“I assume you want the bottle.”
He assumed right.
Sammerin slid into a chair and poured himself another glass before handing it over. Tisaanah didn’t sit. She did that standing, hovering, pacing thing she did when she was nervous.
“Well, it appears I’m behind,” Sammerin said. “The last I knew, the two of you were supposed to be off being sickening in a garden somewhere. Resting.”
He said the last word as if it were some sort of wry joke. Which, I suppose, it was.
Tisaanah and I exchanged a glance. The sheer absurdity of everything that had happened in the last two days was overwhelming.
Tisaanah leaned towards Sammerin.
“We will tell you everything, but only if you promise you will not think we are insane.”
“Oh, that ship has long sailed,” Sammerin said. “But please, do continue.”
It was always a strange experience, telling Sammerin outrageous news. He was an excellent healer because he carefully controlled his reactions. During the war, I’d seen him lean over dying men screaming in pain and maintain steady, comforting composure. It would only be afterwards that he’d turn to me, let the mask drop, and admit, “I was absolutely terrified.”
One might think that after all these years of friendship, I’d be better at recognizing when I was the dying man on the battlefield. Sammerin had been doing that to me — managing me — for nearly a decade, and I didn’t even realize it. Now, maybe I was seeing the world in full color again. Because even though Sammerin’s reactions were, as always, carefully regulated, I could now see the slow rising fear bubbling up beneath all that serenity.
When we finished, there was a long, awkward silence. Sammerin opened his mouth and then closed it, several times.
“Say something, Sammerin,” I said. “You look like a broken man.”
“What can I say to any of this? It’s…” He trailed off, and I realized that maybe he was a broken man, in the sense that we’d just shattered every perception he had of a world that made any degree of sense.
“So you see,” Tisaanah said, “we couldn’t let her keep it.”
Sammerin took another drink.
“A fourth trial. A fourth trial, Max. Tonight.”
His tone said what his words didn’t: You are fucked.
That was an understandable reaction.
The fourth trial was the last step in the Arch Commandant selection process, and the simplest… as well as the most ridiculously archaic. Just one fight, Wielder against Wielder. It would take place in the Scar — the birthplace of magic, a chasm not far from the base of the Towers. When magic had returned to the world half a millennium ago, that chasm was the breaking point. To this day, it remained one of the most unique magical settings in the world.
That was the whole romanticized idea: put two candidates in the birthplace of magic itself for their final battle, to test their connection, their commitment, to the forces they Wielded.
“The whole concept is ridiculous,” I grumbled. “As if whoever wins a pit fight in a glowing magical ravine is better suited to lead one of the most powerful organizations in the world.”
Sammerin stared flatly back at me, silent.
“I can win,” I said.
“Max, she knows you.”
I knew exactly all that was implied by that sentence.
Nura’s magic preyed on the fears of her opponent. And she knew exactly where the gaps between my ribs were, knew exactly which mental knives to turn.
“I know her, too,” I said.
“Right, and that’s exactly what she’s going to use against you. With stakes this high, she’ll fight hard. Nothing will stop her.”
I knew he was right.
No matter what Nura did, there was always a small part of me that hoped she could be better than she was. Yes, she had saved me, many times over, even when it cost her dearly to do it. But I had seen the way she looked at me in that meeting — with a hurt sharp enough to shred whatever tattered history had hung between us.
Sharp enough, maybe, to sever whatever still kept her from killing me.
“I know,” I said. “And I won’t let her take it that far.”
“I would skin her,” Tisaanah muttered, and I quirked an eyebrow at her.
“That’s charmingly vicious. Comforting to know that if she survives me, she certainly won’t survive you.”
“This isn’t a game.” There was an uncharacteristically harsh edge to Sammerin’s voice. “If you lose, if she’s truly that desperate, this affects more than you. Nura is not the kind of person who abides by half-measures. She could purge everyone who has anything to do with you. Did you consider that?”
I went silent. Sammerin stared back at me, his jaw tight. A pang of guilt rang out in my chest.
“Yes,” I said, quietly. “Yes, I did.”
Tisaanah and I had made very direct moves against Nura, and we were well aware of the consequences of that. But if we were to lose, there was a possibility that Nura would not stop with us. We had allies. Sammerin. Serel. The Threllian refugees.
I had seen the way Nura waged war. Scorched earth.
It would be putting it lightly to say that I’d had many objections, when Tisaanah first raised the possibility of my candidacy. But this was the one that still lingered. The one that still made me think, Maybe I’m not doing the right thing.
“I’d make whatever deal I had to, to ensure you aren’t affected,” I said. “You were her friend too. I could convince her.”
Sammerin let out a low scoff.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Then he muttered, as if to himself, “Ten years, I spent building my practice.”
He shook his head, eyes to the ceiling, and a lump rose in my throat. I almost offered to back out — not that I could, of course, realistically.
“I’m sorry, Sammerin,” I said.
