Page 184 of A Vow of Embers

He let out a short yelp and I hoped no one else could hear it. I saw his pulse beating quickly in his neck, the sweat that had formed at his hairline.

“I don’t think he’ll be able to bear the pain,” Zalira said, and the apprentice shook harder.

“Tell me,” I said as I glared, letting him know that I was serious.

When he didn’t answer, I raised my xiphos as if I meant to slice it down.

The gambit worked. “I will tell you! I need my fingers!”

I released his hand and he immediately pulled it back to his chest. He took in two deep breaths and then said, “We ... we call on the goddess by name. And then we call on the aspect she uses as the grower of all things. When we combine the two, it makes flowers bloom.”

They used the goddess’s name? My mouth opened in surprise. I had been searching for this information for so long and I couldn’t believe that I was actually about to learn it. I hadn’t realized whenasking for the incantation that the goddess’s name would be part of it.

“What is her name?” I whispered, keeping my sword pointed at him.

He hung his head and then he said her name quietly.

“Dea. Her name is Dea.”

Chapter Sixty

I said her name in my mind several times, slowing it down and sounding out each syllable—day-uh—and there was a rightness to it. It felt like solving a great puzzle, like when I had figured out the secret of the labyrinth, how the walls edged in green would lead me to the temple.

“Dea.” I said the name aloud.

But much like when I had uttered a false name for her, nothing happened. I didn’t know what I had been expecting, but I had thought something would occur. She had told me to call on her name.

Why didn’t she respond?

“What is the other word you use? What do you call the aspect?” I asked, wondering if perhaps the combination might make something happen.

“To make things grow, we use the aspect Khloe. We say ‘Dea Khloe’ and the flower blooms.”

I repeated the words and nothing happened. I didn’t feel any different.

Zalira also used the phrase. Nothing.

“It won’t work for you,” he said with scorn in his voice. “You don’t have an amulet and you’re women. You can’t wield magic.”

“How do we keep him from talking?” I asked Zalira. I had the information I’d come for, but now I wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Should we get him drunk?”

“Didn’t Io say something about creating a potion of forgetting?”

Zalira was right. It had been in the book Suri had found for her. Maybe the goddess had known that we would be in this moment and would have need of it. “Can you go and get it from her?”

I heard the door unlock and then close as Zalira slipped out. Io would have to stop distracting her brother to fetch the vial. Which meant that my time would be running out. Because even if Xander didn’t notice that I was gone, I was sure that Stephanos had already realized that Zalira was missing. Suri wouldn’t be able to keep them all distracted by herself for very long.

The apprentice stared at me defiantly as we waited. “This magic will never work for you.”

“So you said.”

“No. You have to be worthy of it. We devote our lives to the goddess.” His eyes dropped down to my chest and I followed his gaze, wondering if something had popped out. I was still covered. “We have a higher purpose. We do not stoop to the pleasures of the flesh.”

They didn’t have children, either? That didn’t match up with what I had been told about their inheritances. “Amulets are passed from father to son.”

“We are all adopted,” he said triumphantly, as if he had outsmarted me. “We do not marry or father children. The magic will not work for you because you are married and you lie with your husband.”

I did, but not in the sense he was implying. I had so often wondered if my marriage was the reason that the goddess no longer spoke to me, and this young life mage seemed to be confirming that it was so.