Obsidian and Stars (Ivory and Bone #2)(53)

I open my eyes. The harsh sun is cold and bright at the edges of my vision, but then my gaze warms. Everything about Kol is warm, but his eyes burn. The sun sets a fire in each of them, and I can feel their heat.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he says. His lips are close to my ear and his breath heats my skin. I turn my face toward him and bring my lips to his.

At first his kiss is soft, but like the light in his eyes, it’s filled with its own warmth. Heat runs down my spine. With each beat of my heart it spreads—into my chest, down my arms, over my legs, all the way down to my toes.

Fighting against my will one more time, I pull back from him and tip my head to look him in the eyes. “I will do it again—”

“That was foolish, Mya. You could have died—”

“You’re welcome,” I say.

“I do thank you,” he says. “But—”

“Whatever you intend to say, please don’t say it.” I pull back a little more. “You smiled at me—just after we got me free—”

“I was happy. I knew you were safe.”

“Yet you would deny me the same happiness? You would deny me the satisfaction—the joy of saving you? No. That’s something you can’t take from me.” I kiss him once more, and his lips are already dry and hot with fever. Fear flickers back to life at my core, where I had almost extinguished it. I’m reminded that I haven’t saved him at all.

Not yet.

I roll onto my side and find Pek and Seeri kneeling beside us. Behind them, the creek splashes in and around newly exposed rocks, following a fresh-cut course across the ground.

Pek’s eyes sweep over Kol. “I’m going to give you my tunic,” he says. “You’re too sick to be wearing wet clothes—”

“Pek—”

“Yours will dry quickly on me, once we’re moving again.”

Kol doesn’t offer another word of protest. He knows his brother is right. Pek pulls his tunic over his head while I tug Kol’s up over his shoulders. The skin across his chest is bright red with cold.

Pek squats beside me and I’m suddenly in the way. Reluctantly, I leave Kol in Pek’s hands and climb to my feet. Seeri jumps up with me and pulls me into an embrace. “If I’d lost you, too . . . ,” she whispers into my ear. But then she pulls back, shivering with cold. “Your skin feels like ice.”

“I’ll warm up,” I say. “Like Pek said—as soon as we’re moving again—”

“Kol won’t be able to walk on his own,” Pek says, still squatting beside his brother. “We’ll have to carry him.”

Seeri’s eyes drop to the ground. They sweep over Kol and she covers her mouth with her hand. I drop my eyes to his face and all at once I see him the way she sees him.

How can those bone-white lips be the lips I just kissed? How can those dim eyes be the eyes that just warmed me to my toes?

“He’s getting worse,” Seeri says, and something in her words flares up anger in me that I have to tamp back down. It’s not an accusation, I tell myself. She is not saying that you failed. I want to scream, to defend myself, to shriek that I am doing everything that I can. But I know better. I know I can’t let this be about me. Defensiveness is just a distraction, and I can’t indulge in even the smallest distraction right now.

Seeri drops to her knees and picks up Kol’s hand. “If only we had a fire . . .” Her eyes scan the ground, as if searching for firewood, but then she looks up and meets my gaze.

And there it is. I find in her eyes what I was dreading to find there. Fear. A fear that matches my own. A fear that tells me that my panic is justified—the panic that at this moment runs over my skin like a thousand tiny spiders.

“We need to go,” I say as Seeri scrambles to her feet. “Even if we have to carry Kol, we need to get out of the open.” I look around, realizing that I’m not sure where we are. “Lees and Noni said we would come out near the beach,” I say.

“We’re not far,” Seeri answers. “I think just beyond this cliff is the sea.”

The sea.

Of course. My mind has been a jumble since Kol and I climbed out of the water, but I remember now the purpose of crawling through the rock. It was a passage to the sea.

Not far from where Seeri and I stand I see Morsk, Lees, and Noni. Their backs are to us, and they are watching Black Dog. I stop and watch him, too. He is running along the edge of the cliff.

And I know that below that cliff is a beach. A beach that holds our tent, our food, and just a bit farther away, on the beach facing east . . .

Boats.





TWENTY-ONE


It doesn’t take long for all of us to assemble at the top of the cliff. Pek carries Kol over his shoulder, but Kol doesn’t complain. I think he’d rather accept help from Pek than from anyone else. We stand in a clump facing north, Kol leaning against his brother, with the sun dipping over our left shoulders in the west. The day is growing late and hunger gnaws at me. No one says anything, but I’m sure everyone is hungry.

The ledge below us drops straight down to the water, but to our right, a strip of sand extends from the base of the cliff out into the sea. This is the beach—the far northern edge of it at least—where Lees, Noni, and I set up our camp last night. Squinting, I can see the shadowy outline of the tent in the distance. The kayak Lees and I came in is only a little farther east, tucked up against the wall of rock. According to Seeri, the two double kayaks she came in with Kol, Chev, and Pek are on the eastern shore of the island, too.