One shoulder lifted. “Again that depends. We use many of the same spells, but our powers are concentrated in different elements. He’s better at healing, manipulating fire, and controlling animals. I’m more adept at movement and manipulating air and weather.”
She gasped. “I knew you could move things with wind, but you can control weather now? Can you make it rain?” That was a skill to command the notice of kings and make such a person possessing it very wealthy.
Bron snorted. “No. Rain is a blessing of sky gods, not the talent of mages. I can wield lightning to a point and raise a decent whirlwind when necessary.” His features turned solemn. “There’s a cost to wielding any kind of power. I’m sure you discovered that once you became an itzuli.”
She nodded. Not once had she considered her particular talent a blessing. Unexpected and unwelcome, it had only served to make her a prisoner of fanatics and her sister the hostage of a madman. The nosebleeds she suffered while translating Kocyte’scursed book were nothing compared to the impact her magic had on her life once the wrong people discovered her talent and extorted it.
Ruminating on her circumstances did nothing more than make her angrier and more bitter. She tried to steer the conversation down another path. “Will you ever tell me how you got that scar?” For all that it marred his face with its jagged redness, the scar didn’t detract from Bron’s handsomeness. He was still the moon. The beautiful moon.
He shook his head. “Only after you tell me how exactly you became an itzuli. Did you almost drown a second time?” There was no humor in his question.
Disaris sighed. He wasn’t ready to let go of the subject, and while he might be far more reserved and tranquil than she was, he was no less stubborn when he wanted something and just as intractable. “You’d transferred to another garrison from Burnpool by the time someone noticed. I think I always had the talent. It just didn’t make an appearance in the same grand fashion yours did.”
“Who noticed it first? Master jin Feypas?”
“No. He was dead by then. It was Master jin Morevan.” Or so he’d introduced himself. Disaris had learned later that, like his fellow Daggermen, he went by many false names. That was only one of them. “It was in my final year in the schoolroom when he took over Master jin Feypas’s post.”
Jin Morevan had made her skin crawl from the moment she met him. A precise man with an intense gaze capable of burning holes into the person he stared at, he’d made the militant jin Feypas look like a kindly grandmother by comparison. A fire burned behind his eyes, and he stalked the schoolrooms like a hunter stalking deer. His interest in his students’ work was more uncanny than complimentary, and the thing he focused most on was their reading capabilities. Disaris wished she’d been lessnaïve then and hid her ability, but she didn’t have the years or sophistication to understand that the sly jin Morevan hadn’t come to teach but to spy and hopefully obtain the one thing the Hierarch needed most: a code-breaker.
“He was a Daggerman in the guise of a schoolmaster. He tested all of us to see who could read various script. When he discovered I could, I’m sure he couldn’t get a message to his master fast enough. If Panrin hadn’t been ransacked and those survivors scattered to the winds, I truly believe I’d have been abducted and taken to the Hierarch.”
As she told her tale, Bron’s expression turned ever colder. Mouth thinned to a tight line and pale eyes narrowed in fury, he looked like he’d cheerfully strangle someone with the reins he gripped in a tight fist. His question sound like it was forced through clenched teeth. “What happened to jin Morevan?”
“He disappeared before the Kefians attacked Panrin. If he’s still alive, doing his master’s bidding, he’s either hunting for another itzuli or recruiting another angry, bitter fool to join the ranks of the Daggermen.” Loathing made her shudder. “They’re a plague,” she said. “A sickness that twists the soul and invades the mind with empty promises of power and the illusion of belonging.”
Bron reined his horse to a halt, making hers stop as well. Their escort also paused but didn’t question their leader. Bron’s gaze was as piercing as jin Morevan’s had ever been, though no madness lived there, only puzzlement, sympathy, and bleak regret. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you and Luda when Panrin fell, Disa.”
She reached out to touch him, only to pull away, reminded they weren’t alone or unobserved. “Why would you apologize? Were you not fighting on the battlefield then? You didn’t abandon us, Bron. Neither Luda nor I ever thought such a thing.”
