“Yeah, Erif must have fought for me and won.” She stares up at the sky. “That is, if you believe the legends.” She lowers her head and looks at me. “How do you know any of that?”
“Reading.” I shrug. I know about the legends, but that’s the last thing I’m worried about. My father has been telling me for years how Erif blessed Adraa with a one-armed Touch. At the time I didn’t care. It was an interesting factoid that made sense later, when I learned she had invented firelight. Now, it’s the key to everything. She’s been lying to me from the beginning, leading me to believe she works for my future wife. Now…sheismy future wife.
“And that’s why you serve Adraa.” I give her a pointed look. Will she continue to deny who she is?
She refocuses her attention on me. “Yes. Adraa taught me everything I know. I would be lost without the Belwars.” I wait a beat for her to say more. She doesn’t. So she’s going to keep the charade up, then.
Having verified she is going to keep lying to me, her fiancé, who is lying to her, I don’t know what to say. Being Kalyan is always easier than being Jatin. And it still might be on this occasion. But I’m at a loss. With my conscience giving me permission to like her I’m twisted and tongue-tied. I start to sweat.
“I’m breaking open the crates,” she says, not knowing how life-altering this moment is for me. At least now I understand why she’s so committed to discovering what’s happening with the firelight. If hundreds of my spells were being shipped who knows where, I’d want to find out too.
The crates are wicker, a combination of stalks woven together. Unlike wood, the wicker flexes against acts of violence. The best way to open the crates is through a simple green magic spell that frays one spine and then splits the thing open. Adraa must not know the technique. The sound of a thousand twigs breaking reaches my ears. I step closer to find the nearest crate gutted, with orbs of firelight leaking out.
She picks one up and turns it over. “Two days ago.”
I snatch an orb rolling by my feet. On its underside is a date that confirms it.
“It didn’t stop at Basu,” she whispers.
“What?”Who’s Basu?
Adraa turns to me. “This operation. It’s much bigger than I thought.”
After we open all the crates of firelight orbs, we eventually discover the drugs. In cloth patches tied with string sits a fine red powder.Bloodlurst!it screams at me. Couldn’t be anything else.
“Careful not to touch it,” Adraa says. “It’s absorbed through the skin.”
I warily set the bundle back down.
“Another fire?” she suggests.
“We can’t exactly dump it in the bay,” I counter. “You light them up, I’ll disperse the smoke. We don’t want any more potential signals—”
Before I can finish my sentence the crates blaze. I cast a funnel of wind to divert the smoke, stifling a chuckle as I do. She doesn’t waste time.
A few minutes later, only a spot of ash marks the drugs’ presence.
“Good thinking,” Adraa relents.
Our gazes glide to all the firelight. She sighs. “I don’t want to destroy it.”
This is her magic, her invention. I don’t want to destroy it either. “Then don’t. Let’s hide it below the pier. We’ll put some black magic around it and bring it to Belwar Palace later.”
“Okay.” She pauses. “Don’t rub it in, but you were right. I needed backup tonight.” And with that, the aches in my muscles and the bruises covering my torso stop throbbing. My whole body smiles.
“I said don’t rub it in,” Adraa says as she heaves one crate up and chants it into levitation under a bed of yellow magic.
“I didn’t say anything,” I defend.
“Your face says enough.”
I guess I do need to control my grinning.
The job is done before I remember beginning, feeling perfectly right working beside her, even though the night enters its menacing hour in which the sky slips into a dark sheath of oily glue.
“We should get out of here,” I say after I finish casting the last black concealment spell over four crates of firelight.
“Ah, about that. I have a problem.” Adraa gestures to her belt. “I kind of destroyed, no, Ididdestroy Hubris.”
