“Go,” Daoman says again, “andyouwill be permitted to live long enough to leave this city.”
“I can’t do that,” Inshara replies, simulating dismay. “Not without proving to you and all those here that you have put your faith in a tragic mistake.”
Movement. Elkisa is only a few paces away from where Inshara stands facing Daoman. I see her draw her blade slowly, making no sound.
Gods of my ancestors, please …
For the first time I can remember, I am seized with such a powerful desire to reach out and take someone’s hand that I am forced to ball my own hands into fists. I squeeze them so tightly that I can feel my fingernails digging into my palms.
I glance at North and realize that now my hands look exactly like his.
Daoman’s voice is ringing. “Nimhara is no mistake, Insha.” He leaves off the divine honorific—the sound of that truncated name makes the leader of the Deathless stiffen. “Even without an aspect, she holds great power.”
Inshara collects herself, treating the high priest to a slow, lazy smile. “Perhaps. But you have never seentruepower, Daoman.”
With a scream of rage and effort, Elkisa launches her attack, blade raised. Inshara whirls, incanting a spell I don’t know, and then moves as if throwing something invisible at my guard. Elkisa’s headlong rush halts so abruptly it’s like she hit solid stone—stunned, she lets the blade fall from her fingers. It clatters, metallic and harmless, to the floor.
Cries of shock and horror ripple outward through the crowd, and my own hands lose their strength as surely as Elkisa’s did. I can feel North shifting his attention back toward me, confused.
“You said that you couldn’t use magic to control someone,” he whispers.
I swallow hard, watching Elkisa’s face, the fear in her eyes like a knife in my heart. “This cultist is controlling her body, not her mind—it takes a vast amount of power.”
Adivineamount of power—but I do not say this to North.
I could not have done it.
The realization rings over and over and over in my head, surging up like a rising tide and bringing with it every doubt that ever lingered in the shadowy places of my heart.
She is more powerful than I.
As if she performs such feats every day, Inshara smiles a little, hand still outstretched to hold Elkisa in place. “I suppose,” she says lightly, “in Nimhara’s absence, I shall have to give this little demonstration instead.”
My guard’s eyes are wide as she hangs motionless, only the balls of her feet still touching the floor, the rest of her frozen. Her fear is writ so plainly on her face that I can read it from here.
Slowly, Inshara’s fingers begin to move. They curve, tip downward subtly, shifting with insidious grace.
And Elkisa’s arm moves, matching that slow gesture. She gives a cry of alarm, her body shaking as she tries to fight the invisible force compelling her to move—but she makes not an ounce of headway, for her arm continues to move as Inshara’s does.
The cultists’ leader tips her hand down farther, farther, farther—and when Elkisa is bent nearly double, her arm outstretched to the floor, Inshara slowly closes her hand into a fist.
Elkisa’s fingers wrap around the hilt of her fallen blade.
I throw myself back from the spy hole, clamping my hands over my mouth to stifle the cry that bubbles against my lips.
North does not reach for me, but he is closer than I would let anyone come under normal circumstances. “What ishappening?” he whispers, eyes glittering in the darkened chamber.
I shake my head helplessly, too frightened to answer, too frightened to look back through the screen and watch as Inshara forces my closest, myonlyfriend, to turn her own blade upon herself.
North looks over his shoulder at the spy holes, resting one palm against the wall beside my head, and then looks back at me. “Nimh—can you fight her, stop her?”
I shake my head again. “Sh-she is too strong.” The voice that comes out is thin and wobbly and alien. It isn’t the voice of Nimhara—it is the voice of Nimh, a little girl with no power. “She’s stronger than me.”
The words keep tumbling from my lips as though they’re the only ones I can say. North makes a frustrated noise in his throat, looking down and flexing his fingers to stop himself touching me, shaking me out of my terror.
“Enough!” Daoman’s voice, strong as ever, cuts across the rising sounds of horror and wonder down in the chamber. “You must know there is no power in this world that would compel me or anyone in this room to expose the Divine One to your threats. Every word you speak is a lie.”
Daoman’s tone is dismissive and furious all at once. I have no idea from where he is finding this strength—if I were at his side, witnessing up close the magic she’s using on Elkisa, I would have crumpled to the ground in terror. “There is nothing you could say to convince me to take your word over Nimh’s.”
