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eleven

R ixor’s footsteps receded through the manor. Troi’s greatest enemy was escaping. He let him go. Kaion’s blood spread across the dais toward Celandine’s fallen spindle.

Don’t go , she had begged.

Troi had failed her. Blinded by his thirst for revenge, he had broken his promise to protect her.

He snatched up her fallen artifact and cast his senses through the manor. He couldn’t feel her aura, only the flame wards unraveling across the deserted estate.

He would find where they had taken her, and he would save her, even if it got him sacrificed on Summer Solstice.

What should his next step be? The answer came too slowly to his mind. Weariness dragged at his limbs. He let out a shout of frustration. Dawn was coming. He would go back to sleep and lie helpless for hours while Celandine suffered in the Inquisitors’ prison.

He had no choice. He had to take shelter at his manor and survive till nightfall. He was no use to her dead.

Troi stepped back to his own prison and entered through the gap she had left in the fire spells.

Sharp pain stabbed through the half-healed burns on his back. Troi crumpled to the ground, weakness spreading rapidly through his limbs. He lay helpless on his back and looked up at a leather breastplate painted with the Eye of Hypnos.

A Gift Collector smiled down at him, holding a dagger that dripped with magic and Troi’s blood.

Troi’s last coherent thought was that the necromancer could never have gotten through the Sanctuary wards unless an unspinner had let him in.

When Celandine came to, sunlight was glaring through the high, barred window of her cell.

It was dawn. How many dawns had passed? Sickening fear jolted her awake.

Everything after her capture was a blur of interrogation. She had no idea how long she had been there.

She didn’t know if Troi was dead or alive.

If he had returned to the manor, then it was all over now. Imagining what the Gift Collector had done to him, she retched on her hands and knees in the corner of her cell.

She had tried so hard to tell Troi don’t go back to the manor , to warn him before the guards covered her mouth. She had been too late. If only she had seen the truth a moment sooner…if only she had decided to fight for him the way he had for her…

Troi was dead because of her.

She curled around herself and wept for him. She, the merry widow, the Pavo princess always in command of herself, sobbed for him as she never had for her parents, husband, or throne.

She would join him soon. No life sentence in the temple for her this time. Not even a trial. The Inquisitors were determined to make an example of her on the Akron’s Altar.

She worried away at the traversal cuff on her ankle. She would die in the enchanted shackle that bound her. She couldn’t stop prying and pulling at it, no matter how much skin she lost to the effort.

She finally knew what made her happy, but it was too late.

As a girl, she had done as her parents required. As a wife, she had lived under her husband’s authority. As a mage, she had fought every day against the temple’s demands for her absolute surrender.

But for those brief, golden years as princess in her own right, she had obeyed no one but herself.

She didn’t need dances or power or revenge. All that had ever mattered to her was being mistress of her own destiny.

She had been happy when she had been free.

The answer had been right in front of her the night Troi had sworn to fight for her freedom.

The Gift Collector’s bounty wouldn’t buy her happiness. For a paltry bag of coins, she had traded the greatest treasure she had ever found.

Her last moment with Troi flashed through her mind over and over. Was there any chance he had understood her words? Could there be a shred of hope that he had fled to safety and not into the Gift Collector’s ambush?

After seeing him defeat eight fire mages, she wanted to believe he had somehow defeated the Gift Collector too. But even if he had, he might be in hiding now, suffering from his wounds with no one to give him blood.

She would never know his fate.

Troi counted how many times he had woken chained to his throne. Tallying the nights gave him a little piece of sanity as weakness and pain ate away at his reason.

“Did you poison me?” he demanded of the Gift Collector on the sixth night.

The necromancer put his feet up on the table and lit a smoke. “I didn’t have to. Those cursed chains are holding you well enough. You aren’t the immortal you were one hundred years ago.”

Troi wasn’t even as strong as he had been when he’d woken from his long sleep. This hunger clawing him inside out after six nights was a greater agony than the starvation he had endured for a hundred years.

The Gift Collector smiled. “The gnawing in your gullet will end soon enough. We only need to lie low until the Summer Solstice is over and the mages of Anthros miss their chance to sacrifice you. Then I’ll collect my bounty without their interference.

You won’t feel hungry after I carry your head into the Temple of Hypnos in a bag. ”

Troi didn’t reply, his teeth chattering with a fever chill. He could hardly concentrate on his enemy’s words. The thought of Celandine’s blood consumed him. The layers of her flavor…the feeling of her life force flowing into his veins…

Hespera help him. If the woman who had sentenced him to death walked through the door right now, he would bargain his life for one more sip of her.

“The mages of Anthros can’t boast of burning a Hesperine this Solstice,” the Gift Collector mused. “They’re taking it out on the human who’s to be the sacrifice this year. Your little witch is out of chances to repent and will burn in your place tomorrow.”

No. Goddess, no. Troi threw his weight against his chains and snarled, “Don’t lie to me!”

The necromancer laid Celandine’s distaff on the table in front of Troi. “A Cheran mage’s distaff loses its power when she dies. Watch it happen.”

