by Kallysten
Or it would have been if the cold had touched him. He didn’t seem to even notice the arctic cold she had conjured, though he must have known what she’d done as he sent in return a wave of searing heat. It wasn’t enough to burn her, but she made a mistake by trying to shield herself behind her own hands. While she was distracted, Rhuinn channeled a large amount of Quickening. In a few seconds, he built up walls around and above them, enclosing the two of them in a box that couldn’t have been more than thirty feet long and maybe twenty feet wide.
The walls were translucent, and she could still see well enough through them to identify a few familiar shapes. Aedan, Olric, Brad, even Deltrea and his mother stood out in the crowd that had moved forward all at once, getting closer to the box. She could even see that many people were talking, but couldn’t hear a thing. Translucent or not, they were walls, and there was no way out that she could see.
At the moment the thought formed in her mind, she realized she’d made the same mistake again. Had she told herself the walls weren’t there, or were flimsy, or breakable, or even had a door-shaped hole in them, she could have made it true by channeling. But she had already convinced herself she was in an enclosed space, and while she could have gathered enough will to counteract that initial thought, she wasn’t sure she could do it while in the middle of a duel.
That was all right, she told herself. If she was trapped in this box, it meant that Rhuinn was, too, and rather than trying to break the walls, she channeled to reinforce them with her own will so he wouldn’t be able to break free any more easily than she would. Let him see that she wasn’t afraid, nor was she bothered by the small space around her.
She could see him gathering more Quickening again. Before he could unleash it on her, she channeled first, imagining him wearing handcuffs and ankle chains. He stumbled and came close to falling, but Vivien’s small sense of progress vanished at once, much like the bonds binding Rhuinn vanished. Laughing, he gestured toward her, and she couldn’t step out of the flow of Quickening before it enveloped her in tight ropes from her shoulders almost down to her knees.
She fought back the impulse to struggle against the binding, and instead created a blade out of the Quickening to slice the ropes. They disappeared as they fell off her, and she let the blade fade away as well. She’d have liked to curl her hand around the hilt and attack, but in this duel, she couldn’t.
His next attack was heat again. This time, it rose from beneath her, and in seconds the stone floor was glowing from the heat. A flash of panic overtook Vivien. She had known, abstractly, that there were many ways for Rhuinn to hurt her without drawing blood or putting her life in danger, but the oncoming pain seemed a lot more concrete. She refocused her channeling as quickly as she could. She’d been about to surround him with impenetrable darkness, but she needed to keep herself safe first.
The image of Elver popped into her mind, and his stone platform. She drew on the memory and felt the floor rising beneath her feet, a perfect circle like the in-progress gazebo, though much smaller. It blocked the heat even when Rhuinn redoubled his efforts, turning the stone practically to lava around her platform.
Vivien used his momentary focus on the heat to summon darkness around him, giving life to what, in her mind, she called the ‘black hole.’ Whenever she’d tried this trick on Olric or Savel while training with them, they’d soon given up, so that this had seemed like her best bet to defeat Rhuinn. Channeling relied in great part on giving substance to what one saw in their mind, and without the visual of the Quickening doing what was demanded of it, it became harder, if not impossible, to channel effectively.
She had to suppress a wave of excitement when she noticed that the floor around her was back to its usual form. She couldn’t see Rhuinn, not when pure absence of light surrounded him, but she could still hear him. And she could hear him chuckle.
“Is that how you expect to win?” he asked, mocking. “By wielding darkness like a child afraid of the night?”
She didn’t reply. Aedan had said Rhuinn might taunt her, try to make her lose her focus. She wouldn’t fall for such an easy trick. Keeping silent, she strengthened the black hole and could see that the people outside their cage were looking around them as the light decreased in the entire ballroom, sucked into infinite darkness.
