Page 59

Earn Your Forgiveness

Teleporting with Allusian is not like shadowing with Reven, where I can feel the void of nothing reaching for us. With her, I can’t feel the passage of distance or time or movement. There is nothing and then we appear in the Arydian throne room.

One of the people already gathered there—among the viziers, Vanished, Wanderers, and others—yelps at the sudden sight of us. Which is when I see Reven…and Tabra. No Eidolon. Thank the goddess. I worried he’d try to take her if he got desperate. Though she is lying on the cold, hard stone of the floor with Achlys at her side.

“What happened?” I demand.

The rest all jerk around to face me, and Achlys and Reven immediately assume defensive positions around and over my sister.

Which should hurt, but I’m too busy staring at Tabra, who is the color of death—somewhere between green and white—and shaking so hard, I’m shocked she hasn’t toppled the building around us.

“I’m not the threat right now,” I tell them as I shoot across the room toward her.

The others reluctantly part to let me through, and I’m vaguely aware of the open-mouth stares directed at the now-whole goddess behind me, but Tabra is what’s important now. Introductions and explanations can come later. I kneel before her, my hands cupped around hers before I even think about it. “Tabra?”

Her teeth are chattering, but she’s awake. I think. Her eyes are open, gazing not at me, but through me, like she’s seeing something we can’t.

I glance at Achlys. “Tell me.”

“Eidolon tried to take her,” Achlys says in a monotone voice that might also shake a little.

I expect a tiny cheer to go up inside me from the Shadows. But there’s silence. Allusian must be holding them for me as she blocks Eidolon as well.

“And?” I demand.

“And…she tried to suck out his soul.” Achlys’s features take on a hard sort of satisfaction even as she runs a worried hand over Tabra’s hair. “Reven arrived and started to help, but by then she’d scared the king so much Eidolon used shadows to pull her off of him and then bolted.”

I kind of wish the Shadows had heard that part. “Good,” I mutter. “I hope it hurt like hells.”

I also hope it keeps him from returning quickly.

Cain runs into the room through the open double doors, and right behind him, a small man with a rotund face hurrying our way. My friend pulls up short, staring first at Allusian before turning to me. “Meren?”

“Hi.” I mean…what else am I supposed to say right now?

“I’m the healer,” the other man informs me. Easy to guess given the blood covering his clothes and sleeves. Vos’s blood? Or someone else’s?

I don’t know this healer. “Imperium or Vexillium?”

“Vex.”

So no supernatural help today. I nod and scoot back so he can examine my sister.

“Shock,” the healer finally declares. “Rest is the best thing for her. See if you can get food and water into her. Keep her warm.”

“I’ve got her.” Cain scoops her up, Tabra’s head lolling against his shoulder, and glances first at Allusian, and then across her to me. “Wait until I return to discuss anything.”

“Okay.”

Even so, he still pauses, and I can see in his face all the things he wants to say to me, questions he wants to ask, but above all that he’s glad I’m unharmed.

I smile at him, and with Achlys and the healer in tow, he leaves the room.

Which is when Allusian decides to do more than stand there and watch, crossing the room to where Reven still sits and lowers her lips to his ear, whispering to him. The way he jerks away from her words isn’t exactly comforting. Then she touches a finger to his forehead and a lavender glow spreads out from that point of contact and absorbs into him.

He scrunches his eyes closed, then his face contorts in pain before he pitches forward and shouts, so loud and ferocious, even Eidolon’s Shadows that I can barely feel at the moment quail at the sound.

Reven’s yell cuts off abruptly and he tumbles forward. I try to catch him, but he’s too heavy and I’m dragged down with him, my back and hip smacking the stone points of the steps leading up to the dais. I ignore the bloom of pain in my already injured side, holding onto him, even as the others rush to help lift him off me.

I scramble out from under him and check his pulse, his breathing, and he seems…okay? Just passed out?

I whirl on Allusian. “What did you do to him?” I demand.

“I helped,” she says in an unconcerned voice.

“Helped?” I ask. “How?”

“He’ll wake up with no more pain soon, and he’ll start to recover what he’s lost.”

What he’s…lost?

I suck in a gasp. “His memories?”

She nods. “It will take time.”

But he’ll remember. My thoughts ricochet all over the place. I didn’t ask for that. Only for her help. “I thought you couldn’t heal.”

“That’s not what I did.”

Then what did she do? “I—”

She cocks a single eyebrow at me before addressing one of our viziers standing close. “Please carry him with the others so the healer can check him.”

“Healer?” I ask. “I thought you said he was unharmed.”

“He’ll need care until he awakens.”

A group lifts Reven off the floor, and I get to my feet to follow them.

“Not yet,” Allusian says.

I pause, watching them take Reven away without me, then swing around to face her. “What else?”

She laces her fingers together before her. “Now, I help you release my sisters,” she says. “But let me warn you, they will come out in a fury after being caged so long. To help you best, I must become fully whole. I will have to find the rest of my heart before the Alignment.”

“Wait.” I stare at her, trying to make those words line up in my head in any way that makes sense. “You’re leaving ?”

Does she even care that Eidolon might return and kill us all before she accomplishes this?

“Prepare for the Alignment in my absence,” she says. “You have five days.”

