Page 37

“He left you?” Essabeth whispered on an outraged gasp.

Two days had passed since my visit with Bogo and the late-night confession from Kion Abaddon.

Once we returned to Samira and climbed the hill to the castle, I’d pled exhaustion and kept to my room, wanting all scent of Kion to fade before facing Anneli Zayas again.

It wasn’t just the scent of him. My emotions were out of control.

He said I made him feel and he had to walk away.

But he made me feel too, and I needed to let it go. Not think of impossible things.

“He was outside with the horses,” I told Essabeth. “Wanting to leave as soon as I was awake.”

She touched my hand; I didn’t recoil. I’d never had a friend who turned touch into comfort the way she did, and I was learning to appreciate her kindness.

But concern darkened her eyes. “You haven’t been to the Nithe since you got back.”

“I can’t train for something that will never happen.” Or allow Anneli Zayas to control my life.

Essabeth’s smile faded. I knew her dream was to become a dragon lord, and I hated crushing her hope.

But no one trained on the Nithe for good reason.

The dragons weren’t speaking to humans, not the way they once did, and facing the challenge of trust and jumping meant certain death for those who tried.

The antiquated challenges were better suited to entertainment and gaming than actual training, and I thought Essabeth would find more success focusing on her mage talent.

We stood at matching tables where pebbles and white chalk circles waited. Anneli told us to sort the pebbles using mage magic alone, not touching them with our hands or jiggling the tables to achieve the goal.

Essabeth had moved most of her pebbles into the circles while my focus scattered around the room. My thoughts jumped from Bogo to the hot spring, then to firelight damped low and a man pretending to sleep. All but one of my pebbles wobbled far outside my chalk circles.

“You need to concentrate,” Essabeth advised. “It’s easier once you get the first one rolling.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s not that you can’t. You’re making half an effort. Keep doing it, and you’ll live half a life and die being half of what you could have been.”

Using my finger, I nudged one pebble toward the circle.

“If Anneli sees you cheating,” Essabeth warned, although a smile tugged at her mouth. Her blonde hair sparkled in the sunlight streaming through the window. Her face glowed with youth—and I flashed back on Wilem with a jolt of pain.

“What’s wrong, Senna?”

I smiled brightly. “Nothing.” She had permission to call me Senna. “It was lovely to see Bogo. He’s grown so much.”

Essabeth made a clicking sound. “All those years in the Southern Lands and he didn’t grow at all. There must be some magic in the air, blunting everything.”

“It’s hard to find people with mage abilities,” I said. “The King’s Guard is always searching, and priests roam the streets, ready to grab anyone who might have value. Even the children.”

“Thales sounds horrid. And the things the king made you do.”

I smiled and leaned in as if we conspired. “I learned some devious plots along with the depravity. Anneli doesn’t surprise me.”

A lie, because I hadn’t expected Anneli’s personal attack, planting an impulse to do something intimate that would remind Kion Abaddon of her.

But Essabeth didn’t need the truth in what had happened.

“Anneli Zayas is actually tragic.” Essabeth played with the mage energy the way a child played marbles , knocking pebbles from her circles. “I talked to Renni about it.”

My pebbles rolled in random directions, and I scooped them back together with my hands. “I’m too afraid of Renwick to call him anything else.”

“He’s an old bear who sees me as his daughter. Put a little rum in his evening tea and it’s remarkable what he’ll tell you.”

“You’re braver than I am.”

“When I think of you, interrogating the king’s enemies, dressed in that gown and veil with your feet trailing blood…” Her eyes rounded like an owl’s. “Fearsome wicked.”

“You didn’t see me throwing up afterward. ”

“You need Anneli to help you. She’s skilled in all the mage arts.

And that protective amulet she wears? The magic shields her thoughts from anyone who can read her mind—Renni warned me that was her one weakness, from an old magical wound when she was very young.

She trusted a man who said he loved her, but he betrayed her trust and she almost died. ”

I shook my head at Essabeth’s innocence. The gown I wore didn’t fit me as well as Essabeth’s gown fit her, and I hadn’t figured out why Anneli had strange rules about always coming to class dressed like we were attending a formal event.

Essabeth was still talking about Anneli, though, and she asked, “That makes her kind of human, don’t you think? Having a broken heart?”

