BMT belongs to Trudi Canavan

Chapter 27 Sachaka

"Halt!" Lord Balkan barked loudly as the solemn, mounted party reached a wider clearing in the looping path that traversed the mountainside.

Despite the gravity of their errand, communal relief emanated from the members of the escort as they slithered from their horses to rest a short while and take food. Whilst horse riding was a common enough pass-time amongst magicians, riding such a distance was not something many did often, and even with their ability to heal away fatigue and pain, the Warrior guards' collective posture of easing locked muscles radiated mute thankfulness at the reprieve. But none looked more relieved than Sonea to dismount from her horse.

Akkarin's eyes slid in the direction of his former novice and he noticed the gingerness of her movements and the pain on her face as her limbs adjusted to being on solid ground once more, and he frowned, looking quickly away. His resolve to ignore Sonea, thereby making her feel unwanted and unneeded by him, had remained steadfast, though he was sorely tested whenever she made tentative, uncertain attempts to draw near and talk with him.

In those moments, when his black eyes flashed at hers, Akkarin saw what his unspoken anger did to Sonea, and he inwardly flinched at the hurt in her open features. Yet in rebuffing her attempts to bridge the gulf between them, Akkarin had hope; hope that his plan might just work. That Sonea would accept the Guild's offer to return to Imardin when it came. And it would come - Akkarin glanced at Osen as he handed Sonea some food- the former High Lord was sure of that.

But his hope; his hope was at odds with the fear of hope fulfilled. If Sonea returned to Imardin with the others, he would be alone, and Akkarin knew with grim foresight that it would be a kind of aloneness he had never felt before. Yet if it meant removing Sonea from immediate danger, he would do it; he would maintain his steeliness towards her, and, indeed, it was borne out of a true implacability of rage at her recklessness.

Her damn, reckless, stupid courage. Akkarin was still furious with Sonea, but it had become a flat, blunted anger. The eruption was over, the fires burned down to ashen coals; doused with the wondrous uncertainty of why Sonea had done what she had done.

Akkarin's frown deepened. He had tried not to think about Sonea's motives, recognising the tortuous futility of such ponderings; they were both highly likely to die, whatever happened. Life, and all the things it brought with it, was beyond him now. All that was left to him was to do the best he could to protect all those he loved whilst he still lived; there was nothing more for him now. Nothing at all.

Taking the food offered by one of the Warriors, Akkarin moved as far as he dare away from the others, to the outward edge of the path that afforded a view of the landscape below. He felt all eyes heavy on him as he stared fixedly at something he knew he would not see for much longer: Kyralia.

They were high up in the pass, not far from the Fort, and the land lay sprawled beneath them, so different to what awaited them on the other side of the mountains, Akkarin knew.

The scene was pastoral – a softness of valleys and low peaks shading one behind the next like the shadows of shadows, all of it as tranquil as birdsong. And there, lingering in the sky and barely visible, was the moon. The Eye. A ghost moon, all but vanished by the brightness of the sun, but there, watching nonetheless.

"I see what happens here," she might have taunted. "And I laugh."

As he studied the view, the black magician's eyes narrowed in bitterness, and the pain of exile and injustice felt like a hole in the pit of his stomach.

"We will reach the Fort – and the border - by nightfall. "

Akkarin started as a familiar voice broke his resentful musings. He turned to see Balkan approaching him, a thoughtful, and not unkind, expression on the warrior's face; it could almost have been pity. Akkarin scowled and returned to the view.

"I hope, for your sake, as well as ours, that your story was indeed untrue," the warrior continued quietly as he drew near to the former High Lord. "If there was truth in it, then the Wastes of Sachaka will present a dangerous challenge." Balkan glanced over his shoulder at Sonea as she drank her watered wine. "For both of you," he added grimly.

Akkarin's jaw tightened convulsively as he followed Balkan's glance.

"And yet, someone has to take on the challenge," the former High Lord responded darkly. " Someone has to do battle, or this war will be over before you even have time to appoint a new High Lord; and this time, the Guild will not be the victors." Akkarin spoke in a low, scathing voice, not turning to even look at the Head of Warriors beside him.

