“Warrior strong, too,” Grastinga went on. “Both heal.”
Tasia took a shaky breath. “Will you send me back? To her?”
Grastinga rarely smiled, but now she gave her pupil the slightest ghost of one. Tasia interpreted it as her mentor being pleased. For one childish moment, Tasia felt like Grastinga was the mother she had wanted for so many years, and she wished she could take the small woman with her.
“Empress can send herself back,” Grastinga answered.
“Can I?” Tasia asked, but even as the question left her lips, she felt a tickle far in the back of her mind. The thread connecting her mind to her physical body.
She tugged on that thread. Grastinga’s touch faded; the crackling fire in the top of Xochitcyan’s tower silenced. Everything was black again, and for one panicked second, Tasia thought she was dead. Or worse – that she had actually propelled herself into the Shadowlands after all.
But then she felt a different touch on her, and a shape pressing against her that she would recognize anywhere, perhaps even in death: Joslyn.
Tasia opened her eyes, half fearing, half wishing she would see the barren waste of the Shadowlands with its sunless sky bearing down on her. But instead, two coal-dark eyes, a deep furrow between them but gentle creases at their edges, gazed down at her. Those eyes bore a host of emotions – worry, caution, tenderness. But most of all – love. Tasia reached up by instinct, letting her fingers slide softly down Joslyn’s cheek, like she might smooth the furrow from her brow.
“Empress?” said another voice, a voice Tasia hadn’t heard in over a decade.
She turned her head, and there, to her disoriented surprise, stood Linna, staring down at her with nearly the same eyes as Joslyn’s, face filled with almost all the same emotions. But the expression of love in Linna’s eyes had a slightly different connotation than Joslyn’s, a connotation Tasia recognized easily because it had been in her own eyes only moments before when she’d looked longingly at Grastinga: Linna stared at Tasia the way a child stared at her mother.
Except that Linna was supposed to be a gawky teen of about fifteen summers. This Linna had grown past the stage of awkwardness into a beautiful young woman only a few years younger than Tasia herself. It didn’t make any sense at all.
“Linna?” Tasia whispered.
Tasia’s eyes moved past Linna, studying a semi-circle of other faces that surrounded her. Strangely, most of them appeared to be Adessian men – but there was Akella in the center of all of them, hunched over as though in pain. Another woman, an Imperial one roughly Tasia’s own age, stood beside Akella, an arm hooked around Akella’s waist as though to provide support.
“Tasia?” Joslyn asked. “Are you … all right?”
The way she hesitated tugged at Tasia’s heart. Perhaps she’d nearly asked Are you yourself again? instead. But she never would have suggested to this ragtag assembly around them that there was anything the matter with Tasia.
“Yes,” Tasia said, using Joslyn’s arm to lever herself into a sitting position. “I feel … much better.” She met Joslyn’s eyes, holding them for a moment longer. I am myself again, her gaze said. “Thank you,” she said aloud.
Joslyn nodded, a simple gesture that spoke volumes – that she understood Tasia was herself once more, that she trusted Tasia, that there might be more to talk about it one day, but they didn’t need to do it here, now, surrounded by all these other people. It was one of the things Tasia loved best about Joslyn, her ability to say so much while barely shifting her stoic features.
She loved her. Gods, how Tasia loved her. Ten years’ absence or not, that hadn’t changed, would never change. How could she have thought it had, even for only a few minutes?
Tasia wanted nothing more than to throw her arms around Joslyn and make the rest of the world disappear, but she couldn’t. Not yet.
“Linna,” Tasia said slowly, glancing from the girl to the pirate, “is it just the light, or are you much older than I remember?”
Linna’s face split into a wide grin. “Oh Empress,” she said. She didn’t seem to notice the way Tasia flinched at the word Empress, but Joslyn did. “There is so much to tell you.”
And as if Linna’s words had been a cue, Akella’s eyes rolled into the back of her skull and she collapsed. The woman who’d been supporting her let out a cry of alarm as Akella slipped from her protective grasp and crumpled to the marble floor. The Adessian men turned towards Akella as one body, and Tasia heard scattered murmurs of Rizalt.
Of course. Akella’s sailors. Tasia should have guessed sooner.
“She’s unconscious,” the woman said, kneeling beside Akella. She put an ear to Akella’s chest then sat up, wide brown eyes full of fear. “She’s – she’s dying.”
Tasia pushed herself up and out of Joslyn’s protective arms, staggering towards Akella on unsteady feet. The sailors made way as she fell to her knees beside the pirate captain. Like everything else, it was her fault that Akella was here. And if she died, that would be her fault, too.
Tasia reached her hands out so that they hovered over Akella’s unconscious body and closed her eyes. Tasia reached again – not with her hands, but with her mind, and instantly, she felt the intoxicating power of the shadow arts filling her. She directed that power downwards, into Akella’s body, and she could see everything – each place where the flesh had torn, each place the blood had ceased to flow in the way that it should. Tasia could heal her, Tasia could –
But she hesitated, opening her eyes. She could feel everyone in the room watching her expectantly, hesitating alongside her, waiting to see what she would do.
Tasia glanced over her shoulder, looking up into Joslyn’s face behind her. The look Tasia gave Joslyn was a pained question mark.
“You can,” Joslyn said. “And I’m right here if anything goes wrong.”
“You can – you can heal her?” asked the unfamiliar brown-eyed woman.
But You can heal her was not what Joslyn meant, not exactly. What she had meant was, I believe that you can control the shadow arts without the shadow arts controlling you. And if Tasia couldn’t? Well, then Joslyn carried a sword whose only purpose was to maintain the balance between the Shadowlands and mortal realm.
Tasia nodded – a nod both for the brown-eyed woman and for Joslyn.
I can,she thought, and she imagined Grastinga standing beside her, one child-sized hand on her shoulder.
Tasia closed her eyes again, and reached for all the torn places inside Akella’s body.