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T HOMIL

HADN ’ T

WANTED to activate Sciona’s last spell.

“I’d rather die,” had been his first reaction, at which Sciona had blinked her spring green eyes in surprise.

“That’s… not the response I was expecting.”

“Well, what were you expecting?” he demanded, then darted a glance to the widow’s sitting room doorway for a moment, not wanting Carra to overhear the conversation.

It looked like she had already headed to bed in the spare room, but he lowered his voice anyway.

“Do you understand what you’re asking me to do? ”

“I think I do.” Sciona studied Thomil’s face in confusion. “I think I’m asking you to take your revenge.”

“Using the same magic that killed my people?”

“You helped me compose the spell! Honestly, how is hitting the activation key any different from writing the damn thing?”

“How is sharpening a stick different from ramming it through a man’s belly?”

“Alright, I understand what you’re saying, but—”

“I don’t think you do understand. If I do this, I’ll be a murderer. I’ll be just like…” Thomil swallowed the rest of the thought, realizing how it would sound. But Sciona had already caught the implication.

“Like me?” she raised her eyebrows. “A monster?”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Well, I should hope not!” She laughed dryly. “You have a long way to go yet before you’re half the monster I am.”

Thomil almost laughed, too. But he couldn’t, not under the weight of what she was asking him to do.

“I’m sorry.” Sciona’s smile faded. “I shouldn’t joke. But Thomil, you can’t possibly think that this plan is comparable to what the High Magistry has done to your people. What I’ve done. It’s not the same, or I wouldn’t be asking you to do it.”

“How is it not the same?”

“Because this is genuinely what the Magistry deserves. You’ll be an agent of justice.”

“I’ll be an affront to my ancestors.”

Sciona shook her head. “Thomil, you were a hunter. You killed game. As much as you needed to survive, right?”

“Yes?”

“And if another tribe attacked yours, you’d fight? You’d kill them if you had to?”

“Yes.”

“Killing for luxury is Tiranish. Killing to survive… isn’t that the Kwen thing to do?”

Thomil considered her words for a moment, frowning deeply. “Maybe,” he conceded. “Maybe I can logically say that this is the right thing to do.” Maybe logic and ethics weren’t Thomil’s real problem. Maybe it was all far more selfish than that. “It’s just that…”

Renthorn, Tanrel, and the archmages won’t be the only ones in the coil, he couldn’t bear to say, you’ll be there, too . Instead, he swallowed hard and skipped to the next concern gnawing at his conscience.

“This isn’t just about me. If I do this, I’ll be killed, and Carra will have no one. Worse, when this is traced back to me—Hell, even if it’s not properly traced back to me—the Kwen will be blamed. You know they will.”

He had the mage there. She hadn’t thought of that. Of course, she hadn’t.

“Well…” She shook her head. “And then what? What could be worse than what this city is already doing to your people?”

“I didn’t think you lacked imagination.”

Sciona didn’t. Her shoulders dropped. “Damn it.”

“What?”

“I hate how often you’re right, you know that?”

“Me too.” More than anything, Thomil hated watching that jewel-green gleam dim with his encroaching cynicism, a meadow slowly freezing over.

Just once, he wished Sciona’s enthusiasm could win out.

But Tiran’s eternal summers were bought with the blood of those who lived in the cold beyond.

And Thomil and Sciona both understood that too well to retreat into the sunshine of denial.

“I really can’t ask you to do this, can I?” she whispered.

Thomil shook his head.

“I’m still going to leave the spellograph here in case you change your mind. But I want you to know that whatever you decide, it’s alright.”

“Alright?” Thomil repeated, sure he must have heard wrong. “But this… all this work you put in… You’re content with it all coming to nothing?” It didn’t seem like Sciona at all. Thomil had voiced his misgivings expecting a fight to the bloody finish, not agreement.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Sciona sounded as surprised as Thomil but oddly delighted. “I realized… your soul matters to me—whatever weighing system the gods employ in the next life. You matter to me.”

“I… what?” Thomil said blankly.

“If I’m going to die, I want to go knowing I left you safe and right with yourself.”

“Even if it means the ruin of your legacy?” Thomil still couldn’t believe it. “If it means you die a footnote in your own history?”

“Yeah.” Sciona wrinkled her nose and looked at Thomil with the glowing joy of discovery. “Isn’t that odd? I’ve never cared about anyone that way… more than I cared about my own work.”