The red-robed man frowned angrily. "And what started this war, or who, Akkarin; answer me that? If, indeed, a war it proves to be. Maybe if you hadn't ventured into Sachaka, these Ichani ," and the older man's eyes flashed , " – if they exist - may not have had their interest in the Guild piqued."

Balkan's voice rose accusingly and with an effort he sought to control it, mindful of the surreptitious glances of the other magicians milling around close by.

"If you had not killed one of them, "he quietly seethed, "then they may have remained content to ignore the Guild and continue on as they have done since the Sachakan War."

Akkarin finally looked up sharply to meet Balkan's hard stare and moved a step closer to him, his eyes wide and dilated to utter blackness. Balkan shifted uneasily.

"You believe me, don't you?" The former Guild leader asked with soft incredulity. "And yet, you will deliver me, and her, into their hands, so that the King's cowardly tacit sentence can be meted out by our enemies!"

The escort party behind them began to ready themselves for the remainder of the journey, and Balkan glanced at a concerned looking Osen who was watching the two men carefully. The Head of Warriors gave the assistant Administrator what he hoped was a reassuring look.

"It doesn't matter what I believe, "the warrior said under his breath as he leaned forwards" - not now; not anymore. Just ...be careful, Akkarin."

The black magician snorted derisively but Balkan ignored him and continued.

"Someone once said – 'Battle not with monsters lest you become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you'." * Balkan frowned and looked distractedly into the distance. "I forget who." His gaze snapped back to Akkarin's. "But you would have done well to heed it. Now, perhaps it is too late, for all of us."

The former High Lord's face hardened and his eyes blazed with a cold light."Have you ever asked yourself, Balkan – Head of Warriors as you are – do monsters make war, or does war make monsters? The Ichani are a cruel people, yes, but we shamefully left Sachaka and its people, many of them blameless, in a hopeless state after we won the Sachakan war. When people are desperate and destitute, it breeds resentment and they will look for retribution wherever they can find it. "Akkarin's jaw clenched and he spoke softly through his teeth.

"Do not be so quick to make accusations, Lord Balkan," the exiled magician continued, all but spitting the Head of Warriors own name at him in contempt. He then leaned forwards, tall and formidable, and there was a dark, desperate desolation about him.

"I have seen things, Balkan; things that rip out the soul and make space for beasts to grow inside." Akkarin's voice was a hiss of bitterness and pain, and Balkan stared into his black, black glittering eyes, unable to tear his own away, and it felt like drowning in dark waters.

"And countries need beasts, don't they?" Akkarin asked rhetorically with a macabre twist of a smile. "Pet monsters, to do their terrible work for them." His voice lowered, deep and rolling like the ocean, and his words broke with a harsh whisper in the red-robed man's ear.

"And do you know the worst part?" Akkarin persisted bitterly. "It is impossible to retrieve a soul that has been ripped away."

The strange pathos of the former High Lord gripped Balkan, forcing to the surface an instinctive surge of pity.

"But maybe it can be done, if ever...-" Balkan swallowed as the dreadful remorse that had gnawed at him since the Hearing rose, unbidden, "- if ever you decide to go looking for yours."

"Why would I do that?" Quick and sharp as a shearing blade, Akkarin responded with scathing derision. "Where I am going, Balkan, a soul is as useless as teeth to the dead."

Just as quick and acerbic, Balkan volleyed: "Spoken by one who still remembers what it was like to have one, I think."

Akkarin did remember. His memories were knives, and he was not pleased to have them turned against him. Straightening, he drew in a breath and turned back to stare out over the valley below, an adept expression of cool aloofness caging his emotions in. When he spoke again, his voice was distant and controlled.

"You should worry about your own soul, not mine; yours and all the innocent Kyralians that you and your warriors will have to defend."

"My soul is clean!" Balkan whispered harshly, all sympathy evaporating suddenly. "I have never killed anyone."

Akkarin's eyes narrowed infinitesimally, though he showed no other outward sign of the barb Balkan's words had struck at his heart. He smiled a cold, humourless smile as he continued to stare at the horizon, and it sent a shiver of dark foreboding down Balkan's back.

The taller man's smile vanished between one blink and the next and his eyes slid sideways until he looked obliquely at the red-robed man beside him, and when he spoke, his tone was condescension itself.

