The Sleeping Life

Chapter Twenty-Five

Rennyn woke to a new experience. Her husband, asleep, with his arms around her. Lying in a nest of leaves beneath a fragile pre-dawn sky, Rennyn set aside the mystery of how he came to be there at all, and allowed herself to enjoy this gift. Illidian’s heartbeat. Illidian’s steady breathing. Illidian’s warmth.

He was having a nightmare. Muscles shifted, and fingers twitched against her back. His face was barely visible in this light, but she thought that in sleep it was more expressive than his waking mask, revealing hints of anger and pain and fear.

Moving with infinite care, Rennyn lifted her hand and touched his cheek, tracing one of the grim lines that bracketed his mouth. It woke him, as she had expected, and she knew he would remember the first time she had touched him so, and the night that had followed.

His arms tightened, and for the longest time there was nothing but an embrace without need for more. Then a low grumbling interrupted, and Rennyn stifled a laugh.

"My stomach is not romantic."

"But it is here."

With him. The most important consideration, and one she had almost overlooked when she had been castigating herself for accidental commands.

Sitting up, she discovered a collection of sleepers, and blinked at Fallon, curled between two divinations and with…was that a spell to keep him silent? Sukata, sleeping propped upright, was maintaining the wards around their little camp: low-level things that would keep out life-stealers but not do more than delay stronger predators. Lieutenant Meniar, Kendall, the girl Tesin Asaka, Dezart Samarin…and there, keeping watch, Illidian’s mother, who met her gaze and nodded.

Illidian handed her what looked like a small pumpkin, which proved to be a makeshift cup. Taking it, she found that her hand had been neatly bandaged, along with her feet, with a visible buttonhole to reveal the bandages had been someone’s shirt. She was also wearing Illidian’s coat, though still with her sadly stained lounging suit beneath it.

"I see there is an exceptionally interesting story behind how you managed to find me."

"A complete absence of organisation," Illidian said, offering her a large leaf curled around several slices of cold cooked meat. "We forgot even the honey cakes."

His voice did not quite shake. A day not knowing what was happening to her had taken its toll. She leaned against his side as she ate, and they watched the sky grow lighter. Then he picked her up and took her off to a neatly dug latrine with two stripped branches suspended over it as a rough seat.

"And here I thought we’d moved past the need for you to carry me to privies," she said, after she had finished and he was taking her down to the lake to wash her hands.

"You are light-hearted today," he said, sounding pleased.

Rennyn blinked. "I suppose I am. Glad to be alive, of course, but I think it’s that…I have been trying so hard not to hate being consistently tired, and yet all the time convinced it was keeping me from solving all these other problems. But this place—I have no idea what this place is, but being tired only meant I needed to rest before starting work on rescuing the other mages." She smiled. "Though I am exceedingly glad to no longer need to tackle it alone."

He bent his head and pressed his lips to her temple and then, after she had washed in the chilly water, found a convenient tumbled wall to sit on with her snug in his lap. They had an excellent view over the lake—ethereal and still in the early morning—and were far enough from camp to not worry too much about sleepers.

"Other problems such as Earl Harkness, and preventing accidental commands?"

"Accidental commands, and removing the inherited controls. Things I theoretically could fix, if only I could devise a way to it. Earl Harkness is a different sort of matter: he’s not something for which I can produce a magical solution—not without being rather immoral." She sighed. "My supposedly carefree post-Solace life is a little full of complications like Harkness. While I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of home we can make in Surclere, I’ve never cultivated the sort of skills I’ll need to be its Duchess. I am not a negotiator or even passably diplomatic. I am not good with compromises or weighing fine moral points. So I’ve been pushing those type of problems away and trying not to think about them."

"The Ten," he said, fully aware of her reluctance in relation to their trip to Aurai’s Rest, for all she hadn’t discussed it with him.

"Yes," Rennyn admitted. "I don’t want to command the Ten to die. And yet how can I just ignore them in their half-life? And I do want—eventually—to have children with you, but that is absolutely a choice that will impact dozens of other people, and should I not take their views into account? And, oh, it’s not like I needed that blasted play to point out that perhaps it was unconscionable of me to marry you. How can I continue to put you at risk of careless commands?"

"That is a choice between the possibility and the certainty of pain. And does not take into account what I gain from you."

He said this so warmly, curling a strand of her hair around his fingers, that she was lost to words for a moment, and then recovered herself with a few long kisses. None of which would make the problem of accidental commands go away, but certainly reminded her that he had reasons for facing that risk.

"I was very glad to wake with you this morning."

Illidian knew, of course, what she meant. "And perhaps it is time for me to stop running from the merest possibility of hurting you?"

"I think it’s useful to remember that you have never hurt me." She curled her fingers through his, and kissed one blunted fingertip. "You know your own limits better than I. I was just glad to wake with you." She glanced up at him, smiled a little grimly, and added: "Yesterday I had a very different waking. It perhaps should have occurred to me that if someone or something was kidnapping powerful mages, my Wicked Uncle was very much a likely target. He’d been trapped here for at least a month."

The husband holding her so carefully became a man of steel and wire, then took a steadying breath and listened without comment as she told him of the decisions she had made. Choices that complicated the Kellian’s future, especially if Rennyn and Sebastian died without children.

But, typically of Illidian, his response was only: "Do you feel that you have put him behind you now?"

"I…don’t know. But I think I’ve changed the shape of how I feel into something more manageable. Do you—what choice would you have made?"

"I would prefer him dead. But I, too, would not have killed a man bound and helpless. Much as I would like to pretend he is not a man. I most certainly prefer you free."

"How did you manage to find me?"

He told her, at least up to the point where he said: "We would not have reached it in time if Kendall had not held it open—"

"What?"

"I wondered if that was an issue. Meniar is certain that Kendall extended the duration of this Walk. Having read your guide on learning to cast Thought Magic, it seemed to me this was a step beyond the exercises you had permitted."

"Abstract casting, yes. A travel casting like that isn’t something you just…hold, although it may have felt like that to her."

"And so Kendall has now entered the stage of becoming a Thought Mage where you recommend days of quiet meditation and rigorously controlled exercises?"

"That’s certainly the ideal. I presume Fallon has had a crisis of his own?"

Illidian explained reason for the muting spell. "When Meniar set divinations to monitor his sleep, the boy did not hide his relief."

"An enchantment only active while he’s sleeping might explain it isn’t obvious to me. I’ll have to sit by him without the noise of the wards and divinations and so forth, to see what I can sense. But since he appears to be stable, I think this morning had better be devoted to rescuing mages. Or at least stopping further abductions."

He nodded, finished relating the details of their rediscovery of her, and then took her back to the small camp. Nothing had changed whatsoever about the fact that she had accidentally commanded him, and was all too likely to do so again during their life together. She would continue to hate the thought, to try to find a way of preventing her control…and yet, perhaps no longer blame herself quite so much.

Only Lieutenant Meniar and Dezart Samarin had joined the waking world, and she smiled a greeting, then noticed the bare skin visible above the top button of the Kolan’s coat.

"Do I owe you a shirt, Dezart Samarin?"

"A small exchange, if you happen to be able to point me to my missing mages."

"Point, yes. Extricating them is going to be a formidable challenge, however, though the ones I saw were at least still alive."

Whatever this place was, it was time to start dealing with it.