His body slowed to a stop at Darshan’s feet.
Ean looked dizzily up to see the man staring down at him. Five sets of dark eyes gazed reproachfully, five mouths pursed in a disappointed line.
“This behavior hardly becomes you, Prince of Dannym.”
Necessity gathered Ean’s wits. He somersaulted backwards and came up on his feet with his hand on his sword.
And then what? You’ll fight him in hand to hand combat?
Ean was desperate enough at that point to try.
But Darshan had other plans. A circle of deyjiin geysered up around him, trapping him yet again.
Dizzy, frustrated, all Ean could wonder in that disheartening moment was why the man kept trapping him instead of simply destroying him? Did he mean to merely toy with his prey before consuming it?
‘Come and find me. I’ll be waiting…’
This comportment hardly seemed like the Enemy he remembered…
And then it hit him. Darshan was not—could not—be the Enemy of Arion’s past. He lifted the Malorin’athgul a look of sudden clarity. “You’re not the one I met before…are you?”
Darshan twirled his scepter. “We met every time you claimed one of my eidola.”
A tentacle of sizzling energy leapt from the net towards Ean and sparked against his fifth-strand shield. The frenetic energy continued dancing between shield and net, tiny filaments of icy death drawn to elae’s warmth.
Ean expelled his breath in a frustrated hiss. He had to get out of there. Every time deyjiin touched his shields, he felt icy needles stabbing his brain, felt himself weakening. To compound matters, Darshan was bombarding him with a wicked volley of compulsion aimed at reclaiming his mind.
But Ean had seen Darshan’s innate pattern now; he knew how the Malorin’athgul formulated his intent. So long as his shield held—so long as his strength held—the immortal would not again be able to invade his thoughts.
But neither strength nor shield would hold for long under these conditions.
While Darshan considered him amid a deep and disturbing silence, Ean hastily sought some way of escaping the net. He couldn’t unwork patterns of deyjiin, even had he been able to see them. Nor would it help him to throw elae at the net. Deyjiin would only consume the energy.
So if you can’t unwork the net and you can’t break through it, what can you do?
Ean wondered resignedly why so many of his thoughts had to take on Isabel’s tone of voice.
Darshan clasped hands behind his back again and thrust the spear of his attention at Ean. “I have—”
“My lord! My lord are you all right?” A banging on the outer doors of the chamber drew Darshan’s eye. It was the chance Ean needed—just an instant free of Darshan’s pinioning gaze.
He looked down at his feet and thought, liquid.
The floor melted beneath him.
Thirty-nine
“Fortune never shares her bed with vengeance.”
–Isabel van Gelderan, Epiphany’s Prophet
Nadia van Gelderan, heir to the Empire of Agasan, touched her own cheek and drew her finger across her skin, tracing a path that mirrored the dark patterns around Caspar’s eyes. “But are they actual tattoos?”
Caspar was sitting cross-legged just a few inches away, on the other side of the invisible wall of deadly static. His eyes were closed and he had his hands clasped in his lap, allowing her to study the patterns masking his face.
Nadia had found him waiting for her when she’d awoken that morning. He’d barely left her side, in fact, since she’d bonded with him.
Bonded with a Marquiin.
A bond could be easily undone, but it was still an incredibly foolhardy act. Never mind that Tanis had done far more reckless things. She wasn’t sure she should use Tanis’s choices as any sort of yardstick for measuring her own.
“The Prophet fashioned the marks when he made me Marquiin,” Caspar answered, eyes still closed. “I don’t know how he created them. My eyes became painfully cold, and then I felt the patterns sort of…uncoil through my flesh.”
Nadia gazed at the patterns with fascination. They clearly weren’t native to elae, nor did they appear to be inverteré—though she knew only scant theory about the latter. But if not native to the Realms of Light…could it be possible she was looking at actual patterns of Chaos?
The idea roused a sort of nervous excitement. She couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the energy field or the patterns themselves, but they seemed to emit a faint silvery sheen. She shifted closer to the screen, pushing her nose into the static fringes. Stinging needles zapped its tip. “They have a certain luster to them, don’t they?”
