Metal slid out with a snick. She darted back an instant before he slashed wildly at her, tottering as his ruined hand floundered.
“So be it. You can die.” His eyes glittered. Blood seeped through a head wound he must have gotten when she had tripped him.
She darted a glance to where Kadra lurked in the shadows and discreetly shook her head when he shifted.I can handle this.She twisted out of his brother’s reach with a hard kick to his chest. He doubled over with gritted teeth.
“You Coerced yourself, you stupid fuck!” she snapped. “This story you’ve told yourself isn’t true!”Gods, poor Dalvia.No wonder she hadn’t been able to leave.
The breath seemed to rush out of him even as his body kept fighting. And she knew this too. The feeling of having one’s legs cut out from under them and reduced to little more than mindless fighting instinct. He had made her drink deep from that sour well.
“You’re hopeless! You’ll never understand.”
She dodged the next slice of his blade. “But I do, and you know it. That’s why you’ve tried so hard to convince me to join you. Noceo bu Kader, you thought we were alike!”
She had realized it upon seeing Parvine’s death. Noceo would have drawn parallels after hearing of Kadra’s demise. “Death-Summoner,” he had kept calling her. Because she had done what he hadn’t been capable of. She had made everything right again. And perhaps that was all he had wanted.
Desperation and anger battled on his face. He lunged at her, cutting into her arm. Sarai felt a hot wash of blood drip down it and refused to give him the pleasure of acknowledging the wound. When he sprung toward her with a roar, she absorbed the blow and gripped his throat.
“Move and I’ll destroy your vocal cords,” she hissed.
Clammy and flushed, he dropped his knife, and she kicked it away.
“You said that I had to see it as you did, or you’d be the villain of the piece.” She wiped the blood from her arm overastomand, the rune for “Materialization.” “Well, I did, and you look no different.”
She reached into his head a final time and pulled the truth out in the open. Noceo spat a barrage of curses as younger versions of himself and Kadra bloomed in the cramped morgue but quieted at the sight of Finaze, memory and fear turning his pale skin colorless. The quiet tragedy played out among ice blocks. By the end of it, Noceo had shrunken into himself, trembling like an aspen.
“You’re lying,” he whispered.
She fisted the material of his robes. “Truth is my only task,” she repeated what she’d told him over a month ago in the Academiae’s chapel, then echoed his own words. “Did you want it sugarcoated?”
“It can’t be true.” He stared at a blank point over her shoulder, and she realized that he hadn’t been speaking to her. He withdrew from her grasp as though he was barely cognizant of her existence. “It has to be a lie, because if it isn’t, then—”
All of this was over nothing. She didn’t say it, simply watched as he stumbled toward the door like his legs wouldn’t hold him up anymore. He turned to her, lips parting, then stilled, his gaze unerringly finding Kadra in the shadows.
Something crumbled in his silver eyes.
He turned.
He ran.
The day of Noceo’s announcement on the Tetrarchy’s fate dawned to grim skies and an absentee usurper.
Kadra eyed the angry, curious throngs circling the public square that Noceo had gilded in the vein of a convivium. A group of confused northern vigiles occupied it now and cast nervous looks at each other. Many seemed to have realized they had been abandoned.
He waited until evening came, and the crowd dispersed with grumbles about idiot northerners wasting their time. Damp hung in the air. A storm was brewing in more ways than one.
“Head inside,” he murmured into Sarai’s ear.
Nodding, she darted inside the closest tavern. Moments later, lightning lashed the swathe of black above. The gargantuan, long-fingered hand of smoke that controlled stormfall sent pale streaks arcing over the heavens and down. He anticipated and let the lightning approach before redirecting it back up with a flick of his wrists. Wrath’s strength had made the task significantly easier.
Sleet and rain struck him and hardened at his feet as he worked. He, along with the thousands of magi around Edessa, calmed the skies. Red streaked his armilla when the rain petered to a drizzle, a testament to the volume of power he had used. Fog rolled in to blanket the square.
He readied to retrieve his Petitor when a bedraggled figure stalked through the mist. Kadra’s brows rose. Haggard, pale as smoke, sweating, and sopping wet, his brother looked as though he had gone several roundsat a tavern and lost. Blood still matted his forehead from the wound Sarai had dealt him the previous night. He evidently hadn’t slept.
Kadra leaned against one of the pillars comprising the colonnade. “Power’s treating you poorly.”
“Not awordout of you.” His brother snapped, eyes wild. “I was supposed to have your life.”
“You’ve enjoyed it for a little,” Kadra noted.