He tilted his head to one side. “What’s changed you, Disa? From the stranger who rejected me and demanded I never contact you again, returned to the woman who grew up with me since childhood and became my lover?” Hope and suspicion chased each other across his features.
Disaris wanted to weep. How badly she wanted to tell him she’d never turned her back on him, not even when she insisted they never see each other again. That hope he couldn’t hide was a balm to her spirit and an agony as well. She’d shatter it soon enough, remind him that the Disa he once knew was a fading memory, replaced by a stranger who lied to him without hesitation and used him to achieve her goals.
“This war has changed all of us in ways we never expected,” she said, praying he wouldn’t pierce any deeper to understand her actions or motives. “Shall we continue to the temple?”
A small part of her mourned when once more the fortress gates slammed down on his expression. He made a soft clicking sound to his horse, tugged on her horse’s tether, and they resumed their journey. They rode in silence for a long time, serenaded by the whisper of tall grasses bending to the constant breeze and the muffled thud of hooves stamping a path to their destination.
Disaris interrupted the quiet once. “You said you’d tell me how you got your scar if I told you how I became an itzuli.”
Bron didn’t turn to look at her, his profile hidden by his hood. “I fought a Kefian warrior who possessed a sharp blade and bad aim. Had he been better with the knife, I’d have lost my eye. As it is, I’m a little uglier than I was before I met him.”
She bristled at his self-deprecation. “You are and will always be the most beautiful man who ever breathed.”
He didn’t stop their horses a second time, but he did jerk in the saddle, obviously startled by her words and the passion behind them. The slow turn of his head revealed his nose first,then his chin and the curve of a high cheekbone, then finally his face entirely. The rosy flags of a blush painted his cheeks even as a bashful smile played across his mouth—a mouth Disaris longed to kiss one last time. The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes deepened as his smile widened. “And I thought it was me with the poor eyesight.”
Of the many things Disaris missed about Bron, it was his gentle teasing that she longed for when the days were hard and the nights harder. That had been so since the first day he left for Burnpool as a new recruit in the Daesin army. She returned the smile, admiring how the sun caught stray strands of his hair and made them sparkle, and how humor enhanced the natural creases on either side of his mouth.
When the silhouette of Slaekum’s house of worship began to rise on the horizon, Bron ordered they pick up the pace, and they were soon cantering toward their destination. Once a place of worship to an ancient god of wisdom, the temple no longer saw visitation from disciples or pilgrims. Disaris thought it fitting that in this age of strife, men no longer pursued the enlightenment of the wise.
The temple lay in partial ruin, reminding her eerily of Baelok as it stood now. Towering spires and the remains of walls without a roof were all that stood. Those walls still created a labyrinth where one caught glimpses of the crumbling nave with an altar at its far end. The plains grass didn’t care about the sacred places of men, invading every crack and crevice in the stone stairs, walls, and walkways, so that the entire complex looked as if it wore a feathery mantle of green and gold.
She, Bron, and the others gathered at the first set of steps leading into the temple’s interior where they hobbled their mounts nearby to graze. Bron sent five of their escort to scout the temple while the sixth man remained behind to guard the horses. Bron motioned for Disaris to follow him as he ascendedthe shallow stairs to a loggia built in front of what was left of the main entrance.
“Mind your step,” he said. “Some of the cracks here are deep, and you can sacrifice an ankle to them if you aren’t careful.”
She followed his lead as they made their way farther into the roofless nave toward the altar. Worry set in. This was a much larger complex than she imagined, even with half of it gone. What still stood was ornately carved with flourishes, animal representations, and human faces in peaceful repose. Their lifelike quality made her recoil, certain that any moment, they’d open stone eyelids and mouths to condemn her for the true reason she’d come here.
How in Slaekum’s name would she ever find the gate among this excess of decoration? The instructions she possessed for the gate were only for how to open it, not how to find it. She could wander these ruins for days—nay, weeks—and never find its location.
