Roar (Stormheart #1)(78)
“It’s already done, child. I’ll not argue with you. You have Locke for that,” he said with a knowing grin. Her face flamed, and she took the key without another word.
“Last room on the right.”
She kept her face forward as she walked down the hall. She sorely needed a bath and sleep, and everything else could wait until tomorrow.
But her mind refused to wait. Thoughts beat at her as she bathed in the cramped tub in chilly water brought by a young maid. Her feet were raw from breaking in boots that were fitted to someone else’s feet, and she carefully covered her blisters and wounds with a healing salve.
But for every measure of pain the salve soothed, the more room she had to think of home. What was her mother doing now? Surely, she had received the note Nova was supposed to give her. Was the queen furious? Was she afraid?
Roar pulled her worn copy of The Tale of Lord Finneus Wolfram from her pack. Lord Wolfram was the nephew of the last king of Calibah. Southwest of Pavan and just north of Locke, Calibah was all dangerous swampland and ruins now, given over to the predators who lurked in the murky waters. A year before she was born, the kingdom had been beset by storms. Again and again, it was ravaged with no reprieve, until not even the royal Stormlings could hold them all off. Many died. Many times many. Wolfram volunteered to lead an expedition out to sea in the hopes of finding a land that was not afflicted by storms. That had been in the year of Aurora’s birth, eighteen years prior. The ship was never heard from again.
The book was neither unrealistic fairy tale nor harsh cautionary tale. It walked a fine line between hope and despair—a land that Roar had walked most of her life. And if there was some small chance that Finneus Wolfram had lived to find a land safer than this one, perhaps she could too.
She’d read the book so often that the pages had grown thin with use. The spine was cracked and the edges worn. No matter how many times she read the story, it had never failed to enthrall her.
Until now.
For tonight, she was much closer to despair than hope, and she could not see the potential for truth on the pages, only fiction. More likely, Finneus Wolfram had gone the way of every other Stormling who had ever ventured out to sea. And she was a silly girl if she thought she would meet a different end.
“Enough.” She threw the book down upon her bed and stood. She could not stay here and wallow in her fears and doubts any longer. She dressed quickly, pulling her boots up over brand-new bandages. She no longer had a cloak, and a chill clung to the rocky desert outside. She still had the cream-colored scarf that she had wrapped around her hair when she left Pavan, so she draped that around her shoulders like a shawl and sneaked out of her room, down the darkened hallway and out into the night.
She kept to the shadows, darting down roads without any specific destination in mind. When she found a gap in the village wall, she climbed over the rubble and outside. Her feet sank into the sand as she walked. Overhead, the stars blazed from horizon to horizon, brighter than she had ever seen them before. She found an area without brush and cacti, where the red sand was thick enough to be soft, and she lay back, stretching her arms and legs out, until she saw nothing but sky.
She had done this more times than she could count back home in Pavan. But the earth there was soft in a different way; it did not shift and stick to her skin as the sand did here. She missed the breeze blowing through the wheat stalks. Here, the wind was either absent or blowing in great gusts that dragged the sand along with it. No in between. The stars at least were the same.
It should not have been a comfort, to feel so small in comparison to the rest of the universe. But she didn’t mind feeling small. When the world loomed large above her as it did now, it was easier to have hope. Because surely somewhere out there in the far reaches of the world, there was a place without storms. A place with answers. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the gusting wind, the sprinkle of sand as it settled in a new place, and the call of insects as they poured their songs into the night.
“You have a real bed and a room to yourself, and you choose this?”
She startled, jumping up into a sitting position, and twisting to find Locke behind her, his hands shoved into the pockets at his hips.
“What are you doing here?”
It wasn’t enough that he kept intruding on her thoughts, now he interrupted her solitude as well.
“I could ask the same of you.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she snapped.
“Sometimes that happens after a while on the road. You teach your body to only sleep when exhausted, and it is confused when the routine changes. We could go for a run if you would like.”
She snorted. “I’ll pass.”
He settled into the sand beside her, his long legs bent at the knee with his elbows braced on top. “I’m not that bad, am I?”
“You are relentless and demanding and unwavering.”
“I only hear good things coming out of your mouth.”
She laughed, and he lay back like she had been before, his hands pillowed behind his head, completely at ease. Curse him.
He smiled and said, “That sounds good too.”
“What?”
“The way you laugh.”
She frowned, wanting to lie down again, but too afraid of how it would feel to be that close to him. So instead, she folded her legs and sat with her hands in her lap and her head tilted up toward the sky.