"You could say that." I shrugged nonchalantly despite the exhaustion that dragged at my bones.
"Where's Tannin?" Legacy asked, her voice tight.
"Captured," Ehuna said with a note of satisfaction in her tone. "He was trying to flee like the coward he is."
She gestured to her right. There stood Tannin and the other advisors with multiple soldiers’ swords aimed at their throats and their gauntlets gone.
"Is it over?" Varna breathed out.
"Or is it just the beginning?" Smiling, Legacy dropped her head to my shoulder.
I chuckled and took her hand. "Take your pick."
Chapter
Thirty-Three
Neither torture nor maiming was required to make Tannin talk. We didn't even have to kill him.
Merely the threat of violence was enough to get him to tell us everything we wanted to know.
The bigger challenge was getting him tostoptalking. Ehuna had tied him and the other advisors up in a dungeon cell hours ago, and still, Tannin wouldn’t hush up.
His signed confession, coupled with the stack of parchment evidence Varna found with some advisors’ signatures who’d pledged to join Tannin’s treachery, was damaging enough.
Legacy and I stepped outside the dungeon for a break. I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes, trying to stop the pounding in my head. This was the first quiet we'd had in hours, and it was blessedly silent.
Legacy lifted her hands to my face, her long fingers stroking gently against my forehead to ease the ache. I would have been more than happy if we just stood here and did this forever, but of course we had business to take care of.
"I had not expected a man with so much power to be such a coward," she mused.
She tugged me forward, and I followed without opening my eyes. Soon enough, we sat at a small table at the end of the hall, where a lantern threw dim light, visible even behind my closed eyelids.
I shook my head. "I didn't either. But it serves us well that he is. Now we know why he did it and what needs to happen next."
Some of the war’s advisors on both sides, including Tannin, had thought that by stealing magic, and stealing me since I didn’t need gauntlets and could sniff out magic, he and the others would have power of their own. If the war stopped, they would have far less power over the royalty who looked to them for answers when it came to magic.
The magic itself was an afterthought, something that infuriated me to no end. Tannin and his co-conspirators had stored the stolen magic in the abandoned building, not expecting me to sniff it out, and had rigged the magic with fuses in case someone accidentally stumbled upon the building.
Magic was a struggle for most mages to find, and as far as I knew, I was the only one with magic in my veins rather than harvested from the land and channeled through gauntlets. It was the height of selfishness for them to hoard it all on their own.
Sighing, I opened my eyes. It was then I noticed the golden amulet hanging around Legacy’s neck. The magic within smelled like lightning.
I reached out to touch it. “I’ve never seen you wear this before.”
“Well, I don’t have much of a choice.”
I flicked my gaze to hers. “What?”
“I can’t take it off, no matter what I do. It was put on me by some street urchin who stole my bracelet.” She shrugged as she fiddled with said bracelet around her wrist.
My stomach twisted. “Was this after you thought I died?”
She nodded slowly, her eyes widening at the expression she must’ve found on my face.
The bracelet was sent to me to “prove” her death. Did the amulet serve a similar purpose? Like to hide her from tracking spells?
“We’ll talk to Ehuna about it later,” I promised.
