Page 52 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)

Cast of the Spell

T THE UNDERGROUND city gates, torchlight revealed them: the refugees of Ruedom.

Clothes shredded. Faces hollow. Mothers carrying children.

Civilians and soldiers missing limbs. One woman cradled a piece of broken masonry as if it had been her home.

Some ferried their own severed appendages and limbs as if unable to let them go.

Every survivor had stories, stammering, broken stories. The Ashanas had come, but more than that. It had been the wave they were expecting in Loda.

A beast taller than the walls had broken them down with a roar like metallic thunder. No warning. No mercy. The city, the best fortified on the continent, had fallen in a single night.

The refugees flooded the tunnels and soon the streets of Loda.

Clea felt sucked into their tide, nothing existing beyond the river of pain and the compulsion she felt to heal them.

The intensity of it possessed her, and with each healing, she was drawn deeper and deeper into the mire of their calamity until she was at moments convinced she’d been there with them during the attack.

One of the council members called Clea and Ryson for a meeting. Clea knew only by the feeling of Ryson’s hand on her shoulder. She looked up from her most recent healing and beyond him to the council member.

The obligations of her station called, but she looked back at the vast crowd huddled in front of her. She was on her knees, white and gold dress soiled in the earth, hands stained in blood. Her eyes, glossed with silent tears, flickered back up to Ryson.

“You’ll have to drag me away from them,” she whispered, and it was not a threat, but an honest fact, her hand coiling through his without thinking.

His eyes flickered down to that motion, her bloodied fingers clasped around his wantingly, and he eased away as if he too was now threatened to be pulled under the tide she swam in.

“I’ll go,” he offered. “I’ll come for you when we’re done.”

Clea nodded, and thanked him, releasing his hand before returning to the people ahead of her.

She dove into her healings, her ansra stirred into a torrent of powerful intent that blinded her.

Relieved of her responsibilities in the war council, she was liberated in her blindness, allowed to do at last what her nature called her to do.

She moved among the wounded, kneeling, calling power through her palms, light and warmth seeping into shattered limbs and poisoned lungs. She worked until her hands trembled, until she could feel nothing except the bone-deep ache of those she’d mended. She felt sick with it.

Ryson remained similarly engaged in matters of strategy, working with the council in her absence.

Meanwhile, Clea searched for people they knew in the chaos, asked about Dae, Catagard, and Idan.

No one had any news regarding any of them, but shared rumors that some had escaped into the woods. Clea prayed they were true.

When Ryson at last came to retrieve her, he was patient at first, watching her heal as if caught in a sacred ceremony. Then at last, he touched her arm, and she followed him in silence to the war council. She watched him in their final deliberations before they would each cast their vote.

Ryson explained in detail their options, and he was utterly composed—a warlord at the peak of his craft—cool silver eyes sweeping across troop markers, timing routes, fallback positions, and strategic movement on behalf of Ruedom.

His voice was smooth. Sure.

“You have what, two thousand total? Barely as much as the Golden Army. You said Javelin will likely come with ten thousand if not more?” one of the council members said.

Clea waited in silence at her table, still dressed in ceremonial clothes, now stained with blood and earth. Hair hung loose along her cheeks and down her shoulders, the white painted lines smeared across her chest.

“There is a fair chance Javelin has enough forces to split them and hit us as well as we’re funneling in refugees,” Ryson said calmly.

The council members debated their options predictably, arguing about whether they should accept refugees when Ruedom had refused them aid. They questioned the strength of Javelin’s forces and if Loda indeed stood a chance. Some considered escaping in a caravan just as the previous royalty had.

Clea sat there in silence until she couldn’t listen to any of it any longer. She couldn’t breathe. She stood up and dismissed herself from the council room before the vote to give Ruedom any aid could be cast. She knew the answer.

Racing up the floors, she made her way to the temple that rested at the top of the castle, overlooking the city.

The weather had transformed as quickly as the mood, the sky now heavily overcast and boiling with a storm.

