira returned her gaze to the man who felt too large in the infirmary he had built for them.

"What have you done?"

"I—"

If she had not been trapped in his armored embrace, the weight of her returning memories might have felled her. Hopelessness, desperation, submission. Nightshade and oleander.

"Where is Tala?" Her voice scratched out words, her lips cracked and bled.

Andar's jaw clenched.

Silence was enough.

The sorrow of her people made sense, then. Another priestess lost.

But it was more than grief. Yalira watched their faces, their trembling mouths as they recited prayers that would not save them. It hadn't mattered that she'd surrendered, that she'd embraced the dark unknown. Antala, Eheia—it did not matter. Death still waited.

The torchlight shifted and its eerie glow cast sharp shadows into Andar's narrowed gaze. Yalira returned it with her own accusation.

"You said we had until sunrise"

"I did not start this." His words were acidic as he gestured to the heavy presence of beckoning torches. "You did."

Yalira twisted out of Andar's grasp to gain a better view. Reaching the window, she realized it was not the line of executioners she had feared, not the fiery dawn. It was the people, hundreds gathered. Dread did not abate.

Their lit faces, hollow and shadowed, were hungry, searching.

"What have you done?"

Andar's voice, rough across the silence, was anchoring.

"I—"

What had she done? A desperate descent into familiar bondage? She could not make words leave her throat. Despite the spirit and fire she'd dedicated to liberating herself, it had been so easy to freefall into the shackles of tradition. How could it have seemed so simple when it felt so foolish now?

The twenty-seventh chosen to die. Herb-addled.

"Yalira." Andar was softer An unfamiliar thread of doubt touched his words that made her blood shiver. "They say you breathed life into the dead."