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“Pritkin?”I looked at him.

“It’s been fifty years, Cassie,” he said quietly, pale lashes sweeping down to hide vivid green eyes.“Fifty long years and the old man has been holding on for one thing and one thing only—the chance that you would return.That’s all he can see after his days with Lady Phemonoe,” he added, talking about my predecessor, “or from his interactions with you.How easily the Pythias travel through time, as casually as anyone else might hail a cab—”

“You’re stalling,” I said, equally quietly, because Pritkin never stalled.He was one of the most forthright people I knew, so yeah.This was bad.

“No, I’m trying to make you understand how it came to this—”

“Came towhat?” I was out of patience, and yeah.My gut was definitely cramping now.“What is he planning to do, because I know he doesn’t have the power for a Pythian shift.None of them do!”

“Individually, no, but together?”He finally looked up at me, and, to his credit, he didn’t flinch.“He thinks they might.Which is why he is willing to sacrifice the remaining Corpsmen, and allow you to drain every war mage he has left to give you the power you need.

“To go home.”

Chapter Sixteen

Pritkin was still talking, but I couldn’t hear him with what sounded like Niagara Falls suddenly rushing through my head.Shock, I thought blankly.I’m in shock.

Only no, it was worse than that.

Seeing Jonas somehow still alive when he’d been ancient, even by magical standards, fifty years ago had made my heart leap—first with fear that we might not be able to save him and then with a flood of relief when we somehow did.We’d had our problems, he and I, ever since he’d realized that I wouldn’t be a puppet for the Circle anymore than I was for the Senate.But I’d still been so happy to see him!

With the wily old mage on our side, our chances had just shot through the roof, I’d thought.Maybe I didn’t have to do this with just a ragtag group of refugees, I’d thought.The Silver Circle had survived, and its leader with it, and we coulddothis, I’d thought.

And now all I could think was: he’s mad.

My God, Jonas Marsden was mad, and we were so freaking screwed.

“Bodil scanned him after we arrived when he was too exhausted to have any walls up,” Pritkin was saying, although I could barely hear him over the roar in my head.“She heard it all, and it isn’t pretty.”

“I got that much,” I said numbly.

But he didn’t seem to believe me.He seemed to think I was about to lose it because he was suddenly talking fast and low, not trying to excuse the old man, because what could excuse that?But doing something I didn’t understand because I couldn’t understand anything right then.

“We’ve been through it,” he said, “all of us, but especially you, for a while now.But for us, this has lasted less than a year.Imagine an ordeal fifty times as long and with no wins or reprieves to lessen the impact.Nothing but blow after blow, year after year, seeing everything you worked so hard to build, your legacy, your entire world, being eradicated with no way to stop it.

“Jonas hoped we would return, but he didn’tknow.Everyone else believed we had died, early casualties to the wrath of the gods, which seemed a fair assumption.And even if we did somehow come back, it might be too late.

“So he sacrificed the remaining Corpsmen, one after another, on futile attempts to return to the past.He didn’t have to force them; from what Bodil saw, they volunteered.They’d lost everything, and it seemed the only chance they had left.

“But those spells are treacherous, and the old Guild records that might have helped improve them were not available—”

“Guild?”Someone else said, I couldn’t focus enough to understand who.My body was still riding shockwaves, and my head was chanting,screwed, screwed, we’re so very screwed.

“It’s what they called themselves,” Pritkin said, eyes on me.As if trying to determine just how bad this was going to be.Apparently, he decided pretty bad because he went into lecture mode to give me a minute.

It wasn’t going to be nearly long enough.

His voice faded into the distance as my latest bunch of nightmare fodder hit me like a fist.I’d just seen monsters ripping through people, destroying bodies to get to the soul energy inside, cracking them like eggs—and reminding me viscerally that I wasn’t much different.My mother had been one like them, only far worse.Instead of ripping through a bunch of dark mages, she’d destroyed entire worlds, sucking armies of demons dry to feed her never-ending hunger and then using the energy she obtained to attack her own kind, banishing the gods from this universe and allowing her to rule alone.

Her plans hadn’t worked out quite the way she’d hoped, but that didn’t change what she’d done or what I was.And now Jonas wanted to give me a crap ton of unrestricted power?When my temper was out of control half the time, when the creatures who destroyed my world were everywhere, just begging to be fought, when the Pythian power that usually leashed me was dormant and wouldn’t have any control over this new mass of energy, even if it wasn’t?

Chills went up my arms suddenly.

Hewasmad.

“You’re not your mother,” Bodil said abruptly as if she’d been following my thoughts.And I guessed she had because she was suddenly in them.

The whole room went dim as if a veil had been thrown over it, and everything beyond that veil slowed way the hell down.I glanced around in confusion and found only one person looking the same as always: just as vibrant, just as awe-inspiring, and just as serene.Bodil had decided that we needed a chat when what I needed—