Nothing.
I sighed. A surge of despair and regret broke through my attempt to remain calm. I kicked at the door, swore, and started pacing once more. It couldn’t end like this. I had witnessed too much. I was not about to die here.
I stopped in the center of my cell and lifted my gaze to the window. I had survived Brea, survived the streets, the workhouse, and the sorceress. Despite all the odds, I’d fought them all. This wasn’t my end. I just needed one small opportunity. It would come, and I’d be ready. The fire couldn’t have me, not yet.
Chapter Sixteen
The sun had dipped far below the central hill by the time the guards escorted me from my cell through the steep, narrow streets to the square, where the pyre waited. Flanked by Inner Circle High guards in all their glorious gold and steel, I stumbled at the sight of the timber platform. The breeze, cold enough to bite my face, carried the smell of accelerant. They used to burn people without it, but it was a lengthy, messy business, so these days, they helped the flames along with tar. Its stench brought tears to my eyes.
The spire’s shadow fell heavily over the platform.
The guards guided me up the steps, my boots heavy and my stomach knotted.
The fire can’t have me.
Guards lined the small square, and filling the gaps, quietly and orderly, stood the people of the Inner Circle, clad in their pristine ceremonial cloaks. Maybe they knew of my family. Most likely, they knew of the boy who’d bravely reported his magic-using parents to the guards. The boy who had grown up a thief and now stood before them, an accused magic user.
Young and old, men and women. Nobody wept. They looked on with the kind of obedience and stoicism of a people who believed this was entirely the right thing to do.
The fire can’t have me. It can’t end now.
The guards walked me to the stake and unlocked the rusted shackles, letting them fall. My heart pounded, and despite the cold, sweat trickled down my neck. Even if I could run, the guards would cut me down within a few strides. And where would I run to? There was no sanctuary inside the wall.
As children, my friends and I had wondered if the pain lasted, or if the mind blocked it when it became too much. We’d seen the burnings. We knew the answer. It wasn’t quick. Perhaps running into a guard’s sword would be quicker.
Anuska saw me eyeing her comrades and lifted her chin by the smallest amount. Her hand tightened on the pommel of her sword. If I ran, she would be the one to kill me.
My parents hadn’t run. They hadn’t screamed until the flames scorched their flesh. They hadn’t even blamed me, though my father’s eyes had never quite met mine once he knew it was me who had given them up. They were good people, and brave, and strong. All the things I wasn’t.
The fire can’t have me. It’s not over. I’m not finished.
A guard told me to step in front of the stake. I shifted to the side, my heartbeat the loudest thing I could hear—until the torches blazed to life. The flames hissed, and the guards lifted the torches high and stepped forward. I found myself thinking of the torch Shaianna had used to illuminate the tomb and how the fire had chased away the dark to reveal the kind of treasure few would ever witness. She had told me she hoped to see the spire one day. I prayed she never did.
I closed my eyes and felt tears crawl down my face.
This is just the beginning, the mage had said. I would not see the end.
A guard pulled my arms behind me and tied my wrists to the post. I opened my eyes, and perhaps because I was thinking of her, my gaze was drawn through the heat haze to a small figure quietly weaving her way through the crowd. A hood covered her face. Her dark cloak trailed in the snow. The only part of her that her collar didn’t cover was her cheek, and there glistened a green teardrop gem.
Hope leaped to life inside. But the guards shifted, the torch flames flickered, and when I looked for her again, she was gone.
“Curtis Vance, you are hereby brought to face the consequences of your actions.” Anuska declared, her voice booming.
I searched the blank faces for her dark eyes, for the way her lips lifted in the secret hint of a smile.
“As a magic user, you have broken our most severe law. The penalty for which is cleansing.”
“Why?” My question echoed loud and clear. The Inner Circle people looked on. “Why must magic users burn? Why do we have this law when the world outside doesn’t believe in magic? Why are we so different? Don’t you all wonder? Don’t you want to see what’s beyond the wall?”
“May the fire cleanse your soul,” Anuska said.
“May the fire cleanse your soul,” the crowd echoed.
The guards stepped forward as one line. The heat from their torches pushed at my face.
“This is wrong! It was always wrong.”
The guards lifted their torches and looked through me. In their eyes, I was already dead.
