The historian was gone before I could even offer my own parting.
I sat back, taking in everything he’d said.
There was much to consider. The relics. The balance. The Gate.
And Terran.
None of what I’d learned would matter if he didn’t join me in Grimharbor.
I’d spent a lifetime learning to read people, bending their weaknesses to my advantage. But he was not simply a mark. The way I responded to him… my body responded to him… that was a warning.
One that made me dangerous.
Still, no one else stood a better chance of securing the Stone. If Terran came, the plan could still work, especially with my newfound knowledge of the relics.
If he didn’t…
I would find another way.
19
TERRAN
It had flickered.
Not once, but three times. Three more than the Stone should have given. I wasn’t the most powerful land-wielder in Gyoria.
“It happened again.”
Dren stopped what he was doing, showing a young one how to harness the core of Elydor well beneath his feet, and sent the girl back to her trainers. Partnered but childless, like most Elydorians, he would have been a good father.
“When?”
“Just now.”
Dren looked at the leather pouch. “You have it on you? Have you gone mad? And how do you know it happened again if it’s in there?”
I gestured for him to leave the training field with me.
“The same grumbling, when the land beneath our feet has been disturbed… it’s something like that.” I shrugged. “I just… felt it. When I looked inside, it flicked as it had done before.”
Neither of us wished to discuss its implications.
Dren was more concerned with the fact that, as of yet, the Stone hadn’t been discovered as missing. As for my thoughts, they were frequently, since last eve, on a silver-haired Aetherian whose body responded to my command. Whose lips tasted like a cross between the sweetest Thalassarian fruit and…and danger.
A deadly combination.
Every instinct I possessed screamed to keep my distance. She was a weapon wrapped in silk, deception cloaked in desire. And yet I’d tasted her, let her see more of me than I had anyone in years.
Fool.
“Even now,” I said, “it pulses as if waiting.”
Like her, in Grimharbor.
“You need to speak to Kael.”
It wasn’t the first time Dren had said it. After a fitful sleep, I woke to the same feeling as I experienced now from the previously sleeping relic.
