Don’t leave me.
She’d said those words once before, her knees covered in desert sand and his blood soaking her hands.
Not real.
“You can’t defeat her, Aya love,” Will confessed. “You’re too weak.” Grief flashed in the gray of his irises. “Just like you were too weak to save me.”
The image flickered again, and Aya’s heart lurched.
“I could take him from you so easily,” Evie’s voice echoed in her head. “I made Gianna believe many things. What could I make you believe,Aya love? Could I convince you your love never existed?”
Memories of Will swirled around Aya as if brought forth from her mind. Perhaps that’s where she was—stuck somewhere in her own consciousness, dreaming, but awake, and all around her was Will.
Will standing on her father’s doorstep, a frown furrowing his brow. Will pinning her in training, his body warm and firm against hers. Will bumping into her at the Squal, his mouth twisting in a smirk as she shoved past him. Will and the dangerous glint in his eyes as they stood in the destruction of the Artist Market, his blade on the hand of the Royal Guard.
She’s mine.
Pain grew behind Aya’s eyes, sharpening and spreadingthrough her head until she was certain her skull would cleave in two.
Evie could take them all. She could wipe him away, the one thing that she held fast to.
She could make Aya a mere shadow of herself.
Perhaps I should let her.
It would be…a relief.
Aya closed her eyes, that vise grip over her heart easing just so.
But Evie’s power vanished as quickly as it had descended, leaving Aya bereft and trembling, even as the pain in her head receded, the light of the torches flickering beyond her eyelids.
“Something to consider, I suppose, should the Vaguer not have any other theories,” Evie mused as she stepped away.
Aya bit hard on the inside of her cheek, the iron of her blood flooding her tongue as she tried to keep her legs from giving out beneath her. She felt unmoored, and yet she forced herself to focus as the firelight caught the sword sheathed at Evie’s hip.
“The Vaguer unsettle you,” Aya forced out. She hated the tremor that lingered in her voice.
Evie’s brows flicked up in amusement. “Do they?”
Aya allowed her fingers to seek the familiar ridges of the chain between her cuffs. “I thought you’d relish being worshipped like a god.”
Evie laughed, the sound bitter as she tossed back her head. “Perhaps,” she allowed. “Or perhaps I resent the comparison to swine.”
Aya glanced at the sword, the memory of the saint’s frozen expression when it was presented to her rising to the front of Aya’s mind, as clear as the images she’d just seen of Will.
Answers were everywhere.
“And yet you carry a sword with Pathos’s name carved in the blade,” Aya remarked. She cocked her head at the saint.“You didn’t want it when the Vaguer offered it to you in the throne room. Why?”
Evie unsheathed the blade, a wry smile on her lips as she held it between the point and pommel. She flipped it in her hands so that the carving was facing the torchlight.
“It reminds me of how naive I truly was,” she murmured.
“For hoping the gods would come to your aid?”
The corner of Evie’s mouth pinched as she stared at the engraving. Then she flipped the sword easily, sheathing it back at her hip before facing Aya and asking a question of her own in lieu of answering hers.
“Did you know it is forbidden for the gods to have children? The Nine have achieved harmony, but adding another? One that could challenge their claim to the universe? They thought it too dangerous.” Evie smoothed her hands down the folds of her robes, brushing off a fleck of dirt from the cell. “Petty jealousy, I suppose.”
