Chapter 145 MILK OF THE POPPY

Chapter 145 MILK OF THE POPPY
I pressed my lips together and said nothing. Kai followed her to get the milk and spoke to her quietly in the corridor for a moment. 

He said he would be back with the medicine.

He left.

The room was quiet.

I looked at my bandaged ankle and tried to understand the situation I was in.

I pressed my hand flat against the mattress.

There was something wrong with me apart from my ankle and my head injury even the missing memories. Something underneath all of that, a hole in my chest in the same place an ache lived, the ache that had been there since I woke up. 

I thought about going home.

My mother would make honey cake. Selene would talk too fast and ask too many questions. The house would smell like it always did and everything would be exactly as I remembered it. I thought about Kai’s hand on my cheek.

I thought about the flutter.

I looked at the door he had gone through and felt something shift in my chest.

The door opened and he came back in with the small bottle of the milk and a glass of water and sat on the edge of the bed. He held both out to me, I took them and drank the milk then handed the glass back and he set it on the small table and remained where he was, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him. The milk tasted a bit sour, like ale.

“Thank you,” I smiled.

He looked at me for a moment. “Don’t thank me.”

“You’ve been here every day,” I said. “You wrote to my mother. You’re getting medicine and reading books and—” I stopped. “You don’t have to do all of this, Kai.”

He looked at me with those green eyes and said nothing for a moment.

“I know I don’t have to,” he said finally.

The medicine was beginning to work… a slight softening at the edges of the ankle pain, the sharp pain began to dull, the dull becoming manageable. I felt the tiredness that followed it, my body taking the opportunity of reduced pain to remind me how much of my energy had been spent on managing the pain before it was reduced.

“I think something is pulling me out at night,” I said quietly. “I know that’s not something that makes sense. I know I’m supposed to be sleep walking. But it doesn’t feel like sleep walking. It feels like—” I stopped. “Like something is calling me somewhere. And I can’t hear it when I’m awake but I can hear it when I’m asleep.”

Kai was very still.

“Where do you think it’s calling you to?” he asked carefully.

I looked at the window.

“The field,” I said. “Every time you mention the field I feel it. That reaching feeling. Like something there is connected to the thing I can’t get to.” I pressed my hand to my chest. “And connected to this.”

Kai looked at my hand against my chest and his expression changed. 

“Rest,” he said, and his voice was quieter than it had been. “The milk will help. Rest and don’t fight it.”

I lay back against the pillow.

He stayed where he was on the edge of the bed, and my eyes grew heavier with each passing second.  I closed my eyes, and the last thing I was aware of was the growing uncertainty and fear of not knowing what was happening around me and to me.

KAI

I could not focus.

Ser Thorian’s voice moved through the lecture hall with its usual authority, his hands gesturing toward the illustrations displayed on the board behind him, bond formation diagrams, the technical breakdown of how a dragon and rider’s emotional states influenced each other during high-stress flight. Information I had studied before, understood before. None of it was entering.

I was thinking about the letter.

It sat in my pocket, folded, the paper worn at the edges from the number of times I had taken it out and put it back in the past several hours. I could feel the weight of it against my leg even now. My mother had intended to leave with me.

She had felt betrayed. She had been in enough pain to write those words ‘I will never forgive you’and then she had gone into the realm of magic while pregnant.

A hand went up on the left side of the hall.

I turned my head. Calista.

She stood when Ser Thorian acknowledged her, and her voice when she spoke was leveled “When will the grounding be lifted?” she asked. “It has been months since any of us have been able to take our dragons out of the roosts. This cannot be healthy for them, or for us.”

The hall responded immediately, she had said out loud the thing that a large number of people have been thinking privately, the swell of disorganized agreement. I looked at my father.

He watched the agreement move through the hall “That is a question I cannot answer at the moment,” he replied, and his voice carried through the room without effort. “As you all know, there is a growing threat that puts your dragons and your bonds at serious risk.”

“The same threat that cost Lyra her memories,” someone said, loudly, from somewhere in the middle of the hall.

The silence that followed was loud. Then the room broke open.

I listened to it happen…the voices overlapping, each one carrying a different version of the same fear  and I felt something shift in my chest. 

“If even a powerful storm rider could fall victim to this plague then what security have any of us?”

“Even Zephyr has not fully recovered either”

“Is Aerthwind Academy under some sort of curse?”

“The other academies have not reported any such afflictions, what does that mean for the rest of us?”