I focused on the closest pebble. “That depends on who the man was.”

“He wasn’t the Draakon—Renni said the affair with Kion came way after.”

“Men are the worst gossips,” Anneli murmured, even though she stood across the room, beyond the sound of whispered voices. “That will be all, Essabeth. Class is concluded and I’m sure you have chores waiting.”

Essabeth nodded and scurried away. But when I stepped toward the door, Anneli said, “Not you, Senaria.”

I turned and held her gaze, this mage who had invaded my mind and planted the urge to seduce a man who would reject me.

The need for revenge felt natural, and I searched until I found a useful emotion.

She wore the amulet, but how effective could it be when my psychic entry into her mind was silky, seductive—until I tumbled into the bedlam of her thoughts, moving at a speed that I could not comprehend.

Then the mental door slammed, and Anneli purred, “Fewer than five mages have ever dared what you just did, Senaria.”

“Really?” I refused to cower. “What happened to them?”

“They died.”

“Am I to be dead next?”

“It would be a waste, so I think not. Come with me.”

I followed Anneli from the castle and down the hill.

We were silent enough to hear the faint swishing of our feet through the grass.

The scent drifting from her skin was the same sandalwood and vanilla that choked me every time I’d walked past girls with seductive mage abilities.

The blood-red color of her gown suited her dark coloring.

Beside her, I was a child in a gown the color of the turning leaves, and it chaffed at me, the need to walk demurely, the way I’d walked as Silk.

I’d wrapped my hair in a braided coronet around my head, but a few tendrils drifted against my cheeks. Brushing at them made me appear nervous, so I curled my hands and stared at the quaking trees edging the rim of the forest—white trunks and slender branches, brown knots in the bark.

Yellow leaves on the ground skittered and skipped, pushed by a random breeze. Each time a leaf flipped up, slid, the movement caught my attention as if something else might be there .

“The leaves respond to mage energy,” Anneli murmured. “You exude it, although I’m sure it’s not a conscious effort. The magic leaks from you.”

“We’re not friends,” I said. “Don’t pretend.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “You’re angry. But I can’t help you if you resist.”

“He told me about the bet he lost.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Kion and I were lovers for a time.”

I studied the trees. “Are you here for him?”

“Not entirely,” she said. “But I’ll admit to a feminine weakness. Kion was important to me once, and I wanted to hurt you.”

“Why?”

“I wanted you to have something you’d hate about yourself before it was too late.”

I gritted my teeth. “So, planting a desire to seduce him was a kindness?”

“Sometimes, a little pain is easier than the greater loss,” she murmured. “A concept Silk should understand. The Draakon has sexual urges. I’ve watched the way he looks at you. If I hadn’t stepped in to stop it, the sex would have been inevitable. Along with the pain.”

I refused to comment, and she sighed. “He can be an attentive lover, Senaria, but he doesn’t feel deeply. The need to love is sacrificed for a greater good—and pain lives in that truth. Pain in what you are, what he is, and why everything in your life has brought you to this point.”

“But you,” I mocked. “You’re here to point out some life lesson I have overlooked? ”

“Life often works against what we hope for,” she said. “Instead, it gives us what we need to survive. You’re too young to understand without experience. I had to make it obvious.”

Her smile flashed, but the sadness in her eyes made my fingers clench.

Anneli veered from the footpath and wove between the trees, moving swiftly.

I lifted my skirts and kept pace with her, flowing in and out of the dulling sunlight.

We’d left the town and the castle behind.

The ground grew rocky. The trees changed from thin and white to heavy green with rough, thick bark on the trunks.

Branches bent low. The birds overhead grew flighty and anxious.

When the mage reached a dry clearing littered with stones, she turned to me. “The Draakon exists to protect dragons. You exist to make that impossible. The two of you are opposites, in eternal struggle, and the sooner you accept the conflict, the easier it will be.”

“You’re saving me from heartbreak?” I stared at her amulet, the one she needed because of a magical wound. “Like yours?”

“I am here to guide you, although I’m not entirely sure why when you resist with such passion. But passion won’t keep you from repeating the mistakes your mother made. You are not of Thales, Senaria Wraithion, although you spent your childhood there in exile. Protected. Hidden. Suppressed.”

“I am not of the Faded Lands,” I said tightly.