by K. A. Linde
Matilde’s head snapped to her. “What do you mean?”
She chewed on her lip and looked away. She knew it was ridiculous to hide Byern secrets from them, but the thought of telling them about what had occurred was horrifying. It made her stomach knot up and her body tense. She wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about this. She had given the Byern royalty her word that she would never speak about this.
“Are you all right?” Vera asked.
Avoca reached out and touched her head. “You’re all clammy.”
Cyrene took a deep breath and then forced the words out, “When you become an Affiliate, you go through a loyalty ceremony called the Rose Garden ceremony. It is similar to what happened with Avoca, but magic couldn’t have happened in Byern. It doesn’t exist in Byern.”
Matilde and Vera looked at each other in horror. There was a moment of stunned silence before everyone began speaking at once.
“How could you never mention this?” Avoca asked.
“What happened in the ceremony?” Vera asked.
“Those Dremylons! I can’t believe they would do this,” Matilde spat.
“Slow down!” Cyrene cried. “I didn’t realize how important this was. I had to declare my loyalty to Byern by drinking out of a vial. I had…visions, and at the end, they told me not to speak of it to anyone.”
“At the end, was any kind of magic used? Did you feel anything out of the ordinary? Anything at all?” Matilde pressed.
Cyrene thought back and realized it with a shock. “A jolt. I felt this electric pulse go through me. I didn’t know what it was at the time—”
“Gods,” Matilde murmured.
“What does that mean?” Avoca asked shakily.
“It means,” Vera said, “that Byern has been binding people to them…to the country and the land and the entire Dremylon line.”
“I thought only people with magic could be Bound,” Avoca said quickly.
“So did I,” Matilde said. “But it explains so much. These are just done to Affiliates and High Order?”
“Yes,” Cyrene confirmed.
“Somehow, the Dremylons have figured out how to get around the laws of magical nature, and in binding people to the country and the line, they are forcing these people to work in Byern’s interests. It starts with the conditioning and is solidified with the Bound ceremony.”
Cyrene swallowed. “No. That can’t be it. I’m here. I went against the wishes of the Dremylons and Byern. I used my powers and escaped. I’m here!” She didn’t want to believe that to be the truth. It would mean so much more of her life was a lie.
“Have you felt drawn to go back home? A need to return? An unnatural need for either of the Dremylon boys?” Vera asked clinically.
Cyrene looked down and swallowed. “Um…yes. But it’s been diminishing since I started using my powers.”
Matilde and Vera looked at each other and seemed to come to a resigned conclusion.
“Sit,” Matilde ordered. “We’ll tell you a story.”
“Once upon a time,” Vera said with a sad smile, “we were much like you. Young and ambitious. We traveled all the way from Eleysia to Byern to join the Doma. Matilde’s powers manifested when she was extremely young, and mine showed up just before I turned seventeen.”
“We passed the ritual like your Presenting and were temporarily placed with a Doma because we had shown…exceptional skills,” Matilde continued. “We were shipped out of Byern and went deep into the frozen tundra in the Haevan Mountains. We had never been in cold before. It was devastating.”
Vera cleared her throat. “Details, sister. We were to be trained with a select group of Doma and Leifs. It was tough work. Harder than we’d ever thought possible, and at the end of it…we were Bound.”
Avoca leaned forward with her mouth agape. “You’re not saying…”
Vera smiled. “I think Avoca knows of what we speak. We were part of an ancient group called The Society. Some called us Dragon Bound.”
Cyrene’s mouth dropped. “Dragons?”
“Yes,” Matilde confirmed. “Dragons have exceptionally long life spans. Longer even than most Leifs. And, after the fall of the Doma, our dragons were not welcome anymore in Emporia. They fled our world, but as long as they live…so do we, which is how we have survived these last two thousand years.”
“Why didn’t you leave with them?” Avoca asked.
“The curse,” Vera said.
“Curse?” Cyrene asked.
