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CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

BASTIAN

Matters of the heart can be easy, if you let them.

—Fragment of poem found in Myroshan monastery

I t had been so long since Bastian was in total control of his body, and he found himself out of practice.

He stumbled when he tried to get up, falling off knees that creaked onto legs that felt jellied.

The only upside was that this sent him careening right into Jax, which made the other man get his hands off Alie.

Bastian made it look like he’d done it on purpose, not straightening to his full height until the Emperor was knocked backward. He glowered. It’d been a long time since he got to glower. Apollius preferred sharp smiles. Bastian used to, but now, he felt like he would transition into glowering.

“You,” he seethed at Jax. “I should have you executed. No, fuck that—I should kill you myself, right now.”

The Emperor was too shocked to look afraid. Bastian could use that. He lifted his hand, twitching his fingers.

“No, Bastian.” Alie, his sister, always one to advocate for diplomacy. Wide-eyed, she stepped between them, one hand outflung to either man. “Now isn’t the time.”

Which was just as well. Because when Bastian reached for Spiritum, nothing was there.

Lore and Gabe called it channeling-space, that grayscale place he slipped into right before calling magic.

That seemed a bit overwrought to him, so he’d just never referred to it at all.

But now he couldn’t find that invisible door in the aether that let him through, couldn’t veil the colors away so that the threads of the world shone bright.

There was no magic anymore, not for him.

He should be upset by that. Instead, Bastian felt the lifting of an incredible weight.

“Well,” he said, lowering his hand. “If I want to kill him, I suppose it will have to be bloody.”

Jax breathed in a way that didn’t quite show relief. Alie bit her lip.

Bastian sat down slowly on one of his spindly wrought-iron chairs and looked at Alie, his every muscle feeling like a wrung-out rag. “Apollius is gone.”

“Good.” Despite the circumstances, a sunny smile broke across her face. Her hands came together at her chest, as if she would clap them like a pleased child, but she just gripped them there like the moment was something to cling to. “Thank all the gods.”

“Or don’t. As it were.”

“Figure of speech. Those are harder to get rid of than I thought.” Alie rushed forward, Jax forgotten by the door, tipping Bastian’s head up and turning it this way and that, like she was afraid Apollius might be hiding somewhere instead of banished. “How did you do it?”

“That’s the thing.” Fear wasn’t a new feeling, but to have it suffuse his whole body like this, to know it was his and not shared by a god, nearly made him weak-kneed. “I didn’t.”

Alie’s dark-green eyes narrowed. “You mean…”

“He just went away,” Bastian said. “And I don’t know where He went. But I can imagine that it isn’t back to the Shining Realm. Not when everything He wanted was right in His grasp.”

“No,” Alie agreed, stepping back and letting her hands fall away, convinced now that the god was gone. “No, that seems unlikely. If He went elsewhere, it’s because wherever He went was closer to His goal.”

“Into someone closer to His goal,” Bastian amended. “Since His body wouldn’t hold.”

As if they’d both had the same thought, Bastian and Alie turned slowly to Jax.

It took a moment for the Emperor to figure out what their gazes implied. When he did, he stepped back, hands held up. “It isn’t me.” Bastian didn’t know the man well, but he knew that this uncertainty, this wide-eyed guilelessness, was unlike him. “Alie, I swear to you—”

“Stop.” Alie held up a hand. Bastian noticed, distantly, that it trembled. “I know it isn’t. If Apollius could have you, He would have taken you in the first place.”

There was something in her tone when she spoke to the Emperor. Something soft that Bastian didn’t like.

He arched a brow at the other man. “But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t lock you up. It sounds like war is coming; no further reason for diplomacy, is there?”

“That would be fair of you.” Jax had regained his regal air, recovered from the moment he let it slip, when he thought it might affect Alienor. Even now, when Bastian was threatening him with imprisonment and bodily harm, his eyes kept going to his betrothed. “But I propose a compromise.”

“I’ve broken the habit of compromising with Emperors,” Bastian said.

“I want to help you, Bastian.” But Jax was still looking at Alie. “The idea of a Holy Empire… I thought it was a good one. I thought it was a way to bring peace. But that was foolish; I understand now.”

“Convenient, to understand under the shadow of a noose.”

“Nothing I say will convince you,” Jax said. “So let me show you. I have a private ship currently docked in your harbor, crewed by men who know how to keep their mouths shut. It can be ready in an hour to sail to the Burnt Isles.”

