“On the contrary, I found it a welcome respite.”
She tunneled her hand into his hair. “So what does he want?”
“Don’t know yet.” They were so used to strangeness at this point. So used to nothing going well. Gabe sighed and rolled off her, curling up by her side, his hand idly wandering down the line of her neck to her shoulder and back again. “But it will probably hinder our ability to bring the piece to the Mount.”
Lore thought of Nyxara’s memories of the pantheon’s time on the Golden Mount. How They’d all moved through the threads of the atmosphere, the world allowing Them unnatural passage. “Maybe there’s a way to get here besides taking a ship. The gods used to do that. Moving through the elements They had power over.”
His gentle tracing paused. “I’ve done it. It didn’t end well.”
She sucked in a sharp breath. “I was afraid of that.”
His hand started moving again, though it wasn’t as steady. “Malcolm did it first, by accident. Told me that Braxtos came close to taking over when he did.” He shook his head, churning sand. “I did it after—desperate times—and Hestraon almost had me. Malcolm was right.” He looked at her. “But if it’s our only option—”
“No.” She pressed her palm against his jaw. “I can’t handle that. I can’t handle it happening to both of you.”
Gabe and Bastian, both taken from her, eclipsed in godhood.
“We’ll find another way.” She said it with conviction, like she could make it true.
He closed his eye. He wore no patch over the other, something she just now noticed. The socket was healed cleanly. “If it saves us,” he murmured, “it’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
She stroked her hand over his stubbled cheek.
A heartbeat, then Gabe looked away from her, out at the endless ocean, twisting a lock of her hair around his finger. “It’s quite a lot of power we’ll be giving up,” he said. “Once we remake the Fount.”
There was a question in his tone. Like maybe he didn’t think that was the best plan after all.
And after her conversation with the Fount, that first day when she and Dani had arrived, Lore couldn’t argue with him. “Yes,” she said. “That’s the current plan.”
Currentwas doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Their thoughts traveled along the same lines, she knew. Maybe turning all this power back over to the Fount wasn’t the right call. Maybe they could do more good trying to master it themselves.
But even though they were both thinking it, neither she nor Gabe said it.
The beach shimmered again, the atmosphere taking on a glassy, unreal quality. She turned in his arms, kissed him again, deep and long. “I love you. And if you see Bastian before I do, tell him I love him.”
A question here, too. Gauging his reaction. Seeing how it landed.
Gabe sighed, cupping his hand against the side of her head. His thumb ran over the scar on her temple. “I didn’t know I could do it,” he murmured. “Love two people at once.”
“Me either,” she said. “I thought love would always come with choices, so I just refused to really make them. Even when I said Iwould marry Bastian, because I loved him, I loved you, too.” She covered his hand with her own. “Love is bigger than we thought.”
“Far bigger.” Then, with another kiss to her cheek, Gabe was gone.
A blink, and she was back in the grove, awake on the Mount as it was now.
When Lore stood, she was pleasantly sore, her body languid and satiated.
She supposed she should be glad that Alie or Malcolm hadn’t popped in while she and Gabe were busy, but she couldn’t help but wish Bastian had. She’d never seen him on the beach; she assumed because Apollius had pushed him so far down in his own mind that simple dreaming wasn’t a possibility.
The sky edged toward night. She’d slept the rest of the day away.
Lore made her way back to the Fount, wandering over the dead island. She’d been disturbed at first by the fact that nothing else lived here. No people, no animals or insects. Now it was nice to walk for miles and know you were almost completely alone, if you didn’t count the woman who’d betrayed you and the god who should be dead.
It was almost beautiful, the way the moonlight filtered through the dead trees, made all the shadows stark. Especially after months without really seeing it, on the Second Isle where the smog was thick. It reflected on the cloud of ash below the peak, and on the water in the Fount.
Water that was shining gold.