Vera nodded. “Magic has been contained within Emporia for all these years. In an attempt to rid the world of our kind, we were trapped at the end of the War of the Light, so Viktor Dremylon and his army could hunt us down and kill us. Rid the world of magic. There were so few Doma left, and where the most magical blood still existed—Byern—any potential Doma were killed before they could reach safety.”
Cyrene shook her head in horror. “How am I alive?”
“We have to assume, the strength of your powers,” Matilde said. “And your determination to get away. I cannot think your desire for adventure is a coincidence.”
“So, as you see”—Vera revealed her wrist, and Matilde stretched hers out as well. As with Cyrene and Avoca, they had shimmery gold tattoos that appeared bright as they ran their fingers over them—“our bond has diminished with distance and time from our Bound mate, but it is still there. It is entirely possible that the connection you feel to Byern and anything in Byern is drawing from your strength as it tries to pull you back.”
“That’s…horrible. And I did it unwillingly.”
“No,” Matilde corrected. “No one can be Bound unwillingly. You might have done it without knowledge of the consequences, but it had to be done willingly.”
How naive she had been to think that all she could ever want in life was to be an Affiliate, to be tied to her homeland. She certainly hadn’t been able to grasp the full realm of what that ceremony meant at the time, and now, somehow, she was Bound for life.
“Can I…remove it?” Cyrene asked hopefully.
Matilde and Vera sighed and exchanged worried glances.
“I’m afraid that is outside our area of expertise,” Vera said. “If there’s a way to break a binding, we haven’t found one.”
Matilde gave her a long level look. “And, believe us…we’ve tried.”
Winter came and went without a single snowflake.
And, as the time passed, Cyrene’s powers grew, her control improved, and she was lost more and more to this boy.
“Just one more,” Dean said, wrapping his arms around her waist and trying to hold her to him.
“I have to go. You always make me late,” Cyrene chided.
He dropped his lips down on hers again, and she sighed into him. Creator, I could do this all day! He swung her around in his room and backed her legs up against the footboard of his bed.
“Skip training for one day,” he encouraged.
“And would you skip a day of your military training?”
“For you, I would do anything.”
He planted a kiss on her lips and then across her cheek before moving down the curve of her neck. She felt breathless.
She had to fight not to give in and skip training for the day. Matilde, Vera, and Avoca would kill her. But it was getting harder and harder to pull away from Dean. Harder and harder to remind herself to stop and not to give herself away. Many people back home had thought that Cyrene was Edric’s mistress, and despite the fact that it wasn’t true, Cyrene did not want the same rumors to fly about her and Dean. He wasn’t married, but it simply wasn’t proper to move forward. But curse her body for wanting to.
“I have to go,” she reminded him.
“You said that once.”
“You will be the death of me, Dean Ellison.”
She tugged away from him, but he grabbed her hand and gently kissed it.
“You are the life of me, Cyrene Strohm.”
“How do you expect me to leave when you say thing
s like that?”
His brown eyes lit up, and that gorgeous smile that had won her over lit her up from the inside out. “I don’t.”
“I have work to do.”
“How is that going?” he asked sincerely.
She knew he was just trying to keep her with him longer. He would do it every day they were together, and that was most days after he had talked to Alise and convinced her to leave them alone. She had been under the impression that Cyrene was just going to disappear, but the longer Cyrene had stayed, the clearer it had become that she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Good,” Cyrene said. “Making progress.”
“Moved on from water?”
Cyrene frowned and shook her head.
Despite her limitation of being Bound to Byern, Cyrene had been working twice as hard to master her powers. Matilde and Vera had warned her that it normally took years to be able to manipulate all of the elements, but Cyrene didn’t want to hear it. She felt ahead of the game since she was Bound to Avoca. They had spent all winter on the water element, and they had to be getting close to mastering it. Cyrene was anxious to move forward with her training.
“No, but I will, if you let me go,” she rebuked.