That got Bastian’s attention away from nooses. Lore. Seeing her. Saving her. The last memory he had of himself in his own body was lying beside her that night she left. Knowing, somehow, that the beginning they’d just had was also an inevitable end.

And now Apollius was gone. Now, Bastian was almost certain, Lore was in even more danger than she had been before.

“That’s a start,” he said, after a moment of quiet. “But you’ll be on it, where I can keep an eye on you.”

“I will be, too.” Alie crossed her arms.

But Bastian was already shaking his head. “Absolutely not. The last thing we need is—”

The door burst open. On the other side, Sophie, one of the Presque Mort, her eyes wild. “Report,” she wheezed, catching her breath from what appeared to be a dead run up the stairs. “Caldienan ships on the horizon.”

Well. So much for war coming; it was here.

Sophie closed the door as soon as she’d made her pronouncement, rushing back to Alexis. Bastian, Jax, and Alie stood in shocked silence, until Bastian broke it with a harsh laugh. “How much do you want to bet Gabe is on that ship? Impeccable timing.”

A shimmer in the air. Bastian’s spine and stomach momentarily felt like they were trying to change places, a sucking gravity pulling him toward the center of the room, then pushing him away hard enough to bow his back.

A spark of light, embers in the air. The sharp scent of green.

Gabe and Malcolm stood in front of the fountain.

So not on the ship, then.

The way they’d arrived, in a sudden drift of magic, let them bypass any defenses.

Not that any would have held them back, Bastian was nearly certain.

Malcolm stumbled, tipped forward. The hands that stabilized him on the floor before his nose smashed into marble had tiny leaves growing from the nailbeds.

The same small leaves sprouted from the corners of his eyes, closed now against what looked like a splitting headache.

And Gabe… gods, he was magnificent.

The eye patch was gone, so nothing covered his face, nothing to hide how beautiful and terrible he was.

The white of his eye glowed red-orange around the bright-blue iris, like a beacon on a stormy shoreline.

A flame hovered in each outstretched palm, shivering above inked candles.

Char lines tracked from his wrists to his elbows, like he’d dipped his hands in ash.

But there was more different about him than just his appearance. This man wasn’t the one who’d escaped on that ship to Caldien a month ago.

He was more.

“Remaut.” Bastian’s mouth was dry. “Gabriel.”

“Is it you?” His voice sounded different. Softer, strangely, with an underhiss of ember.

“It’s me,” Bastian said. “He’s gone.”

The blue-and-red eye closed, both in relief and, strangely, in sorrow.

They moved toward each other, cautious, the space between them volatile in a different way than it ever had been before.

No, that wasn’t right. Things between them had always hovered around this want, this desire, but they’d never allowed themselves to acknowledge it.

Not until Lore was in that space, too, the magnet drawing them both.

Bastian stepped toward Gabe, and already his hands rose with the want of him. Something softened in Gabe’s never-soft face, despite the fire in his eye.

But then Gabe saw Jax.

Even lost in his struggle with Apollius, Bastian had found ways to keep Gabe away from the Emperor.

His care was that deeply rooted, that he would refuse to let Gabe get hurt, even with the god in his head and the enmity that his love had twisted into at first. He’d thought that perhaps it was overkill.

That it’d been so long ago, maybe Gabe wouldn’t recognize Jax even if he was right in front of him.

Stupid thing to think.

That almost-softness fled, set on fire and burned away in seconds.

Gabe still moved forward, but not toward Bastian—he all but pushed him out of the way, his other hand rising, that tongue of flame growing tall and unflickering, and Gabe brought up his flat palm like he’d throw the fire directly in the Emperor’s face.

He would have. And Bastian would not have stopped him.

But Alie did.

“Gabriel!” She darted in front of Jax, hands up. Wind whipped at Bastian’s hair, but he couldn’t see the threads she wove. “Stop!”

He wasn’t cowed by her magic, but his name in her mouth gave him pause. Gabe didn’t close his fist and dispel the flame, but he lowered his hand, brows drawing together. “What are you doing, Alie?”

He said her name like he had to think about it. Like another had come first to his tongue.

“Stopping you from committing murder.” She drew in a shaky breath, standing at her full height. “And creating an international incident.”

“Too late for that one,” Bastian said. He wanted to interfere here, wanted to pull Alie aside and let Gabe finish the job. But he restrained himself. Mostly because he still felt weak in the knees and couldn’t bear the idea of losing a potential fistfight to his half sister.