“Good. You should be. You make my life difficult.” But then he took a long sip of wine, and when he set the glass down again, his jaw was set. “But. If all this is true…” He waved his hands, as if to gesture to the whole ridiculous mess of it. “Then you are right. She cannot hold that power. And I suppose I’ll take this over the alternative, if the alternative is…”
His voice trailed off, and Tisaanah provided, quietly, “The end.”
We all looked at each other, the words hanging in the air.
“I won’t lose,” I said, more confidently than I felt.
“You are not allowed to,” Tisaanah muttered.
“Yes. Not losing is a good goal.” Sammerin leaned across the table, a wrinkle between his brows. “And Max, try to do it without using… that magic.” He nodded to my hands, and I knew he was talking about my deeper, mysterious magic — the “gift” that Reshaye had given me. “There’s something odd about it. I don’t know what, yet, but…”
He lapsed off into thought, and when he blinked and looked back to me, his gaze was harder. “Just don’t lose.”
Chapter Seventy-Six
Tisaanah
The Scar was set deep in the earth, so far down that it was partially beneath the Towers themselves. We had to journey down spiral after spiral of metal stairs, built into the rocky edges of the ravine, just to reach it. The sun was already disappearing behind the horizon by the time we embarked, but it was so dark down there that even if it had been broad daylight, it would have been near pitch black by the time we made it to the bottom. After the fourth set of stairs, I looked up to see the final sliver of a dusky sky disappearing between layers of rock.
There were Syrizen ahead of us and behind us as we descended. I peered across the expanse of stone and darkness. Somewhere over there, where the shadows made structures deteriorate into abstract, formless shapes, Nura was making the same journey down. She and Max would meet within the Scar. And the rest of us would stand at the edges and watch — helpless — while they fought for the title.
I knew Max was nervous, but he hid it carefully. He walked with lon
g, confident strides, his chin raised and stare sharp. He wore a gold jacket embroidered with emerald trim, the sun emblem of the Order of Daybreak across his back.
He looked like a leader. He looked like a victor. He looked like an Arch Commandant.
But all I saw when I looked at him was a man who was willing to sacrifice everything that mattered to him for a chance, even a slim one, at a better world.
I refused to allow myself to think about the possibility of losing him here. It had been so much more comfortable at the Mikov estate, when I was the one throwing myself into the jaws of a monster. Self-sacrifice was easy. But watching Max journey so close to the fangs of a beast of his own was agonizing.
At last, the stairs stopped. I pressed my hands against the rusting metal railing. Of their own accord, my lips parted.
Before me was a massive crack in the earth. The rock was jagged and raw, like torn flesh, and strange, rippling light spilled from within it. It wasn’t bright, exactly — it barely cast a glow on the stone around us. But it seemed to bend the air itself in strange and unnatural ways, like an eerie parody of the way the heat rippled the air above the plains back in Nyzerene. During the walk here, a strange magic had prickled at the back of my neck. Now, goosebumps rose all over my flesh.
“You have to go in that?” I whispered.
“I do indeed.”
Oh, gods. I didn’t like any of this.
Down on the other side of the crack, I saw a white figure standing completely still, face tilted towards us.
Nura.
She was so far away that her features were unintelligible, but I could still feel the razors in her stare, and my own rising to meet them.
If she hurt him, I would kill her. Gods, I would make the fates of Esmaris and Ahzeen Mikov look pleasant compared to what I would do to her.
“Are you ready?” Sammerin said, and Max gave him a wordless glance that replied, No, but does it matter?
“There is a path for you this way,” Ariadnea said, gesturing to a gap in the railing.
Max nodded, then turned to me.
I had been ready to be dignified. But the force of Max’s gaze made me forget all of that. I didn’t have time to second guess myself before his hands were on either side of my face and his mouth on mine, and I was struck speechless not only by the kiss itself — a tender, passionate, world-ending kiss that felt far too much like a goodbye — but also by the sudden palpable possibility that it could be the last.
His lips broke from mine, then grazed over the tip of my nose, the bridge, the space of my forehead right between my eyebrows.
It was that forehead kiss, the one that seemed as if it wasn’t even fully intentional, that almost broke me.
“Everyone is watching,” I murmured, self-conscious not of his affection but of the way it threatened to unravel me.
“Who cares,” Max replied, still close enough that I felt the words in my skin. “I’m about to become Arch Commandant.”
He said it like a joke. It couldn’t be a joke. It had to be reality.
I couldn’t speak, even though suddenly, there was so much I wanted to say. I pulled him into one more embrace instead.
“I have a request.” His voice rumbled against my ear lobe, and I choked out my response.
“Smart to ask now, when I have no choice but to say yes.”
“The man with the parrot. The one that we saw in the Capital. Which came first, the bird or the coat?”
The memory made me rasp a chuckle. The man we had seen the first time I visited the Capital, what felt like a lifetime ago. A tall, bespectacled man with a green coat and a matching parrot. It had been a simple sort of joy when I ran up to him — I must ask you, did you get bird to match coat, or coat to match bird?
My eyes burned.
“That’s a secret,” I said, and he laughed as if that was a ridiculous answer. It was, really. He pulled back and we looked at each other.
