She had been going to say: What’s that to me? Not my problem that you got yourself trapped. But she stared at her tea, her piled blankets and shaking hands, and could not say the words.
“You always have an escape plan,” she said instead. “Or two.”
Torrence nodded. “Or seven. Yes. Gone, now. Some jobs turn strange and you put the work in anyway, because the pay will be worth it, right? Some jobs go bad all at once, and you’re left with nothing. Less than nothing.” He shook his head and glanced at Daye. “Speaking of nothing, you could have made me some tea too, you know.”
“No,” she said.
“Typical.” He turned back to Xhea. “If everything works out, maybe we’ll still get the big payoff. Maybe. But if it all goes wrong, crashing aircar style? We’re going with it.”
“You know too much.”
“Oh, blighted hell, yes. These last few days? Just a glimpse of the past month.”
Xhea blinked at that. “Month? What did they hire you for?” Because she’d thought they’d been hired to kidnap her, and to guard her and Ieren both.
A nod. “That’s when Ieren killed his handler—the man sent by the Spire to watch over him. The boy became unpredictable, his mood swings wilder. There was no one to rein him in when he got out of control. Those who tried, died. Until we got here.”
Maybe she should have been taken aback by the thought that Ieren had killed—but she wasn’t. Not after seeing one of his mood swings for herself. That much dark magic flying around in his anger? Even she’d felt it. And how could you stop a child having a tantrum when he could kill you on a whim?
“You want out, why don’t you just go? You’re Rown citizens.” Surely that offered some protection, even if only within their walls.
“Rown who dances at Farrow’s command? Rown whose barrier Ieren bored straight through, turning it to dust and ashes while we watched? Rown who barred the door when last we returned home, calling us spies? That Rown?” He shook his head. “We managed to grab a few of our things, but we can never return.”
And oh, the bitterness in his voice—anger, sudden and sharp, to mask the grief. Rown had saved him, he’d told her once; taken him in when he was no one, just a scrawny kid too clever for his own good with a mouth that always got him knocked to the dirt. Rown had given him a chance when no one else had.
Xhea had never known how Daye had come to Rown, nor to stand at Torrence’s side; there was no point in asking. But Xhea imagined that Daye’s blank expression hid the same sorrow, the same pain of leaving. Even if they were to escape Farrow and any retribution, their lives would be forever altered.
No going back.
“So what are you saying?” she asked dryly. “That we should work together, just like we did before you abducted me?”
“Now, now,” Torrence said. “You don’t have to be like that.”
Xhea’s voice turned sharp enough to cut. “How else am I supposed to be, Torrence? Sweetness and blight, if you knew Farrow was doomed, why drag me here? You could have just left me out of it.”
Torrence shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve got nothing but bad choices and worse, darlin’ girl. You know that. Nowhere to run, Ieren with us … what would you have done?”
“I wouldn’t have stabbed Mercks, that’s for blighted sure. I wouldn’t have pulled another person into this mess.”
Again, that shrug. “And I wouldn’t have gone underground at all, if I were you. But you did anyway. We all make our choices, darlin’. We’re all stuck with the fallout.”
It was true. Run away, the ghost had said. A ghost Ieren had sent to find her, and who had instead tried to warn her. A ghost that Ieren had devoured. She’d been warned; she’d just chosen not to listen. Anything, she had thought, to break the boredom. If only she could go back in time, she’d smack herself.
“You feeling better?” Torrence asked.
No, Xhea wanted to say, I feel like I’m dying—except she didn’t anymore. Her hands, wrapped around her mug, were steadier; her mind felt clearer, and her teeth had stopped their awful chattering. She was still weak and feverish, and nothing—not the warmth nor the tea nor the distraction of their words—had touched the growing pain of her hunger. She nodded anyway.
“The lifting will be in a few days, at most. Not much time to get out. And you do want out, right?”
