One of the two nodded curtly, and without a word, they walked around the Mage and knelt on the ground near his head, their eyes never leaving his face. The two quintets who had accompanied them from the Fading Lands knelt around the Mage’s body. Each of the warriors pulled razor-sharp red Fey’cha from their sheaths and held them over the Mage’s body. Twenty blades were poised over vital arteries and organs: neck, heart, belly, thighs, arms. If the Mage so much as lifted a finger against theshei’dalins, he would be dead in an instant. Ellysetta shivered at the thought.
“Let’s go,shei’tani,” Rain whispered. “There’s no need for you to be here.”
“There’s every need,” she said. “I’ve never seen anyone Truthspeak a Mage. It’s a talent that could come in handy, don’t you think?”
He scowled. “Not for you. If you think I’d ever let you put your hands on a Mage…”
“Once our bond is complete, no Mage can soul-claim me,” she reminded him. “Let me stay, Rain. Let me watch…and learn.”
He surrendered with ill grace, but insisted she remain securely at his side. On that, he would not budge.
When the vol Oros sisters were ready to begin, they nodded to the warriors holding the twenty-five-fold weave around the Mage. Ellysetta expected the warriors to disperse their weave slowly, cautiously, but instead, one of the Fey cried, “Now!” and each Fey dissolved his thread in the weave.
The instant the weave vanished, the two sisters leaned in and gripped the Mage’s head in their hands. Power exploded in a bright, golden-white light around them.
Ellysetta’s belly coiled tight as she watched theshei’dalinsspin their weaves. She’d seen Truthspeaking before…but never like this. The threads were sun-bright, blazing with such concentrated power she could taste the snap of it in her mouth, feel the shocking tingle race over her skin. It reminded her of the burst of power that billowed around Rain every time he summoned the Change.
She kept her eyes on theshei’dalins, summoning Fey vision in an attempt to see the patterns of their weave. The threads were so bright, they would have blinded a lessershei’dalin, but Ellysetta saw the pattern—or, rather, sensed it somehow—and her mind worked to commit it to memory. Spirit andshei’dalin’s love…not soft, not soothing, but hard and sharp as a knife. It stabbed deep into the mind of the unconscious Mage.
His eyes flew open, filled with shock. His lips parted in a soundless gasp. No other part of his body so much as twitched, because the Fey had spun a paralysis weave on him as soon as the shield weave had dissolved.
Ellysetta heard a voice—a wail. The Mage’s wail. His mind rejecting the invasion of his thoughts. On the heels of his cry came a powerful intonation, two female voices, each vibrating with compulsion so strong, a chill shuddered up Ellysetta’s spine.
«Open your mind, son of Eld. Let us in. We can feel how it hurts you to keep secrets from us. Don’t torment yourself this way. The knowledge you hold is a knife in your belly, twisting deeper with every moment you delay. Let go of the pain, son of Eld. Open your mind, set free your burdens, and let us bring you peace.»
Ellysetta’s nails dug into Rain’s wrist. The Mage was screaming now—a silent scream that ripped through his soul. Theshei’dalinswere not spinning pain upon him; he was doing it himself, thanks to the compulsion woven into their voices. Still, he fought to hold his barriers in place and resist the invasion of his mind. He wanted to whisper the death spell, the one that would free him from this torment and keep what he knew safe, but he couldn’t remember the word, and his tongue couldn’t move to form it.
«Torvan…» Theshei’dalinshad pierced the outer layer of his mind and discovered the Mage’s name and a memory from his childhood—a memory of a time when he’d been young and still innocent, a powerful child already slated for greatness. He had a mother, a Primage’s favored concubine, a beauty with brown eyes and raven hair. She had loved him—at least as much as a woman of Eld dared to love her child.
«Torvan.» Narena and Faerah had now tapped the memories of that mother, the feelings the boy Mage had reciprocated until he grew old enough to know that one day he would be her master. Using those memories, theshei’dalinsspun a vivid illusion of the boy’s mother, the sound of her voice, the sweet smell of her skin, the soft warmth of her embrace in those too-brief moments when she was allowed to hold her child. «Torvan, dear one,» the boy’s mother pleaded. «Please tell us what we need to know. Please, my son. Trust us.»
Ellysetta swayed. It was almost as if she were there in the weave with theshei’dalinsand the Mage and the Mage’s memories. She knew the instant the crack into the Mage’s mind opened a little further, gasped as theshei’dalinsplunged deeper.
«Tell us what you know, Torvan. Tell us. You cannot hold back. You don’t want to hold back. The need to speak, to confess what you know, is too strong to resist.»
Theshei’dalins’fingers tightened on the Mage’s face, and another wail was wrung from his soul as a surge of fresh power bolstered their weave.
They had tapped other memories of his youth. Rain was wrong: Mages weren’t born evil. They weren’t born without a conscience. They were a product of their upbringing and the dark weaves of Azrahn that they were taught to spin when they were too young to know the danger. That sort of power was a heady drug for anyone, let alone a child.
Once Torvan donned the green robes of a novice Mage, earning the approval of his teachers and masters became the goal of his daily existence. That desire soon grew into a personal need to excel…to be better, stronger, more capable than his fellow novices. But it was only at age ten, when he watched his master force anumagito commit unspeakable acts, that the true hunger for power over others blossomed in his Azrahn-darkened heart.
Cruelty came soon after, born from a mix of boredom and a driving urge to destroy every hint of weakness and emotion in his soul. Weak souls were slaves. Strong souls were masters. And it was much, much better to be a master than a slave.
Soon he moved from novice green to apprentice yellow, then Sulimage red. His rapid rise in rank and exponentially increasing talents caught the eye of a daring young Primage who had just ascended to the blue. Together with a handful of like-thinking Mages, they spoke in hushed whispers and thoughts stored in the small, private area of their minds that every Mage learned to create—the area that, in fact, separated Mages fromumagi, though only a truly powerful Mage could keep even a small portion of his mind secure against the master who had claimed his soul as a child.
Torvan and his mentor talked about the rule of Demyan Raz, and the hidebound traditions of the Mage Council. They shared treasonous, revolutionary thoughts and plotted ways to increase their own powers by supplanting older but less talented Mages. They even conceived the idea of breeding stronger, more powerfulumagiby crossing magical bloodlines.
And then the Mage Wars began. Gaelen vel Serranis slaughtered Demyan Raz and every last member of his clan—erasing the most powerful Mage family in Eld and upsetting the balance of power. As the Wars raged, Primages fought like vicious dogs to ascend to the dark throne of Eld. Intrigue, betrayal, even murder became commonplace in the great Mage Halls scattered across the land.
It was Torvan’s mentor who finally succeeded where all the others had failed. Torvan’s mentor whose revolutionary ideas and forethought had led him to build the first underground stronghold, into which his trusted inner circle and a few thousand Mages andumagifled when Rain Tairen Soul scorched the world. It was Torvan’s mentor who assumed the mantle of power and claimed the purple robes of the High Mage of Eld.
And soon, very soon, it would be that same mentor who would lead Eld back to greatness. Then all the world would tremble and fall prostrate before them. And all the world would venerate the name of Torvan’s mentor, the High Mage Vadim Maur.
Vadim Maur. The mere mention of that hated name sent a bolt of fear shooting through Ellysetta’s veins.
As if alerted by her fear, a familiar sentience suddenly turned its dagger-sharp attention in her direction. Ellysetta gave a choked scream and flung herself backward. She yanked her consciousness back into herself and raised her mental barriers in a flash. Her hands clutched Rain’s arm so tightly, her nails broke against the unyielding surface of his golden war steel.
“Fey!” he cried.
