“What’s wrong?”
“Tell me you have a scar here.” Her whisper fluttered the tiny hairs around his ear, making his confused heart skip a beat.
“What?”
She pressed hard against the back of his neck with a single nail. “Here,” she said. “You have a scar, right?”
He had scars. Plenty of them. One from when Quint slashed his calf while practicing. Another much smaller scar beside his belly button from the archer in Aeos who took down Kai and Safie. Two on his left arm from when he’d jumped out a window with Kohen as kids. But none on the back of his neck.
He frowned. “No, not there.”
Nes yanked his head down until his forehead hit her chest. She sucked in a breath so hard he was shocked his hair didn’t fly up her nose.
“What is it?”
Her fingers were moving again, tracing something on the back of his neck. She let go, and he lifted his head, met her eyes.
“Nes, talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
She glanced down at her lap then back up at him. Her jaw locked.
“The symbol,” she said. “The one on the guards in the Holy Triad, on Mikaud’s neck after he died—” She cut off just as the last of the body was burned away.
“What about it?”
Beside them, flames were sucked into the ash until only flickering embers remained. He felt as if his heart were withering away with them as he waited for her to speak the words he knew were coming.
But knowing didn’t make the blow any less striking when Nes said at last, “You have it, too.”
22
Nes
Nes had never seen a death omen. But this symbol felt as good an omen as any. She couldn’t smell any magic in the symbol on Toran’s neck, but she suspected it was only a matter of time before she did. The symbol would not remain simple lines on skin.
Toran had tried washing it off that first night. She’d watched him lean over a Wharf canal and scrub until his skin was raw. The symbol remained. Magic, as they knew, couldn’t be scrubbed clean.
Toran insisted he would be fine, promised her it didn’t change anything. But she saw how he walked the streets with one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other itching to cover the back of his neck. She couldn’t stop herself from imagining him dead in the street—from replacing Mikaud’s body with his.
By now, she’d memorized every line, every slope, and every point until it felt like she was the one seared by the symbol. Every time she closed her eyes, it blazed to life in the darkness of her head. So she didn’t close her eyes.
She didn’t sleep.
When she wasn’t with Toran, piecing together their trap for Damari, she was tailing him, guarding him from a distance. At the end of each day, he’d head back to the Siren’s Hair. She couldn’t watch over him from the room she shared with Suri, so she scaled the surrounding buildings and watched from their rooftops. She’d easily found the window to his bedroom, and since then, she’d spent every night atop a roof, monitoring the man sleeping beyond it. A man she was trying—and failing—not to give her heart to.
“Do you really think I don’t know what you do all night?”
Toran’s words brought her out of the memories of the past week. She blinked at him. “Do you really think I care?”
They walked side by side down the main street in the Wharf, fish guts splattering at their feet as fishermen gutted the day’s catch. They’d spent the last three days wandering from sector to sector in search of a hidden stash of magic, but so far, all she’d been able to pick out were trifles. Today the only thing she smelled was rotting fish—something she was sure Toran could smell, too.
The first part of their plan was simple. Damari was stealing magic. All they needed was enough magic to lure her to them. Their only problem was Damari had already hit the largest sources. This was their fourth sector in three days with no luck.
And magic wasn’t the only thing they couldn’t find. For reasons neither of them could learn, Genna had vanished.
Toran lifted a hand, running his thumb over the skin beneath her eye. “You have bags under your eyes. Are you sleeping at all?”
She turned her head, making him drop his hand. “I’m fine. You’re the one I’m worried about.”
