“I once thought we were too.”
So had he. Now, he was closer to losing everything than he had ever been.
One more day until he told Sarai everything.
Then, the noose would pull tight.
The blue sliver that was Silun crested behind the wispy clouds over Aoran Tower. Hours bled at a sedate drip until its pale-blue moonlight gilded a slight figure examining the end of the cobblestone path leading to his home. Dalvia pressed her palms against his wards with a sound of frustration and stared at the illusion Cato had crafted of a grassy field as though she would see straight through it to his tower if she looked hard enough.
“Aelius didn’t have much luck either,” Kadra remarked from his shadowed corner of the pathway to her squeak of surprise. He emerged, raising an inquiring brow when she pressed herself against the barrier shielding his tower. “Did you think that I wouldn’t expect you?”
“But you didn’t.” Dalvia’s voice was thin with apprehension. “You didn’t see any of this coming, Magus SupremeKadra,” she said with a shadow of a smile. “What a name, Drenevan.”
Metal hissed in the dark as he drew his sword.
She blanched. “I didn’t come to harm you, Drenevan. You know I lack that power.”
Empty amusement played on his lips. “You allied with someone who could. Was this the power you wanted? Hiding in Noceo’s shadow and doing his bidding?”
“You have no right to pass judgment,” she bit out. “You abandoned us. We had little more than the clothes on our backs, and you ran off to play Tetrarch in the south.”
“I offered you the chance to come, and you informed Clevsin.” Anger roared in him at the memory. “He took me by surprise. I saw a chance to strike and took it. I didn’t predict that it would tear through the manor.”
She laughed weakly then, a surprisingly bitter thing for all that it was little more than a puff of air. “You still see it as a betrayal, but Ifearedfor you! I thought you would fail. And when you didn’t…” Her hands fisted. “I had no illusions that the three of us would form a proper family, Drenevan, but I thought better of you than to leave us with nothing.”
He studied her tight expression. “Ah, this is about coin. You hoped that I would leave you Clevsin’s empire after I killed him.”
“Why didn’t you?” Her eyes glittered. “Because of you, we inherited all his enemies and none of his strength. That power, thatprestige, can you understand how desperately we needed it once he was gone? We were fourteen and thirteen when you threw us to the vagaries of the world. Noceo nearly killed himself right after your departure, overextending his magic to make the Praetor his puppet and give us some semblance of strength.” She swallowed. “He had no choice but to enter the Order. You could have come back. Put things to rights and set us free.
“You were free. You, of all people, never needed me to escape,” he said with cool mockery, approaching her in a glide. There was nowhere she could run. The Academiae’s wards prevented Bridgers from opening portals in or out. “You seem to be forgetting that I was thirteen too. You act as though I left without reason.”
“I haveneverbeen free.” Her quiet voice held a scream’s worth of anguish. An abyss seemed to yawn in her eyes before she shuttered them. Her shoulders sunk. “I shouldn’t have come. I thought our shared hell made you care at least a little.” Her voice lowered and grew thorns. “If it were your Petitor abandoned to the north, you’d have moved the mountains to give her a better life.”
“I would.” On that they were in accord. “And yet, she accomplished that on her own.”
Dalvia laughed soundlessly. “She’s going to start regretting it. Noceo has every intention of breaking her. I thought you should know.”
A primal fury that bordered on madness surged in him at the thought of Sarai trapped in her head, screaming as her body followed Noceo’s orders. He lunged forward to find Dalvia’s pulse with the edge of his blade.
“Are you enjoying this?” he asked softly. “Imagining an innocent being put through what you wanted to be rescued from?”
“No,” her voice shook. White-lipped, she finally met his raging eyes and recoiled. Her head struck the barrier of his wards. “I never enjoyedanyof it. But I don’t know what else to do when no one’s listening. I have known nothing but the Clan and Noceo, and I am what you all made me.” Her chin wobbled. “It’s too late for change.”
Silence permeated the air. Understanding crystalized. He withdrew the blade. “How long have you been in love with Noceo?”
She winced and took a stuttering breath, pulling the tattered shreds of her pride around her like a cloak against the cold. “I don’t think it’s love, Drenevan.” She inched away from him, dark eyes haunted. “I think I’m just empty.”
There was no torturing Noceo’s whereabouts from her. His brother would have Coerced her into silence, and her loyalty to him meant that she wouldn’t choose to fight it.
“Dalvia,” he said quietly when she turned to leave. She halted, her back to him. “I would have returned if I had known that this was not the freedom you’d wanted.”
Her shoulders flinched as though he had struck her. Apparently having used up her capacity for conversation, she walked away.
Kadra leaned back against the gates to Aoran Tower with a low exhale. The book of his past opened wide, flipping beyond his revisitations of the night of Sarai’s Fall to an equally bitter one, that he had avoided for years. Now, he wondered if he had done the right thing then. Would any of this have come to pass, or would it have been worse?
He was too late in this, too. He could only alter the present.
By the time the sun rose the next morning, she had decided not to think about any of it.I’m not avoiding anything, she insisted to her hollow-eyed reflection in the washbasin’s mirror. She simply needed more information before she jumped to conclusions.
