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I’m sorry for all I didn’t share, Ember. Let this be my attempt to explain.
— ALARIC SARE’S PAPERS FOR EMBERLINE ARKOVA
Once, the wordCursedtold the story of a prince who defied his fate. A man who refused the summons of a goddess. As all stories in Kavios go, this one, too, had a monstrous ending: the cursed hero unleashed nightmares with his resistance.
Now it was my story, too.
The wordCursedfilled my every waking thought, or at least those not crammed with the snap of my uncle’s neck and the crash of his too-thin body against the wall where the goddess had thrown him.
I shuddered in an attempt to suppress the mentalimage.
The whole of the Three Kingdoms spread before me. A continent I’d dreamed of exploring for years. None of it held my attention. Not the fact that I rode on the back of a dragon, even though my fingers clung to his scales for purchase. Not even the fact that each beat of Charon’s wings brought us closer to the city of Ciril.
I had planned to visit the capital city of Linia, and the library housed there, before my life turned upside down. Before Alaric went missing, before I became Jeweler to the Blessed, before I learned about goddesses and Champions. It seemed an unholy symmetry—like Themis’s scales held in perfect balance—that it had become the destination we fled to after everything.
We.
I shuddered again.
Smoke billowed from Charon’s nostrils, and he grunted. His voice in my head sounded low and deep like the gnarled roots of the Oldwood where I found him. “I don’t know what we’ll encounter in Linia…”
None of us did, but his hesitation revealed the reason for his comment. He needed to heal before we reached the city. I’d all but forced the magic on him during our journey. Trapped in a mine for almost two hundred years, his wings needed time to unfurl—to strengthen. In our rush to leave the kingdom before the Blessed caught up with us, we’d given him none.
We.
My curse—Hart—leaned forward. The worst part was that I didn’t even know what that meant. He was my curse, as I was his. I knew only the basics. Namely, when it came to our magic fueled by emotion, mine could only be powered by his feelings, and his by mine.
The goddess found it irrelevant that he was perhaps thelast man in the Three Kingdoms I wanted to share my emotions with.
I no longer knew what drove us. We had nowhere else to go after the events in the throne room. Experience dictated that physical separation would have consequences. My only thought had been to seek out knowledge on magic, and there was only one place to search.
We couldn’t find answers fast enough as the sensation, forever present between us, shot a bolt of awareness down my spine with Hart’s proximity. A shiver fought to free itself. I held still, halting the inadvertent reaction. He didn’t deserve to know his effect on me.
Especially now.
Lost in my own thoughts, I hadn’t noticed Charon’s body tense beneath us. His neck lifted slightly, and his wings angled as he banked east. It didn’t take long to notice what he had. Another dragon circled the city walls in the distance.
Charon wanted to prepare for any reality as we flew toward the city. No other dragons existed in Kavios, but that obviously wasn’t true here in Linia. I had considered them myths, lost symbols of a forbidden chaos goddess, before I freed Charon from captivity in the mines. If he required healing magic to face another dragon, I would grant it. I only wished that I could heal him myself.
But that was my curse.
I sighed, wishing that the existence of dragons and the fact that Charon could speak directly into my mind were the worst of the revelations that led to our fleeing Kavios.
“Hart.” I turned to face him and met his outstretched hand. The ease with which that name rolled from my tongue gave me pause. When I’d first used it, I hadn’t thought it suited him. Now that I had another name—Sebastien—I found I preferred thefirst.
My continued use of “Hart” only proved my ability to ignore hard things.
And look what it had cost me.
I flinched from the memory of my uncle’s body as it slammed into the throne room wall. I closed my eyes like that would remove the scene from my mind. Death by a thousand tiny cuts didn’t begin to cover the loss. Each thought seesawed my feelings about him. This morning, when Charon recited the whole ofChampions of Kaviosto stop Hart from asking questions about our imminent arrival in Ciril, I thought Alaric would have liked the dragon’s methods. Another cut quickly followed the thought: Alaric had known about Charon, that he was trapped, that he needed me, yet he’d kept his existence a secret.
Nothing could be done about it now. I tucked the heartache deep within my chest, twisting a key as I locked it up tight. Sadness wouldn’t save me, no matter how convenient the sweet stupor of its calming magic might seem.
Unfortunately, sadness wasn’t the emotion I required.
My gloves protected my fingers from Hart’s skin. In Kavios, the layer had shielded me from the Blessed’s unwelcome touch—from the discovery of my immunity to their magic. Their flimsy protection did next to nothing against the spark that lived between Hart and me.
