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Sarina shouldn’t have been surprised. Not with so many years of hurt between them. Still… “What changed your mind?”

Brielle grinned around an exhale of smoke. “The fact that your human has the most glorious set of flaming brass balls I’ve ever seen.” Sarina barked a laugh. “I take it you had something to do with that?”

Sarina didn’t fight the swell of pride in her chest. “Believe it or not, she came with those. Though I like to think I had a hand in teaching her how to use them.”

Even if it had been a battle. Taly was talented, make no mistake. Smart as a whip with a natural curiosity. But she was also stubborn, impulsive, and easily bored. The teenage years were especially harrowing.

Above the bar, the screen panned to their family’s box, where Skye was leaning over, whispering something to Taly. She grinned in response, strands of gold glinting in her hair.

“She reminds me of you,” Brielle said, sipping from a glass of clear liquor. “When you were younger.”

Sarina tore her eyes from the screen. “Are you calling me old?”

“No. Just boring. You’ve been boring ever since you decided to marry that twit, Madoc.”

An old pain tugged on her heart. “Brielle,” Sarina warned.

“I’m serious. When was the last time you rang in the Summer Solstice dancing on top of a blazing, four-story ritual pyre dressed in nothing but your own flames?”

“A while, admittedly,” Sarina murmured.

It started when they were girls. Every Eris and Yule, she and Brielle would honor the latter’s distant Draegonian heritage by drunkenly reenacting the most arcane, most hedonistic Hrathinian[iv] rituals they could find. Dancing naked with crowns of flowers in their unbound hair, absolutely butchering the words of the ancient songs they shrieked to the night sky, they would let themselves go wild for no other reason than the pure joy of it.

Madoc had never approved. He hadn’t approved of a lot of things. And she’d wanted to make him happy, so she’d… changed. Become someone quieter, softer, with a gentler kind of strength—a woman he could more easily love.

“Madoc was a good man,” Sarina said softly.

“No comment,” Brielle muttered.

“And he made me better. I was… I was too wild. Always giving in to my worst impulses.”

“Oh, is that what he called me? He always was coming up with the most darling nicknames.” Brielle held up her empty glass to signal the bartender, saying to Sarina, “Water for you, I’m assuming. I’m sure Madoc’s ghost is lurking around here somewhere, ready to slap your hand away.”

Sarina reined in what she truly wanted to say. She’d had too many years to master her temper to give in to such lackluster bait.

Instead, she cut straight to the heart of it. “What is this really about, Bri? Hmm? You want to punish me? Is that why you brought me here tonight?”

“No,” Brielle said with a wave of her cigar. “No, I don’t want to punish you. I have better things to do with my time than that.” She blew out a long stream of smoke, a challenge in her eye. “I just thought it might be nice to see a little of that old fire, but apparently it’s all gone out.”

Never insult a fire mage’s flames. Never.

“You take that back,” Sarina growled, heat and ash scalding her throat. So much for mastering her temper.

Brielle’s smirk was sharp as a blade. “Or what? You’re going to make me? The way you made that little shit nephew of mine take his seat. Except, oh wait… Your human did that. Because, unlike you, she still has somesparkleft in her.”

Smoke rippled from where Sarina’s hand sat flat against the bar, the wood beneath it glowing.

Brielle tsked her tongue. “Careful, Rina. Singe me, and that could be considered an act of war.”

The bartender set down two glasses, one with liquor, the other water.

Sarina reached for the liquor. “War is a man’s game. Surely, we’re more civilized than that.”

Then she knocked it back.

It tasted vile—burned all the way down and left her skating along the edge of something reckless and wild. Something she’d thought she buried a long time ago.

The man behind the bar was a skinny, floppy-haired Fey with stains on his shirt and a decidedly harried look about him. “Barkeeper,” she shouted. When he didn’t turn around, she snapped her fingers and lit a fire beneath his ass—literally—that had him yelping and frantically patting at his trousers. “We need ten, no—make thattwentyshots of your strongest liquor.” A glance at Brielle. “Each.”