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Lila could feel when someone was watching her.
The pricking sensation in her shoulders caused by eyes lingering a little too much for comfort. The invisible knife pointed at her back hoping to catch her unaware and the shock written on their face when she pointed the knife at them first.
But this wasn’t a threat. Her shoulders weren’t tense but softened and warmed when the gaze of a person she cared about set on her back.
It wasn’t just the way Kell smelled that gave him away, nor his boots, which he tried not to press on the wooden pavement like she had told him.
When it came to him, she knew that there was no chance to hide. He would see her and find her, always, and that terrified her.
But she would terrify him first.
“Glad you can wander for a little while?”
“I guess,” he said. “I haven’t set foot on land for weeks and I’m quite lightheaded.”
“Do not come too close, then,” she replied. “You might fall into the sea.”
“Good thing that I can swim,” he shrugged.
Lila turned to him. He had his eyes set on the horizon, probably searching for the harbor which should appear anytime by now.
He was close to her yet far enough that she would have her own space, and she could only see his blue eye from there. Perhaps she had been at sea for too long, but she thought his eye was the same color as the water. You could lose yourself in it and drown, or you could let it embrace you and stay afloat.
Lila swam in the depths of Kell’s eyes quite often, but these days his blue eye rivaled the black and it made her even more determined to look for a cure. And as she did so, she could only try to sweeten the sadness in his irises, but it didn’t often work.
Docking in a new city presented a new opportunity to find what or who could help his case, and she couldn’t wait.
She averted her eyes from him and glanced in front of her. She could finally see land.
Kell looked at his reflection in the mirror and was at a loss for words.
They docked in a small port of a little sea town that he had never heard of before. They had stopped there because they needed to stock on supplies for the ship.
“We have to stay the night,” Lila said, appearing behind him. “The salesman told me that he won’t be able to get us what we need today, and we will have to wait until tomorrow morning.”
Kell nodded, looking at her reflection in the glass. “Shall we stay on the ship?”
“I’d rather sleep in a real bed, but do as you see fit.”
“Sleeping in an inn will be fine,” he said. Lila grinned, then she went to speak to the salesman, leaving him alone with himself once again.
He was eager to get off the ship to eat real food and stretch his legs as well, but on that day, the thought barely got him excited.
He sighed at his own reflection, and decided to look elsewhere.
A child picked up a crystal ball from the table while his mother observed some other trinkets. He looked at it as if it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, even if it was probably just an empty sphere with no magic.
Lila once told him that during fairs in Gray London, charlatans claimed they could see the future inside of those spheres, and people took the bait and paid them to be told lies.
And maybe it was true. If you trusted in something enough, you could trick yourself into believing it might be real even though a part of you knew that it was not. Perhaps that was what he lacked. Trust. He should believe more.
The child’s clammy hands slipped from the ball, and Kell didn’t think. He conjured wind magic out of habit to stop the crystal from bursting into tiny little pieces on the ground.
It was as if the air was knocked out of him and then sucked back in. As if the breeze he had called upon had been sent back to the sender with twice the force it had taken him to do that simple move.
Calling on his magic had become so daunting, and he felt like it slipped from his hands just like the crystal ball.
The little kid watched the ball in awe until his mother grabbed it and put it back where it was, thinking that the thing was magical, and not that somebody had to use magic to enchant it.
Kell grabbed the first thing he could find for support – which was luckily a wooden pole – and hoped that the waves of pain would disappear quickly.
“Are you okay, sir?” the same child asked him.
He nodded at him, at the same time that he raised his head and locked eyes with Lila, who was still talking to the salesman. He couldn’t read her expression, and he wondered whether she had seen his stunt five minutes ago. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure whether she ignored him on purpose or she was giving him space.
She strode to him, her mouth a thin line. At least, the pain had subsided a bit.
“Seeing something you like?”
“Nothing caught my eye,” he replied curtly. “You? Did the salesman strike you a good deal?”
“He didn’t want to budge, but I persuaded him,” she said. “We are to get the stuff tomorrow at dawn. Come,” she continued, without letting him answer her first. “There is a place I want to show you.”
Lila took him on a cliff which overlooked the bay.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she inquired. “You can see the volcano from here.”
Kell frowned. “How do you know that isn’t just a mountain?”
“The salesman told me even though I didn’t ask,” she revealed. “I thought, since we have a lot of time on our hands, why shouldn’t we go see it?”
“Ah.”
“What? Don’t you like it?”
“It’s not that,” he replied.
“Then what is it?”
“It is breathtaking,” he turned his gaze on her.
Lila smiled at him and he leaned in to kiss her. He was being sincere when he said that the view was great. And she was too.
She kept making progress with her magic. She often tried to overexert herself and bend the rules in her favor, but she mostly succeeded. He was unsure whether it was just luck or talent. Perhaps a mix of both.
He sometimes envied how easy everything came to her. He couldn’t blame her, but why did it hurt?
She thrived like vines on the side of a wall: rampant, thick, dangerous.
He withered like a field of flowers in a wasteland: dying for water, fragile, harmless.
He almost forgot about the crystal ball, but the memory came back full force, and so he deepened the kiss. He wanted her lips to dull the suffering. Her arms around him to make him feel like he belonged. In the mist of pain and uncertainty, she still was his beacon in the darkness. The only one who had ever been real. The one who saw the different sides of him and accepted them all.
Make me forget. Hold me. Make me belong –
Lila licked her swollen lips and beamed at him, pressing her hand on his side.
They enjoyed the view from the promontory for a little more, and he couldn’t help but think how blue and how deep was the sea below.
