My heartbeat was quickening in my chest, as was Alaryk’s in his. He dragged in a deep breath, my hand rising with it.
“She could put suggestions into place in a person’s mind, but they never lasted long. Not long enough, so she had to be a quick thief, and she needed to leave as swiftly as she came. At least that’s what she told me. But in Gryloth…she found me. And so she stayed much longer.”
“You took care of her?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, the word wistful and yet full of regret. “I thought I was in love, remember?”
I frowned.
“My magic had always been an unpredictable thing,” he admitted. “Used more for violence and pain when someone wronged me or my mother. Kamora became my tutor, helping me manage it. Which, in some ways, I am grateful for. But I told you that magic responds to different things and for each person, it’s individual.”
“You said yours was pain,” I remembered, brows scrunching.
“We discovered that accidentally,” he told me. “She’d been frustrated. We’d been arguing. She’d hit me so hard my ears rang, and I felt my magic surge, like it was trying to protect me.”
“Alaryk,” I whispered, my heart squeezing in my chest, tendrils of my own magic wiggling.
“After we discovered that, the pain started carrying over into sex,” he admitted. “Lust was also a strong conduit for me. Sex became a battleground for our sessions together.”
My stomach cramped. I could imagine rough, needful,can’t get enough of yousex, where you wanted someone so much that your teeth ached. I’d felt that with Alaryk…
But still…it had never turnedviolent.
“And you…liked it?” I found myself asking.
“Truthfully, I don’t know,” he replied, surprising me, making me wince. “I’ve thought about it for many years. At that age, sex was so intertwined with what I thought was love…but also with power, with accomplishment, with control, with pain. It’s hard to differentiate and untangle it when it was one complete thing, all at once.
“Regardless, Kamora’s power was greater than what she’d led anyone to believe. In Harta, she’d been raised in a group called the Idima, who practiced together to create more powerful magic. Darker magic. It was usually built around a sacrifice, to appease their three gods.”
What he was telling me…it was frightening. I’d only ever known Kakkari and Drukkar, the two Dakkari deities. The Karag believed in no god, only in their Elthika. But the Hartans? They used blood sacrifice?
I’d heard of Dakkari sorceresses once practicing the same thing. All for power. So perhaps it wasn’t so out of the realm of possibility that this would happen in a different place, on a different continent entirely. Perhaps it was entirelylikely.
“How long were you with her?” I asked.
“A year,” he replied. “And it felt like a lifetime.”
I exhaled sharply, spreading my hand wider over his chest before I moved it up the column of his throat. I rested it on the back of his neck, feeling his heat and the silky smoothness of his hair.
I was surprised by how much he was willing to reveal to me, only because I’d asked. It was a vulnerable place to be, for someone as private as Alaryk.
He’s private for good reason,I couldn’t help but think.
“What ended everything between us was my mother’s death,” he told me. “I’d only stayed in Gryloth because of her, because of her declining health. My relationship with Kamora was already volatile. Twisted. She began to realize the extent of my magic, of what I coulddo. She wanted me to take things from others or persuade them to enrich her own life. She saw me as a tool—a weapon, even. And I found myself not willing to do what she wanted. She started saying that I owed her for everything she’d taught me. She started to think that I would join the Idima. That I would travel back to Harta with her. And that with my power, the Idima would rise together.”
The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
“Needless to say, after my mother died, I wanted to leave Kamora. And so I went to Grym. I wanted to leave the region because I was worried that she would find me. So, in Grym, when I saw there was a band of acolytes leaving for the Arsadia for that year’s training, I used my heartstone magic to convince the instructor to let me come.”
I was shocked. “That’s how it happened?”
He nodded. “It was pure chance, or perhaps fate, that led me here. That eventually led me to Samryn, whose magic bonded with my own on the Tharken cliffs. A Vyrin, when the position of theKarathof Grym had been opened that season. I was not, in any way, qualified. But I learned. I had Samryn at my side whenmy position was challenged. It was not easy. And then the war was growing, tensions rising with my power over Grym. And one day, when I went to the Hartan region of Bral to visit with a council of Elysom’s members for peace negotiations, I saw her again.”
I nearly jerked, but my hand only spasmed on the back of his neck.
“Kamora. Dressed in silk, silver adorning her. She’d become a mistress to the Hartan king, having persuaded her way into his bed.”
He stopped talking for a brief moment. I got the sense there was something he might be leaving out, like he was navigating the thread of the story that could be cut out.
