She bit back a scream as the Angels shoved her against the rough-hewn stone. She tasted blood, warm and metallic, felt hard, cold armor brush against her back as the seams of her flimsy performance páo were ripped open as easily as rice paper.
Was this how it would all end? At the hands of a few Angels, freedom just several steps away on the other side of the wall?
“Leave her.”
The voice broke through her haze like the thunder of a winter’s storm. At once the pressure on her back loosened, and she was hauled to her feet.
Blinking the tears from her eyes, she looked up into the frosted blue gaze of the newcomer.
The Winter Magician strode toward them. Torchlight bled crimson into his livery of silvers and blues; his hair was a shock of ice white. She’d always remembered it as red, red like the blood from her mother’s heart the day she’d seen him.
Except this time he saw her, too. A gleaming whip trailed behind him like a snake; even as she watched, it coiled up his arms, dissolving into one of the metal cuffs he wore.
“You,” he said quietly. “I thought I recognized the magic from twelve cycles ago: the very one I told myself I would never forget.” He knelt, his blue-gloved fingers wrapping around her jaw so tightly she let out a gasp as he jerked her face toward his. His eyes narrowed in triumph. “If you hadn’tmurdered General Tarley, you would have continued to dance under my very nose without my realizing it.”
He recognized her. Worse…he’d been searching for her.
For hermagic.
What magic?Lan thought desperately, but the knowledge burned through her mind in a series of images: General Tarley dead before her from that mysterious flash of white light; her mother, hair and páo adrift as though caught in an invisible wind, fingers dancing on her lute, then clutched over Lan’s own wrist, leaving Lan with a scar only she could see, written in a language no one had understood.
No one—until tonight.
The magician lifted a hand and plucked off the glove. The sight of his fingers—long and spindly and sickly-white—sent a wave of revulsion through her. “It’s time to finish what I started.”
She’d sworn to herself that the next time they met, she wouldn’t be the frightened, trembling child lying helpless in the hot water vents. That she’d have grown powerful. That she would fight back.
Yet as Lan met his gaze, she found her voice drying up in her throat. Fear overtook her—so violent that she shuddered in its grasp.
“This time,” the Royal Magician whispered, “you’ll give it to me.”
She couldn’t tear her eyes from his winter’s gaze. Couldn’t wrench her mind from the words that had haunted her for twelve cycles.
Give it to me,he’d said to Mama.
Never,she’d replied.
Time seemed to slow as the magician pressed his bare hand to her left wrist. The metal on one of his cuffs began to writhe. It sharpened to a needle point and punctured her skin.
Pain erupted, shooting from her arm to her chest and consuming her entire body. It was as though he were tracing a white-hot knife across her bones, carving out a space in her flesh. This time, when the memory of her mother’s death found her again, there was something different to it—somethingmore.
This time, Lan saw a serpentine shape uncoiling from her mother’s shadow, writhing as Mama had grasped Lan’s wrist, burning the invisible scar into her flesh.
Lan screamed. The Winter Magician’s face was aglow in white light, lancing like fissures across his cheeks. A white light that, she realized, came from her own wrist.
Her scar was aglow, the character and circle blazing like white gold. The fire zigzagged through her veins, cracks appearing in her skin as though she were splitting from the inside out. There was a high-pitched shrieking in her ears as the world around her undulated and morphed.
With a cry, the Winter Magician let go. Lan dropped to her knees, clutching her left arm. Something had broken loose inside her, something growing in pressure in her head and howling in her ears.
A shadow sliced through the chaos. Cool hands wrapped around her shoulders, pushing her back. The sky tumbled, stars reeling and suddenly brighter than crystals, so close she could almost taste them.
Then they disappeared altogether.
—
Cool wind, grass-scented. Wetness on her cheeks.
Lan awoke to the soft pitter-patter of rain. Above her, the sky was slatted with bamboo leaves, the moon no more than a silver whisper behind storm clouds. She did not recognize her surroundings. She appeared to be in the midst of a bambooforest. No Elantians, no city gates, no fear or pain. Here, there was only the soft susurrus of water winding down mossy stalks, dripping into the slumbering earth.
