Fingers twined in her hair, pulling.Lina swung without thought; sparks burst at her fingertips, but Castor caught her wrists, held her still.
“You,” he whispered, inches from her: a mirror, a man minutes older and yet worlds different.Dried blood crusted his nose.“are humiliating me.”
Unwisely, she struggled.Heat bloomed beneath his hands, and very quickly, pain.Her skin sizzled and Lina shrieked, terror making her struggle harder, push, kick, anything to escape the agonising blaze, the revolting, meat-like stench of charred flesh.
He healed her after.He always did.
Lina cradled her arms, ran her thumbs over waxy handprints.“It’s nothing if I go,” she gasped, barely believing she was still trying.“Tell Rigel you killed me, Castor,please.”
“You know he won’t believe that without proof.”
Lina gulped for air.Thrust out her left hand.“Take a finger.All of them, I don’t care.Say the rest of me was too charred to recognise.”
Something like pain flickered in his eyes.“You want to go so badly?”
Ridiculously, her heart kicked.No, she nearly said, as though it would matter now.Of course not, Castor.I’m sorry.Please don’t tell.
He softened.“It’s different out there, Lina.Without your family to support you.”He clamped her shoulder, squeezed hard.“Not just me.You’d leave Mum and Dad?”
She would.
She thought of the lives she’d only lived through books.Imagined how simple life could be as a nameless priestess for a peaceful, wronged goddess.How she might begin, in tiny, tiny steps, to make amends.
Her hesitation cost her.He thrust her head back, fingers around her jaw, the bite of a dagger white-hot against the base of her throat.
“I have given you countless chances,” he hissed.“You’ve no idea what Archpriest Rigel has planned for me – heliade, holy successor, so much more.If my family – mysister– betrays the shrine, what’s that mean for me?”He pushed; she felt a thin line of blood drip down her chest.“Come with me, Lina, or I won’t even cleanse you.I’ll carve you up and let you burn for eternity in the bowels of Sowelan’s hell.”
Lina knocked into something, the barrel, liquid sloshing.Verdure.She lurched out of his grasp and kicked the barrel over, splashing gallons of verdure over both of them, over every wooden crate.
“Let me go, Castor.”She lifted a hand, bade a soft orange flame to dance between her fingertips, and poised it inches from his soaked chest.
And there it was: fear.And proof, sweet, intoxicating proof that despite the purity of Sowelan’s fire, the glory of death by immolation, Castor, too, did not want to burn.
He stepped back, a smile bisecting his face, although the fear was still plain in his eyes.The smile widened, a mean grin, the familiar, giddy excitement of a game.
“All right.”He moved aside, one arm out in a genteel bow.“Go, then.And see how long it takes me to catch you.”
It was not a victory, she knew, but a death deferred.A delayed gratification.
Still, Lina stole past him, out the door and into the cool winter night.And beheld for the first time in her life a freedom as infinite and frightening as the moonless night sky.
And as fleeting.
Chapter One
Ione
The brass clang of the death knell startled the seagulls into taking flight, their own plaintive cries competing to ruin what had thus far been a lovely first day of summer.Mainlanders, Ione recalled, celebrated today with dancing and weaving unfortunate-looking marigold garlands – but as the faint, sickening stench of roasted flesh hit her, Ione remembered that this day was also for burning.
“Ignore it, Holiness.”Jorah, her hydromancy teacher and one of Archpriest Saros’s many dogs, straightened his posture as though he hadn’t just been half-asleep.“Don’t let it break your concentration.”
The bell sounded again, a call for the high priests to meet and mourn.Ione tried to be impressed that Jorah could ignore not only the bell but the reek of death, but came up short: sanctimonious old men only annoyed her.She steeped herself in the change in the air, breathed through the pain of what it meant.It felt distant, somewhere on the mainland, but heavy with the lingering essence of magic: the acrid burn of pyromancy wielded by the Sun God’s followers.
Ione pivoted towards the source of it, her bare feet bitten by the pebbled floor of the fountain.Outside the stone walls of her courtyard glimmered a world of blue: cornflower skies and matching painted roofs of homes and shrines dotting the Isle of Oseidos.And surrounding it, the sparkling summer sea.
And – there, a shadow curling up over the wall.A column of black smoke.
“Is that Caelos Shrine?”A thick trunk of water snaked around her as she moved towards the edge of the fountain, an elementary spell and Jorah’s latest attempt to awaken the true breadth of Ione’s powers.Feel the water, no, FEEL it!, including but not limited to standing in a cold fountain and meditating for hours.
