Lierick’s eyes flashed, and my body tensed, waiting for him to attack. I would happily put him down, especially if the accounts inside that book were true. Avalon was mine, and Vox was hers. That made Vox mine by extension.
But rather than angry, the Second Line Heir looked enamored. Yeah, I’d beat the shit out of him for that too. I growled low in my throat, and when his eyes shifted to mine, I let him see the beast. He thought he knew the secrets of the Third Line? I’d show him personally just how animalistic we could be.
“I said no offense.” Lierick Hanovan’s lopsided smile didn’t reach his calculating eyes. But I knew. My instincts knew. He was a man who was here with a plan, and that plan hinged on my Soul Tie.
“My loyalty is to her first. If I find even a hint of danger to her from you or your Line, what Ivan Vylan did will seem humane. I’ll put you fucking down, and bury the rest of your Line so deep in the ground, there’ll be no chance you’ll rise again.” I held his eyes with mine. I wanted him to see the soul-deep conviction in my statement. “We can agree that the majority of the First Line are rotten, but not all. If you’re here with plans to avenge yourLine’s genocide by perpetuating one of your own, Iwillstand in your way.”
The air in the library seemed to still, the absence of sound broken only by soft breaths and heavy heartbeats.
Finally, Lierick inclined his head. “Understood. We aren’t here for that.”
Avalon leaned forward. “Then what are you here for, Lierick? The truth this time.” He held her eyes, intensity burning in his own, and I wanted to pluck them from his head and feed them to Alucius.
“We want our lives and lands back. We want to return to the homes we abandoned. To mourn the ancestors of our past. We want our place back at the Conclave. We want to return to Ebrus.” He leaned closer too, and if he lunged, he’d be in headbutting distance. Or kissing distance.
Braxus got between them before I could, his low growl echoing from the vaulted ceilings. Avalon buried her fingers in his fur, like he was as reassuring to her as I was. I liked that.
“We want every person in Ebrus to have food and a voice. We don’t want the amount of magic a person has deciding their worth in our society,” Lierick continued, swallowing hard. “For that to happen, you need to get a hold on your powers, so you don’t keep resetting time.” He looked between us as he pushed the copy ofA Future History of Ebrusback toward Avalon, opening it to a page in the middle.
I skimmed the pages quickly, reading how Avalon had fallen in love with me. And then fucking Eugene had killed me in a cowardly attack with a bolt of lightning.
“That fucker,” Vox grumbled, and I couldn’t agree more. Could I punish someone for something they’d done in a different timeline?
Once Avalon had started, she kept reading, her eyes moving furiously over the pages. I tried to keep up, picking up the gistas she flicked the pages. She’d avoided me in the next lifetime, and the pain in my chest at even the thought had me holding her closer. I couldn’t imagine the heartache of knowing my Soul Tie was avoiding me.
When she gasped, I skipped to the end. Her eyes were filled with tears again. Vox’s face was set in a hard line, as he read about his father sending Stanlus to kill Avalon. About me dying instead.
The next page started where she reset time again, the one we’d already read, where Lierick killed Vox. Lierick wisely moved the book away, before she could get to the end of that part once more and remember she wanted to punch him in the face again.
I loved her so much.
Avalon turned into my chest, her face buried in my neck. “You keep dying.”
“I’d give every life for you, Avalon Halhed. You own every part of me.”
She was shaking her head. “You die one more time, I’ll bring you back and kick your ass. You understand me, Hayle Taeme?”
I just laughed, holding her tightly against my chest. There was no timeline in which I wouldn’t stand between her and danger. Even the idea of watching her die was like ripping my heart in two.
Quarry sent me images of the bay around Boemouthe. There were three clippers, and from Quarry’s count, at least fifty soldiers on each. Not much of an army. Lierick wouldn’t stand a chance against my own family’s guard, let alone the private soldiers of the First Line. They’d be decimated in minutes by the Dawn Army.
Which begged the question once more: what was he doing here at Boellium?
This was honestly above our paygrade, but who would we tell? Vox’s father, so he could finish the job their ancestors had started? Master Proxius was gone, conveniently, leaving the war college captainless.
Obviously, the Eleventh Line already knew. Who else?
“You mentioned Baron Abaster visited your father, so I assume it isn’t a new development, this contact between the Second Line and the Eleventh? Who else knows you exist?”
Lierick ground his teeth, the only tell he had outside the beating of his heart that he was stressed by our conversation. “The Twelfth Line know. After their last drought over a hundred years ago, the Eleventh Line brought them to us as refugees from their lands. But only on the proviso they couldn’t leave and couldn’t tell the outside world about our existence. They agreed. There are still members of the Eleventh and Twelfth Lines in Ozryn, though they’ve married and intermingled so thoroughly, we think of them as Second Line citizens.”
Avalon let out a long breath between her teeth. “They all know?”
Lierick shrugged. “I’m not sure how widespread the information is in the Twelfth Line in recent times, but it’s a common secret among the Eleventh Line, and has been since the day we were smuggled through their lands on the word of Ellanora Halhed. We’ve had a lot of desperate people making the trek to our doors over the last few years, though. The Twelfth Line is very community driven, and leaving their families and towns is a hard decision to make, but some families sacrificed for the survival of their children, or their elderly parents. Desperate people do desperate things. But not even we can support so many. There isn’t a whole lot of agriculture up in the north, so sustaining a large influx of people has quickly become unsustainable.”
That wasn’t news; the last Conclave had suggested as much.
The Third Line had spies throughout most of Ebrus, and not even we had heard a single whisper of the Second Line being alive. At least, not to my understanding, but I was only the spare Heir.