“I think you’re overtired,” Thomil said. “You should get some sleep before the presentation. I can walk you to the train station.”

“No.” Sciona knit her fingers together and looked up at Thomil, seeming suddenly self-conscious. “I thought… I wouldn’t go to the station tonight.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if this is the last night of the world as we know it, I want to spend it with someone who can appreciate that with me. I want to spend it with you… if that’s alright?”

Thomil froze, wanting the suggestion to be genuine, knowing in a deep, painful part of him, that it couldn’t be.

Sciona cared about her legacy more than she cared about her Kwen assistant, no matter what she might say to the contrary.

She had to have ulterior motives for looking at him like that—like he really meant something to her.

“Don’t stay because you’re hoping to talk me into your plan over the course of the night,” he said tightly. “I’ve given you my answer. I’ll have no part of that spell.”

“I know that.” Sciona looked wounded. “That’s not why I…

” Her voice shook, and she paused to clear her throat.

“I’ll go then.” She took her coat from the hook and shrugged into it.

“After all, if I’m right, this won’t be the last time.

The Council will come around, and we’ll both live to see each other again.

Honestly, I don’t know why I indulge your pessimism. ”

Misery squeezed Thomil’s heart.

“This is better, actually,” she said, lifting her chin in defiance. “This way, we leave off with a little hope, yes?” She smiled. Gods damn, that smile. “Until next time, Thomil.”

The lamplight caught Sciona’s tousled hair, casting a soft halo about her. In that moment, time collapsed, and Thomil was looking at his sister, his father, and the whole of his clan again, knowing that all this hope was doomed.

There would not be a next time.

Before Sciona’s hand reached the doorknob, he caught it and pulled her into a kiss.

The moment their lips met, Thomil realized that he had gone insane.

Sciona didn’t want this. She was leaving.

They were parting ways in conflict, Thomil having denied her both glory and revenge.

And all this directly after Cleon Renthorn had tried to force himself on her.

There was no way she wanted this from her presumptuous, prickly, uncooperative Kwen assistant.

But a strange thing happened when he tried to abort the movement.

Sciona seized his shirt, pulling him closer.

Thomil hadn’t made a conscious decision to stop cutting his hair after he started working for Sciona—nor had he realized how long it had grown until her slender typist’s fingers clutched his locks tight and pressed them both deeper into the kiss.

He and Sciona both knew this was a delusion, a precursor to something that could never be.

They couldn’t have this—Thomil couldn’t really belong to a Tiranishwoman, and Sciona couldn’t really belong to any man—without losing some vital part of themselves.

There was no future here. Thomil would never meet Sciona’s family nor endure the scorn of her archmage father figure.

Sciona would never have to shiver through a dark winter in Thomil’s homeland.

There was only this moment, and its isolation rendered it invincible.

They broke apart, and Sciona breathed a soft “Wow!” her eyes as bright as they had ever been. “What was that for?”

“I don’t know,” Thomil confessed. “It felt right. I’m sorr—”

She leaned up and kissed him again.

The crossing had put a sliver of ice in Thomil—a belief that no one he loved would ever stay. Far from refuting that belief, Sciona reinforced it. But he found her presence slowly thawing that ice with the hope that someday, for some Kwen, things might be different. Loss might not be so inevitable.

Thomil held Sciona’s face between his hands, desperate to kiss her again, terrified that if he did, he wouldn’t be able to let her go.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Whatever comes next,” Thomil said, “however history remembers Highmage Sciona Freynan, I want to remember her this way.” Up on her toes, luminous with hope so powerful it verged on mania.

If he was to survive the days to come, he needed to remember this buzz of energy that death and better judgment could not contain.

It was hard to say how long Thomil sat in the widow’s kitchen, staring at the spellograph with his knuckles pressed to his lips where they had met Sciona’s. He didn’t move until Carra found him there in limbo, and he had to explain the dilemma to her.

“Sciona and I have been talking about this like it’s a question of what I want or what she wants,” he said, “but the future we make… You’re the one who has to grow up in it.”

“If I get to grow up at all,” Carra said.

“I should have asked… What do you want, Carra?”

“Is this the ‘Freynan Method’ of asking, or does my answer actually matter?”

“Our answers did matter to her,” Thomil said—as evidenced by the spellograph sitting before him in unbearable stillness, awaiting his decision—“and your answer matters to me.”

“But I’m just a child.”