Page 127

Her lips part, but she does not wake.

I tear open my wrist, then press the wound gently to her mouth.

“Drink,” I order knowing she can still feel compulsion even while unconscious, and after a moment, her throat moves. I brush the blood from beneath her nose with my thumb while she drinks from me, trying not to think of the crowd, the hatred, or the way her first instinct had been to protect the people shouting for her to be chained.

Retrieving a washcloth from the bathroom, I wipe the blood from her mouth, her chin, the line under her nose, and the little smear at the corner of her eye. With each stroke of the cloth, the anger in me settles into something darker, knowing she put herself at risk.

Alessia stirs as I clean the last of the blood from her throat, so I move to the chair by the fireplace and grab my book while I wait for her to wake.

CHAPTER 40

• Alessia •

MY HEAD THROBS with a slow pulse that sits behind my eyes and radiates outward, giving everything an aura.

When I lift my hand to my face, my skin feels soft, clean. I am no longer covered in my own blood, but the smell still lingers in my nose.

In my eagerness to get them to listen, I forgot to listen to my instincts. I pushed too hard and way too fast. I opened a vein to my magic and let it loose. The gold light ripped from my hands with a hunger I couldn’t rein in once it was unleashed.

My anger got the best of me, and the boat flew through the air like a toy, crumpling against the retaining wall. Then the town became an angry mob ready to burn me at the stake, just like the Arcanum, which is exactly why my mother said to hide our powers.

I push myself upright, and the room swims. Kylian is sitting in a chair near the window, his long legs stretched in front of him, his arms resting on the chair’s sides with deceptive stillness. He’s watching me the way someone watches a fire they’re not sure has finished burning, and the caution in his expression is something I’ve never seen before. It makes him look less like a king and more like a man who has been sitting in that chair for a very long time, waiting for something he wasn’t certain would happen.

The more I stare at him, the more I notice his bone-deep weariness. The lashes on his back come to mind, carved into my flesh but ripped through his skin in all the same places. It makes me wonder if it is the bond connecting my exhaustion to him as well. The shadows beneath his crimson eyes are darker than I remember, and his jaw holds a tension that tells me he’s not impressed.

“You’ve been out since midday,” he says. “Eagan ended up trapped in the town center trying to get through the mob of humans until I got there.”

I swallow the lump in my throat at the memory of how angry they were. Before the war, mages were revered, but the humans have forgotten why we were once held on a pedestal—not that I blame them. They feel no grief for the mages who burned alive, only grief for the suffering they have experienced since the curse took hold.

It’s hard for them to place blame at the feet of the kings who caused this, the same kings who paid for their crimes against the mages with their lives. The kings’ descendants control food and supplies, offer jobs and feigned safety if you follow the rules.

The curse left by the Arcanum has overshadowed every good thing we’ve ever done. All the life my people breathed into the land. Every injured or sick body we healed with our own hands.

“I remember.” My voice sounds raspy.

“Then you remember the way your body shut down because you demanded more from it than it was used to.” He doesn’t move from the chair, nor does he raise his voice. His eerie calm feels more intimidating than if he were screaming at me. “Your magic has been dormant for years. You’ve been suppressing it since you were a child, starving it, and now that you’ve opened the door, it doesn’t know how to come out at anything less than full force. When you lose your temper, you have no control.”

“Full force is what that field needs.”

A flicker of frustration moves through his expression, and he presses his lips into a thin line. “Dormant magic isn’t stable. It feeds on the body’s energy reserves. Every time you push past your threshold, the cost increases. A nosebleed could be a hemorrhage tomorrow. Did the Arcanum teach you fucking nothing?”

I see red as I pin him with my glare. How dare he! I’m here because he wants to use the power in my veins, yet the moment I do, I’m in trouble for it.

“Nothing?” I scoff.

Kylian looks away as if ashamed of his own words, yet just as his weariness is bone-deep, so is my fury.

“The Arcanum taught me plenty, like how using my magic would get me slaughtered,” I spit. “Or was that the wrong lesson to teach me?” Who is he to question me on magic like I don’t know the risks of it? I can feel it inside every inch of my body. “Your mother taught you nothing. I didn’t think Liliana would be so careless,” he snaps.

“She taught me what she could.”

I swing my legs over the side of the bed, and my vision grays at the edges.

“It was clearly not enough, or you would know better than to use that much power when you haven’t used it properly in years, if at all.”

I grip the mattress and wait for the room to stop swaying, unwilling to let him see me fall, and when the room steadies, I look at him directly. “You’re right. She didn’t teach me all I needed to know,” I admit quietly. “But whose fault is it that my mother left this world with two little girls who had no one? Because I don’t remember the Arcanum burning themselves.”

His jaw clenches and unclenches. “That never should have happened,” Kylian says. “But it did, and you and your sister might be the only ones left that can save what’s left of our world—that’s if you don’t destroy it before you have the chance.”