"And therein lies your weakness, Head of Warriors: you are sending your monster away just as the beasts are coming to your door to bay for blood." Akkarin then looked contemplatively at Sonea, where she stood, awkwardly trying to soothe her jittery mount.

"And if anything happens to Sonea? Will your soul - all of their souls – "and Akkarin glanced up at the watchful Warriors surrounding him, "- will they all be absolved of blame if she falls into Ichani hands?" The black magician's voice was a rasp of a blade to a sharpening stone, and his intense gaze was just as biting and hard as he drove home his meaning.

"They are a cruel people, Balkan; they rarely kill without amusement first – not if they can help it."

Balkan made a guttural, choking sound as his imagination conjured its own images of what such amusement might entail. "I...I..." he stuttered, appalled at the notion that what Akkarin had implied was true and he could not help the pull of his eyes back to the diminutive figure of Sonea.

The bleak smile returned to the former High Lord's face as he moved to face Balkan directly now, tethering the warrior to the spot with an intensely challenging gaze. "Are you sure you don't want us to stay...?"

"Lord Balkan; the escort is ready to ride." Osen called as he approached the two men who stood facing each other, a barely concealed look of vicious dislike and suspicion on his face as he glanced at Akkarin.

Balkan and Akkarin stood a moment longer before the warrior tore his eyes away from the taller man's, and strode purposefully past Osen to where his horse waited, leapng astride skilfully.

"Onward!" The warrior barked hastily, and he resolutely avoided meeting Akkarin's eyes as the black magician mounted his own horse and followed in Balkan's wake; but all the time, the Head of Warriors felt the former High Lord's gaze at his back, like hot coals burning through the thin silk of his robes.


"Remember the faces of these two magicians; they are Akkarin, former High Lord of the Magicians' Guild, and Sonea, former novice of the High Lord. They have been cast out of the Guild and exiled from the Allied Lands for the crime of practising black magic."

As Lord Balkan's ritual words echoed off the steep stone walls of the ravine in which the exiles and their guard stood, Akkarin's mouth felt suddenly dry as he stared into the blackness beyond that was Sachaka.

Finally, it was before him once more; the place that had changed the course of his life so completely. The place where he had found love - and unimaginable pain and despair.

Sachaka; its Wastes that had once been as richly vibrant as Arvice itself, full of life and people. Now, now it was a land of stone and sand that hid beneath it the toppled towers, the crushed battlements and destroyed villages that once made up this part of Sachaka.

Beneath the very soil on which they now stood was a field of ash and charred bones. This was the Allied Land's monstrous victory – a victory that had led to the birth of a monstrous enemy, and thanks to the Guild's numerous announcements of their crimes, that enemy was laying in wait for the former High Lord and his novice, Akkarin was sure of it.

Behind the aloof exterior, fear pulled at Akkarin and all the terrible visions of his time in this desolate place crowded his inner vision, making his stomach roll nauseously.

He relived the moment of Dakova's bed slave's execution and could hear the thud of her body as she fell to the hard ground. And then, it wasn't her anymore but Sonea in his mind's eye; the same scene from his nightmares, and the dark silk of her hair fell from her face as her body hit the floor, limp and unmoving, showing events from a possible, terrible future, rather than those from his past.

The eyes of the bleeding woman in Akkarin's mind turned to brown instead of amber, but they would go dull in the same way, stare the stare of the dead, and she would be gone. It would happen again. Again, and worse this time, because it was his fault Sonea was here in this ravaged place of slavery and death.

And worse, and worse, because Akkarin knew now the difference between loving a shadow and a thought of someone, and the aching fire of loving a person with the full knowledge of their soul. And Sonea... she had burned down the prison he had made for his heart and he knew he could not survive the pain of losing her in this dreadful place.

And then it came. The offer. And it was no surprise to hear who voiced it...

"Sonea, this is your last chance." Osen's soft words broke through Akkarin's panicked thoughts, bringing him back to the moment.

"Come back with me," the Assistant Administrator implored, and the tall black magician did not miss the use of the singular noun rather than the collective.

Akkarin's mind touched Osen's and he was swamped by a fear and panic that almost matched his own, and the former High Lord took no pleasure from the confirmation that the younger magician cared deeply for Sonea.