He groaned in protest, but then he leaned down and kissed her one more time, wrapping his arms around her. “Come back to me today. I’m going to miss you.”
“You’ll be too busy beating Robard to miss me,” she said with a wink before scurrying out of his arms and rushing to the door.
Training went much the same as it had been going.
She’d wake up exhausted and go to bed exhausted. Her powers were growing, but she never felt like she used as much energy as she had against the Braj or Indres. No more blackouts. No more Serafina visions. Just the endless, tiresome work of making water do her bidding.
She and Avoca linked, and together, they reached toward the ocean and pulled up a huge amount of water. Cyrene took lead and began spiraling the water in the air, creating a spherical cyclone. Avoca twisted, and Cyrene could feel what she was going to do before she even did it. Avoca jerked her hand, and the cyclone rose into the air, picking up sand, rocks, and even more water. It rotated and enlarged as it spiraled upward.
All the while, Matilde was shooting dangerous flames in their direction. The first time she had tried that, both Avoca and Cyrene had needed new clothes because their gowns had been singed beyond repair by the end of practice. Now, working as a team, they could dodge the flames while still raising the water formation overhead.
“Now, freeze it,” Vera said.
She jabbed at Avoca with her magic, and Cyrene could feel the ice hit her in the sternum.
“Ugh!” Avoca cried, nearly losing focus.
Cyrene reacted on instinct to protect her and take more of the energy for herself. She felt the burst of release as her powers rushed from the depths within her. She took a deep breath and forced herself to keep going. She was never as good at freezing the water as Avoca, but it was a test. Vera had taken Avoca out of the equation for a reason.
Cyrene shot her hands forward, and in her moment of clarity, the sphere shook and cracked. Then, before her eyes, there was a perfectly round ice crystal. The bits of sand and rocks and seaweed were trapped within it, but it was so flawless that Cyrene nearly cried.
She brought it down toward them, and as it drew near, the water was so cold that it made their breaths come out in puffs in front of them. Cyrene giggled and then did something on instinct. She ruptured the ice crystal into tiny snowflakes and let them softly rain down on them, as if they were in the Taken Mountains.
She held her tongue out in front of herself and danced in the snow. Avoca laughed along with her, and soon, all four of them were twirling around in the snow on the middle of a deserted tropical island.
“First and last snow of the season,” Cyrene murmured.
“In spring,” Avoca said.
Matilde nodded with a smile at Cyrene and Avoca.
Vera looked pleased as well. “I think that concludes the water element.”
“What?” Cyrene asked in surprise.
“You have more to learn, but you could not have done what you just did without significant control and understanding of the element,” Matilde said.
Vera nodded. “The Bride of the Sea ceremony is coming up this week to praise the start of spring. We’ll break until then and start up on the next element henceforth.”
“What will we be working on?” Cyrene asked.
“Earth,” Matilde said automatically. “Avoca has a perfect grasp on it, and you should know how to manipulate her element, as she does yours.”
Avoca looked ecstatic. “I can’t wait.”
The girls returned to the capital with a feeling of giddiness between them. Avoca almost immediately disappeared to go find Ahlvie. He still wasn’t staying in the palace because he appeared to like his new job as an entertainer, but he had relocated closer to the grounds to be near Avoca and Cyrene.
To both Cyrene’s and Avoca’s dismay, Ceis’f had not returned. Avoca had sent a messenger to Eldora to ask her mother about him, and her response had been disheartening. No sign of Ceis’f back home either. If they hadn’t had training…and if not for Ahlvie, Cyrene was sure Avoca would have gone out to look for Ceis’f. But he had done what she had asked of him, so she tried to block him out.
Since today was the first day in months they had ended early, Cyrene decided to go down to the training barracks and check in on Dean. But, when she got down there, it was mostly empty, and no one had seen Dean at all that day. She found that strange but decided not to panic about it. She hurried back up to the palace and looked everywhere for him. She finally was about to give up when Robard abruptly stopped in front of her.
