“Well,I’mthe Champion… so I should be able to makeloft dorhlook just as easy in time.” She hoped, at least. But the only thing Vi knew less about than being Yargen’s Voice, was being the godddess’s Champion. “Speaking of our supposed titles… Any progress on the Apexes of Fate?”
Vi started up the stairs to the pit, Taavin following dutifully behind. She glanced over her shoulder at him, pausing when the silence continued to stretch on. His brilliant emerald eyes were fixated across the pit, avoiding hers.
“That’s a yes.” Vi slipped her long braid over her shoulder, running her fingertips along its end. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure, entirely.” Rather than pestering, she waited for him to find the words. “The vision of the room keeps appearing.”
“Room…” Vi thought back to the last time he’d listed possible locations for apexes. “The throne room? Or the one you mentioned with the two women?”
“The latter.”
“Have you seen anything different?”
“That’s the thing: every time I see it, it’s different.” He looked up to her. “All glimpses… sometimes focused on shelves crammed with jars of various objects—bits and baubles stacked around them to the point of chaos. Sometimes there are people, sometimes not. Tapestries darkened with soot hanging over a fire. I see them holding things, and—”
“Casting them into the flame?” Vi finished for him. Taavin’s lips hung, slightly parted, the words he’d been forming never leaving. Instead, they closed briefly, and a new statement was put together.
“How did you know that?”
“It sounds like a curiosity shop.” Vi glanced over the top of the training pit, looking for the horizon line—or as close to it as she could see in the jungles. The sky was still dark, which meant she didn’t have to be rushing back to her room. This was a conversation that Vi didn’t want to cut short. “I’ve never seen one, of course…” She had spent her life in this fortress, confined to the city and at most its immediate surrounding area. All of that would change soon. “But that sounds like the descriptions I’ve read in books—the variety of objects to burn, people there sometimes and not at a later date. It all seems to add up.”
“It can’t be a curiosity shop, then.” Taavin shook his head, his tousled hair getting further out of place in the process. For one brief second, Vi wondered if it was as soft as it looked. But she fought off the need to tuck a stray strand behind his pointed ear.
“Why?”
“Because in the last dream I had…” His voice disappeared, and with it his attention on her once more.
“You… what?” Vi shuffled on the step. There wasn’t much room, and she couldn’t catch his eyes without all but stepping into him.
“I thought I sawyoulooking into the flame.” Was that a blush on his cheeks, or a trick of the magical light that lingered on him? “I think it was likely just a run-of-the-mill dream—not tied to fate or us or the apexes.”
He’d “run of the mill” dreamt about her?Vi swallowed down her heart so it wouldn’t beat so loudly in her ears. She was being ridiculous. He’d said she’d tortured him in dreams all his life.
But wouldn’t those be related to the Apexes of Fate?
Did he dream of her differently now than he had before?
“Why—” Vi cleared her throat. “Why couldn’t it be me?”
“You see the future at the apexes, but my visions and dreams seem to look to the past—places where fatewaschanged, not will be.”
“Well, then I suppose it couldn’t be me, given that I’ve always been cooped up here.” Vi shrugged and started up the stairs again, ignoring the opportunity to follow up on the implication that she’d been appearing in his dreams. If she acknowledged that, then she’d have to admit he’d begun to do the same for her and that—
A new thought stopped her dead in her tracks at the top of the pit. Taavin’s hand rested lightly on her back as he rounded her side.
“What is it?” he asked, gravely serious the moment he saw the expression on her face.
“Unless it was me, but wasn’t me,” Vi whispered, looking through him, back to a strange interaction with a Western woman in the winter solstice market.
“How is that possible?”
“If you dream of the past, where the lines of fate twist and align, then perhaps I’ve never been the one torturing you.”
“I’ve seen you.” He took a small step closer. “I’d know your face of any in the world.”
“Perhaps… Unless my face isn’t my own, but that of a princess reborn,” Vi whispered.
“What?”