“But what else could I expect from a child?” Rhuinn continued in the same tone. “After all, you’ve been thinking like a child since you returned to our world. Are you going to challenge all of the people who had a hand in your mother’s death the way you challenged me? You do realize you might have to battle half the High Families if that’s your intention, don’t you? Even your friend Dame Solea did nothing to help Eleoren in the end.”
Telling herself not to listen to him because he was a liar was one thing; remembering Deltrea’s words and the veiled hints that she had something to forgive his family for, however, made it more difficult.
“Of course,” Rhuinn went on, still not channeling as far as she could see, “you’re not here to avenge her. You came at me raging over the death of an old servant who had no ties to you and who died from the shock of coming back to Foh’Ran after all those years, and over the death of a man I had nothing to do with.”
“Liar!” she shouted, unable to contain herself. That he would dare say this when she’d followed Brad’s killer to this very palace incensed her.
She formed chains in her mind, restraints she could place over him, even a gag to stop his lies and blindfold to prevent him from seeing and channeling effectively, but the black hole stopped her just as it did him: if she couldn’t see him, she couldn’t put the chains on him.
“Believe what you want,” he said, sounding bored as though he weren’t in the middle of a duel that wasn’t going well for him. “I had nothing to do with it. What would I gain from removing the main source of distraction from your life?”
The chains Vivien had prepared wavered in her mind, finally disappearing. He was a liar, she repeated to herself. Aedan had told her he was. If he lied to the entire kingdom, why wouldn’t he lie to her now?
Then again, why would he lie about this? They were isolated from the rest of the court. He could admit to anything in here and only she would hear it. So why bother denying his involvement… unless he was telling the truth?
But if he was telling the truth, that meant that someone else, someone powerful had plotted to take her right to the throne from her. And that person was responsible for what had happened to Brad.
She had to know. There was no point in winning the duels and the throne if it was to lose everything again because she had been so focused on Rhuinn that she hadn’t noticed the rise of another threat.
In the blink of an eye, she made her decision. She knew the risk, but it was worth it. She allowed the black hole to dissipate, and Rhuinn reappeared at the other end of the box, his arms crossed, his posture nonchalant as though they were having a polite chat. He wasn’t even channeling anymore, and the colors swirling around him had disappeared, leaving the world in shades of gray. If his lips were curled in an amused smirk, she didn’t let herself see it and remained focused on the ball of light hovering above him.
“Say it again,” she demanded in a harsh voice she barely recognized as her own. “Tell me to my face that you didn’t order that girl to steal this—” She touched the insignia pined to her breast with two fingers. “—and kill whoever stood in her way.”
“I did not employ anyone to try and steal a bauble that means little to anyone other than you,” he said, sneering. “Nor am I responsible in any way for your pet getting killed. If you cannot protect your own people in the heart of your domain, you have no one to blame but yourself.”
Above him, the ball of light glowed brightly, its green color never flickering and casting a sickly tinge to Rhuinn’s features.
“You killed Anabel!” she shouted, closing her fist as though it might help her hang on to the Quickening as her control started to slip. “Deny that!�
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When he shrugged, it was all she could do not to lash out at him, hurt him the same way he’d hurt Ana, but even if she’d tried, she might not have managed to, not when the ball of light was drawing all the Quickening she could channel.
“I questioned her,” he said coolly. “I’m not denying that. Had she told me what I wanted to know, she might still be alive. But she thought keeping quiet would protect you. She thought you were worth her life.”
His grin grew sharper as he turned to look out ostensibly toward Brad. Vivien’s breathing accelerated, beads of sweat rolling down her back.
“I wonder if he still thinks you were worth dying for,” he added. “After all, if you can’t keep your own people safe, how can you protect Foh’Ran?”
Green. The light was still green. Every word that had passed his lips had been true.
Gasping for breath, Vivien redirected her channeling. The light above Rhuinn vanished, and darkness started to form around him again, more slowly than before as Vivien’s strength was diminished. He didn’t appear to notice; he was still looking out toward Brad.