The isolated temple had been a private temple of the royal family.

The torches inside were burned out and abandoned.

It was simple: four columns and arches against a single wall upon which the history of their people was engraved, a history decoding light against darkness.

Clea watched it with the rain at her back, unable to fight off the feeling that they were sitting in the final act.

The darkness and thunder were as imposing as the eclipsing of her thoughts.

She cried silently at the temple wall, staring at it and imagining Ruedom beyond.

Her energy burned through her, activated by her recent healings and spurred into action by the suffering she’d felt through them.

Her skin was illuminated with it, her hands hot, fire pouring through her veins. It overwhelmed her.

She knew she needed to calm down, already having pushed herself through so many healings and feeling out of control.

She considered running back out into the rain, allowing it to soak through her clothes, but her eyes were transfixed on the carvings of Loda’s history.

With all of the force in her body, she felt capable of pushing it over with a powerful scream. Maybe that’s what she needed.

Ryson’s voice didn’t startle her when he spoke.

“This doesn’t mean our hands are tied,” he said, appearing several feet away through the doorway.

Clea turned to face him, swallowing. “I know the vote.”

He looked composed, as he always seemed, his form relaxed on a strong frame. His clothes framed him in darkness against the rain outside. His hair and shoulders bore the slightest traces of rain, but he was not disheveled like she was, not falling apart like she was.

“You know the council’s decision and my own, strategically sound in the interest of your people. But it doesn’t mean our hands are tied,” he repeated, and she shook her head.

He approached, slowly, carefully, as if she were a fire that might soon burn him. His silver eyes flickered over her in an assessing way, and she didn’t doubt that somehow he could see her energy boiling through the room between them.

She couldn’t express her grief, and could only whisper that bitter word he’d said to her at the Kalex village: “Sacrifice.” He seemed to know what she referenced—their argument when she’d been forced to leave that place behind.

“Isn’t that the way of this?” she asked angrily. “Isn’t this just the way of things?”

He stopped in front of her, and lifted a cautious hand to her face.

His touch almost broke her as his hand glided into her hair.

She rested her cheek into his palm, closed her eyes, and breathed shakily to keep from crying.

His brows were pulled together, and for the first time, it looked as if he were in genuine pain.

“A crime of my own weakness. A sacrifice you wouldn’t have had to make had I been stronger,” he murmured.

“Strength at the cost of what?” she asked, pushing back, eager to argue, eager to fight. “At what point is strength the enemy?” she said weakly. “At what point is this simply our fate?”

He didn’t answer the question, only replied without expression, “I will be leaving for Ruedom within the hour along with Prince and Alina. We’re going to scope out the degree of the damage. We might take the battle to them.”

She tilted her face in his hand, and he almost seemed to flinch as she captured his fingers in hers beckoningly.

That subtle suggestion of pain only drew her closer to him in her current state.

“The three of you?” she asked, her heart jumping with the idea and yet perplexed by the possibility of them going alone.

“Without the other Insednians? You’ll be at a disadvantage. ”

“We won’t have Loda to protect,” he replied, his voice nailed down with obvious restraint, “a larger disadvantage. We are artists of destruction, but I’m afraid we can be rather inadequate at preserving anything. It will be better to not have Loda to pull focus.”

“Let me go,” she pleaded.

He seemed to hesitate at this, looking at her as if she were the city itself prepared to pull focus.

“I am just one person,” she whispered, “not a city. You might need a healer.”

He did not resist outright, perhaps predicting her reaction.

She knew the choice was in his hands. She had little leverage, and she prayed his next words would be yes.

He could point out how devastated she already seemed from the healings she’d already performed.

She already bled with other people’s pain, but as he looked upon her, she didn’t sense that he saw her brokenness as weakness.

“The devastation will be gruesome,” he said, a fact they both knew, but he seemed compelled to bring it up.

“If you need a healer,” she started, fire working its way into her voice. “You’ll need a healer.”