When he finished, I opened my eyes to find that my wings had come around to encircle him. He gazed at me, flushed and adoring, from within a nimbus of brown-and-gray feathers.
“Did that hurt you?” he whispered.
I shook my head, feeling suddenly shy.
“Good. Now, you listen to me. Your heart is your own. Your mind is your own. You belong only to yourself and not to her,neverto her. But gods help me, Mara, you’re alsomine.”
He brought my hands to his lips and kissed the hard curves of my talons. “You’re mine to love, mine to cherish, in this form and in every other. I wanted to have you as you were in Fairhaven, and I want to have you now. Don’t you see how lovely you are?” He bent to kiss me, a soft sigh escaping him. “The lines of your body, the feathers in your hair, the power in your muscles, the breadth of your wings. Darling, you feel like silk in my hands. And I will want you and love you—allof you, every part of you—for the rest of my life.”
I closed my eyes, the last of my tears spilling over. “I love you,” I whispered, sliding my feathered arms around his neck and pulling him into the curve of my body. “I love you, I love you.”
He kissed my hair, my brow, the curve of my chin. When he palmed my breast, I arched quietly against him, natural as breathing.
“Mara, I need to ask you something,” he said quietly, “and you must promise to answer me truthfully.”
“Of course I will.”
“You’re certain my touch doesn’t hurt you? You’re not just saying that to reassure me?”
“It doesn’t hurt me,” I replied. “The balm helps. And, I think, it doesn’t hurt because it’s you.”
“Oh, Mara.” He bent to kiss me, soft and slow, and then dragged his lips down to the hollow of my throat. “Let me take you downstairs to my bed. Let me love you properly. You’ll never doubt your beauty again.”
I tilted my head back to let him explore, ran my talons through his hair. The soft scrape of my claws across his scalp tore a moan from his throat, and he shivered against me. The familiar heat of his body was glorious; I was suddenly ravenous for it.
One last jolt of uncertainty gave me pause. “Gareth, I…I’ve never made love like this before.”
He pulled back from me, held out his hand, and helped me rise. His eyes were soft, his smile gentle. “Then let’s find out what it’s like together.”
Chapter 37
Two days later, I stood near the back of the library in Big Deep’s east wing, watching the scene before me with chills running up and down my body. Part of me wanted to look away; it was too huge, this magic, too volatile. The air was hard to breathe, like it had taken on a physicality the room couldn’t quite contain.
But I couldn’t possibly look away. Not yet. The impossible was unfolding right before my eyes, and my Gareth was the one orchestrating it all.
Lily and Alastrina lay on two heavy tables parallel to one another. Surrounding them in two concentric circles were twelve Anointed magicians from Gareth’s university team—six elementals in the inner circle, and six beguilers in the outer one. They murmured spells and prayers, but not in unison; each magician’s litany was highly personal and uttered at their own pace. For the most part they remained stationary, but every now and then someone would shift or exchange places with another.
Outside the circles, eight more Anointed drifted slowly around the room, following a strange pattern that reminded me of dancers cycling through an excruciatingly slow waltz. I recognized several members ofGareth’s Rosewarren team among them, including his friends Tarek, Loudon, and Blaise, the librarians Marvyn and Fiacra, and Gareth’s scowling assistant from the university, Heldine.
And in the center of it all, between Lily and Alastrina, stood two figures with bowed heads. The first was Ankaret, one hand touching each woman’s forehead. Her white hair streamed out behind her like a banner, and as I watched, the tiny flames outlining her body shifted, expanding to cloak her entire form in fire. Wings unfolded from her back, spread wide, then retracted. An instant later, the flames resumed their previous tame form.
The other figure was Mhyll, the artificer to whom General Haldrin had granted asylum in exchange for her services. She looked entirely human—light brown skin like Cira’s, a soft cap of black hair, an elegant bearing—but her arms were not made of flesh. They were made of undulating, blue-tinged light, and they wereinsideLily’s chest, and Alastrina’s too—probing, cutting, siphoning. Artificers were surgeons, only they didn’t cut bone and organs; they cut magic, manipulated it, transformed it into something new.
As I watched her, I tried not to think of five-year-old Gemma trapped in a room with such a being, screaming her poor little heart out as she was cut open and remade at our parents’ command. I understood why they’d done it; her magic was conflicted, torn between the botanical magic she’d inherited from Philippa Wren and the power of the goddess Kerezen, who in those days had only just begun to awaken inside the body of our mother.
I understood, but I wasn’t sure their decision had been the right one. And the sound of Gemma’s screams echoing through the house was one of the few clear memories I’d retained from my years at Ivyhill. No amount of Farrin clamping her hands over my ears could truly block out such a sound.
I shifted my attention to the iridescent cords of magic streamingthrough the room. They were delicate and coiled, like curls of smoke, connecting the magicians to Ankaret and her to them, amplifying their magic and fueling their spellwork, which in turn allowed the artificer to carry out her own work. Gareth had explained the whole thing to me the day before, but even with his careful, confident descriptions in my mind, I couldn’t quite believe that what I saw was real.
The most important factor, he’d told me, was Ankaret. Her power made all of this possible. And rather than draining her, reducing her to the tiny creature she’d been on my sickbed in the Citadel, the effort made her look stronger and more resplendent than ever. After only a few minutes, she’d grown too bright to look at comfortably.
Gareth was in constant motion, overseeing everything with a patient watchfulness that reminded me of Brigid. He traveled slowly from person to person, providing them with water and food, assessing their comfort, observing their magic and offering suggestions on how to adjust the rhythm of their incantations, the angles at which they raised their arms.
I tried not to worry about the shadows under his eyes or the fact that they’d been at this for twenty-one hours straight. What if it didn’t work? What if they exhausted themselves to death first? Thinking back to Vauzanne and my own brush with that particular danger made me want to yank Gareth away from this room and tuck him away somewhere safe, somewhere far away from this humming, crackling magic that both smelled and tasted like burning.
But worrying would help neither of us, and I had my own work to do. I left the crates of fresh sandwiches I’d brought from the kitchen near Gareth’s paper-strewn desk. Then I quietly left the room, residual magic sticking to my taloned feet like wet snow.
Brigid met me in the entrance hall for our morning patrol. She glanced at my feet with mild curiosity. “You’re buzzing.”