Laughing, the Gift Collector left him there. Troi sagged in his chains, unable to look away from Celandine’s distaff.

Even now, caught in this trap of her making, the loss of her was destroying him.

This was neither poison nor hunger. He should have known when her blood had revived him so quickly from a century of starvation. The truth had been creeping up on him as mere days with her had made him want her for eternity.

He needed her. He Craved her. Celandine was his Grace.

He had squandered his Grace for revenge.

Kaion was dead, and Rixor must live with the loss. And for what? Another mage of Anthros would take Kaion’s place, and Rixor would carry a personal pain that gave fresh life to the feud. A hundred years ago, men like them had reigned, and a hundred years from now, they would again.

Troi had kept coming back, caught in this repetition of human history. Even as a Hesperine, he was still trying to be a Cordian man. The man Iovian, Remus, and Marto had known and loved.

Troi let the memories wash over him and looked at the dangerous truth.

His acts of brutality had been the fuel for his men’s morale.

They were not only the ones sobering him up but the ones getting him drunk and angry in their endless cycle of abusing themselves and others.

They had kept him alive, and yet they had been killing him.

Was that the man he wanted to be? A man like his father?

Troi’s tangled emotions finally unraveled, and he saw them for what they were. He had loved and hated his father. He had also carried anger toward his mother for holding on to her beliefs instead of coming home to him.

After having Celandine’s emotions had bleed into him these past days, Troi finally understood. His mother hadn’t been choosing between Hespera and Troi; she’d been forced to choose between defying his father or losing herself.

His father hadn’t destroyed her. She had saved herself each time she told him no.

Troi couldn’t make things right with her now. But he could choose not to repeat history with Celandine.

It was time for Troi to act like a Hesperine.

One hundred and ten years after he had first received the Gift, Troi finished his transformation. He could only pray it was not too late for it to matter.

Celandine tore at the cuff with a scream of frustration. She was powerless. They had taken everything from her, including his ring, and left her here in the white robe of a sacrifice. Her spindle was long gone.

Thoughts spun in her mind. She ran her finger round and round where his ring had been.

In her forbidden youthful experiments with her magic, she hadn’t needed a spindle. She had popped enchanted locks and pranked old codgers who wore illusory hairpieces, all with her mind and a flick of her fingers.

With her formal training in the temple had come artifacts to help her focus her magic and wield it more powerfully. She had mastered the tools she hated, vowing to use them against her enemies one day.

Had those tools really made her more powerful? Or had the dependence they taught her been another way for the temple to control her?

Casting with pure will was the most difficult way to practice magic. But if she could find a new way to focus her power here and now…

She wasn’t powerful enough to unravel the bastion of spells that fortified the Inquisitors’ prison. But she might make it as far as the guardroom at the end of the corridor, where they had stripped her and locked up Troi’s ring.

Celandine lay in wait until night fell outside her window. Then she pulled herself to her feet and faced the solid door. She pressed her bloodied palms to the smooth stonework and closed her eyes.

The spells on this place felt like all the years of her life when others had ruled her. Order and authority given form and hammered into every lock and bar.

Anger vibrated through her, and she poured all of it into her magic.

She thought of her happy years and the independence that had felt like wings in her chest. Of the moment when she had torn off her shroud. Of that night in bed with Troi, when she had felt free with another person for the first time in her life.

Celandine held out her arms, palms up to the night sky, and envisioned Anthros’s wards spinning away into Hespera’s stars.

The magic on her cell was rent into powerless threads with a force she felt under her skin.

The door opened soundlessly. She strode down the corridor to the guardroom. Two auras inside. She plucked at the spells they had drunk to help them stay awake on their long shift. By the time she walked through the door, the entire night watch lay slumped over their table, fast asleep.

Celandine spun in a circle, dancing the Widow’s Weave backwards. All the locked chests in the room sprang open.

The glimmer of Hesperine magic led her to Troi’s ring. She snatched it up and pushed through the next door, climbing the stairs to the top of the guard tower. At her mind’s command, the spell lights on the parapet snuffed out.

She let her awareness expand into the moonless sky and rubbed the moonstone with a bleeding finger. A red glow spread from the gem.

A storm of Hesperine magic rose beyond the prison’s defenses. She ran her finger widdershins around the moonstone, wearing away at the flame wards. She bared her teeth, her blood spattering on the stones at her feet.

A narrow breach split open in the wards. A presence crashed through, and she fell to the ground from the sheer might of his magic. A Hesperine manifested before her, crimson light glowing from the stone in the hilt of his sword.

She tilted her head up to look at him, her mouth hanging open. She saw a storm in his steel-gray eyes and pale, hawkish face. Wind tugged at his ankle-length red braid. Now she knew how Troi had felt when the Blood-Red Prince first stood over him with that gleaming blade in hand.

Rudhira reached down and took Celandine’s hand in a powerful but gentle grip. He helped her to her feet.

A gong sounded from deep in the prison. Shouts reached her ears, then boots tramping up the stairs.

Just as the Inquisitors burst out onto the top of the tower, the Blood-Red prince stepped Celandine away through her tear in the Order’s defenses.