by Terah Edun
Whatever she had expected him to say, it wasn’t that. “I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t,” Sebastian said with a sigh as he turned away to go down the stairs.
Ciardis caught his cloak and shouted, “I thought we’d agreed that this was fine, Sebastian!”
He turned back to her silently.
Her lip trembling, she said, “In your father’s palace when you and I were facing him and he told you about the souldbond between myself and Thanar, you said it was fine.”
Sebastian said, “We were under threat from all sides. We still are.”
“But....” she said helplessly while searching his eyes and waiting him to speak more.
“But now,” he said, “I can’t pretend I’m okay with this. I can’t pretend I’m okay with losing you to him.”
“You’re not,” she cried.
“He’s a murderer, Ciardis,” Sebastian exclaimed. “And, dammit, I know we need allies, but not him. Just not him.”
Ciardis reached for Sebastian’s hands, and he quickly pushed her fingers away and took a step back as he searched her eyes.
“What do you want from me?” Ciardis pleaded. “I told you that I’d never choose him.”
Sebastian said, “I don’t want your promises. I want you to get rid of him.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” she shouted. “I can’t even get rid of you.”
She hadn’t meant it like that. It just slipped out. But she couldn’t take it back. Everyone had heard, judging by the shocked whispers erupting from servants who seemed to spend more time spying on people than working.
Sebastian smiled. She could see that it was filled with pain. But all he said was, “Glad to know how you feel.”
“I didn’t mean it like that!” she pleaded as she watched him turn to go back up the stairs. “Sebastian!”
Sebastian paused and angled his head without turning around. “You know when I asked you where he was this morning?”
“And I told you I didn’t know!” she shouted.
“He was following you, Ciardis,” Sebastian said.
“How was I supposed to know that?” she asked weakly.
“The question should be, Ciardis Weathervane, how could you not?”
Ciardis watched in silence as Sebastian walked over to a carriage and spoke to an attendant. Leaving her alone on the steps, unable to move. Unable to think straight.
When Thanar had walked away, his mental presence had gone with him.
When Sebastian had gone in the opposite direction, he had firmly shut his thoughts to her.
It was just her. She had to wonder what had gone so wrong in just a few minutes.
Chapter 13
Ciardis stayed silent and still for a long time. As she did, she thought about what had just occurred. Sebastian had given her an ultimatum. Leave Thanar or I’ll leave you.
She fisted and unfisted her fists unconsciously. She didn’t like either option, and she certainly didn’t like being threatened. But she didn’t want to give in, either.
She couldn’t give up Thanar. Not yet.
Ciardis didn’t fool herself and say that it was because she needed him to fight alongside them against the blutgott. He had pledged his allegiance to aid their cause, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t aware that Thanar did all things for his own reasons and in his own time. She wouldn’t put it past him to turn against them in mid-battle. Which made him more liability than asset.
No, she kept Thanar because her heart wouldn’t let him go. She didn’t love him. But she had to admit that she did desire him. She enjoyed his company, his dark laugh, his wicked intelligence, his smooth skin, his strong presence, and his electric demeanor.
She would be lying if she said she didn’t.
She just didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him.
As for Sebastian, she did trust him. She did love him.
But she despised his stubborn refusal to bend, his allegiance to duty rather than to the cause, his unwillingness to see the world as it stood, his belief in the archaic system of status by birth, and most of all, his ability to bury his feelings under protocol. Sebastian knew what was right, Ciardis knew that, but he wasn’t willing to do what was needed to be done if it meant taking a chance on doing what was wrong.
Closing her eyes, she thought, And that’s where the crux of the matter lies. Sebastian’s father may be dead or dying in a hole in a ground, but he will not take action unless he has to. He won’t attack the man that he has sworn his sovereign oath to unless he’s forced.
She understood familial duty. But she also understood loyalty and love.
There would never be a day where Ciardis chose duty and honor over her family. Never.
And the fact that Sebastian did made her resent him.
Her stomach in knots, Ciardis couldn’t tell herself why. Why she resented him. Why that feeling was eating away at her like slow-dropping acid. She didn’t want to tell herself why.
She heard steps behind her. Soft steps. Steps meant to tell her someone was coming.
Ciardis looked down at the ground, unwilling to meet another’s eyes. Not yet. She saw the supple brown leather boots in front of her. She smiled.
Vana could have hidden her approach and ghosted past Ciardis without a sound if she had so desired.
She hadn’t.
Without looking up, Ciardis asked, “Why do I resent Sebastian for being who he is?”
It was barely a whisper, but loud enough for Vana to hear.
Vana answered, “Because who he is is exactly the opposite of who you are. Controlled.”
“You mean he’s a coward,” Ciardis said with a breath so light she wasn’t sure Vana would hear her accuse the love of her life of such a fault.
But she heard. “Control is not cowardice if the person is preparing instead of running straight in.”
“If he was Thanar or even me,” Ciardis growled through gritted teeth as she snapped up her head, “then we would have found out the whereabouts of his father and torn his uncle from the throne in the same day.”
