Chapter Sixty-One
Tisaanah
For the ten-thousandth time, my palms were empty.
Everything inside of me still felt eerily, terrifyingly quiet. I couldn’t conjure my silver butterflies. I couldn’t feel the emotions around me. Couldn’t so much as ripple the water.
I heard footsteps behind me.
“Sneaking out to work in the middle of the night,” Max said. “Something about this is very familiar.”
I couldn’t even make myself answer. My hands clenched.
“Give it time,” he murmured. “It’s still barely been—”
“It’s been almost two weeks.” I peered over my shoulder. “I don’t understand. It is one thing for Reshaye to leave me. But why would it take everything with it?”
“It didn’t. You need to let yourself recover, Tisaanah.”
“I do not have time.”
Despite myself, my eyes were beginning to sting. The anxiety had been a constant companion these last two weeks, but it had been so easy to simply let it fall to the back of my mind and look away. There was, after all, so much good to cover it up.
Max and I spent our days sleeping and fucking and eating, joking in the garden or sparring in the fields. I was just… so deliriously happy. I was drunk on it. Drunk on Max, and the way every time he responded to one of my deeply-unfunny jokes with that huff of a laugh, it suffused my whole body with warmth.
Now, the shame hit me all at once. Our two weeks were nearly up. My magic was nowhere to be found. And there were people out there, suffering — my people — while I rolled around in a garden, selfishly content.
“I should have been trying harder,” I said. “This whole time. I should have been trying to find out why.”
A flicker of hurt crossed Max’s face, and I immediately regretted the callousness of my words.
We hadn’t spoken again of the question he asked me several nights ago. But it was still there, beneath our every interaction.
Do you ever think about it? he had asked me.
What a ridiculous question.
Of course I thought about it. How could I not? I had never been so happy as I was here, with him. I craved this. But every time I let my imagination extend further, to that soft dream of a future, it was so quickly followed by a wave of darker, more complicated feelings. Guilt. Shame. And above all, fear.
“I can’t sit here and be happy,” I choked out, “when there are so many people waiting for me. People who did not get the chances I did.”
The hurt shifted to understanding.
Max settled down beside me in the grass and withdrew a pocket knife. He opened the blade and, before I could speak, drew it across his palm. Then he offered the knife to me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Supposedly, we draw from the same magic. And we’ve proven that you can draw from it. So if your magic isn’t working, then try using mine.”
I hesitated. “What if I hurt you?”
He gave me a wry smile. “Realistically, I think it’s more likely that nothing will happen.”
This seemed ridiculous. But then again, he’d managed to bring me back from the dead with this, and I was desperate. So I took the blade, and cut open my own palm, and pressed it to his.
At first, nothing happened.
But I forced my mind to still, reached out for him the same way I would reach out for minds and emotions with my magic. Everything felt dull and off-color, like one of my senses had been hacked away. But…
No.
There.
I felt it — what? I wasn’t even sure. Something. And it felt like him, a magic now so foreign and familiar at once, rolling and melding with mine like a distant, approaching storm.
Max drew in a sudden breath between clenched teeth. His fingers tightened around mine. Our hands were trembling.
It didn’t feel the same as it once had, but it was something. And maybe it would be enough. It had to be.
I lifted my other palm. And I whispered to the magic around me as I had a million times before, even though it was more slippery and rebellious than the magic I had wielded.
Still. It responded. Yes. Yes, this would work. I knew it. This had to be the key —
The thing that rolled from my hand was barely even a butterfly. It was, in fact, more like a moth… or a fly. It was weak and shuddering, dissolving into the air before it barely even made it past my eye line. No… I could save it, I could—
I made a final, desperate push.
But then Max drew in a sharp breath and yanked his hand away. My concentration snapped. My weak butterfly dissolved and fell to the earth, disappearing into nothingness before it hit the ground.
I barely saw it. I was just looking at Max, who let out a low hiss as he rubbed his hand. My heart fell.
“I hurt you.”
“It’s fine. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not…” I pulled his hand to me. The shallow slit across his palm was now black and purple. There wasn’t much of it — not enough to spread beyond the very edges of the wound. Still. Too much. This shouldn’t have happened.
A lump rose in my throat.
“I shouldn’t have done this.”
“It’s nothing, Tisaanah. It’s still just a scratch.”
“I don’t care. We are not doing that again.”
He said nothing, his lips pressed together.
I stood and paced, my arms around myself.
“It will come back,” he said, quietly. “Give it time. We’ll find a solution.”
“We do not have time.” They do not have time.
“You can’t rush this. It’s not the sort of thing you can bang your head against until it works. But something will give. You know I’m too cynical to say it if I didn’t believe it was the truth.”
Despite myself, a smile twisted one side of my mouth. Cynical, he calls himself. At first, maybe it was easy to think he was, with
