Kadra’s blood went from ice-floe cold to the temperature of lightning, his mind already plotting vengeance.
“If reason doesn’t work, then it’ll have to be fear,” Noceo grit out.
“Do you—” Dalvia took a deep breath. “You seem intrigued.”
Noceo gave her a cold once-over. “Jealous?”
That resigned look again. “There was a time when I might have been.”
The abrupt widening of his brother’s eyes was Kadra’s only sign that he had been thrown off.
Noceo drew his cloak tighter around him, walking faster than her. “You swore that you’d obey me. Do it. I didn’t ask for your thoughts on strategy.”
Dalvia slowed her paces, staring at the sky. It took Noceo several yards to realize that she wasn’t dogging his steps. He turned to her, exasperatedly roughing his hair with both hands.
He took a loud, drained breath. “I didn’t mean that I wasn’t grateful for your help.” The words seemed to be pried from him with a blade. “Your formula gave me more power than I thought possible. Three months of research and Bridging back and forth every night. None of this would have been possible without you.”
Kadra’s eyes narrowed at Dalvia’s near-soundless laugh.
“Sometimes, I wish it hadn’t been.” Her whisper hung in the air, too quiet for Noceo’s ears but close enough for Kadra’s. He watched her leave, brow furrowed.
Could I have saved her from this?
Sarai would tell him that he had been thirteen, that he had given Dalvia a choice, and that she had chosen to betray him to Clevsin. All true. But the question lingered as he returned to the city, using the white claw Wrath had gifted him to see in the tunnel’s darkness, and then through a maze of alleys he was intimately familiar with for how often he had butchered people therein.
The god’s gifts were dangerously useful. He could understand why men had gone mad.
“It’s rather aggravating having that thrown in my face all the time,” a cold voice mused beside him in the next breath. Black robes swept his as Wrath materialized, long hair knotted atop his head. “Good evening, Tetrarch.”
“I haven’t asked for help,” Kadra reminded him.
“You aren’t getting it. I try not to fight with my colleagues.” He stroked his chin. “Do I need to have an occasion to visit my acolyte?”
“Preferably.”
Voids and stars burned in the god’s robes. Kadra grew faintly nauseous, watching suns crash into each other and die.
The alley they stood in bulged. Long gouges tore through the walls. Hands of striated muscle reached from them, whether for mercy or to deliver condemnation, he couldn’t say. Blood dripped from the invisible wounds to pool around his feet, lapping at his boots. To act was to leave a mark upon the world. There was no changing what he had done here.
“Life and death, blood and time.” Wrath examined the tears in the rock. “Echoes of what you’ve done, what you could do, and things that happened a long time ago that could happen again. You saw those very futures at the Aequitas, did you not? Death or obliteration.”
“Do you want gratitude for providing me with a third choice?” Kadra followed the god’s slow glide across his cell. “And the claw?”
“A nice touch, wasn’t it? I didn’t think a fang would suit.” Wrath prodded at one of the hands reaching from a gouge in the wall and set it ablaze. “But the worst would have come to pass had you not chosen my power. Which you only did because your woman was injured in Komis. Which, in turn, wouldn’t have occurred if your brother wasn’t seeking vengeance for what happened eleven years ago.Thatis the nature of a god. Consequence.”
You will see it soon, Wrath had said at their last meeting. He understood now.
“The process should still have more in the way of safeguards if I’m in the running,” Kadra dryly noted.
Wrath’s fangs flashed in the dim light of the cell. “You amuse me, Tetrarch. And you understand consequence better than most. So, when you dwell on the past and wonder what you could have altered, ask yourself what you would have lost in the present. Everything has a price. Even regret.”
Everything has a price. He had warned Noceo of that once, pointed out what his obsession with Parvine Poxtan could cost her. It had cost them both.
Wrath’s fiery eyes narrowed knowingly. “Stay alive, acolyte. Contrary to the opinion of the masses, I don’t enjoy losing those I mark.” He was gone in the next breath, the alley’s brick rearranging itself in an impossible snarl behind him.
The gods, Kadra reflected, were a headache to understand.
But he was starting to think that he did.
