Like a trained dog, I still feel a thrum of excitement at the impending challenge.
But because I’m not, in fact, his student anymore, and haven’t been since he’d promised me it was only temporary and then sent me back here like every other Low Earth student—as if, unlike the others, I hadn’t at that point lived more than half my life there, hadn’t risen to the highest magus levels they’d allowed me to test for—I ask, “For what reward?”
One of the guards looks askance over his shoulder at that. Demanding rewards of a grand magus isn’t done.
Well, betraying disciples apparentlyisdone, so fuck that noise.
The grand magus doesn’t look disappointed, which might have made me feel a little bad, that I can’t treat this as a heartwarming reunion. He looks surprised and a little annoyed, as if he’d expected I would remain his dutiful sycophant even after years of abandonment.
Is that really how little he thought of me as a person?
I quash the thought. I already know the answer.
“The reward of a job well done, of course,” Evram says, and what little hope I had is crushed with it.
He’s not here to bring me back.
He’s just here to extract more work from me for his own benefit, and then leave me again.
I laugh, bitterly, a little hysterically. “You were never coming back for me, were you?”
Evram folds his face into sympathetic lines. I know too well how changeable his moods are, so maybe in this moment he does mean it. “It was never up to me, my child. You were born in this world, however much I might wish it otherwise, and I can’t change that. But now you can help us all. There are lives at stake, Sierra.”
Itwasup to him. As one of very few grand magi, he has the power—magicallyandpolitically—to do damn near anything he wants.
You just had to make him give enough of a shit, and apparently in ten years as his best student I hadn’t managed it.
I’m not going to today, either. I tried to make myself so indispensable he couldn’t get rid of me, and he did anyway, and now he thinks he can still use me.
I’m done playing this game.Hisgame.
It’s past time for a new one.
“And yet, you need a Low Earther’s help after all,” I say, focusing past the feeling of magic like static electricity dancing across my skin. “All these years, and you haven’t trained anyone else who could solve whatever has brought you to me today.”
The grand magus raises his eyebrows in familiar hauteur. “Do you think you can help, where no one else can? Then prove it.”
“Of course I can,” I say calmly, as if I’m not a flurry of emotion—of old hurt, of anger, of despair.
But above all is laser-focused clarity: I’m not going to beg him toletme have the magic I always should have. If that could work, it would have.
“You know I can, or you wouldn’t be here,” I say. “So show me the puzzle, Grand Magus, and in return, I’ll solve your problem for you.”
That, finally, gives him pause. “This is too important for games, Sierra. You can tell me the solution.”
Hestartedthis with games.
“You won’t let me have magic.” My voice breaks, and I don’t try to stop it. “That’s the way it is, right? So please, now that I know it’s the last taste I will have, let me savor working magic one last time. That’s my only price.”
This is a lie.
The grand magus is here, and he’s brought magic with him, and with it so close, the tingling of magic all around me making me practically drunk with it, I’m not willing to settle for never again, just because an old jackass I once trusted says so.
If I want magic—and it is the only thing I haveeverwanted—I will have to take it.
But it is just enough truth, because this man, heknowswhat magic is to me, that he buys it. Evram nods.
Not good enough. I know how slippery he is, and I trusted him once without a formal oath.
