Page 49

I vehemently shook my head. “I barely had time to think, much less summon magic.”

She kept her gaze on the garden; several of the flowers were now opening, their colors brilliant and bold shades of red, orange, and yellow. All of them were golden-edged and glowing, as if catching bits of the sun—a heavenly object that didn’t even truly exist in this world; there was only that strange orb of light wrapped in the shifting, cloudy energies. That orb still hadn’t moved. Still, looking around, I felt the same way I did wheneverI sat on the porch at Orin’s and watched the sun rising over the trees.

“It’s as I said before,” I whispered, “I merely touched him when I woke him up, too. I swear it.”

Thalia was quiet for so long that I thought she would never answer. That she would never believe me.

Finally, she said, “How…odd.”

I held my breath, almost afraid to ask what conclusions she was coming to behind her troubled eyes.

“Your magic. His magic. They seem to have a profound effect on one another, no?”

I couldn’t deny it.

“So you’re…” She seemed to be searching for the correct word. “...Together,” she settled on, tapping her fingers against one another for emphasis. “Magically bonded to one another.”

I made a face. “Bondedis a very strong word.”

She didn’t offer an alternative.

My eyes slid back to the king, despite my best efforts to keep them from doing so.

Peaceful, meditative, motionless—yet he still looked utterly terrifying. Alarmingly powerful. Like he could open his eyes at any moment and send light crackling across the landscape once more, ripping it all apart faster than I could blink.

Except, it wasn’tterrorI felt whenever I looked at him.

It should have been.

But it wasn’t.

I didn’t know what it was. But as I stared, a memory fell, unbidden, into my mind. One of the first time we’d met—as children, when he’d found me hiding in the courtyard at my old home.

We’d been so young.

I’d been so upset—exasperated with my lessons, with my teachers who had been trying their best to teach me to crush theshadowy parts of myself away. This had been before my mother gave in to Orin’s offers to tutor me. Back when she’d believed there was still a chance for me to hide my magic and live a normal life without it. Back when I had wanted nothing more than to make her happy by doing just that—when I would have given anything to just benormal.

Aleksander had comforted me that day; I still remembered the warmth of his magic as he summoned a show of light to distract me from my tears.

And then he’d done something unexpected: He’d asked me to summon strands of my shadows, too, so that we might create something by weaving together both the light and the dark—something like the shadow puppets my father sometimes entertained me with at bedtime, only more elaborate.

I didn’t really remember anything we’d spoken of that day. Only the stories we’d written with sunlight and shadow on the brick walls around the garden—that, and the way the flowers around us had bloomed like an eager audience coming to life at our show, and how my heart had felt truly at peace for perhaps the only time in my entire childhood.

But politics and other twisted, sharp-edged things had long since gotten in the way of whatever peace I’d felt that day. He had changed.Ihad changed. There were too many questions between us, too many plans gone astray, and I didn’t want anything to do with him anymore.

Still, the evidence could not be ignored.

Our magic desperately wanted to weave together once more—to cast another story upon the walls of this world we’d found ourselves in.

And until I figured outwhy,it seemed we were bound to one another whether we liked it or not.

We decidedto pitch a proper camp and rest before deciding what came next. I slept—though poorly, and only after Zayn repeatedly insisted that he would be the one to keep the first watch.

At some point, I startled awake from a nightmare, opening my eyes to a bottomless abyss.

It took me several seconds of blinking to realize I was staring at the sky. Or what passed for askyin this world, anyway; I was alarmed at how deeply black it was. I hadn’t realized it could get darker than the expanse I’d fallen asleep beneath. But it was as Elias had told me: there was an observable day and night cycle in this realm—and it was clearly the dead of night, now; the light I desperately wanted to call asunwas completely hidden behind swirls of dark clouds.

Even though I couldn’t recall the nightmare that had woken me, I still felt its claws in my mind, tightening every time I tried to close my eyes again.