“I’ll tell you when you get back,” I said.
A smile curled his mouth. Left side first, as always. “Deal.”
“Deal.”
“Maxantarius,” Ariadnea murmured, and Max scoffed.
“Give me a minute. This is a momentous enough occasion, isn’t it?” Then his gaze slipped to Sammerin, who looked as admirably collected as ever.
“I’d tell you not to do anything stupid,” Sammerin said, “but that would be useless and outdated advice.”
“Thank you, Sammerin. I, too, treasure our friendship.”
Still, something softened in his gaze as he patted his friend on the shoulder, gave him a little nod, then turned to the gap in the rail and the rocky stairs that led down to the Scar.
“Alright,” he told the Syrizen. “I’m ready.”
Ariadnea volunteered to lead him down. He did not look back as he took his first steps. The last thing I heard as they departed was Ariadnea’s voice, solemnly saying, “Good luck, Max.”
And with those words, the match began.
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Max
This entire concept was the most ridiculous fucking idea.
When I was twenty-one and generally a naive idiot, I had thought there was a certain romantic appeal to the fourth trial. Now, I wanted to laugh at myself for ever having thought that way. What had once seemed natural and primal now struck me as barbaric. Sure, this certainly will encourage rational, compassionate leadership.
Still, even as I told myself that there was nothing mystical about this process whatsoever, I had to fight a shudder of unease as I went down the stairs and landed in the unnatural, rippling darkness of the Scar’s floor. The light and air were strange here, even stranger than they looked from above. Mist that disobeyed the laws of nature swirled from the floor and the jagged rock of the walls. Shocks of light glinted in the stone that surrounded me, as if fireflies were buried within it and still, half a millennia later, were trying to dig their way out.
But more unnerving than all of that was the way it felt. It reminded me of how I had felt when I melded my magic with Tisaanah’s, except while that had been a pleasant, alluring sensation, this was odd and saccharine, like a noise so high-pitched it left my ears ringing.
I drew my magic to the surface, readying myself. I looked out into the dark fog, and though I couldn’t see Nura there, I knew she was waiting. There was a time when her magic was as familiar to me as my own, and here, in this twisted place of amplified senses, I could feel it hanging in the air.
“Do you expect me to come chase you?” I said. I did not raise my voice. She could hear.
Sure enough, her voice rolled from the darkness.
“That’s entirely up to you, Max. I wouldn’t stop you if you wanted to walk away.”
“I won’t.”
“What an interesting heel turn for you. Of all things, this is the one that makes you stay.”
I still could not see her. But her hatred — no, not hatred, hurt — slithered through the air like the hiss of a snake.
“I have no desire to do this,” I said, quietly. Flames thrummed at my fingertips, carefully tethered. “We don’t have to, Nura.”
“Why? Are you afraid?”
I felt her magic wrapping around me, burrowing deep, searching for fear in all the places she knew so well.
“I’m angry,” I said. “I’m tired.”
No lies there.
I turned around to see her standing there, silver stare picking me apart. Something was different about her. Something dangerous was closer to the surface.
“I showed you everything.” Her voice sounded like her knives whipping through the air. Quiet and deadly. “I showed you all of it and you still threw it back in my face like this. When we were together, all you wanted was for me to carve my fucking heart out for you. And that’s what I did. I showed you. I always have loved you. Always.”
It was the truth. I understood it, now — the dangerous constancy of Nura’s love. When she lifted her hand to my temple in Sarlaza
i, she had been utterly convinced that she loved me. Convinced, too, that she loved the people she was about to kill.
“And you love Ara,” I said.
An odd vulnerability rippled across her face. “More than I have ever loved anything.”
“Then help it be better, Nura. Let your love be an action, not a feeling. Love this country by sparing its people from yet another war.”
“You saw what I saw. You know I can’t avoid it.”
“You can. None of this has to happen. Not like this. Do you want people to speak of Ara the way they speak of Threll? Is that what you want to become?”
“If they’ll speak of me that way, I’ll let them. If someone needs to make the hard decisions to save us all from this mess, then I’ll be the tyrant and burn for it later. Hell, I already have.”
Until now, I had managed to keep my anger carefully controlled, measured against whatever scraps of compassion I had left for the girl I’d known. But now, fury ripped through me, so violently that the flames at my fingers brightened.
“Hard decisions?” I breathed. “People, Nura. These are people. What’s the difference between a life worth saving and a life worth throwing away? I saw what your hard decisions are. I lived it. Tisaanah lived it. And I won’t let it happen.”
I knew immediately that I’d said the wrong thing. One second, and the glimpse I’d seen of Nura as I knew her fifteen years ago disappeared like a corpse falling beneath black waters. In her place stood nothing but cold steel.
“I warned you back then that bleeding heart would get you killed,” she said. “But I never wanted it to be by me.”
“Nura—”
But she was gone. Shadows wrapped around her like a cloak, reducing her to a smear of darkness.
Just like that, her decision was made. And I knew her well enough to know that there would be no coming back from this — no half measures.
Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Page 51