Cedric nodded, drawing Ashrender up, level to the floor. He stared down the length of the blade as it pointed at the man he had once looked up to. “Come with us now to face the king’s justice or forfeit your life here and now.”
At his side, Elyria grimaced, as though she heartily disagreed with the first option, but she said nothing. Only continued staring murderously at the dark lord who had stolen so much from her too.
“I thought I broke you once, boy. I was wrong. You’ve always been stronger than I gave you credit for.” His eyes darted from Cedric to Elyria, then back again. “That will change.”
Malchior raised his hands, fingers splayed wide.
Cedric and Elyria both lunged forward.
Then, they stopped.
Froze, mid-step—midair, in Elyria’s case.
Cedric released a choked breath as invisible threads of power suddenly slipped around his body, squeezing his arms to his sides. It wrenched Elyria’s daggers from her hands and Ashrender from Cedric’s, the weapons clattering on the stone floor.
Elyria let out a hiss of pain, and Cedric’s head snapped instinctively toward her.
The power wrapped around her was not invisible.
It was red and shimmering, like the clearest rubies.
Cedric’s eyes dropped to where the cultists’ blood had flooded every inch of the runes decorating the floor. He watched it slowly drip into the basin behind Malchior, tinting the brilliant turquoise mana a sickly shade of gray.
“This is nowhere near over, dear boy,” Malchior said, stepping forward. “I’m afraid we have only just begun.”
58
SHADOWBORN
ELYRIA
She sensedthe instant Cedric was bound.
It was like the bond between them had wrenched taut, like the golden thread in her chest was being plucked—violent, attacking. The choked breath he loosed rang in her ears like a call to war.
The feeling was so overpowering, it took an extra moment for Elyria to realize she was restrained too. Her daggers hit the floor under her feet as she remained frozen, held aloft by strings ofsanguinagimagic.
“You really have no one to blame for this but yourself,” Malchior said, striding over to Elyria with a smug expression emblazoned on his face. “Though perhaps I should thank you for making such quick work of my willing sacrifices. Much more exciting, I think, for you to have spilled their blood, rather than for them to spill itthemselves.”
Elyria’s shadows skittered through her veins, leaking over her skin, over the magic binding her, but it could not break through its hold. Not as whatever wards the dark sorcerer had cast upon the estate kept them smothered, held her power at bay. “Why would they sacrifice themselves for you?”
Malchior ignored her question. “If you had only died in Dawnspire like you were supposed to, it need not have come to this.” Malchior turned to Cedric, something like regret held in the creases of his eyes. “You and Portentia might’ve been happy together, and when the time came, we could have claimed dominion over this world together.”
Cedric snarled, struggling against his bonds. “I wouldneverhave helped you.”
“And your timeline is a bit off there,” Elyria said with a sneer. “Even if you had succeeded in killing me, even if you’d taken out the whole merry lot of us in Dawnspire, and even if Cedric had eventually run back to you in his shock and grief?—”
“I would have died right there with you.”Cedric’s voice echoed in her mind, and Elyria’s heart simultaneously swelled and clenched.
“—your jig was already up. You’re forgetting that it was your own daughter who helped unearth your treachery, who found the half of the crown you stole.”
Malchior’s back stiffened, his voice like acid when he said, “If you had never come here in the first place, if the two of you had never bonded in the Crucible, Dawnspire would not have needed to happen in the first place. Portentia would never have been left to spend time with Arcanian trash, would never have been manipulated into breaking my confidence and?—”
“There’s no fighting fate, Malchior.” Elyria smoothed her face into that cool, arrogant mask, arching a periwinkle eyebrow. “Sometimes things happen that are beyond even our best—or worst, in your case—intentions.”
He laughed, raising a hand toward Cedric’s frozen body, beckoning it forward. The knight thrashed against his restraints with a pained groan, but the blood runes beneath his feet only glowed menacingly as he was dragged toward the manaforge basin. To the platform still laying atop.
“I said something similar tohim, you know,” Malchior taunted, and with the snap of his fingers, a blood-red ribbon of magic shot across Cedric’s mouth, silencing his shouts. “Before I left him in the Sanctum. Before hefailedme.”
