Oh.Oh.
His heart ached for her as he realized all at once. “You thought, after you escaped, that others might come to you.”
Theira sighed, pushing the food around on her plate. Varius made a point of taking a big bite, not letting her effort for him go unappreciated or to waste.
“Silly, in retrospect,” she said. “Tychon’s probably made it even harder for anyone to take actions without his oversight, given what I managed. And none of them has any reason to believe they might trust me—all they know is that I’m powerful, clever, and don’t want to live under the Sorcerer Ascendant. But that describes almost all of them. But if someone did think to try...”
That’s why she had guest rooms. Spare clothes, even.
But the only one who’d thought to come to her was her enemy.
Had she been as desperate to open the door to someone, anyone, as he’d been to have a door open to him?
Varius didn’t want her to think of him as just another supplicant.
“Howdidyou manage to get away?“ he asked. “I knew not to believe the official story, but what actually happened was never totally clear.”
Theira smiled a little. “After that first battle—“
Her smile died abruptly, because while it hadn’t been her first battle by any stretch, she didn’t need to specify which one she meant. Even among sorceresses, Theira was known for her epic destructive capabilities, but at that one she’d taken it to another level.
Varius had been fighting another sorcerer at the time and was called over to support—he was the only general who reliably survived Theira. He didn’t know what traps his jackass colleague had missed and whether he might have caught them, but by the time he’d been within miles of the site, it had already been over. His people had just seen the explosions in the sky.
He’d known some of the kids who’d died that day, and he was sad for them. But Theira had been as trapped in the war as they were, and compared to some of her brethren, at least her sorcerous attacks weren’t cruel. She didn’t torture those kids; they just died. She didn’t spread destruction indiscriminately or horrifically; she just killed. Precisely, terrifyingly. And if those kids hadn’t died that day under the orders of that particular jackass, it still would have come at someone else’s hands.
They were all of them trapped.
So after an awkward pause where Theira seemed to be debating what to say after that, Varius just nodded.
Apparently deciding he didn’t need her to say any more about it, she continued, “That was the first decisive victory on either side in years. The Sorcerer Ascendant awarded me one of the largest jewels in Korossia’s collection, only a step down from the Crown Jewel itself.”
An impressive statement. While sorceresses could store and draw power from all manner of jewels—from all natural resources, though gemstones were special—Korossia’s Crown Jewel was unique. It held incomparable power and could only be accessed by the person who bound themself to it—and it could also only bind to the one who killed the prior bearer.
That was the true source of a Sorcerer Ascendant’s power: access to the largest pool of magic available that no one else could use. It’s what made them nearly impossible to kill, even for a sorceress of Theira’s experience. Not to mention the fact that the Ascendant would have managed the same feat meant they were invariably both shrewdandpowerful.
Theira continued, “I thanked Tychon graciously, turned around, and broke it into a thousand tiny jewels I could actually convert into capital.”
Varius barked a laugh despite himself. Of course she had.
But that had been years earlier. “You were building this all that time?”
“I was having it built,” Theira corrected. “What does a sorceress know about building?”
What indeed.
“I hired experts and paid for materials, I made it worth their while, and I hid the whole thing from under Tychon’s nose. You may have noticed after that battle—“
“Your tactics turned to precision. Effective, but not dramatic. I’d wondered where your power was really going, but I thought we’d found out.”
When, a year later, she’d managed aseconddramatic victory.
Varius hadn’t been at that one either. He’d always been hesitant to seriously consider that his absence from both was on purpose as wishful thinking and arrogance.
But he was wondering again now.
“Everyone knows I’m a long-term planner,” Theira said, “so after my first decisive victory wasn’t immediately followed by a second, I bought myself time at court because everyone who believed it was possible for me to replicate that success also believed I needed time to work toward a bigger one.”
“Your long-term planning becomes part of the long-term plan,” Varius remarked dryly.
