Almost.
I feel magick. Not Nephele’s magick. Not Witch Walker magick. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, kissing my skin like that charge in the air the first few times I ever met Alexus Thibault’s stare. Only stronger.
Every hair on my body stands on end, and chills run up and down my arms, but not out of fear. The magick in the air is silky to the touch, so cold, and thick enough to taste. It tastes like him—like honey and cloves—and something else. The wood, perhaps, where magick now permeates the soil, the roots, the trees, the leaves.
In reverent form, Alexus presses his forehead to the ground, palms flattened to raw earth, and rocks back and forth, chanting. His voice is too low for me to make out the words, but they’re Old Elikesh, ancient and beautiful, and I know their cadence.
A plea, not a prayer.
I’m not sure how long we sit there, him chanting, me helplessly watching and listening, but eventually, his rocking slows, his wordsfade, and he collapses in on himself. His cloak falls to the side, revealing the God Knife, still safely sheathed at his thigh inside Finn’s dagger belt.
I roll him to his back and touch his face, wiping away the snowflakes that settle on his eyes and in his beard. The black veins around his eyes have faded, leaving behind purplish bruising in their stead, and his tunic is untied, revealing his reddened chest.
After a moment, he blinks up at me and cups my hand, pressing my palm to his cheek. I expect him to be furious—to scream at me again. But he isn’t, and he doesn’t. He looks relieved, like a man who just survived something I can’t begin to understand.
“Are you all right?” he asks, and I nod. “Good. Help me stand?”
I do, though I’m not sure how much help I am. Alexus is two of me, and whatever he did to those men weakened him a great deal.
With his arm wrapped around my shoulders and my blades secured, we trudge back up the hill toward the crest, but I pause, leaning him against the rocky hillside once we get that far.
“You killed twenty men,”I sign.
He nods and rubs his eyes, squinting at me like they burn. “Yes. I did.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“In an unnatural way.”
A half-nod. “That depends. Magick is not unnatural.”
“It is if your magick died a long time ago.”
Magick that he didn’t employ during the Eastlander attack, nor with the wraith, and I have to wonder why.
“Yes. I offered the Eastlanders a reprieve. They did not accept. And so I did what I had to do. Us or them.” He sighs. “Do you hate me again?”
Again. Because I so clearly lost that particular battle.
“No,”I answer, and I mean it, even though there are remains of dead warriors glittering in the crimson light hovering over the wood. While more unnecessary death is the last thing I need weighing down my already overburdened conscience, he’s right. It was us or them, and I’m beginning to understand the misery of that situation.
They had a choice. They chose wrong. I’m only glad I didn’t see it happen.
“Good.” He winces. “I don’t hate you either, for breaking your promise and seeing things you weren’t meant to see. You could’ve been hurt. Killed, even. That could be you in those trees, all because you don’t listen.”
He gives me an irritation-laced glare, the same look he wore when he tricked me before we entered the construct. Only now, it’s half as severe.
I arch a brow.“But I was not injured or killed. And now, I require a thorough explanation. Not this moment, but soon.”
Still breathing hard, he glances beyond the destroyed path. “How about within the hour? There’s a stretch of caves ahead, in the ravine I’d hoped to avoid. But perhaps it’s the best route. We’re farther north than I realized. We can get out of sight, get warm, rest, and I’ll tell you all that I can.”
This seems far too easy, though I hear his boundaries plain enough: All that I can.
Still, I’ll take it. This man has secrets he’s finally willing to talk about, and I’m tired of being in the dark. Besides, I can be more than persuasive.
He’s a little steadier now, so we make our way through the snow toward Mannus and Tuck. I catch him staring at me, paying no attention to the path before him, a glint of amusement sparkling in his glassy eyes that are slowly returning to their normal shade.
