. Begin Your Journey .: sample

There was nothing better than this: the pressure of his chest against hers, the warmth of his skin, his scent like wheat and hers like wind. Her heart sped to catch his, their pulses matched as their paces had so often been, and she could feel the vibrant rushing of blood through his veins, so quick, quicker than anything she knew, and the fine adrenaline trembles seizing his muscles. He said her name, and she felt a little more alive. The dead have no names; Moselle had given hers back to her, when she had given her back her life. Cymru spoke it now, and she remembered a bit more of herself, the sister he had known from his first days. She lifted her head from his back and drew away slightly, and their heartbeats were estranged and kept rhythm alone, without the strength of an echo. His eye, when she looked into it, was haunted still by grief, and tears darkened his golden cheek.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered against his cheek as she wiped the tears away. Through that touch, she felt the shuddering release of tension from his muscles, the aftermath of fear and pain and grief, leaving his body a wasteland of discarded chemicals and fatigued nerves. She did not want to leave him (never again, never), but she must; there was her son, always a bright spark at the edge of her awareness. But before she left, she tucked her face close to his, her muzzle in the hollow of his throat, and reached for what Moselle had given her. Closing her eyes, she dove into him and passed fluidly through his body like blood or oxygen, carrying her own sort of vitality to every cell and fiber. And when she opened her eyes and withdrew, placing a kiss on his smooth neck as she turned away, she knew what he would feel: as though he had slept and woken again, rejuvenated, and the day they’d not yet shut their eyes upon would seem only a dream.

This magic—her body scintillated with it, and the world before her eyes was changed—or her eyes had changed. Her renewed life, no doubt, had much to do with that, but the night was alive to her now as it had never been before. Her eye was captivated by the way moonlight and shadow glimmered along stalks of grass, flashing when the night wind blew over the meadow in a way that looked like light sliding along the scales of a hundred fish, moving as one body. And deeper than that, the rustlings of night animals and bursts of screeching chatter in the air—a thousand breaths and, beneath them, all around them, the slow, quiet transpiring of the meadow grass. All these things might have torn her in a million directions from her body and into the rapture of the night, but for them, her brother and—

From the moment she looked at him, she could feel her body was not her own. His anger blazed up in her own breast, and just as quickly died, but some other emotion rose expansively from the ashes until her body could not possibly hold it in—but it did, though the strain of it was terrible and exquisite all at once. She went to him, wondering at the strange pain she saw in his face and the brightness of his eyes. And when she kissed him, he was soft beneath her lips. She could see then what she’d not been able to before, and a surprise seized her that was so calamitously strong she felt it would remake her down to her cells. And indeed it did, for a moment—she shuddered, and shuddering the years were shed from her, and for a moment she appeared to him as she had when they’d first met, a yearling filly, slender, with sly eyes that were wide now with shock as they had never been then—but in an instant she was herself again, the self that he loved, much older but more beautiful than she had been as a child, though there was still a wide-eyed surprise about her that was very young. (You must first be surprised, to understand, they say.) She understood the strength of his love then, and they both trembled with it.

She exhaled against his skin, the breath she’d not realized she’d been keeping until her lungs ached with it. And then he shook her off, but gently, and she wanted both to shy away from him (from this, the feeling that had robbed her of herself) and to join their skins and hearts and veins until he beat in her and she in him. Her eyes asked questions of his when he whispered against her shoulder, “You’re welcome,” and she shivered beneath his lips. She could not help it; he had her in thrall. They had been closer than this, of course, but she had never felt such intimacy with him. She had never truly looked at him as she did now.

She slipped away from him and into the cool night air which, unconsciously, she wrapped around herself until her skin (still hot) gleamed with condensation. She was electric. She was luminous. Her skin could not hold her in and, far away, a rumble of thunder from a newborn storm echoed off mountain and forest and lightning lit the bellies of the clouds.

She reached her son and touched him and whispered in his ear, and her body was large enough for her again—for that was the measure of what her son needed of her, a warm body, milk, a sheltering neck, gentle lips, and a voice to speak of morning in his dreams.