“I can leave. Ahrent said I could go at any time.” Xhea looked to Daye for confirmation. She hadn’t seen Ahrent, hadn’t had a chance to ask him to let her go like she’d meant—but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t.
Daye just looked at her, slow and steady. She did not say anything; she did not need to.
“You’re lying,” Xhea said. “Both of you.”
Torrence raised his hands palm up and shrugged. “We do have that tendency, I admit. But not this time. You can’t walk out of here any more than we can.”
“You left yesterday.”
“Only on official business, and it’s the rare mission where Ahrent lets both Daye and I leave Farrow together.”
But that, Xhea thought, was their problem—not hers. Though it brought up the one thing she truly did not understand: “Why do you need me?” she asked. “Why are you even here?”
“Because, even injured as you are, there are things you can do that neither of us can.”
She snorted. “You mean I’m leverage.”
“No, I meant what I said—but you’re leverage too, if it comes to it.”
“Lovely.”
Torrence smiled—yet for a moment, beneath the charming expression, he looked tired. “Just think about it.” He turned to Daye. “You ready?”
A nod.
“We’ll see you in the morning, then,” he told Xhea. “One way or another.”
Daye paused. She retrieved the cane from near her chair, and laid it by the couch where Xhea could reach it when she rose. Torrence, his hand on the doorknob, frowned.
“We can get her another cane,” he said, as if Xhea wasn’t there. “You don’t have to give it to her.”
Daye shook her head.
“Are you sure?” Daye just looked at him until he raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, whatever you want.” Shaking his head, Torrence left the room.
As Daye made to follow, Xhea whispered, “Daye?”
She spoke softly enough that Daye might have pretended she hadn’t heard; yet she paused in the doorway, glancing back. There were so many things that Xhea could say; more, in truth, that she couldn’t. Why did thanks lodge so fully in her throat, the words hard and round as stones?
“It was my mother’s,” Daye said, nodding toward the cane, and then closed the door behind her.
Xhea stared at the ceiling for a long time after Torrence and Daye had left. Despite the exhaustion that dragged at her limbs and eyelids alike, sleep seemed impossibly far away. She’d always thought better when she was moving, but she knew better than to pace. Or sit up. Or move at all, really.
Maybe they’re right, she thought. Maybe Farrow’s attempt is destined for failure. Still she imagined it: a skyscraper rising, leaving the dirt and the ruin of the Lower City behind. Not just one Lower City dweller escaping to a better life, but hundreds.
Xhea sighed, her feet restless, her hunger a painful ache. It was not that she wanted to stay, not that she believed all Ahrent had said. Wasn’t even that she stood to learn more about her magic—good and bad and flat-out terrifying—within these walls. She shuddered, remembering Ieren as he’d consumed part of the young boy’s ghost—and tried to push the memory away.
It was just—
Xhea smiled then, a thin and humorless expression. It was just that she did not know where she could go, what she could do if it were not this. Once she might have run from this place without a backward glance. Now, this was the only place where she was wanted, needed, and she’d abandon it for—what? Some cold, small room, hidden away. Limping the halls, day and night, tolerated only for Shai’s presence. Xhea looked at her q
uivering hands, her weak and broken knee. She was hurt and feverish and dangerous.
Edren wants me. That was the lie she had been trying to tell herself. If not Edren, then Lorn, or Emara, or … someone. But if that were true, where was her rescue? Where was the sign that anyone had even noticed her absence?
Oh Shai, she thought. Where are you? The ghost should have found her by now. Unless, of course, she wasn’t looking.
What if she just … left? Left Xhea; left the living world entirely. Xhea couldn’t imagine which fate was worse. But no, she tried to reassure herself, Shai had been angry with her before they separated, little though Xhea had understood the cause—but surely not so much that she’d turn her back on Xhea altogether.
Xhea took a long, shuddering breath, trying to push away the fear and uncertainty. Ever since she’d understood how badly her knee had been injured, she’d felt like something had fled from her. Confidence, maybe; trust in her own worth. That feeling, however misguided, that she could handle everything on her own.
