Read Online Deathless by Belinda Burke - Free Book Online

faster, the emotion thicker in them with every passing moment. In the space of one mortal argument he learned together and never and tomorrow . He heard maybe and gained interest and confusion, not in his understanding but in his being.
    How could maybe exist? He knew only certainty, within and without. The passage of the seasons, endless, perfect. The nebulous precision of nature, and the order of things that meant all beginnings would come to their end, all beginnings, eventually, come to him…
    Death . I am death, and death is Kas, and I am Kas.
    Was that the reason he had gained only goodbye? Despite the lingering spark, despite the wide eyes, those parted lips, despite sounds, love and…everything else. Despite the easy way Myrddin had let Kas take him as he would, had bent for him. Pliant as the willow—but even the willow had its roots.
    “Just don’t go! Stay with me and we’ll work it out! I love you!”
    Kas fled, struck by those overheard words as by some power beyond all defiance. His fury was pain, an agony of understandings.
    Some words…some words were not enough for even their own burdens, never mind the weight he wanted them to carry. He touched his own lips, and he wondered what he’d done, but it was too late now to take it back even if he wanted to, even if maybe now he knew it would have been best…never to have said it.
    “Love…”
    He said it because he was alone—because it no longer mattered. The sound came through the pines and took their needles, dried their branches, came as a wind through the standing grasses above the snow and turned their green to gray, then to black ashes. No one seemed to hear him, to notice. Not here. Not mortals, and maybe that was best for them, because the voice the wood and grasses had heard was the voice that had taken their lives.
    A little at a time Kas pulled back, turned away, left doors and windows behind him and retreated to the very edge of the tribe’s territory to be alone with the whispering of his mind.
    But it was a human place and there was no real quiet there, no space empty in the boundaries of their claim. At the edges there was other loneliness than just his own, and the words of another mortal to fill out the feeling into something Kas would be able to express.
    “Told me, she could have…I would have waited, anyhow. But what am I supposed to do without the truth? Like it means anything now. Might as well be dead, might as well just—go. Somewhere. Anywhere…maybe there’s a somewhere that’s better than here. Except that she won’t come with me, won’t be there. Damn it!”
    Kas stared at the one who defied his solitude. A young man, flushed with anger, eyes dark and bright at the same time, forehead wrinkled and something on his face, something…that Kas thought he would know in his own reflection, though his memory of his own face did not include it.
    “I don’t want to be alone.”
    The boy spoke Kas’ own thought, and that was it, perhaps. Did he know what it meant to be alone now, when he hadn’t before? Many things that Kas had always known but never acknowledged were visible to him in sharp outline. He understood that this had happened now because he could hold the long black expanse of his past against that short time in which he had possessed…everything else.
    Dimly confused and suffering softly, Kas turned away from the one who was alone, back to the hearth fires of the tribe. Everything was quieter now, the sunset approaching and with it a dimming of human sounds. There was still…something else. There was still one other thing, one other word he needed to know.
    He waited, through the long night and into the morning, for voices to return, but neither that day, nor the next, nor the one after that brought him the necessary syllables.
    Time passed, and Kas’ presence had its effect. Days—weeks—deaths. Deaths . More than there should have been, if indeed there should have been any…and still, Kas stayed.