Caspar opened his eyes and met her gaze. “I wouldn’t know.”
She drew back to stare at him. “You mean you haven’t looked at yourself at all? Not even once?”
“Would you, Nadia?”
The question gave her pause. Once she thought about it, she still wasn’t sure what she would’ve done. She touched her fingers to her own cheeks in lieu of touching his. “They’re frightening because they’re so different. But they’re also rather beautiful.”
“I can see my face in your thoughts, Nadia. Perhaps…” but for whatever reason, he didn’t voice his thought, only confessed into the shared space of their minds, I think if you were standing beside me, I could be bold enough to look.
Nadia could not mistake his intimation. It made her apprehensive…and even slightly fluttery.
Suddenly the howling wind that ever roamed Caspar’s mind blew open a shutter into her own, and Nadia rushed to shut it again.
The effort of cordoning off this tumult was draining her strength by the hour. This was one of the risks of the bond she’d allowed—nay…the bond she’d forged after catching the desperate lifeline Caspar had thrown at her. But despite that chaos storm, she didn’t want Caspar to go away any more than he wanted to leave her side. He was her only friend in that despairing place.
As soon as she shut out the howling mental winds, she felt Caspar shudder and then settle within the refuge of her mind, like a tiny animal sheltering in her arms while a cyclone raged outside. They were both equally trapped in a sanctuary that neither dared leave.
“How long can you endure it?”
She managed a weak smile that she hoped he would find encouraging. “A bit longer yet.”
He studied her in silence. Then he held up his hand before the invisible wall. Nadia matched it with her own. His eyes, holding hers, entreated caution. “Please don’t weaken yourself because of me.”
“I’m not as fragile as I look, Caspar.”
“No…” he lowered his hand and gazed off along the barrier, “but the Prophet’s storm is everlasting.”
“We just—” but whatever she might’ve said, the words fell unspoken off her tongue, disrupted by the sound of men running.
Caspar moved quickly to his feet. “Something’s happening.” He darted a look over his shoulder and then back to her. “Your rescuer?”
Somehow she didn’t think Pelas would’ve announced himself so dramatically. Her gaze tightened, and she stared beyond the veiling wall of her prison feeling oddly unsettled. “I’m…not sure.”
“I should go look into it.”
“No—please.” She automatically reached for him and just checked her hand before it touched the deadly field. She entreated him with her gaze instead. “Please stay with me.”
He considered her while exhaling a slow breath. Then he nodded. “As you wish.” He slowly settled back down into the same cross-legged position, grey robes pooling around him.
She braved a slight smile. “You don’t mind staying, do you?”
Caspar looked into her eyes. “There is nowhere I’d rather be, Nadia.”
Nadia quickly dropped her gaze. She ought not to feel nervous beneath his stare. She ought not to care how he was looking at her.
Oh, if only her mind might’ve been free of this torment that she could think more cle
arly, see clearly where lines should be drawn for sake of propriety and even her own troths! But Caspar was providing as desperate a lifeline for her as she was for him, and she couldn’t let go of him just yet.
No… Nadia swallowed around a sudden welling lump, the produce of ever ripening fears…not just yet.
***
Ean sprinted through the bowels of the Prophet’s temple, keeping his mind and body shielded and his eyes on the currents. His fall from the gallery through melting stone had delivered him onto a level of windowless chambers and servants’ quarters, which had been built in labyrinthine fashion around the monolithic blocks that supported the upper temple. Even using the currents as a guide, he hadn’t yet found his way out.
This futile flight of yours suits neither of our purposes, Ean. Darshan’s stiletto thought stabbed painfully into Ean’s consciousness. Unable to gain control of Ean’s mind, the Malorin’athgul was exploring new ways to penetrate his shield by fashioning his thoughts into different shapes. You cannot hide from me in my own temple.
But Ean didn’t intend to hide. He intended to get the hell out of there.