Cyrene stood her ground with fire in her eyes. “What do you want?”
“The Queen has requested your presence,” he said smoothly. “If you’ll follow me.”
“What? So, you and Alise can trap me again? I think not. You can tell me where to find her and be on your way.”
“I’m under orders.”
“And I don’t care.”
“From Prince Dean,” he bit out.
Cyrene’s brow furrowed. “If you make one wrong move…”
“No worries, Affiliate,” he said dryly. “I think where you’re going will be bad enough.”
Cyrene opened her mouth to ask what he was talking about, but he grabbed her elbow and unceremoniously yanked her down the hallway. She was lost in her thoughts about what the Queen could possibly want from her, let alone why Robard was collecting her on Dean’s orders.
When she stumbled forward into the throne room with Robard on her heels, the tension was unbearably high. Queen Cassia, Princesses Brigette and Alise, and Prince Dean were standing together, arguing. Each was yelling over the other, trying to be heard.
Queen Cassia snapped at them to be quiet, and everyone turned to stare at Cyrene at once. She had the distinct sense of déjà vu from the time when everyone in the castle had thought she had been murdered. Edric and Kael had rushed to her side because they had been so worried. But, for some reason, she didn’t think that was the case here.
The Queen was holding a piece of paper in her hand, and despite her regal appearance, she seemed ready to hurt the first person she got her hands on. Brigette looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. All of her energy had left her. Alise seemed smug, whereas Dean looked irritated.
When his eyes met Cyrene’s across the room, instead of the happy man she had been falling head over heels for, she saw he was guarded.
“You requested to see me, Your Majesty,” Cyrene said, falling back into her proper ways with ease. She dipped a low curtsy to the Queen before rising with her chin held high.
“Yes. It seems that your presence in my city has become an international matter,” the Queen said.
“Pardon?”
“You are to immediately leave Eleysia and return to your homeland,” she
commanded.
Cyrene’s eyes widened. “You’re making me leave? But why? I’ve been here for months. I thought I had proven myself.”
“It’s not a matter of proving yourself,” Queen Cassia said. She held up the paper in her hand, and from where Cyrene was standing, she could see that it was a letter. “It’s a matter of this.”
“Mother,” Dean said urgently, “can’t you reconsider?”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “You spoke for this girl once. I don’t think you can do any more for her.”
“What is that?” Cyrene asked.
“It is a personal letter from the King of Byern, demanding your immediate return upon receipt of this letter,” Queen Cassia said.
Cyrene’s mouth fell open. “He did what?” she snapped.
“He’s sending an army to retrieve you, in fact,” Alise said with a self-satisfied smile.
“An army?” Cyrene squeaked. “He would never—”
“Do it again,” Dean finished for her.
She opened her mouth to protest, but what could she say? Edric had sent an army into Aurum to retrieve her. No matter how validated she felt about leaving and finding the key to unlocking her magic in Eleysia, she couldn’t deny what he had done or why he had done it.
She had spent the last couple of months trying to forget the Dremylon men and all the trouble they caused…and what they did to her heart. But she refused to return at Edric’s summons. She was not a toy. She might be bound to Byern, but she’d rightfully made her own choice to leave.
“I’m not leaving Eleysia to go back to Byern,” Cyrene told them.
“You absolutely will!” Alise said.
The Queen shot her younger daughter a fierce look and then turned back to Cyrene. “We’re not starting a war over one person. You haven’t acted like other Affiliates here in Eleysia—I will say that much—but that does not mean we want Byern’s might knocking on our doorstep.”
“Let her stay, Mother,” Brigette said.
“No.”
“Do you want to break your son’s heart?” she whispered. But everyone could hear her.
Dean winced at the blow, as if someone had struck him. Cyrene wanted to reach out to him, but she knew that it wasn’t appropriate.