Five days. Five days to hold off a now very pissed, very motivated Eidolon. He knows the Celestial Alignment has some part to play in releasing his mother. That Tabra can release them, but also that the nymph said I’m some sort of key. Will he wait until it’s here? Or attack sooner?

We have to be prepared for both.

While most of my friends are incapacitated. Heavens preserve us. My mind begins to whirl and wobble in a way that my stomach hates.

“To release the goddesses from the amulets your ancestress created will take both your sister’s power and yours.” Allusian pauses. “Did you hear me?”

I glance between her and the door Reven has disappeared through, hardly able to absorb her words, already in my head about everything that just happened, my friends, and the defenses we need to be adjusting. “What?”

She sighs. “Listen to me.”

I force myself to focus. “Okay.”

“Both you and Tabra must work together at the exact moment of the Celestial Alignment. Use the connection to the heavens, to me, to enhance your powers. But also, it took both of your previous selves to imprison them—one making unbreakable glass amulets and the other forcing my sisters’ souls inside them. It will take both of you to undo this—one to break the glass and the other to set the souls free.” She steps back. “I will meet you here in this room when it’s time.”

Then she’s gone.

She takes with her the iron control of the Shadows. “Whatever she told you, she’s a liar.”

And it’s not that I’m listening to them, but I suddenly have no idea what to do with myself to the point that I can’t make myself move.

Maybe I’m in shock, too. Or overwhelmed.

My own numbness is how I find myself sitting alone on the steps of the dais in the throne room trying not to listen to the voices in my head.

I don’t know if it was returning here or seeing Tabra safe but also so terrified she’s catatonic, or watching Reven writhe in agony, or my friends in danger and pain, or maybe what just happened in that cave all just caught up with me, but the lingering anger finally abandons me, and my heart unfreezes, letting despair in.

“Bene,” I whisper. Then cover my face with my hands.

I don’t cry. I just sit here trying to figure out if I could have done anything to save him.

I have no idea how much time passes while I sit like this, breaking a little more with the thought that I could have done anything but what I did. If I had found another way, maybe Bene—

Very real fear shivers over my skin, so violently that it feels like razors. Anger is a reason that only excuses so much. So is protecting the others. That one, though, is more insidious, because in my head I’m making decisions for what seem like good reasons. The same as Eidolon.

That’s what scares me most.

I scare me.

I don’t know what alerts me that I’m not alone in the room, but I lower my hands just as a man enters. The man who betrayed us more than any other. A man I’d thought of as a father. As a friend.

Horus.

“What were you doing in that mountain?” I ask him, and even I’m a little shocked at how dead my voice sounds. Emotionless, drained, uncaring.

His gaze lowers to the ground. “I found Vida’s family in the palace in Skom.”

The capital city of Tyndra? He went there? Alone? “You freed them?”

He gives a single nod. “Among others the king was holding.”

I’m too empty to be happy about that. “How did you find us?”

“When I was learning where Vida’s family were held, I overheard Eidolon tell his new general that one of his shadow alarms had been tripped inside the mountain, and that he thought it might be you.”

I stare at him. “So, you came all that way on the off chance I’d be there?”

He nods.

“Why? To beg me to take you back?”

His shoulders pull back, head up. “I know you can’t do that.”

“Then why?”

“In case my queen needed help.”

His queen.

I feel like parchment being torn down the middle. One side of me rejects him, hates what he did. I don’t know how many died because of his deception and the information he shared with Eidolon, but even one life lost is too many. But the other side of me knows I probably just doomed Bene to death, maybe Vos, too, depending on his wounds, and I don’t know if I can do that again right now. And this is…Horus.

I bunch my hands into fists, hiding them inside the long, thick sleeves of my Tyndran jacket. “I am not your queen.”

He finally looks directly at me, his dark eyes sad but also certain. “You will always be my queen.”

I look away from him, over his head to the back of the room, not really seeing anything in front of me. “I have exiled you. I can’t have you here.”

“I know.”

His quiet acceptance makes it worse.

“I can’t even offer safe passage out of this palace.”

“I know that, too, domina.”

“Stop being so goddess-damned reasonable,” I snap.

Surprise widens his eyes. “I apologize, domina.”

I breathe through my nose. “Damn it, Horus.”

“I will leave now.” He gives me a stuffy little bow and turns to walk away, the set of his shoulders somewhere between pride and defeat.

“Stop.”

I can’t let him go like this, despite what he’s done. “Are you able to get in and out of the Skom palace unnoticed?”

Tension brackets his shoulders before he faces me. “Yes.”

“You’re a good spy,” I say.

And he flinches, because he knows that wasn’t entirely a compliment.

I ignore that small tell. “Let’s put that to use. Spy for me.”

It’s the way of the Wanderers. The only way to reverse exile is by performing an impossible task. He survived the desert exile a second time, though I still don’t know how. He saved my life. Again. I can do this much for him.

When he bows this time, the defeat is no longer visible. “I won’t let you down, domina.”

“Don’t let Cain see you,” I warn. “He is zariph now.”

A zariph is honor bound to kill an exiled Wanderer. Horus’s position with me was the only thing that kept him alive around Zariph Cainis and the others. But now…

“I understand,” Horus says, then slips away.