“It must have been lovely for you to get him back,” he said as though musing aloud. “If only for a time. He’s found someone else to follow now. Someone else to bed.”
Of their own accord, Vivien’s eyes snapped to the glass wall and, beyond it, Brad. The wall seemed clearer all of a sudden, letting Brad’s image in flawlessly. He was watching her, like everyone else, but she couldn’t read anything on his features. What she could see, all too well, was how close to him Ciara was standing, her body pressed against his side, her mouth an inch from his ear when she leaned in to murmur something to him. He looked at her, taking his eyes off Vivien.
And everything went black.
“Nice trick,” Rhuinn said, a laugh lurking in his voice. “Too bad you didn’t push your advantage when you could.”
Vivien blinked repeatedly, turning her head this way and that, but she knew already what Rhuinn had done: he’d turned the black hole on her, taking advantage of her distraction. She tried to channel light, a flame, anything so she’d be able to see, but her own expectations of how the black hole functioned worked against her, and every light she summoned was consumed by the darkness.
She couldn’t silence a shriek when something touched her arm. She wasn’t quite sure what it was until she felt hard metal close on her wrist. She tried to tug herself free, but Rhuinn was behind her, yanking at the chain attached to the cuff and forcing her arm to curl painfully at her back.
“Be careful with vampires,” he murmured right against her earlobe. “All of your mother’s troubles started when she married one.”
Vivien struggled against him, but she couldn’t stop him from binding her second wrist and pulling it behind her as well. He let the darkness dissipate at the same time as he forced her to her knees on the hard stone floor. She couldn’t see him or the chains as he remained behind her, but she tugged at her restraints, trying to free herself… and realizing too late that all she was doing was reinforcing the strength of Rhuinn’s channeling.
Her head was pounding with a headache from channeling the lie-detector trick, and as she tried desperately to find a way out of this, she could feel the Quickening slipping out of her grasp. All at once, colors returned to the world.
She had lost.
“Do you concede?” Rhuinn asked coldly above her.
Her gaze flitted over the glass wall again, back to Brad, but she couldn’t bear to look at him, not when Ciara’s hand was clenched over his shoulder. She looked down the line of faces, all of them so tense as they observed what they had to know was a lost cause, until she found Aedan. He gave her the tiniest of nods, and it was almost like having permission to fail.
She nodded, lowering her head.
“Say it,” Rhuinn demanded, tugging at the chains.
His voice sounded different, and Vivien didn’t need to look up to know the glass cage around them was gone.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, calming herself. At this point, it was all about appearances. She had lost this time, denying it was futile, but if she could make it seem as though this was the outcome she had wanted…
After all, Rhuinn himself had thrown away his first duel in the past to have the chance to kill his opponent.
Drawing a smile to her lips cost her, but she managed it. She raised her head and turned it back to look at Rhuinn and let him see her smile.
“I concede,” she said loudly so all would hear, making the words as close to a drawl as she could manage.
She’d lost, yes. She’d lost this duel, she’d lost her focus, she’d lost the Quickening, she might even have lost Brad—no, don’t think about that, not now—but watching a frown of uncertainty flicker over Rhuinn’s features still felt like a tiny victory.
EPILOGUE
Soon
If Aedan was honest with himself, he had thought about what might happen should Dame Vivien lose the first duel. He had believed in her chances and in her desire to win, and he had hoped with every fiber of his being that she would defeat Rhuinn, but a small part of him had been unable to ignore the question ‘what if?’ and he had tried to imagine how Rhuinn, the High Families, even the other guards might react if she lost.
What he’d never considered — what, maybe, he hadn’t wanted to consider — was how it would affect Dame Vivien herself. She put on a wonderful mask even as she conceded, and kept it on as they left and Passed Through back to the castle. But as the door closed on Olric, leaving the two of them alone in the library, it seemed as though the mask crumbled.