"No." Sonea shook her head, keeping the tilt of it proud and defiant.

"Would you have her turn down this opportunity?" Osen asked the former Guild leader, with a hint of desperation and anger colouring his voice.

Akkarin was surprised by Osen's directness and replied with the same honesty as the bleak realisation hit him that his plan to alienate his former novice had not worked.

"No, but she seems determined to discard it. I doubt I could change her mind." Believe me, I have tried, he thought to himself with grim irony. I have tried.

Osen looked at Sonea once more as if he would try to persuade her, but, on seeing the implacability of her features, he snapped his mouth shut, turning instead to Akkarin again.

"You had better look after her," the Assistant Administrator grated with an open fierceness that betrayed his emotions, and he carefully avoided looking at Sonea now.

The colour drained from Akkarin's face then, though the mingled darkness and false glow of the globelights disguised its chalky-whiteness. But the strings of his mask obediently held firm and only a convulsion of his throat and a slow blink of his nocturnal eyes indicated that he was moved at all by Osen's words.

But he was moved; for the young magician's words echoed another's, and brought back the pain of regret that he had caused the grief of separation to others who loved Sonea.

For a moment, Akkarin's memory reeled back to the Hearing, which now seemed a lifetime ago, and to Rothen's face as he had approached the disgraced High Lord to ceremonially rip his black robes. A strange mix of anguish and fury had distorted the older man's usually mild features.

"If you believe nothing else, please believe that to put Sonea in any danger was my very last intention," Akkarin had softly implored. "I think we both know that she has a mind of her own, and this situation offers no exception."

The truth of Akkarin's last sentence had knocked Rothen's anger sideways, replacing it with a surge of emotion for the wilful and determined girl he had once nurtured, and all other words of furious admonishment for the tall, black magician had died on his lips. Only one thing had mattered to the aging alchemist at that moment:

"You had better look after her; promise me, if you have one shred of decency left, that you won't let any harm come to her." Rothen had quietly demanded as he felt despair threaten to overwhelm him.

Akkarin inclined his head, once, and the promise had been made.

But now, faced with the dark reality of Sachaka just a footstep away, Akkarin could not make that promise again; not now that Sonea had refused to go back. He merely stared at Osen blankly, unable to give the young Assistant Administrator – or himself – any comfort in this moment.

"Be gone from the Allied Lands..." Balkan's carefully ambivalent voice broke Akkarin's reverie for the second time that day.

The former Guild Leader turned to Sonea, and, whilst the other magicians present saw only the proud stance of a pitiably duped young woman, Akkarin saw the bewildered fear in the deep earth-brownness of her eyes as they flashed up at him.

He was still angry at her refusal to return to Imardin, but it was an anger that paled to almost nothing in the brightness of the wonder at her loyalty. Akkarin saw her uncertainty and wished for nothing more than to simply take her hand in his. But he couldn't.

"Come, Sonea," he murmured softly with a tone of quiet reassurance. "We have a way to go yet."

And with that, Akkarin walked into the darkness, and, eyes wide open and glistening in the gloom, Sonea went with him.


The next few days were both a physical and emotional trial for Akkarin, and he used his physical discipline as an aid to keep his emotions in check.

Akkarin, unlike many magicians, had never succumbed to the laziness that magic afforded; he never levitated when he could walk; never healed away aching muscles instead of honing them to endure. His time as a slave had removed all the physical softness of youth, leaving him lithe and strong, and it was a physical strength that he made every effort to maintain when he returned to the indolent comforts of the Guild.

However, Akkarin's gruelling pace across the barren peaks and ravines of the Sachakan Wastes was not just a means to distance himself and his former novice from any following Ichani; the arduous trek also served to silence the, by no means unfit but considerably smaller, Sonea, who breathlessly struggled to keep up with the long strides of her mentor.

There was also a part of the former High Lord that knew he was spitefully punishing Sonea – taking out his anger and fear on her because it demanded some kind of outlet. To add to her physical punishment, Akkarin kept up his cold aloofness towards Sonea at first, not trusting himself with more, and he pushed on over the unforgiving terrain, heavy and heartsick.