They chose an inn not far from the cliff because it was convenient, and the first thing they did was sit down to fill their stomachs.
As Lila ate her food, she watched Kell. He sat in front of her, grabbing bites of meat lazily. They weren’t in a rush by any means, and he could take all the time in the world, but she still found this odd.
She had noticed something was off in him ever since their talk on the deck, but she tried to dismiss it as boredom. He often wore this far off look, and sometimes it was hard for her to decipher whether he was okay and it was just his expression or he was spiraling into his own thoughts. For someone who wore his heart on his sleeve, Kell was hard to read.
Their dinner ended up being quiet, and they didn’t speak much. He finished eating his food, but she knew it didn’t mean anything. He could have done it so she would think there was nothing wrong, like at the market a few hours earlier.
She had turned just as he was struggling, and she gave him a minute before strolling to his side to ask him a random question when truthfully, she came to gauge his state.
And then the cliff too. It was true the salesman had told her about it, figuring they weren’t from that town. So she took on the chance to be alone with him, to be tourists for once, hoping to distract him. She wasn’t sure it worked.
They retired to their room and they talked about the plans for the following day until he said that he was tired, and he wanted to sleep. It wasn’t that late, but she had to admit that she was weary too, and wouldn’t mind resting.
But sleep wouldn’t come. Her senses were on high alert but not like old times, when she had to be vigilant to protect herself in case of attack.
She was all ears every time he made the smallest movement next to her. Every time she heard him sigh, she listened more. At some point she thought she was overdoing it, letting her brain quell her worry, but her gut instinct told her to keep tuning in.
And in the end, she caught him when he pushed the blanket aside and got off the bed, put on his boots, and silently left the room.
Maybe he went to relieve himself, a voice told her. Maybe he wanted to take a walk and get fresh air, told her another.
But she decided to ignore them all, and went looking for him.
She went to the cliff. It was the last place they had visited, and the first one where he would go to have a moment by himself. He was quite predictable this way.
She heard a splash as she arrived, and she sighed. She cut her finger and dropped the knife on the soil, then whispered as illumae to the dark, and with her heart pounding in her throat, she didn’t think twice and jumped in the water.
Please, let me be on time, she prayed as her body hit the waves with a thud. She stifled another sigh of relief when the antari command shined light on the otherwise bleak and inscrutable sea.
She hoped it lasted enough for her to see him.
Kell couldn’t sleep, and so he decided to go out.
Thoughts of what happened at the market kept replaying in his head, and haunted him like ghosts of a past long gone, where everything wasn’t right by any means, but at least he didn’t feel like a part of his soul had been damaged.
Before leaving, he glanced at Lila, who was quietly resting on the other pillow. He wondered how could she handle life the way she did? As if nothing touched her, and she didn’t obsess over things that went wrong. If things didn’t go her way, she steered them in the direction she wanted. He was nothing like that, and sometimes he wished he were. He loved her, but he also envied her.
Was this the reason she attracted him? In many ways, she was a star. In spite of wearing black and keeping to the shadows, she shone bright and lighted his way.
The sky was clear and starry that night, he noticed along the way to the cliff, and before he jumped in the water to clear his head.
He thought it would be warm, but it was cold and dark. It surely cleared his head. It also made him rethink about his choices. He had been thoughtless and impulsive, but he was in too deep now, and he couldn’t go back.
The force of the jump sent him down, and for a moment, he imagined what would it be if he let himself go. If he let himself fall. If he let the water devour him and lay his body at the bottom of the sea, in this foreign land where he wasn’t a prince, nor a magician. Where he was just Kell, someone who was quite lost and quite at loss.
Other lives depended on his, and even if the thought of drowning had briefly crossed his mind, he wasn’t selfish. He didn’t want to die. Not yet. Not until he had seen –
It was then when he saw the light, literally. And he realized it wasn’t a trick. There was only one person who could illuminate the dark with and without magic.
It was enough to distract his incoherent and dark thoughts from turning into reality, and to remind him that he was sinking, and that he had to do something about it before it was too late.
His life had value.
It was then when he began to swim, and he drove himself up instead of down, and he found human connection in the abyss and held on tight until he was dragged above water and could finally breathe again.
“What the fuck, Kell?” Lila cried once they were back on land.
He thought he deserved her rage, but she didn’t know the full truth. “I acted rashly,” he replied sincerely.
“Yes, you did,” she narrowed her eyes and passed a hand through her wet hair. “Haven’t you thought about your brother?”
You could have died.
“He will want to talk to me later,” he tried to lighten up the situation, but Lila looked at him severely. “It’s not funny, I know. I am not funny.”
“No, you are not,” she said, pacing in front of him. “You are an idiot.”
“I guess I am,” he agreed. “I just wanted to clear my head.”
She raised her eyebrows, seemed to think about it for a while, then shrugged. “I guess we have different definitions of what clearing our head means.”
They went back to the inn, and Kell climbed on the bed. All the tiredness of the day caught up with him, but he didn’t feel like resting.
Lila sat down next to him, her expression unreadable. “I would have jumped with you,” she said suddenly. “If you had asked.”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to bother you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You know that spur-of-the-moment decisions are my thing.”
“I didn’t think.”
“No,” she said. “Come here,” she demanded, and he settled his head on her lap.
It was so unexpected, just like her. “I didn’t want to die,” he confessed. “I would never let my brother die because of my foolishness. And there is still a lot I have to see.”
“Yes it is,” she said. “And I wouldn’t have let you anyway. You are stuck with me,” she muttered, and it sounded like a promise.