She wavered on her feet, unsteady in the way he’d expected her to be when she’d taken her leave from the court. Aedan rushed forward to help, but she raised a hand to stop him and took the few steps to her chair on her own. There, she all but collapsed, hiding her face in her hands. A light tremor shook her shoulders, and the faint smell of salt drifted toward Aedan. He swallowed hard. How many times would he have to witness her tears when he had long ago promised himself to do everything in his power to stop them before they even rolled down her cheeks?
Worse—he was, in part, responsible for this. He had brought her back to Foh’Ran, with Bradan’s help. He was one of the reasons why she had decided to remain and reclaim the throne. He had agreed that challenging Rhuinn to a duel would be a good idea. He hadn’t fought harder for Bradan to come back, and his absence had ruined her focus.
He wished he could have comforted her, with words or actions, but words escaped him at that moment, and what could he possibly do? At a loss, he came closer. At the sound of his steps, she turned her face away from him, wiping at her cheeks and taking big gulps of air. Aedan considered asking her if she wanted some privacy, but before he could summon the words, she looked back at him.
“What now?” she whispered. Exhaustion and defeat rang in her words as clearly as they shone in her eyes. “What if I lose the next duel, too? What if I win and have to kill him in the third duel in order to win?” She shook her head, and her voice fell quieter still, so quiet that Aedan might not have heard her without the acuity of his vampire senses. “I don’t know if I can kill anyone, even him.”
Aedan would have given anything to be allowed to reach for her, offer a light touch of comfort, or even hold her against him the way he’d seen Bradan do with such ease, the way he’d done himself once, when they’d both been so upset. He closed his hands into tight fists to push back the impulse.
“I still believe in you,” he said, putting every last bit of his faith in her into his voice.
She let out a quiet, humorless laugh.
“You’re the only one. Maybe you should have left me on Earth. Or maybe I should go back now before things get even worse.”
Although Aedan did not reply and tried to school his features, something must have shown of his distress because Dame Vivien gave him a pained smile.
“I’m not going to,” she said softly. “I know what it’
d mean for you if I ran back to Earth, and I wouldn’t do that. But I can’t help wishing I could.”
Aedan inclined his head, showing he understood. He couldn’t begrudge her wishes that couldn’t come true, not when he had some of his own, too.
“It’s no use thinking about what you might have to do come the third duel,” he said, knowing the words were less than adequate, yet unable to offer anything better. “First, you’ll need to rest and prepare for the second duel. You had little time to get ready for the first one, and I know Bradan’s absence affected you. For the second duel, you are the one who will decide on a date, and you can give yourself time to prepare and collect yourself. You can take up to forty days if that is what you wish. It might be good to delay that long.”
He forced himself to stop talking. She knew all this, she’d read everything about duels she could find in this very library, and she didn’t need him to repeat it to her.
For long seconds, she remained silent, watching her hands and turning the ring on her thumb. He wondered what she was thinking about, but would never have dared ask. She gave him an answer soon enough anyway.
“Did you…” Her voice was shaking. She took a deep breath and started over, never looking up at him. “Did you talk to him while I was fighting?”
Aedan didn’t need to ask whom she meant by ‘him.’
“I didn’t get a chance,” he said. “I’d have attracted too much attention by going to him.”
And besides, at the time it hadn’t occurred to him. He’d been too caught up in watching her battle Rhuinn, the cage that held them both hiding nothing of their duel. The entire time, however, the bond had pulsed with Bradan’s feelings, with his worry for Dame Vivien and his love for her, and they had echoed against Aedan’s own, reinforcing them until Aedan would have been hard pressed to tell whose feelings they were—not that it mattered.
So little time had passed since her return to Foh’Ran, barely more than a blink when compared to Aedan’s entire existence, but already he had given up denying his own feelings to himself. He would never act on them the way Bradan had, wouldn’t even confess to his dame, but trying to pretend he felt only a guard’s respect for her was useless.