He paused at an intersection of passages and pressed a hand to the wall, hanging his head while his breath burned in and out of his lungs. A constant bombardment of compulsion hammered at his consciousness, a hailstorm against his mental shield. It would’ve been challenging enough if his sole attention had been upon preventing that storm from shattering the fourth-strand barrier he’d fashioned to protect himself, but he also had to find some way through the temple’s minotaur maze, knowing full well that the beast was hunting him.
Ean focused his mind’s eye upon the copper-hued labyrinth that spread before him, the product of his second-strand working. He searched the mental overlay of twisting passages while listening to the pounding rhythm of his heart. His hand trembled against the wall. Just holding his shields in place felt like he was hauling one of his grandfather’s ships onto dry dock on his back.
Take care, Ean.
Ean ground his teeth. Damn it all, he didn’t need Isabel’s warnings! He knew perfectly well that if he pushed himself too hard his mind would become a sieve, that he wouldn’t even be able to grasp elae, much less mold it to his intent. But the only other choice would be to give Darshan free access to his mind.
He could make you into his weapon. He could make you eidola.
The horror of this thought—which echoed against some fear Arion had also experienced—flung Ean into motion again. He took a flight of steps two at a time and turned down a long hallway, running towards the far end where a solitary lamp burned a cold, dim light. The entire level looked deserted. The servants had probably fled at the first sound of the alarm.
Why do you insist upon this cat and mouse effort, Ean? Darshan’s thought struck as lightning against his shield.
Ean gritted his teeth and pushed on, wondering what possible reason Darshan could have for apprehending him if vengeance wasn’t his aim. The Malorin’athgul had barely seemed to care what Ean had done to his Marquiin and eidola, save to understand how he’d done it.
‘The currents will show you what is true…’ Isabel’s words. But they couldn’t be showing him the truth, for they defied his every expectation.
Reaching the end of the passage, the prince flung himself around a corner and past an open chamber, large and well lit, just glancing within—
And drew up short.
Inside, a dark-haired girl was just rising to her feet; but it was the energy field in front of her that riveted his attention.
As a moth drawn blindly from darkness towards the light, Ean moved inside the chamber, his every perception glued to that shimmering field. He’d never encountered patterns like the ones captured within this static sheet of energy—patterns which seemed to bind deyjiin and elae together.
Balanced? The two energies are balanced? He hadn’t thought it possible for deyjiin and elae to coexist.
Barely noticing the girl staring at him from the other side of the field, Ean lifted a hand—
“Be careful,” said a male voice to his right.
Ean stepped back and drew his sword.
“Stop!” gasped the girl.
The man—Marquiin?—lifted both hands in quick surrender. He appeared to be unarmed, but Ean kept his sword pointed at him while he glanced brusquely to the girl. “Who are you?”
She looked nervously at his sword and its evident target. “I might ask the same of you, sir.”
Ean spared another moment to look her over. Though apparently a prisoner, she was radiating purpose, and when their eyes met…
A sudden powerful sense of kismet flooded him.
Ean shifted his gaze between the female truthreader and the Marquiin, who seemed hardly older than himself. Without understanding why, he exhaled a forceful breath and lowered his sword. “I am Ean val Lorian.”
***
‘I am Ean val Lorian.’
Nadia couldn’t believe she’d heard him correctly. She wasted several astonished heartbeats trying to accept this truth. “Tanis’s Ean?” She stared at him while a tingling sensation coursed through her for no reason she could explain. “You’re the Crown Prince of Dannym?”
Ean stared at her in return. “You know Tanis?” He spun a look between her and Caspar and then stepped closer to the field. A sense of urgency underscored his manner. “Do you know where he is? What’s happened to him?”
Nadia gazed wide-eyed at him. “I know much of Tanis. I’m Nadia van Gelderan.”
Now it was Ean’s turn to draw back with widening eyes. “The Princess Heir?”
She managed a flickering smile, more revealing of culpability than hauteur.