Vana searched her eyes calmly. “I believe that, but he is not you, and that is good. Because Sebastian is like a volcano. We see only the peak of his power above the surface. What lies beneath is the greater whole. If that erupts, the entire empire would feel his wrath.”
“What are you saying?” Ciardis whispered. “You think he’s right?”
Vana slowly looked her up and down. “Yes, he’s right. That’s not what you want to hear, but it’s the truth. There’s a time and place for everything ... including control.”
With that, Vana walked off again, and Ciardis let her eyes fall once more so the servants around them wouldn’t see the simmering resentment that lay underneath. It was then that Ciardis’s gaze fell onto her own hands. They glowed with magic, and clouds of vapor with sparks of lightning leaped off them.
Ciardis sucked in a harsh breath and dove into her own magic. Looking at her core, she saw that it looked as infuriated as she had moments before. It bulged and rolled with surges of magic and sparks of gifts.
Taking a deep breath, Ciardis raised herself up and gathered the magic that had seeped to the edges. Then she latched on to the thread of her power that led from the core with the two other mage links tied to it.
Right now, there was no control, just magic overflowing until it became visible.
It was time to tie that off. So she floated up to the very top of her mage thread and slowly enclosed the thick base of power with her arms. As she floated down with her arms wrapped around the thread like a thick pole, she gathered the surge of magic and pushed it back down into her core.
Ciardis felt the magic drain from her hands as she did, and her core settled down while she went.
But that wasn’t enough. Not for her. Sebastian and Thanar had already partially closed her out. She could feel thin mental barriers from each ... as if they didn’t want her to hear their thoughts or share their
minds.
That’s fine, she thought. Because I don’t want to share their magic. I could have killed someone with the magic that they’ve given me.
And Ciardis knew that if she had touched someone moments before, she might have.
Vana was right. Control was necessary, and Ciardis couldn’t control her gifts as long as she had two others funneling their magic into her gifts like spigots she couldn’t turn off.
But perhaps I can, she pondered.
She hadn’t tried before, but she knew now that nothing was one-way in their seeleverbindung. If they could block her from their minds, then perhaps she could do the same with their gifts. It was now or never.
Letting out a slow breath, Ciardis tried to approach this logically. She stared at the two ropelike lengths wrapped around her core. They were intertwined like knots, and short of cutting them, something she didn’t know how to do and was quite sure would be a lot more painful than this case warranted, unbreakable.
No, I can’t do that, Ciardis decided. Not until I’m sure.
Sure that she hated them both enough to do something that was irreversible ... and possibly deadly. Those tales of Viv and Dirk weren’t far from her mind, after all.
She felt her mouth dry as she kept her gaze focused inward. Diving toward her core as she let go of her grip around the thread that let up to her physical presence, Ciardis grinned.
She knew what she had to do. Instead of removing their gifts entirely from her magic, she was going to block them off.
Grabbing her own power, she pulled at it and hardened it like a mold. Swiftly she began to cover the entire mage core with her hardened gift, making sure to put it everywhere, especially where their roped magic touched hers.
As she did it section by section, she waited tensely for the soulbond’s magic to reject her makeshift barrier. But it held. Perhaps because it recognized her as part of the bond.
Finished, she floated back to see her work. A slightly darker golden shell wrapped around her core, just below the intertwined ropes of Thanar and Sebastian’s magic below. It glowed like a perfectly wrapped jewel of onyx, silver, and gold.
It’s quite pretty, Ciardis thought. But more than that, it’ll hold.
She could feel it. She couldn’t tell against what pressure, and she supposed as long as they weren’t under attack, that was fine.
Testing it, Ciardis reached down and slowly pulled up an edge of the golden shell she had wrapped around her core. It peeled back like the skin of an orange and snapped back just as quickly when she let go.
It was a simple patch, with tiny leaks she could already see, but it was something. More than she’d had before. And if either of the two males had something to say about it, they could whine to Vana.
Ciardis wanted her life back, and failing that ... control.
And this, she decided with a smile, is one more step toward that.
Sighing, she raced out of her magic and emerged back in the land of the living.
Opening her eyes, she looked around. Biting her lip, she saw that she was still alone on the steps. In an oasis of her own making, with servants flowing back and forth around her with muttered apologies as they went.
Ciardis rolled her shoulders in discomfort, but at least now the magical lightning in her hands was gone. She tried to tell herself that that was all that was gone. But she was no fool. She could already feel the difference. The loss of magic that had felt like energy running through her veins. The loss of the ever-present buzz around her head that said Thanar and Sebastian were nearby and their gifts were ready.
As she tried to manage that loss and count it as a blessing, she almost choked on a sob.
She tried to hold it back, screaming at herself for it. For the weakness.
Thanar and Sebastian never hesitate to hold themselves back, she thought. You shouldn’t either.
She kept telling herself that over and over. She was just protecting her interests and trying to wrest back control. But if that was the case ... why did she feel so shitty? Like her heart had been ripped out and pushed back inside her chest in pieces.
It couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes before Christian poked his glowing head out from the carriage he was peering into and noticed her standing stock-still.
Frowning, he came back up to the stairs. “Ciardis, what are you doing?”
Her eyes rose from the point on the steps she had been staring at mindlessly for the past few minutes. “Standing here?”
It was a question. A simple one, but loaded with emotion. To her ears, her voice rang hollow. In her heart, she felt the sense of loss and pain. She knew what she had done, but she couldn’t pinpoint everything she had lost. So she stood, still and immobile, almost afraid to move. Afraid that if she moved, her world, the small barrier she had put up, would shatter and the whole of Sebastian and Thanar would come crashing back in.
With no control and no direction. The thought frightened even her.
Not for herself. Not necessarily. But for the innocents who milled around her unaware.
For the friend who stood staring at her just steps below, as if waiting for her to come to her senses and stop this madness.
Ciardis’s eyes twitched as she waited and nothing happened. Her core didn’t erupt. The barrier held. The two entwined soul bonds settled down.
Christian sighed and rubbed his face with a tired motion.
Of course, he has no idea what I’m thinking, she told herself.
It was a funny thing to see, even if it didn’t make his visage any less scary.
Shaking her head sharply, Ciardis let out a breath and took a small step forward. A big leap for someone who had been afraid to move just moments before.
Guiltily, Ciardis asked, “Do you need to go lie down?”
She was wondering if he was still suffering from the effects of killing Thomas. There was no other way to put it. Because he had ... killed him, that is.
She wasn’t sure if it was shock or tiredness that was causing her mind to run so sluggishly that it felt like she was in shock. She didn’t particularly care, either.
She was alone for the first time in her mind in a long, long while.
The funny thing was that that was precisely what she had wanted. She’d wanted them gone, she’d wanted her space, and now that she had it ... she wasn’t satisfied. It felt like she was empty, when before she had been full to the brim.
It was a disconcerting emotion. Disturbing to rely on another’s ... no two other people’s ... thoughts and emotions in her head in order to feel some semblance of normality.
But in the short time she’d been connected to Sebastian and Thanar, she’d grown used to them.
Used to their quirks and her irritation at them. Used to feeling their power settled alongside hers in a smooth meld.
She still felt their power. But now, instead of a comforting bond, it felt like two snakes wrestling with her core ... and she didn’t know what to do about it. They weren’t trying to constrict around her magic anymore; it felt like they were trying to pull away as much as possible. But only ended up bumping into the other male’s magic more often than not. It wasn’t just the unsettling feeling inside of her that unnerved, but the fact that the more she and Sebastian fought, the more her tenuous bonds with both of them crumpled.
She tried to stop feeling the strange pain from her magic by walling off her power from the bed of her ability. It only worked in limited scope, though. The pain was gone, but the emotional heartache of being torn in two by competing sides was not.
To her surprise, Christian had swiftly trotted away from his position at the carriage and up to her. With a strong sigh, he caught her attention as he said, “Trouble in paradise?”
She blinked. Not certain if he meant her new trick ... and if he did, then how did he know?
A person’s mage core was private.
He can’t know, she counseled herself.
Then what did he mean?
“It
was just a small fight,” he said while searching her eyes anxiously. “You’ll survive.”
Swallowing harshly, she said, “I think we will.”
She was talking about more than the fight, of course.
Chapter 14
“Whether or not you survive with your reputations intact is another thing entirely,” he said dryly.
Ciardis turned shocked eyes to him. “Were we that loud?”
Christian shrugged. “Just loud enough for the entire palace to hear.”
Ciardis blinked and looked around to see servants previously invisible to her eyes move around them with lowered heads.
They’re shocked, Ciardis thought. No, that’s not it.
Her eyes caught on a boisterous young milkmaid hovering on the edges who would peek at Ciardis over her shoulder with wide eyes. Then she saw one of the butlers in a shiny suit almost trip over his own feet as she watched him swiftly walk past her—a bright red blush creeping up his neck.
They’re embarrassed for me.
She swallowed and wondered when her personal life had become cannon fodder for the masses.
“When you got engaged to a human prince and took up with a kith prince,” Christian said gently.
She turned tired eyes to him. “I didn’t think I had said that aloud.”
He grimaced. “You didn’t, but it’s clear as day what you’re thinking.”
“What, you can read my mind now too?” Ciardis said half-jokingly.
He snorted. “Just the thoughts etched on your face.”
She laughed. “I suppose I need to learn to have a better resting face.”
“Just a blank one will do,” Christian said jokingly.
She smiled as quiet descended between them.
Christian looked up at the sun and back at her. “They’re almost through packing the bags for the journey. We have a meeting to discuss our travel route in the atrium.”
Ciardis felt her shoulders slump. “Great, another meeting,” she said. “When is it?”
“Ten minutes from now,” he said.
Ciardis nodded and turned away.
“Where are you going?” Christian asked.