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‘Here’s what we know,’ I muttered, keeping my voice down for the ears hidden in the foliage. Perhaps some brilliant idea would come to me if I simply repeated all of it again. ‘The Mother used a combination of iridescence and smoothness to bind you all. Iridescent magic to limit your powers, smooth magic to do it only when you’re intent on harming her. But that whole condition of intention is optional – she would be able to bind people by takingalltheir magic, too, wouldn’t she?’

She’s done that, too, Creon signed when I looked up.With people whose magic wasn’t useful to produce tributes for the empire.

‘Of course.’ I pulled a face. ‘Any idea if the favourite pearl necklace was worn to the occasions of those bindings, too?’

He nodded, slowly.Think so.

‘So that would essentially be a less sophisticated variety of the same thing.’ Less sophisticated sounded good. Sounded doable, at least. ‘Let’s try that first, then. Does anyone happen to have a handful of pearls around?’

Creon chuckled as he dropped down to the ground, crossed his legs, and swung a flash of yellow at the moss around me. The plush green turned iridescent, shimmering like emerald pearls under my fingertips.

‘Still feels like cheating,’ I said, pressing my hands into that opalescent surface and focusing my gaze on the unconscious fae thief. Magic to change magic … But where to start when there was only a limp body before me, rather than the sharply drawn rays of colour I had so easily diverted on the Sun ship?

Sheepishly, I added, ‘Do we have any idea of where someone’s magic is located?’

‘There are dozens of different theories about that,’ Lyn said, plopping down next to me with that small line between her brows that signalled the experiment had become an academic puzzle. Tared kept standing, his nonchalant stance against a tree not enough to conceal his wary glances at both Creon and the unconscious fae male. ‘The current most popular thought is that magic is stored in the heart, but …’

Her sentence died away, sounding dubious.

Truth be told, Creon signed with a lazy quirk of his eyebrows,a knife to the heart does tend to limit one’s magical capacities.

I snorted a laugh, then caught Tared’s look and decided I best swallow my amusement. With another sting of guilt, I bent over and lightly placed my fingertips against the fae male’s chest. His heart fluttered like a caged bird below his ribs. I closed my eyes and thought of pearls and opals and bubbles of soap – enough to draw a tingle of magic from my left hand, but that power that stirred in me …

It didn’t go anywhere.

Like a trickle of water running into an obstacle, the magic halted, the pressure of it building in my right fingers, hand, forearm. I muttered a curse and pulled my left hand away from the pearly moss. The built-up pressure seeped out of me, leaving a sensation of cold water behind.

‘Can’t find a target to use it on.’ I bit my lip, studying the unconscious fae male. ‘Do you think I need to make him use his magic before I can take it?’

‘Didn’t need to do that when the Mother bound us,’ Naxi offered with a light shrug. ‘She just pointed a hand at us and I went all hollow and wobbly in my belly – took no more than—’

‘Belly?’ Tared interrupted, stiffening up against his tree. ‘It was a headache for me.’

An abrupt, eerie silence fell. The two of them didn’t move, frowning at each other over the fae body in the moss as each of them went over their memories again, found them accurate, and waited.

‘Oh, gods,’ Lyn said breathlessly. ‘Why did we never talk about this? Lower belly for me, too – but does that mean …’

The rest of her sentence drifted off.

I glanced at Creon, sudden suspicions sharpening in my mind, and found no laughter in his eyes as our gazes met. He nodded, reading my thoughts as usual as he tapped two fingers lightly against his throat.

His throat.

Because she’d taken his voice.

‘Inika help us,’ Lyn whispered. ‘We’re idiots. Ofcourse.’

Her price had been her fertility – magic coming from her lower belly, or more specifically, from her womb. The same applied to Naxi. For Tared …

I turned towards him, saw his thin lips and the steel gleam in his grey eyes, and hesitated. ‘What … what did she take from you?’

He did not smile, did not shrug, did not raise an eyebrow. None of those softening gestures that usually accompanied even the most unpleasant of truths from his lips. His voice was tight as a bowstring as he said, ‘The memory of my parents.’

I stared at him.

‘I know what the others have been able to tell me about them afterwards, of course.’ Now he did force a smile onto his face – a wry, aching thing I felt like a blade to the guts. ‘But I can’t remember their voices. Or their faces.’

‘Fuck.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.Why did we never talk about this?Lyn had asked, and the answer to that question seemed crystal-clear – because none of them had wanted to think about that hell of a day after the Last Battle, or about what they’d lost. ‘I’m so sorry.’