His arms felt banded by iron, keeping them pinioned, keeping them from reaching out for her when she tripped and stumbled. And the way the light went out of her at the coldness of his manner - it was killing him by degrees. But it was better this way he told himself again and again. If he gave in and let himself have what he wanted here, now, in her vulnerability, she might end up hating him again, and she had only just stopped doing that, he suspected. It was wrong, so he held himself remote, aching, battling against more than just the inhospitable landscape.

At times when Akkarin was forced to let them rest, his mind would drift back to the question of what had led to Sonea's tenacious loyalty. Why was she risking her life to stay with him when she could defend Kyralia with her knowledge of black magic from the relative safety of Imardin.

A few days into their exile, Akkarin would find out the answer.


The nightmare had pursued him relentlessly since they had been in Sachaka. The fear of it stalked Akkarin's waking hours to the point where he was afraid to sleep, insisting that Sonea rest whilst he healed away his fatigue and kept watch instead. And it was taking its toll.

A nagging, sickly ache constantly thrummed at his skull, and his mind felt wrapped in smothering blankets so that the world took on a kind of muffled unreality.

He was exhausted. Tired.

Tired of running; tired of battling – and not just with his enemy and friends. Akkarin's resolve to remain emotionally distant from Sonea was draining; his anger at her disobedience blunting to the harmlessness and insignificance of a pebble on a beach.

There was a new intimacy between the former guardian and novice that gnawed at Akkarin's will; an unspoken closeness that only the fight for survival can unfurl:

Find food or starve.

The mute, impregnable solidarity of the hunted:

Be seen, and be killed. Be heard, and die.

It was just them now, no-one else, and each time Akkarin took Sonea' s small, cool hands in his to receive power, he found it harder and harder not to pull her into his arms and hold her. To bank down his emotions for her under a firewall of protection so that she remained unaware of them was increasingly difficult.

But the wearier Akkarin got, the weaker his defences became. It was only a matter of time before something slipped through, and it was his nightmare that was his undoing. The lurking vulture dream, circling, waiting for him to give in to sleep and slip stealthily in.

And he did sleep. Finally he could stave it off no longer and, gratefully sinking down onto the bed of grass Sonea had made one evening, Akkarin slept.

And it came. The nightmare. That taunting echo of a painful past and an unthinkable future, invading Akkarin's unconscious mind; insidiously creeping in the space between seconds, proving that sleep has its own physics – where time shrinks and swells, lives unspool in a blink, and the prolonged agonies of death crash down in a mere flutter of lashes.

Groans of denial and pain escaped Akkarin's sleeping lips as the images of his cruelly complicit mind flashed through his head.

"No!"

Then, Akkarin felt another's mind at the edge of his own as a terrible, mocking hybrid of Kariko and Dakovas' blood-spattered faces swam before his closed eyelids. Waking, he became aware of a foreign, magical pressure on his shield around him. He jolted upright, slamming into consciousness as he instinctively let fly a defensive forcestrike.

"Ow!"

Sonea's cry abruptly shook off the last vestiges of sleep, and in a moment, Akkarin was on his feet and at his former novice' side as she lay crumpled at the foot of the cave wall. His hands trembled as he carefully turned her over.

"Sonea! Are you hurt?"

His heartbeat slowed as she reassured him she was alright, and he rocked back on his heels, his hands clenched to fists now in bleak understanding of why she had woken him. Akkarin stared at Sonea, his face hooded in darkness and the need to touch her, to quell the lingering sickness of his nightmare, almost overwhelmed him.

He stood up suddenly and stepped away from her.

"Go to sleep, Sonea. I will watch."

She pushed herself up onto her elbows and stared angrily up into the shadow of his face, her body clearly displaying her mute resentment.

"No. You've barely slept," she said with clipped annoyance. "And I know you won't wake me up when it's your turn to sleep," she added.

"I will. I give you my word."

Without thinking, and with no time to baluster his emotional barriers, Akkarin bent down, and he was all darkness and shade as he took Sonea's hand in his and pulled her, at last, into the light.

In that brief contact, and just as steadily as the slow cresting of the sun on the horizon , a dawning realisation crept upon Sonea as tendrils of her consciousness unfurled themselves in Akkarin's unprepared mind. And, like rays of sunlight casting the darkest corners into brightness, Sonea knew.

