Eimarille had lucked out that Raziel had crossed paths with Caris and Tristan in Veran, reporting the interesting news that Tristan was married tojarlHonovi of Clan Storm. He’d made a very good spy, passing as an Ashionen so well Terilyn hadn’t questioned his nationality.
Terilyn stood and looked over at the doorway where a Daijalan government magician waited. “Wake him up.”
The magician nodded and entered the room, withdrawing her clarion crystal–tipped wand from the case hanging off her belt. It looked to be made of antiqued metal, the end of it twisted coils molded to her grip. Kendrick closed the door behind them but didn’t lock it, giving them privacy. Terilyn stood back, allowing the magician space to work.
The tip of the wand glowed softly, magic drawn from the aether slipping free in a coiled loop of foggy light. It fell onto the prisoner’s slack face, sinking into his flushed skin. Terilyn counted three breaths before he jerked to awareness, eyes snapping open, body arching against the compulsion running through him.
“Wha—” he slurred, not quite all there, despite being awake. Fever and infection would do that.
“Do you remember me?” Terilyn asked.
He blinked slowly up at her, brow furrowing after a moment. His answer, when it came, was a long syllable of sound. “Yes.”
Terilyn quirked a smile that wasn’t friendly at all. “Good. Tell me your name.”
He tried to lie. She could see the fight in the way his tendons stood out in his neck. In his current state, magicless as he was, he couldn’t win against a magician. She expected the name from the warrant, but it wasn’t the one she got. “Blaine Westergard.”
Terilyn dropped to her knees, blade in hand out of instinct. The edge of her stiletto pressed against his throat, snug against his jaw. Considering the way he swallowed, she didn’t think he knew it was there. “The Westergard bloodline is dead.”
She should know. She’d read the reports of the Blades who had gone after it during the Inferno, killing generations of the people who’d claimed that name. No one of that bloodline should have been left alive.
And yet.
Blaine’s lips parted, and he panted for air. “I’m not.”
She held the stiletto so close to his skin she could slice it open with just the barest hint of pressure. His identity as the professor had been a lie all along. “Who is Caris?”
His expression twisted, eyes squeezing shut as he fought magic that was better than an alchemist’s potion to coax the truth out of an unwilling target. “Rourke.”
Terilyn was so startled her hand slipped, a motion her trainers would have beaten her for. The blade cut into the edge of his jaw, drawing a red line over the angle of bone. “How?”
She didn’t want to believe it, but starfire of the caliber Caris wielded would realistically only be found in royalty. All the cadet bloodlines should have been eradicated. If Meleri had found a survivor of any of them, then that would explain it, but the Blades had been thorough.
Inneshad been thorough.
Blaine opened his eyes, staring up at her. He bared his teeth, trying to keep them together, but the words slipped out anyway through the compulsion. “I carried her out of Amari after fleeing the palace.”
Terilyn went cold at that revelation, breath stilling in her lungs. Caris wasn’t from a cadet branch, then, but a direct descendent of the royal family that once sat upon the throne. Eimarille had once had a younger brother, thought dead since the Inferno. Queen Ophelia had died with her unborn child—or so everyone assumed. Yet here Blaine was, lying at her feet, claiming to have rescued a princess whose name was never written down in the royal genealogies.
But could be, with a proper witness.
She should kill him now, Terilyn knew, except the act of bearing witness could also be used in Eimarille’s favor. She’d never given up her name, never given up her right to the throne, but there were Ashionen bloodlines who refused to support her simply because of her Daijalan upbringing. If the last living representative of the bloodline that once protected the royal Ashion family threw their support behind Eimarille rather than Caris, then alliances might shift.
The choice between two women who would be queen—one born to it, another a mere noble and engineer—would hopefully be obvious to the nobility. Except Queen Ophelia had born three children, and no one had heard even a whisper of Prince Alasandair Rourke’s survival.
“What of the prince?” Terilyn demanded. “Did you give him aid as well?”
Blaine tried to turn his head away from her, but she slipped the stiletto underneath his jaw to the other side of his throat, between skin and the gold marriage torc, stilling him. His gaze slid her way, the fever brightness in his eyes stark in the dim gaslight. “I didn’t.”
Oh so telling was that confession. “Who did?”
“The star gods.”
An interference Terilyn was well familiar with. She’d been brought to Eimarille by the Midnight Star himself, Xaxis happy to deliver her to that train in Istal all those years ago. She’d never regretted being bound to Eimarille’s service—had learned to care for and love the woman she lived for. She stood by Eimarille’s side because Xaxis had chosenher.
It seemed other star gods had been generous with their own favor as well.
“Where did they take him?”