The ability to walk away.
She might as well have been bound, though she could not see the ropes that held her. Her past and her future, her needs and Farrow’s, Ahrent’s bold words and the dark magic that tied her to Ieren sure as any tether. Her fear. Her desire, in spite of everything, to learn more about the power that even now seemed to hollow her out and fill her up at the same time.
Xhea looked at the pale gray of the ceiling, the patterned gray of the aging walls. On the table before her, the candle burned out. She smelled mint and wax and the faint wisp of smoke—and beneath it all, the dust and rot of the Lower City itself. All the myriad scents of the people left to live and die and scrabble for scraps in the Towers’ shadows.
Sweetness save me, she thought. This? A blighted Tower? If only.
But she didn’t need to trust Ahrent’s word, she realized; if he were telling the truth, the evidence would be written all around her. Spells upon spells within the walls and ceiling and floor—spells that she’d already glimpsed in passing. To bring this ancient hulk of concrete and rebar to life, power had to flow through those spells day and night. Even Ahrent’s little metal sculpture, its core softly glowing like the heart of a living thing, had absorbed years of his magic.
Xhea refocused her eyes. A moment and then the grays vanished, replaced by a glimmer of light. She stared at the lone thread of a spell. Yet she’d no sooner begun to frown than she saw further, deeper, and gasped as layer after layer of spells were revealed. It took a moment to understand what she was seeing: the spells in the ceiling, and in one above that, all the way up to the skyscraper’s top level, superimposed one atop the other.
Then she could only stare as the extent of the spells appeared before her eyes, unfolding like page after page of some dense novel written across the skyscraper’s floors and ceiling and walls. However long its creation, Xhea had expected this working to be crude; massive, but crude. The reality, shimmering all around her, was enough to stop her breath, for what Farrow’s casters had lacked in raw power they had made up for in complexity. It was beyond beautiful—it was a complex piece of art drawn across years, and it flared to life before her.
Viewed one atop the other, it was all but impossible to tell where one spell ended and the next began. She knew some small bit about reading spells’ lines of intent, but this was far beyond anything she’d ever seen, ever known.
Deeper still, there were designs. Dim, now: the patterns glimmered on the edge of her seeing, faint but present. It was a charm, Xhea realized—the biggest charm she had ever imagined never mind seen. The lines of wires, of drawn patterns, of designs scraped and carved into Farrow’s very bones, all held the shape of a spell where magic alone was too weak.
This was not the work of one man, no matter how passionate, but the work of generations. She could see the casters’ signatures, many and varied, written in magic all around her.
She did not know how long she stared, watching magic flow through the building all around her, making her feel as if she were held in a cradle of light. Maybe Torrence and Daye were wrong. Her own earlier misgivings, too, seemed trivial—all her fatigue and worry and uncertainty—compared to something so vast and beautiful.
It will be okay, Xhea told herself. One way or another. At last, she sank into the couch’s embrace and closed her eyes, banishing the vision.
Daye came for her the next morning long before dawn, before Xhea had managed to force herself out of the couch’s embrace. She had slept, but not deeply and not well, and was more than ready for the distraction.
“Ahrent Altaigh is waiting,” Daye said in her strangely soft voice.
“For what?” Xhea asked, fitting the brace around her discolored knee. Her hands were still shaking. Steady, she told herself. Steady.
“You.”
After three tries, Xhea managed to get to her feet and stood swaying, the cane’s support the only thing keeping her up. Her vision, too, wavered. She kept feeling the sudden shift that she had oft thought of as refocusing her eyes to see magic, and suddenly the room around her would bloom with light and pattern, reflections of the spells beyond.
The depth—and the growing strength—of that vision surprised her. She was tired of being surprised, tired of being weak, tired of being tired. Oh, for the strength she’d once taken for granted. The strength to set her shoulders and shrug as if nothing in the world could touch her. The strength to simply stop caring.
