Page 159 of House of Marionne

“Don’t speak of her.”

“But you seem determined to make Father proud.”

Jordan let him go with a shove. “I came here to stop you from making a mistake.”

“You won’t stop me with your words.”

Jordan’s composure hardened, but Yagrin could see right through him. The fury that burned in Jordan was no more than an ember. He was more wounded than angry. More confused than determined. He was still too broken over that girl to do anything to Yagrin. He didn’t have the grit to stop him. That was a good thing, Yagrin supposed. Meant his brother had some semblance of a heart. It hadn’t yet all rotted.

He rolled up his sleeves to get on with his plan, picturing Beaulah’s face. The devastation that would stain it when she heard what happened to the Sphere. How she would fear for her life every day until it ended. A dark smile curled his lips. Yagrin wished he could be there to witness it. But he had other places to be. Other duties that called.

“Yags,” Jordan pleaded, with his boyhood nickname. But that tender wound had long since scabbed over. It wouldn’t work. He would empty the Sphere.

Yagrin’s magic stirred in him like a brewing storm. He raised his hands and unleashed it at the bobbing orb above them. His brother’s knees hit the hard ground and weeping sobs scratched at Yagrin’s ears, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the dark magic assaulting the Sphere’s glassy surface.

It cracked like an egg, and breath stuck in Yagrin’s lungs. Tight in his chest. He held it in, waiting for the first piece of it to fall to the ground and its innards to bleed out. But she glowed brighter. He flinched with frustration, and he drew the destructive magic to himself again, this time with more force. He unleashed. The Sphere cracked more, into a tapestry of spiderwebs, but still its form held. Irritation burned through him, and fatigue weighed down his shoulders. He pulled at the remnants of toushana, all he could muster, the last of his strength, and unleashed once more. But it held, still. Broken, fractured beyond repair, but not a single trickle of matter fell from it.

“Bleed, dammit!” He pounded his fist to the ground and found a glisten of hope in his brother’s green eyes. “Well, it’s a start.”

Jordan’s lips parted as if he were reaching for something to say, but it came out as sobs. Yagrin considered embracing him, but his brother was like their father—it would take more than momentarily wallowing to change his heart.

“I’d stay and chat, but I have someone to train.” Yagrin pulled at his Anatomer magic, and a ripple ran down his body as he slipped into his other skin, the one he’d grown comfortable in as of late. Ever since he’d found an impressionable heiress in a Tavern. The face the girl wasn’t scared of—Octos.

After meeting her close up, her getting away, he wasn’t convinced she deserved to die. So when they crossed paths on the stairs of the Tavern, he’d shifted into one of his personas to get to know her. Form his own opinion. When he offered her the potion to tempt her ambition and she turned it down, that’s when he knew she was different. When he saw his brother come to her aid, he wondered what drove him.

Yagrin had decided then he would think hard before bringing the girl to Beaulah as she’d requested. But it was when the girl emerged and chose to trust him, when she’d said she was sorry he wasn’t allowed to finish his training—him, a nobody—that he’d made his choice. She would live, and he would help her get away with it. When she wrote looking for her mother, who was being held captive by his Dragun brothers, he wrote back forging her hand, to urge her to stay under her grandmother’s protection. And when he’d finally mastered her mother’s face, he paid Quell another visit to drive the point home.

She wasn’t only different, but she would be powerful.

When he later realized his brother was falling in love with her, he knew she needed to survive and be protected more than ever for the sake of not only her life, but Jordan’s. He’d been pondering a way to do just that, stewing over a letter, when her friend Abilene found him. Her binding with her toushana was an unexpected delight.

Yagrin could be credited for many egregious, harrowing things in his life but not loving his brother wasn’t one of them. The girl was good for Jordan. She was good for them all. He glanced at the Sphere, his work unfinished. She would be able to do far more than he ever could. He rolled down his sleeves over Octos’s marked arms.

“Until we meet again, brother.” Yagrin departed to the melody of his brother’s sobs.