Page 38 of The Curse of Gods (The Curse of Saints #3)

There was something to be said for the consistency of torture. Aya could track the time and place by it, not in any true measurable form, but in a way that kept her anchored to something real.

Two sessions. Three. Five.

The light cell. The dark cell.

That surety had disappeared when they shoved her into the dark and left her there to rot, and it had only worsened then they’d taken her to the throne room.

Now, she never knew where they were leading her. The light cell? The dark? The throne room? Somewhere else?

She’d lost any sense of consistency, that thin coherence she’d been clinging to washed away in confusion whenever they dragged her from the dark.

It sent her heart hammering, gave fear a sharper tang on her tongue. She tasted it now as they led her from the dark cell, down the hall, and in some new direction she did not understand.

List what you can see, mi couera .

Shackles. Cells. Dirt-slicked feet. Grime-covered skin she no longer recognized.

Her father’s advice was no comfort.

Gray. Everything was gray.

The guards led her to a cell at the end of a long hall. This one was larger than the dark cell—or perhaps it just looked that way with the high-set torches that cast the space in flickering firelight.

There was a stone bench set into the wall, and a chamber pot in the corner, and…

Lorna.

The guard shoved Aya into the cell and slammed the door shut behind her. Even battered and bruised, Lorna still managed to look at Aya with that defiant tilt of her chin.

“You look awful,” the Saj remarked.

Aya situated herself on the far side of the cell, her weight heavy against the wall as she tried to calm her raging pulse. Lorna simply watched her, blinking steadily despite the bruise that blackened her eye.

Aya had figured her torture had been confined to that inflicted by affinities. It was odd for Evie to resort to more human methods like physical blows.

Why? What was Evie so desperate to uncover?

“I don’t bite, you know,” Lorna muttered.

Aya dug her fingertips into her thighs. The Vaguer had suggested this, had likened it to preparing an ox for slaughter. What—

Lorna let out a sharp hiss, and Aya blinked away her questions. Pain twisted the woman’s features, her shoulders rising with her wince.

“What is it?” Aya asked.

“I have…issues with my shield. I am more sensitive after Evie’s ministrations.”

So she had inside wounds, too. The realization was eclipsed by a much larger realization, one that made something in her chest twist.

Will’s shield issue—the one he’d sought answers to for years—wasn’t some random determining of the gods. His mother had it, too.

“But you’re not a Sensainos,” Aya remarked.

“True,” Lorna admitted with a confused quirk of her brow. “But I doubt the issue is confined to those who sense and manipulate emotion and sensation.”

Aya didn’t know anyone other than Will who experienced such an issue.

“The saint was questioning my knowledge ,” Lorna continued.

“As such, I was forced to give a great deal of it, to use a great deal of my affinity. The effect on my shield is the same as it is on my son’s.

And given a Visya’s shield protects them against all sorts of affinities…

the pain lingers. The saint was nothing if not creative in leveraging her power against me.

I can feel the echoes of the pain, just as you can feel the lingering of a bruise. ”

For a moment, Aya was back in the Athatis barn, watching Will drag a hand through Akeeta’s fur as he confessed to the very same.

“I don’t suppose you ever told your son of such issues.”

Perhaps it was wrong to let anger coat her voice, shaky as it was. Perhaps Lorna deserved grace, especially after what she had been through since arriving in Kakos. But Aya had never been one much for it.

That fact had bothered her once.

It didn’t now.

Lorna didn’t seem to take offense. She simply settled back against the wall, her lips twisting into a grim expression. “He never found a cure for the issue, did he?”

“You would know if you’d stuck around.”

Lorna let out a dry laugh. “I did what I thought was best. I thought you might have more sympathy for it. Or did you know what bringing the saint back would entail?”

Aya took a single step off the wall, her hands balling into fists where they rested as close to her sides as they could with the shackles. Her spark of anger felt foreign after so much numbness.

Lorna just grinned in the face of it.

“Speaking of shields,” she continued, as if she hadn’t just dealt Aya a verbal blow, “I don’t suppose you can conjure a shield of air to give us some privacy?”

Mockery danced in her tone, and it prodded that spark she had just lit.

It seemed Will had come by his goading honestly. He’d always known how to push Aya to the brink when she needed it.

Aya raised her shackled wrists. “These are imbued with a tonic King Dominic created to mute Visya power.”

Lorna glanced down at her own in surprise. “Interesting,” she muttered. “So that is how the Visya king hid for so long.”

An aborted objection stuttered out of Aya. How did she know? Was it her ties to the Bellare, or—

“The news came to us on the road to Kakos,” Lorna explained. “I overheard the Vaguer speaking of it. King Aidon was seen wielding Incend fire in the Battle of Dunmeaden. He hasn’t been seen since.”

Aya swallowed against the burning in her throat, a distant voice echoing in her mind.

Control.

“I assume your Bellare hold some responsibility for his disappearance,” she ground out.

“If they do, it would be news to me,” Lorna replied evenly. “They were busy laying plans, but those plans were far from Tala.”