I looked past them over the sedate crowd. She’s here. I saw her.
“Shaianna?” Her name resounded off the high stone walls and was met by silence. Please. Please be here. Please help me.
The torch fire flickered and licked at the wood.
A screech sliced through the quiet and then abruptly cut off. The crowd and the guards looked to my right, where the townhouses cast long shadows across the square, and there, from the dark, came the mages. They crawled low on the ground, arms and legs rippling, red eyes bright. The crowd erupted in panic, and as the guards rushed to defend the people, they dropped their torches.
“Not possible!” Anuska hissed.
The flames took hold, leaping and skipping over the tar-coated wood. I forgot about the mages, the screaming people, and the clash of the guards’ swords, and focused only on the heat and the flames as they lapped at my legs. Twisting away saved me only moments. Tar-blackened smoke clogged my throat. I wasn’t sure whether I heard other people’s screams or my own, and then a cool blade touched my wrist and the ropes binding me fell away. Shaianna pulled me back from the rising flames and down the steps. All I could see was her black cloak. I stumbled and tripped after her, coughing hard while tears streamed from my eyes.
“Out of my way,” Shaianna ordered in that gloriously commanding voice of hers.
She was here. She’s come for me.
I blinked my stinging eyes and saw Anuska blocking the narrow alley, sword out. Shaianna stepped closer, her dagger clasped in her right hand. She was quick, quicker than an armored guard. Shaianna would kill without hesitation.
“Wait,” I wheezed. “Don’t kill her. Anuska, let us pass.” I gripped Shaianna’s shoulder. I couldn’t hold her back, not in the condition I was in, but Shaianna may listen.
Anuska’s eyes narrowed. Behind us, screams persisted, drawing the High Guard’s eye. Duty called to her.
“Your people are dying,” I told her. “They need you there, not here.”
“This isn’t finished, Curtis.” She brushed past us, heading toward the fire in the square.
When I turned back, Shaianna was already a few strides ahead, her cloak flaring as she marched away. “Shaianna, wait. Those people need help—”
“They shall burn—or not. I do not care, thief.” When she realized I wasn’t following, she half turned and fixed her green-eyed glare on me. “They would have watched you die. I will not go back. Come.” Her snarl softened. “Let them go or let me go. Make your choice.”
You will make the wrong choice, thief.
My feet were already moving forward, but not to follow. “You’re not heartless, Shaianna.” I paused, fighting to breathe around the burn in my chest. “You think you are, but you have it in you to help them.”
“Why should I?” she asked.
“Because they don’t know any better.”
She stepped back. Her eyes searched mine, and for a moment, I thought fear showed on her face, but then relented with a small nod and headed around an alley corner, back toward the pyre.
I staggered a few steps and fell a
gainst a wall. The alley tilted and the night sky slipped sideways. Eventually, the screams faded and the breeze no longer carried with it the smell of smoke. Minutes later, or hours, Shaianna returned in silence, grabbed my arm, and led me into the fragile night.
“How did you know?” I asked, although I didn’t much care for the answer while Shaianna’s cool hands ran over the burn on my arm. I hadn’t noticed I was hurt until we had taken shelter in a hayloft. Once we’d stopped running, the pain had rushed in, dragging exhaustion in with it.
I kept my gaze cast out the open window, pretending to admire the fabulous nighttime view of Brea’s Inner Circle and the vast, impenetrable wall between us and freedom. In reality, all I could think about was how Shaianna’s featherlight touch soothed the heat of the burn and how she was here. She could have been halfway across the sea by now, free of me and Brea. Why had she stayed?
She bent my forearm up, keen eyes observing—in an entirely clinical manner—how my muscles moved. She turned my arm and gently examined where the fire had bubbled my skin. All that remained now were a few fresh pink scars. She took my hand and stroked her fingertips over the scar across my palm.
I remembered her kneeling opposite me, our bleeding hands clasped together, her words mere whispers—magic on her lips.
She slowly lifted her gaze, peering through dark lashes, and I knew she too remembered our last moment together. I had kissed her in the tomb and wanted to again. I would have already if I could have summoned the energy. To see her again, here, like this? It seemed too coincidental, too surreal, as though this were a dream and I had died on the pyre.
“You are healed.” She released my hand, rose to her feet, and turned away with a swirl of her cloak.