Ean was clearly trying to comprehend the machinations behind this improbable meeting. Well, so was Nadia.
“The Prophet took you hostage?” Ean looked again to Caspar, obviously confused by his presence.
“No.” Nadia grimaced. “I was a…gift.”
Ean turned back to stare at her. “A gift to Darshan? From whom?”
An odd sense of relief flooded Nadia upon hearing Ean speak the Prophet’s true name. The prince knew of the Malorin’athgul then. “From his brother Shail.”
Ean exhaled an oath, and Nadia saw a flurry of thoughts sweep across his gaze. Something in his manner reminded her of her father—whereupon she realized that what she was perceiving in the prince was elae’s fifth strand. He must’ve been shielding himself with it.
“Your Highness, what are you doing here?” She gazed at him with wonder threaded through concern, for Ean looked about as haggard as a man could manage and still be on his feet.
The prince startled back to awareness and looked to her sharply. Then he took a step away and looked over the field, assessing it with a critical eye. “There’s got to be a way to get you out of there.”
He lifted his sword towards the field.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” came a voice from the archway behind Ean.
Nadia caught her breath, and her heart did a little jump, for she knew that voice! She moved to better see around Ean’s form.
Pelas stood in the portal. “Opposing polarities, you see…” but his words trailed off as Ean turned to face him, and his expression went slack. “Ean.” Pelas sounded horrified.
“Pelas.” Ean’s tone pulsed with fury—an inexplicable fury that filled Nadia with immediate dread.
Pelas lifted a hand. “Ean, you must let me explain—”
Ean swung for him.
Pelas threw up his hand—he must’ve summoned some kind of shield, for Ean’s sword sliced along it in a wild spray of sparks. “Ean, I don’t want to fight you!”
Ean dove at him again. That time his sword struck Pelas’s shield with a forceful explosion. The prince skidded backwards towards the energy field and just rooted his footing before slamming into it.
Pelas lowered his hand, looking tormented. “Ean, please—”
Ean leveled his sword at him
. “You will not speak to me.” Then with a look of fury, he flung his sword into the energy field.
Light flared in a blinding eruption of force. The concussion knocked Nadia backwards off her feet, knocked her breath painfully from her lungs. Her vision went starry and then dark, and the next thing she knew, she was tumbling into chaos.
***
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” came a voice from the archway.
Ean froze, at first unbelieving of his ears. Of all the improbable, impossible places to meet…
“Opposing polarities, you see…” but Pelas trailed off as Ean turned to face him, and when their eyes met—
A violent and instinctive urge to attack instantly roused within the prince. He saw himself with his bare hands around Pelas’s throat—he saw twenty ways at once to destroy this duplicitous man, who had helped him rescue his brother but then taken Isabel to his bed…who’d sliced Chaos patterns into her flesh!
Ean sucked in his breath through clenched teeth, while fury exploded in his chest and loathing blackened his gaze.
Pelas’s face went slack. “Ean.”
“Pelas.” The name tasted like char on his tongue.
Pelas lifted a placating hand. “Ean, you must let me explain—”
Ean swung for his head.
Pelas threw up a shield, and Ean’s sword sliced along it in a spray of searing sparks. “I don’t want to fight you, Ean!”
But Ean had descended to a plane of frost and fury where reason lay as rime upon the world to be tread upon by vengeance’s iron hooves. In Pelas, Ean didn’t see a Malorin’athgul, only the man who’d tortured and then bedded his wife.
With fury veiling his gaze, Ean dove at Pelas again, that time putting the fifth into his blade. His sword striking Pelas’s shield caused an explosion that flung Ean backwards towards the energy field. He threw the fifth behind himself to recover his footing.
Pelas lowered his hand, wearing a look of abject remorse. “Ean, please—”
Ean leveled his sword at Pelas and aimed his words along its razor edge. “You will not speak to me.” Ean couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. All he knew was that this man had to feel what he’d felt, had to atone for the harm he’d caused. Suddenly he realized that a deadly weapon lay just behind him.
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