Unless she couldn’t. Unless she’s been trapped or imprisoned all this time.
“She is not just anyone,” Raina says. “My intuition tells me that she is a force.”
Her intuition. Growing and changing with every passing day, every call upon her gift of Sight.
I blow out a breath as thunder rumbles over the land. Again, my fingers itch to touch the scar on my wrist, and a chilled sweat breaks across my skin. Suddenly, it’s harder to breathe.
How I wish I could see Raina’s vision. I trust her, but this is something so hard to believe that I long to know for sure.
She stares up at me with that weary gaze. “I do not know who she is,” she signs. “Only that Colden radiated concern. That concern was not only for himself. It was also for you.” With tenderness, she presses her palm to my face before signing, “I see you, Alexus. What are you not telling me?”
As she stares into my eyes, I’m reminded of our time at the refuge when she showed me the God Knife. How stunned I’d been to see a lost part of my past, returned by her hands. This moment feels very much the same.
Impossible.
This time, I don’t wait to tell her the story. Instead, I snuff out the orbs and take her hand, walking with her toward the green so the others can hear as well. Because there is only one reason the prince could want to see my old friend roaming the world again. The one reason that made her father long to control her, though he never could.
Fleurie can take the prince straight to the Grove of the Gods. Before we even get a chance to leave this godsdamn valley.
16
ALEXUS
“A portalist.” Disbelief edges Nephele’s words. “Thamaos’s godling daughter is a portalist? And she’s alive?”
Nephele, Helena, Rhonin, Callan, and Mena sit with Raina and I on tree stumps placed around a nest of lanterns inside Warek’s meeting tent as wind beats the thick canvas. Warek stands by the entrance, arms folded over his barrel chest.
“Yes. She was—is—a portalist.”
“What does that actually mean?” Rhonin asks.
A long sigh leaves me. Not from annoyance. But because I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.
“A portalist can create an opening between two places and carry things across that divide,” I tell him. “They use the gift of farsight to visualize the location to which they want to travel. But it’s only a temporary visit. They’re bound to whatever point they originated from. So even when Fleurie fled her father through a portal, the moment that opening closed, she’d find herself back where she started. She was but a courier and a visitor.”
“I’ve heard stories about Thamaos’s lovers,” Mena says, “and that he spawned a child with a sorceress, but one never knows what tales are true. So many lies have been spun to erase our true history.”
I nod, too aware of how right she is. “This tale is certainly true. Fleurie’s mother was called Isidore, an Eastland sorceress. When Fleurie was nine years old, Isidore confessed to Thamaos that they’d conceived a child, and that the child had a powerful ability she feared. He didn’t view the unexpected daughter as anything more than…” I pause, shaking my head as the only appropriate word comes to mind. “A weapon. And he meant to wield her as such in the Land Wars.”
“But is she alive?” Callan asks, running their fingers up and down one of the many long strands of beads hanging from their neck.
I scrub my fingers through my beard and look at Raina. I fear this is especially difficult for her given that Fleurie is the only other person to whom I’ve ever been bonded.
“I don’t mean to negate what Raina is experiencing with Sight and intuition,” I say to Callan. “But I can’t imagine how she can be here after all this time. Unless she truly was immortal.”
“Some godlings recorded in the East’s history books in the grand library were listed as immortals,” Rhonin says, leaning his elbows on his widespread knees. “Like the ones still living in hiding across the world. You thought otherwise with Fleurie?”
He doesn’t understand how well I know those history books.
“I did,” I answer. “Even she believed that she was mortal. Inherited immortality wasn’t the norm in the age of gods. It was the exception. The very reason that relations between gods and mortals became forbidden. Immortality couldn’t be tested without a long passage of time or a risk of life. And besides…” I swallow the swelling sickness swirling inside my chest. “I watched her die. At least I thought I did.”
I close my eyes, trying to suppress the images rising in my mind’s eye and failing. As a strong wind howls, I picture Fleurie trapped by some glacier or rock at the bottom of the sea, pinned beneath an icy ocean of inky darkness, in pain and drowning, wishing for a seam in reality through which to escape, longing for death and never finding it, for three hundred years.
I pray to the Ancient Ones that the woman from Raina’s vision isn’t her. That this is all a grand mistake. Because the alternative couldn’t have gone well for Fleurie.
“Can the prince force her to open a portal between him and the Grove of the Gods?” Raina signs, staring into the flames flickering inside the lanterns a moment longer before lifting her head and leveling that sapphire stare on me.
“Not by force alone. It took a hundred sorcerers to prevent the two of us from escaping the East. A hundred more to chain us against those rocks. The prince is but one man. I can’t imagine him or his modern-day Brotherhood being that capable, even if he held the most powerful siphon in existence captive.”
