Page 31

CHAPTER 31

L aena’s throat was sore.

Consciousness came and went, but that one fact stayed with her: her throat was sore. And her cheek, her wrist, and, for some reason, the base of her spine.

None of it compared to the pain below her ribs. Not just pain, not just the emptiness of depleting her reserves, which she’d felt before… but a sense of wrongness. Darkness.

It frightened her.

When she finally managed to open her eyes for more than a few heartbeats, she could see from the view that they had made it to Vunmore after all. She may never have visited the city herself, but she recognized the ancient stone towers that rose up around her window, the cone-like mountain that rose in the background like a permanent reminder that the mages had owned this city once. That they might well own it again.

Callum Farrow was asleep in a chair by her bedside, his cheek propped on his knuckles. Even in his sleep, he looked worried, that little crinkle marring the space between his eyebrows.

And she couldn’t help it; she reached forward and brushed her fingertip against it. As though she could smooth it away with a touch.

He opened his eyes. “You are meant to be resting.”

“Indeed, touching your face is a terrible exertion. I do not know how I’ll ever manage the strain.”

He sat up, and when she dropped her hand, he caught it between his. “Laena,” he said. He looked so serious she wondered if he was going to report someone’s death. Someone other than Declan, whose dying breaths still rattled in her ears like a curse.

“Hawk,” Callum said. “He has magic.”

Laena sat back in the bed, releasing his hand. That was it? As if she would not have noticed the king throwing fireballs at her sister. The king’s fire had melded with her ice, in fact. She didn’t think she would have been able to call forth any ice at all, any magic, had he not joined his power with hers. His reserves had answered hers, balanced it. Responded to her need.

“Yes,” she said. “I do recall King Hawk’s magic.”

He scrubbed his hand over his face, wincing. Mages, but he looked tired. She wondered how much he’d slept reaching the city. “I wasn’t sure how much you would remember.”

She pursed her lips, attempting to paint her expression with disapproval. It wasn’t easy, considering she wanted to beam at him, throw her arms around him. He was alive. She could have wept with joy.

Still, she could at least attempt it. “I remember trying to tell you that Hawk had magic. Before the attack on the camp.”

She also remembered implying that she suspected him of treachery, when her own sister had been to blame.

“No, no.” Callum shook his head. “Your memory is definitely faulty. I don’t recall that at all.”

The man had the audacity to smile at her.

“So,” Laena said. “Are we arrested? Hawk and I?”

“No, my lady. You are free to go. If you wish it. ”

Go. Go where? To save Etra, but how? The idea of Katrina returning there to wreak havoc on the place she claimed to love… What destruction could she bring if she loved it as much as she said she did?

The look in Katrina’s eyes as she’d bent down to kill Laena… she didn’t think she would ever forget it. How could a heart-tithe work, truly? If you loved someone enough to gain power from their pain, how could you ever want power enough to kill them? It was a dilemma that could not be solved. Maybe that was why it could produce such destructive power.

She’d watched Kat kill Declan with her own hands.

Perhaps Callum was right. Perhaps all magic was evil. At the thought, a new darkness in her core writhed, as if awakening for the first time. Hungry.

He met her eyes more seriously now. “Hawk and Thaddeus have been studying magic. Apparently for just over two years now, ever since Hawk’s magic began to show itself. They can help you.”

Laena looked at her hands, focusing on the feel of the blankets beneath her fingers. She felt no coolness within her core. Despite Hawk’s intervention, she was nothing but hollow. “I’m not sure I still have any magic.”

“According to Thad, Vales magic feeds on itself. There’s still a price, Laena. It just… comes from you. Instead of from some unwitting victim you supposedly love.”

That didn’t sound like it was much better.

“Maybe I burned it out of me,” Laena said. Maybe that was the reason for the dark feeling, the tingle that prickled her spine. Her body wasn’t searing with pain any longer, but her abdomen still felt sore. When she dared to prod at the space beneath her ribcage, where the magic lived, there was no ice. No cold. No power. Only tender pain, and that thrumming sense of darkness.

“Thaddeus doesn’t think so. ”

Thaddeus, it turned out, knew a great deal more than Laena would have guessed. Who would have anticipated that a poisonkeeper, a protector of the Vales, would know so much about magic?

Of course, the monks were nothing if not secretive. It was not beyond the realm of imagination that they all knew, that they protected this knowledge along with the barrier. Somehow, though, she suspected that Thaddeus had proceeded beyond the expectations, and perhaps even the wishes, of his master.

“Why us?” Laena asked. “Hawk and me, I mean. Why gift us with magic?”

Callum blew out a breath. “Well, he’s got a theory about that, too. He’s got a theory about everything. But you’re not going to like it.”

She waited. He knew he could not keep it from her; he knew she would want to know.

“You’d have to ask him for the specifics,” he said, after a moment. “But it amounts to the idea that the magic of the Vales has been dormant since the mages left. And that it’s now responding to a coming threat by arming its rightful heirs.”

Laena frowned, trying to understand. “But the Vales were united under the mages.”

He lifted his shoulder, as if it made little sense to him. “Hawk is heir to the Aglyean throne. You’re heir to the Etran. I don’t want to make assumptions, but I suppose we can deduce that the Ruthless King also has some magic in his line. Perhaps that’s why Silerith is more lenient toward it.”

But she wasn’t heir to the Etran throne. Not anymore. A wave of nausea washed over her, thick and tinged with guilt. Thaddeus though the Vales had chosen her, gifted her with power. While Hawk had embraced his, Laena had abandoned her people.

She’d doubted herself for years, worrying that her secret store of magic was somehow as evil as the heart-tithes that criminals performed in the dark. Criminals and queens, apparently.

Now that she knew for certain that her magic had never been a threat to Etra, or the rest of the Vales, by abdicating her throne, she’d put them all in danger.

She couldn’t guess what Katrina would do next. But certainly, she would do everything possible to increase her powers and finish her task: she would return the mages to the Vales and rule alongside them. Assuming they had not poisoned her with treacherous lies.

She sat on the throne because of Laena.

If the Vales had gifted her with magic because it considered her one of its heirs, and if she had answered that call by giving her throne to someone else, then there was one solution she could not ignore. The thought stuck in her throat, and she reached for the cup of water at her bedside, wishing she could wash it away. Wishing she hadn’t yet woken. Wishing that the void in her core felt less like a poison—less like a danger that she would need another power to balance. And keep in check.

Her choices had brought her here. And if she wanted to save Etra, she knew what she would need to do. It might have been the magic, but she had the feeling—she knew, without knowing how—that King Hawk very likely knew it, too.

There was a knock at the door, and Thaddeus stuck his head in. “You’re awake. Good. The king would like to see you.”