“Plans your other son aided in, I’m sure.” She would never forget the look on Will’s face when he’d explained how Lorna viewed Ryker.

“Yes,” Lorna exhaled. “Ryker was certainly distracted by it all.”

“That’s how the Vaguer got to you,” Aya said, her brow furrowing as the pieces clicked together in her mind. “The Bellare were distracted, and you…”

“And I was ripe for the taking.”

Aya dug her teeth into her bottom lip, considering for a long moment. Then she crossed the cell, her chains clanking with each step until she settled on the bench next to Lorna.

“How did the Vaguer know to find you?” she murmured, her attention flicking to the wooden door.

Lorna brushed away the question with a simple shrug. “There has long been interest in my family line.” She hesitated, her eyes scanning Aya’s face. “What…of my son?”

The vulnerability behind the question did nothing to quell Aya’s anger. “Where was your concern when you dragged his name out of Evie’s mouth?”

“I needed to tell her something of how we knew one another. Would you have preferred for me to tell her of my vision?” Lorna snapped back with a sharp whisper.

“She already knows the veil is torn. She did it herself.”

“As did you when you brought her back, according to her. What were you thinking?”

Aya wrapped her fingers around the chain between her shackles to keep them from Lorna’s neck.

“I was thinking that my kingdom was about to fall to Kakos, and my queen had a knife in my best friend’s chest, and there was no way to save innocent people without help .” She nearly spat the words, bitterness punching through each of the vowels as it purged itself from her throat.

Lorna fixed her with a grim smile. “You care too deeply.”

Aya shook her head once as she let another truth fall. “Not anymore.”

A muscle in Lorna’s jaw twitched, but she pressed her lips in a firm line as she considered her.

“They believe I have knowledge of the veil,” she finally murmured, her voice hardly a whisper. “Knowledge that will help them in their endeavor to destroy it entirely, so that they might kill the gods.”

Aya could hear the way her own teeth ground in her frustration. She’d forgotten how the Saj were never ones to get to the point.

“I don’t know how your vision will aid them in such a thing.”

“I know that now,” Lorna admitted. “Which is why I have already told them what I have seen.”

Aya jerked back. “Then what?”

“The Diaforaté cannot summon the veil without severely taxing themselves.”

Aya froze. That couldn’t be possible. Could it? “But…they’ve siphoned my power. I thought the experiments were working.”

“In a sense,” Lorna agreed. “They are no longer rotting away. But there are still limits to their abilities. I suspect the Vaguer will help there.”

Surely Evie did not expect the Diaforaté to rival her own power. The saint was too smart to create an army that could so easily defeat her. But Aya had wondered, in those days spent wrapped in darkness in her cell…

Would the same limits that Viviane had experienced with Aya’s power exist in the Diaforaté as well?

Would it matter?

Apparently, it did.

The realization did not come with any sense of hope. If it was simply a matter of not being able to generate enough power to summon the veil, then surely the Vaguer could help in that regard.

They had, after all, been the ones to tell Aya the inner workings of the original art of the Decachiré. The true practitioners—the ones who had eliminated the bounds of their wells so that they might bestow powers onto humans—had yielded to the darkness of their souls.

But…

“The experiments on humans,” Aya breathed. “They’ve…they’ve worked, haven’t they?”

Had she dreamt of the screams of the prisoners receiving their Visya power?

Lorna grimaced. “The saint alluded to inconsistencies.” She fixed Aya with a look that she couldn’t parse.

“There has never been one simple truth when it comes to magic. But now…we are wading into elements of the affinities that the gods never intended for us to know. It is not so simple as strength and depth.”

Aya frowned. She glanced at the door, her voice lowering as far as it could go. “Do you know why they can’t summon the veil?”

Lorna shook her head. “But I have my theories.”

“And?”

The Saj looked to the door, her meaning clear. She would not share them with the risk of listening ears. Before Aya could argue, Lorna was facing her once more, her gaze falling to her shackles before flicking back to Aya’s face.

“Do you remember what I told you in Rinnia?” Lorna asked.

Of course she did. It was Lorna who had taken Aya’s doubt of Gianna and turned it into full-blown suspicion. It was Lorna who had planted the fear that Gianna, with her piousness and devotion, would do anything to stop the Decachiré from rising once more, including using Aya to call down the gods.

And it was Lorna who had told her no practitioner had reached the level of power to tear down the veil. No Visya , except Evie. That even Aya, with the power she once thought rivaled Evie’s, would not have been able to.

Not yet.

We are who we choose to be.

Aya held the Saj’s stare and let her see exactly what she knew she sought to find. And then she offered up something of her own.

“He was alive when I left the battle to face Gianna.”

Perhaps it was more than the woman deserved. But it was all Aya had; this was a confirmation she could give.

Lorna’s eyes fluttered shut, her chin dipping as she let that truth settle in her. When she looked at Aya again, sadness and regret dulled her gaze.

“That means nothing now.”

It was not an admonishment. It was the truth. And Aya accepted it with a heavy breath as she leaned back against the wall, her head tipping toward the Beyond.

“I know.”