Beneath it all was the weight not of magic, but the hunger its use had engendered—a feeling that went beyond hurt or desire into stark, cold need.
Xhea closed her eyes and swayed unsteadily, then took a deep breath and tried to push it all away. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
They walked in silence to the elevator and then up to the skyscraper’s highest floor, returning once more to the penthouse suite where she had first met Ahrent Altaigh. As the elevator doors slid open, Xhea spoke without thinking: “Something’s changed.”
Her words were meant more for herself than the man who once more stood across the room, looking through the expanse of windows—and oh, the exhaustion made evident in those spoken words, for who was she to express her thoughts aloud? Especially here.
Yet it was true, a myriad small things telling her their stories. Again, there was food on the table, but the plates were scattered as if left in haste. No places laid, no covered dishes; only the familiar: roasted skewers with scraps of unidentifiable meat, a tangle of cold, spiced noodles, and bits of day-old bread. Lower City breakfast. For all that her hunger roared within her, Xhea made no move toward it.
There were papers scattered over one end of the table, piled haphazardly as if they had been read, set aside, then read again. Half a glass of water dripped condensation on the table’s surface, and from the sediment she knew it was unfiltered rainwater.
Not so fancy after all. She did not know how much of what she’d seen two days before had been truth and how much charade; but the charade, it seemed, had been discarded. Something had changed—including the man who had brought her here, not least of all his face.
For when he turned to her, Ahrent Altaigh, he might have been a different person. She recognized his dark eyes and arching brows, the sharp lines of his cheekbones. The stubble was new, and his silver-streaked hair was in some disarray.
But his expression? There was nothing she recognized there, no sign of the carefully crafted façade she’d seen before—even if she’d not known it as such before this moment. At their first meeting, she’d thought Ahrent a leader, then a spellcaster; during the long, quiet night that followed, she’d wondered what else he might be. Politician. Commander. Heir.
Now she saw all of those things, and none of them. She saw a man, just a man, strong and raw and somehow vulnerable.
He met her eyes, no hint of smile on that face. “Hello, Xhea,” he said, then turned back to the window. No lift of his hand, no gesture, but she felt the invitation nonetheless. X
hea made her slow way across the room to the window by his side, grateful for the cane’s support. The coins and charms bound into her braid-tangled hair made a soft, rhythmic music in the silence.
On the way here, she’d wondered what she should say to him, how to voice her questions and the fears that circled through her thoughts. She’d wondered whether to ask that she be allowed to leave—wondered how to demand the truth about him, about Farrow, about her abduction. She’d felt her anger rising, and with it rose her magic and the hunger with which it seemed entwined.
Instead, she stood at his side and looked out across the Lower City.
It was calm here, and dark. The sun had not yet risen, though it lit the eastern horizon with a wash of paling gray, erasing the stars. Below, the Lower City streets were shadowed black, everything poised and still. Seen from on high, the Lower City looked more like a picture than the home she knew so well; and, lightheaded and feverish, Xhea forgot to be afraid.
She looked up. The City glimmered, the Towers wrapped in veils of light, and she saw—
Xhea hesitated, blinked, and looked again.
The Towers above, always bright, seemed in that moment like brilliant pillars of light scattered across the sky. Looking down, she could see people—not in the streets, not yet, but she saw them as if walls were no hindrance to her sight. People sprawled in their makeshift beds against the summer’s oppressive heat; people waking, rising, slowly moving. She saw them not as distant ant-like figures, but as lights, as if each held a glow in their head and heart—a glow sometimes so dim as to be barely visible, a glow that was nothing compared to the light of the Towers above, but a glow nonetheless.
Blind, Ieren had said. Or almost.
It wasn’t true—not in the way it counted. It wasn’t that she could not see, only that she saw differently. Magic, she realized. Gray upon gray: she didn’t see light, but magic—and not just spells like those in the walls, not just power forced out into the world, but magic in its truest form. Magic running through a body sure as blood.
Defiant Page 23