So I Can Breathe

If I hadn't come here... She had heard that he would already have left for his next inspection site days ago. In the original course of things, he never would have lived through this forest fire at all.

Rhea chewed on her lip. Is it because of me?

A grave expression settled over her face as she sank into thought — then she flopped back down onto the bed. I changed the future the moment I returned. I was prepared from the start that everything might change.

She rolled onto her side. A strand of hair had stuck to her cheek, and it tickled. I thought he'd keep me until dawn, holding me there, asking me all sorts of things...

The position was uncomfortable, so she rolled the other way. It isn't that he didn't ask. He just put it off. Tomorrow he'll summon me for certain and interrogate me down to the last detail. If he does, I won't just sit there and take it. Should I tell him to take responsibility for stealing my lips? I wonder what face he'd make.

She giggled, picturing Carion's dazed expression, and rolled over once more.

...He looked unwell earlier. I hope he's all right. It was unexpected, him going off alone to save one child from the forest village. I thought he was a cold man... Anyway, I'm glad they found the child.

A soldier had come running the moment they reached the garrison to report that it had all been a misunderstanding — the child had never gone missing in the first place. What had impressed Rhea was that Carion hadn't snapped at anyone. He had simply said, As long as they found him.

He really is her son. He has compassion for people.

She kept tossing and turning, and only after a long while did she finally drift off to sleep.

"Huh?"

Rhea's eyes flew open. The Spirit's voice. From time to time, the Spirit sent her its will with unmistakable clarity. In most cases, it was a warning. That will reached her sounding almost like a human voice.

Stop what?

What's going to burst?

Rhea bolted upright and swung her legs off the bed. Has the forest fire flared up again?

She looked out the window. People still moving about in the aftermath of the blaze were visible only as shadows in the dark, but none of them seemed to be in any hurry.

She opened her bedroom door without a sound. The corridor was quiet. Empty. From the far end of that darkened hall, a wind came blowing toward her — showing her the way, telling her to come.

She followed it down the corridor and stopped before a door. Whose room is this?

Security at the residence was looser than usual. Everyone's attention had been pulled elsewhere by the chaos of the forest fire; she hadn't encountered a single soul on the way here. She glanced around, eased the door open, and slipped inside.

She was still taking in the darkened bedroom when a faint groan reached her. She moved toward the bed it had come from — and froze.

"Your Highness?"

Carion was dragging in ragged breaths, his face twisted with pain. Rhea stood there helplessly for a moment, then sat down on the edge of the bed. She hesitated more than once before stretching out her hand and laying it against his forehead.

His fingers snapped shut around her wrist. Their eyes met.

After returning to the garrison, Carion had received welcome news: the wind had shifted, and the forest fire was losing its strength. On any ordinary night he would have stayed up until dawn directing the cleanup. But the body that had felt so clear when he left the forest had begun, little by little, to go wrong. A heaviness settled through his limbs; his head throbbed. It seemed the aftereffects of the seizure were catching up with him at last.

He judged it wiser to rest until morning, and returned to his chambers. He was more or less fine through the bath and the moment he lay down. Then, as time passed, the fever climbed. The breath leaving his mouth grew hot. His body sagged like waterlogged cotton.

The symptoms were distinctly different from the seizures he called his curse. If a seizure was like being flung into a roaring fire, this was like being lowered, inch by inch, into water coming to a boil.

A fever? He had heard of such illnesses in passing. He had never actually suffered one. Barring that chronic curse of his, he had the constitution of a man who had never so much as caught a common cold. The knowledge that he had succumbed to something so trivial filled him with a kind of self-disgust, and he tried to sleep.

By the time he understood that something was truly wrong, his mind had gone hazy and the strength had drained from his limbs. He hadn't the energy left to call for anyone. He lay there in something close to resignation — and then, from deep inside his body, he felt a force beginning to seethe. A vague, terrible certainty settled over him: that force would swallow him whole and burn him away.

So this is how I die.

He had no particular attachment to living. But he had not wished for a death this hollow.

Princess.

Why, at a moment like this, was it that woman with the green eyes who drifted across his vision?

A wind brushed over his face. Had the hallucinations progressed so far that he was now inventing sensations with no substance at all? There was no reason for wind to be stirring inside a closed bedroom...

A coolness touched his brow, and strength surged suddenly into a body that had been going slack. He snatched at the wrist of whoever had laid a hand on his forehead.

She appeared to him in a blur. As his mind cleared a fraction, he understood he was not seeing things.

Princess!

Was this what it felt like to see hope at the far edge of despair? In the darkness, she seemed to shine.

But he did not want hope. Better that it had never existed than to catch hold of it and lose it. And so his voice came out hard.

"What are you doing in my room right now?"

The instant his hand closed on her arm, the wind rose. A wind only she could feel.

All at once Rhea felt as if every sound in the world had been stripped away, leaving her alone in a vast, empty white. It was the signal that every one of her senses had crossed into a realm beyond human limits. She could not will this into being herself — the Wind Spirit drew her into this state whenever it needed her to understand something that could not wait.

She saw a vision of violent flame, raging as if to devour the world. And then she heard Nella's voice.

Nella had known a great deal about the ancient spirits the world had long since forgotten. The reason they had faded from memory, she had said, was the vanishingly low chance of awakening.

A spirit's rampage!

Rhea locked her gaze on Carion's silver-grey eyes.

"Your Highness. Answer me honestly. How long have you been like this? Since you saw the forest fire earlier?"

Carion closed his eyes slowly, then opened them again. He was holding her wrist not to push her away, but to keep her from pulling free. The mere contact of her skin felt like a small air hole opening in a sealed room.

"Like what?"

"The force running wild inside your body. How long has it been tormenting you?"

Carion looked at her for a long moment. So this woman did know about his curse. And he knew the precise answer to her question.

"The autumn I turned ten."

"Ten? Since you were that young..."

Rhea swallowed the rest — How are you still alive?

"Did the symptoms appear in the forest earlier, too?"

"Is the princess a mage?"

"What?"

"When your hand touches me, the curse subsides."

"...A curse?"

"A curse."

With that, Carion turned his face away. His hand, however, did not let her go.

"That isn't a curse... Then how does it subside? In what way?"

Rhea's green eyes went wide. She murmured it under her breath.

"So that's why. Earlier."

That's why he kissed me?

A single picture assembled itself in her mind, every piece clicking into place. The wind's power is calming the incomplete, rampaging force of fire.

She did not know why a spirit that had awakened in childhood was running wild now. But it had never happened in her previous life — which meant this was a future that had changed because she had come here and met him.

If she failed to stop the spirit's rampage, he would die. Nella's voice rang in her ear.

No.

She could not let him die here. Not him. Not her son. Left alone, he would have lived at least another ten years. For him to die young because of her — what a monstrous thing that would be. She would have no face left to meet Nella with, even in death, and no reason left to live this life at all.

"Wait—!"

Rhea tore her wrist free of his grip, climbed onto the bed, and settled astride his body.

"Pardon me."

She met his startled silver-grey eyes and bent down at once, laying her mouth over his.

Carion's body went rigid — but his hesitation lasted only a breath. He caught her face in both hands and pulled her in, devouring her lips, pressing into the kiss with a hunger that left no room to refuse.