She knew.

Her heart raced, thrumming like a moth's wing in her chest, and her eyes widened in hopeful wonder. Her mind cast back over the last few days, a flicker-book of pictures that slowed and stilled until one image remained: Akkarin, watching her. Always, watching her.

Her breath caught in her throat as her mind reeled back over events; now she thought about it , wasn't there something in the way he looked at her?

Of course. Of course! In his sidelong glances? Some flicker of feeling other than the sad gravity of his features since their arrival in Sachaka?

Sachaka. It had been an abstraction to her; his life here, given over to slavery. She hadn't been able to conceptualize its reality until she saw with her own eyes the desolation of this place.

The obvious bite of his memories had shot a pang through Sonea's heart; the heart that she had come to realise belonged to him. Thinking him an unrequiting custodian, she had desperately tried to free herself from this new tangle of emotions. But now...

Now she realised those haunted, those dead-eyed looks he had at his remembrances of his time here, they were the antithesis of the glances she received when he thought she was not looking.

Sonea held up her hand against the brightness of the rising sun beyond Akkarin's dark form, and again the air hitched in her throat and her stomach flipped as she caught the glint of eyes as black as jet, watching her.

The way he looked at her now... it made her feel as if he was coming back from the dead – for her, and that seemed an impossible thing, and an intimate one and she felt the colour rise in her cheeks.

Whilst Sonea stared and hoped, Akkarin's own heart swelled within him as he took in the confused joy of her features. He pulled in a breath and swallowed hard but the air...the air, oppressive and warm even at this early hour, seemed rich enough to sip and it was like a presence between them – and then not as Sonea stepped close.

The sun behind him cast him to shadows, all angles and darkness; her opposite - a slicing shadow to the glow of her face. Her face; so close. The pale, alabaster smoothness of her skin, her full lips, softly parted, and her eyes! The luminous sheen of her deep loam-brown eyes, and the open wanting in them, and he saw; he saw, and he could scarcely believe. And he couldn't breathe, he couldn't breathe.

But Sonea could see nothing; he was all silhouette to her, and staring into the darkness of his face, she desperately sought confirmation of what she had touched in his mind.

It was in his eyes, glittering dark, and in his waiting – he was waiting, she knew – that Sonea saw him - finally: Strength and grace and loneliness and longing.

And hope.

Hesitation.

Sonea closed the space - negative space - between them further, and he felt the temperature rise at their nearness. Akkarin still looked at her with that half-hesitant intensity and, as the gap between them was abolished, his hands came up to grip the top of her arms, his body still trying to do what his mind could not: resist. Deny the embrace.

A pointless exercise; futile, because now Sonea knew.

She arched her neck upwards, reaching into the shadow of his face with hers, betraying her lingering uncertainty in the bird-tilt of her head, and he ached at the familiarity of it. And then, smooth as inevitability, her mouth brushed his; a gliding together. A touch, like a whisper – a gentle, gentle grazing of her full lower lip across both of his, and Akkarin tasted her, sweet and warm and trembling, and he felt as if his rushing heart pushed all the air from him, and he couldn't breathe, he couldn't breathe.

Akkarin's fingers tightened their grip on Sonea's arms as she rested her head on his chest and she felt his heart beat, quick and steady, beneath her cheek. She felt him draw in a ragged breath as he fought with the reluctance that enveloped him; a complex, faltering web of loves and longings and loss.

And then there was space again as Akkarin pulled away. So small a space, but cold and void like the distance between them they had always been used to. A line drawn, not to be crossed.

"Stop. Stop this," he whispered, his voice cracking with desperate pleading.

But, of course, she didn't. It wasn't in her nature to give up, and even if her mind saw the logic of the reasons he gave her then against their togetherness, her heart did not, and her unruly, disobedient tongue effortlessly swatted away his arguments, practised as it was, until there was nothing but silence between them.

"Well this is going to make things awkward..." she concluded, finally admitting defeat. She turned away, trying to conceal the miserable hurt she was sure was plainly written in her face.

And so it might have gone on between them in that terrible, false way, but, when Sonea had touched him – had kissed him – Akkarin had felt her yearning meeting his own, and when she had turned away, he experienced a sudden unspooling as all restraints gave way, and he couldn't bear it anymore.

