Chapter 123: Chapter One Hundred and Twenty One: Distance Between
The fire dancers, lean and savage, painted circlets of red and orange around the darkening dusk, the air held the very essence of joy and festival spirit.
But Alarion was cold.
The Crowned Prince sat by the side of the King— a privilege, beyond doubt, a gold-gilded prison— and followed the merriment with an air of enforced restraint. His chair, carved out of heavy wood, and with carved stone armrests, had been cold where his fingers touched it, as though his blood were cold itself. He hadn't allowed anyone to sit beside him. Not Amora, who had cast longing, speculative glances his way.
He had saved that space. He had saved it for Kaelia.
But Kaelia had refused, gently, of course, with that soft, hesitant smile that never quite reached her eyes lately, and words too polite to sting, though they still managed to stab. “I’m not ready for that kind of attention, Alarion.” That's what her words meant.
Alarion had nodded, a practiced, almost imperceptible dip of his head designed to convey indifference. Like it didn’t matter. Like it didn’t quietly, painfully gut him, leaving him hollowed out in the heart of a celebration.
Now, Kaelia was across the courtyard, cloaked not in shadows, but in the vibrant, easy aura of genuine laughter. She was near the fire dancers, where the light rippled and flickered, playing across his silver smile like liquid moonlight. Aaron leaned close, his shoulders shaking with silent mirth as he whispered something. A joke, undoubtedly. Kaelia’s head tilted back, her throat bared in unselfconscious joy, her laugh, that free, bright sound that Alarion used to hear directed only at him – soared for a moment, then was lost in the pulse of ancestral drums.
Alarion's fingers curled, digging white crescents into the cold stone armrest.
It wasn’t jealousy. Not truly. He trusted Aaron with his life, with Kaelia’s life. But there was something in the way Kaelia smiled tonight – unburdened, youthful, a wild grace that hadn’t been present in weeks – that Alarion had longed to see aimed at him. Not from across a crowded yard. Not from behind a polite refusal that had built a wall between them.
“I just wanted her close,” Alarion thought, his eyes, like a prisoner behind glass, tracking Kaelia’s every movement, every flicker of emotion on her face. “I wanted her here, where she belongs. With me.”
The sweet reek of roast meat, mulled wine and the sweet nausea-inducing fragrance of honeyed pastry scented through, normally even enough to make an alpha hungry, but Alarion was barely aware of it. His stomach was one tight knot of longing and frustration.
The floating lavender lanterns, moved by a second magician swathed in midnight blue, mocked at flocks of migrating birds. They soared in their silent patterns over Kaelia in the air, casting flitting and shifting light upon her in a way that turned her hair silver.
The commentator’s voice, loud and cheeky, boomed over the courtyard, cutting through Alarion's quiet despair. “Ladies and gentlemen, even the spirits of our ancestors are rising to catch a glimpse of tonight’s beauty! Don’t blink or you’ll miss your future mate!”
A wave of drunken, hopeful laughter echoed across the square.
Kaelia smiled again, a broad, easy smile, which wrinkled the eyes. Aaron clapped, leaned forward again, and Kaelia elbowed him in a friendly way that had Alarion grinding his teeth.
“How did you learn to laugh that way without me?” A stab of thought, a sudden, shocking hurt, a soreness deep down inside Alarion's chest, not wrath, but intolerable desire, a remembering of something that was gone.
Alarion turned aside, and stared at the motionless beings on the stage. Even so he remained sitting, with his mask of inner strength, the face of the prince indomitable. Watching. Waiting. He knew not what, for. To get over with the night? So that Kaelia would look at him?
There was a change in the wind.
It was not wind. It was not the leftover magic of the illusionists. It was more precise, more fundamental, than a stream or a current that wound and turned through the very depths of the yard. Suddenly there arose a hushed denial, something swift and breathless, which passed over the whole space as though everything living, everything breathing, everything pulsing in heart had ceased.
There was a sound made, a ringing bell, not with a loud note, but on its very subtlest strings, in the depths of the hollows of Alarion bones, a note that was a voice and a voice that was a sound. It's persistent… and seems to be in everyone's head.
He stood up, slowly, unconsciously, his heart sinking with a foreboding. Everywhere heads were turned, with one accord, to the very center of the courtyard. The lights hanging above then appeared to darken unconsciously something imperceptible, and long restless shadows fell.
Even Kaelia was motionless, her laughter subsiding to a sort of reverent silence. Aaron, beside her, had gone rigid, his eyes wide.
Something was coming. Something profound.
The chatter died completely, strangled in a collective intake of breath.