Page 86 of Hearts Lost

“Don’t you dare call me lady!” Arryn screams. “I don’t care what kind of magic you have! You don’t even know if it works in the Worlds Above—”

Someone tugs on my shoulder. I turn around and see Phaedron tilting his head at the door. Orryen, Elanerill, and I excuse ourselves from the table as Arryn and Rowan yell at each other, and Phaedron opens the door for us. I pull my hood up against the ice raining down from the ceiling of the world as Phaedron closes the cabin door behind me, which does very little to shut out the screaming argument raging behind us.

“I’m sorry about this,” I say to Phaedron as the door to his cabin slams shut. “I’m not bringing your brother to my parents.”

Phaedron sighs. “Yeah,” he replies. “You are.”

I open my mouth to argue, but Phaedron shakes his head and cuts me off.

“I knew it from the moment you said Rensivar,” Phaedron continues. “Rowan went into the void as a kid, you know. Nothing scares him. There’s no way he’d pass this up.”

There’s a cracking sound from inside the cabin, like a plate shattering against a table. Elanerill jumps and Orryen reaches for her hand.

“Come with me to the pub?” Phaedron asks.

“Yeah, let’s give them some space,” Orryen replies.

Phaedron nods, then pushes his hood back and rolls his head. The air around him shimmers somehow, like a fire throwing off heat and distorting the light, and then he gives us a hesitant sort of smile.

“What do you think?” Phaedron asks.

It takes me a minute to realize what he’s talking about because he looks exactly like the Phaedron I remember. The Phaedron who had both arms, back before the monster prince from the Worlds Above attacked him.

Right. As I try not to stare too openly at the new arm that’s just appeared on Phaedron’s right side, I dimly remember reading somewhere in his mountain of application paperwork that Phaedron’s magic is illusions. I glance at Orryen, and we exchange a nervous sort of half-smile. Orryen is the first to recover his bearings, of course.

“Wow,” Orryen says. “Looks great.”

There’s a pained twist to Orryen’s smile, and his voice is just slightly too high, but Phaedron doesn’t seem to notice. He pulls his hood back up over his head and turns toward the well-worn path through the snow that leads to the World’s End’s sad little pub in the center of their sad little town.

I catch Orryen’s eye; he shrugs as if he’s dismissing the matter entirely. And he’s right, of course. There’s something sad about Phaedron creating an illusion to replace his lost right arm, even if the illusion does look almost real. Hells, there’s always been something sad about Phaedron, with his bone-deep loyalty to his loser of a brother and his constantly rejected applications to join the Royal Guard. Losing his sword arm to a monster from the Worlds Above was bad enough, but covering it up with an illusion somehow makes it even worse. I shake my head, trying to dismiss that thought, and then hope to the voids that I haven’t been barred for life from the World’s End pub.

Happily, the stout older man behind the counter gives me the exact same scowl he gives everyone else, and I sip a dirty glass of cold water while Phaedron, Orryen, and Elanerill share a pitcher of sour ale. Phaedron wears his illusion arm the entire time, although everyone in the gritty little pub is too polite to mention it, and the four of us make stilted small talk about life in the Crystal City until the pitcher goes dry.

The ice is still falling as we head back to Phaedron and Rowan’s little shack, but not even the sound of ice hitting our hoods and pinging off the dead trees lining the path can cover the screaming that’s still echoing out of the Evenworth brothers’ cabin.

“Voids,” I grumble. “They’re still fighting?”

Elanerill makes a discreet little coughing sound, and I realize my mistake with a flush of heat across my cheeks. Yes, Rowan and Arryn are screaming. But they’re not fighting. For a heartbeat, the rhythmic gasps and cries coming from the little cabin make me think of Ithronel, of her hands bound above her head, her eyes closed and her head thrown back, and something deep inside of my chest feels like it’s bleeding onto the dirty snow beneath my boots.

“You know,” Orryen says, conversationally, as he turns to Phaedron, “the next time I’m in the Crystal City, I could pick you up some earplugs.”

“That would be much appreciated,” Phaedron replies.

The screams intensify, then collapse in a long, slow moan. A moment later there’s another, deeper cry, almost a growl, and I cover my face with my hand. I could have gone my entire life without hearing Rowan Sans Evenworth climax, and I would have had no complaints. No complaints at all. After a few moments of awkward shuffling on the ice outside the cabin, Phaedron bangs on the door.

“Yeah, yeah, on my way,” Rowan replies.

The door swings open. Rowan stands in the doorway, his shirt rumpled, his traveling cloak fastened around his shoulders, and his cheeks glowing. Arryn has her arm around his waist. Her eyes are red and puffy and her dress is wrinkled, but there’s something undeniably fierce in her expression, and for some odd reason it occurs to me that she might be tougher than she appears. Tougher, and perhaps smarter too.

“Well,” Rowan announces, with a grin. “Let’s go fuck this dragon up.”

“Absolutely not,” I reply.

Rowan’s smile contracts.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I continue, “but there’s no way in the nine hells I’m turning you over to my family or to the dragon. We came out here to warn you, Rowan, not to bring you back with us.”

Rowan tilts his head to the side and gives me another infuriating grin.