And the moon – the Eye ; she hung in the sky still, stubbornly open against the increasing light of the sun, and she was bored of her torments now.

"I've had my fun," she seemed to say. "Enough of this; stop pretending."

So, with a shudder, Akkarin did.

"Sonea." His voice was no longer fearful, but low and ardent and defeated, and it caressed her name. Hesring it, she spun back to face him and Akkarin reached out very slowly, and, with one long finger light against her cheek, he hooked a loose wisp of her hair and pushed it behind her ear. The tiny touch sparked and blazed, but the spark and blaze were consumed by a deeper, fuller fire when he brought the whole of his palm against her cheek.

And she smiled.

It wasn't the radiant, dimpled cheek unfurling he'd seen in his secret watching – not the sunburst, not yet; that smile, for him. This smile was another species entirely; small and sudden, shy and surprised. Dazzling, nonetheless.

"Either of us could die in the next few weeks," he said, not wanting to hide anything from her now.

The smile vanished. "I know," she answered quietly. The rich brown sheen of her gaze dimmed slightly – depthless, full of worry and a pain to match his own at the prospect of their fate.

Akkarin's eyes narrowed. "I'd be happier knowing you were safe."

As defiant exasperation lit her features, it was his turn to smile. "No, I will not start that argument again, but..." his smile faded as he thought of his long, unwavering priority of protecting the Guild, and of his devotion to Her, even in death, and how Sonea had come to change everything, turning his world on its head.

"...you test my loyalties, Sonea."

"How?" Confusion knitted her brow. She didn't know. How could she?

"It doesn't matter. It's too late, anyway." Much, much too late. "I started to fail that test the night you killed the Ichani." Akkarin's mouth pulled upwards as Sonea' s eyes widened in understanding, but he smiled, too, at her ignorance:

Oh, Sonea, Sonea, it's been so much longer than that, he thought.

And he felt the pull gather between and around them, and then the space was gone again. His arms went around her and he drew her in.

"Sonea..." He dipped his head to her upturned face, and this time when he spoke her name, he breathed the word against the curve of her mouth. Their eyes were still wide with wonder, and they only let them flutter shut when their lips finally met and another sense – touch – could take over in convincing them that this was real.

And, oh, it was. So very, very real.

Akkarin's hands slid through the silk of her hair, plunged to the wrists in dark waters as he cradled her head, and all there was was the kiss.

Soft and hard and deepening. Relief. Urgency. And wanting. Wanting...movement that spoke to movement, skin to skin and heat to breath to gasp and...By the Eye, he had never imagined this! Her sweetness to his salt and musk. Pulse. Pleasure. The taste and feel of Sonea against his lips, and realness – trueness – overwhelmed Akkarin, and the kiss, the kiss was threatening to become so much more than a kiss, but it couldn't. Not now, like this.

Not yet.

Akkarin leaned away abruptly; a break, yet close enough that they still breathed each other's breath, and he smiled at the shy blush in her face, bringing his hand to caress her cheek with his thumb. He pulled her closer and she placed her head against his chest once more and, with a sigh, she softened, and it felt like home to have her melt against him and rest like this.

No air between them. No space. No more shame.

Akkarin dropped his head, so that his brow came to rest against the warm crown of her head, and as the light of the new day shone and burnished their dark hair, Akkarin and Sonea were like two matches struck against each other to flare sunlight.

They stood like that for a long time, and they were quiet, but their blood and nerves and hearts were not; they were violently alive, rushing and dancing and aching and...burning in the thrill of discovery.

Akkarin tightened his arms around Sonea – his murderer's arms – and, as he stared at the barrenness of their surroundings, he could almost laugh at the absurdity that they should find each other here, now – prey as they were in a deadly game of hide-and-seek.

But maybe that was the point.

As long as we're both alive there is a chance.

It was the thinnest grounds for hope that Akkarin had ever heard of – to be living and to be together – but they were alive, and he clung to it nonetheless. Akkarin smoothed Sonea's hair, breathing in her nearness, and he cradled her in his arms as if she were the very, fragile embodiment of that hope.

And, maybe, maybe she was.

*Nietzsche