I flexed my arm, testing the pull of new scar tissue, and watched her in the corner of my eye. Standing guard, she cast a striking figure against the sparkling Brean cityscape visible through the loading door.
There was too much to say—so many questions I had thought of in the weeks since the tomb—but I couldn’t remember any of them. I leaned back against a stack of pallets and knew I should thank her. I closed my eyes against the sting left over from the noxious smoke. When I slept, and it would be soon, the nightmare would return, and this time it wouldn’t be air I fell through, but flame.
I opened my eyes and found her watching me. “You can’t read thoughts, can you? Now that we’re no longer attached—bonded?”
“When we were first bonded, I became aware of thoughts that were not my own. I could speak to your mind, and you to mine, but I couldn’t so much read your thoughts as sense them.” She frowned. “Why?”
It was a testament to my tiredness that I contemplated telling her all the times I had left my window open for her, all the times I had thought I had seen her in the market, and all the times I had wished to see her again. I smiled at my own foolishness. “No reason.”
The bitter Brean air gusted into the loft. I hunkered down among a few empty burlap sacks.
“The mages have the Eye.” I paused and swallowed hard. The smoke had singed my throat, making my voice hoarse. My thoughts whirled, barely anchored in reality. I needed to rest, but too many questions bubbled up in my mind. While we were in the Inner Circle, there would be no rest. The guards would flush us out soon enough. “I … Shaianna, there’s a mark on my back. The guard, Anuska, said it was the mark of a magic user. I didn’t put it there.”
Pain throbbed behind my eyes and down the back of my neck.
“It is the knot, a magic branding,” she replied, still gazing out of the window as though Brea held all the answers. “All mages have the mark.”
“Why do I?”
“Mages are people of the Inner Circle, corrupted long ago by a flood of magic. It is why the people here are forbidden to harvest magic, and why they are imprisoned behind these great walls. You and your kind were born mage. But you do not become mage unless you harvest magic. Your parents, and the generations before them, were the same. While I slept, the world changed. The past was buried beside me. The Inner Circle forgot the foundation upon which their great spire was built. The people grew content in their ignorance.” She smiled a sorry smile.
I rubbed at my forehead and winced as the pain throbbed anew. “I don’t understand any of this. You’re saying I’m going to turn into one of those things?”
“As Inner Circle born, you have the potential, but the knot proclaims you’re safe. You are under my protection, even from the threat you pose to yourself.”
“You marked me?”
She crossed the floor in a few strides and crouched beside me. After pushing her hood back, she stared into my eyes, trapping me under her glare.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
She hesitated, perhaps wondering whether to lie or how to word the truth. “I am torn. At odds with myself. I am lost. It was not meant to be this way.”
“You’re the Arachian queen’s advisor. You’re the shadow on the wall.” What little light there was caught in her dark eyes. “The mages said you are the last.” I touched her face. She seemed so real, so normal, and yet so entirely foreign and unfamiliar, so unreal: an impossible contradiction, like night and day held together in one moment. “They said the shadow will embrace all.”
Her glare thinned. “We must retrieve what they stole.”
I brushed a thumb over her lips and down her chin. “You were hidden away. Forgotten. Like magic. Like the Eye. Why?”
She caught my hand and held it still. “Why do you place artifacts in glass cases? To preserve them. All of my kind were destroyed, and I would have been too had my queen not hidden me from the world.”
I knew enough about her to know she didn’t run or hide. She’d fought to the end atop that hill. “Why are you here now?”
She swallowed and bit into her lip. “I’m …” Taking a breath, she tried again. “I am afraid.” She released my hand. “I was never afraid, thief. My vengeance was a swift and final sentence. A spark in the night.” Her lips twitched. “Fear has no place in my heart. And neither do you.”
I’d seen fear in her before, but only when her guard slipped. It was there now, bright in her eyes and etched into the fine lines of her face.
“Leave Brea,” I said. “Go far away. We can both go. There’s nothing left here for either of us.”
“I cannot. They are gone, and I am dust, and dreams, and myth. Harnessed by duty, I must fulfill her wish. What else is there?” She took my hand again and pressed my palm to her cheek, then bowed her head into my touch. “There has never been one of us who has feared the ebb of the tide, the flow of blood, or the passage of the stars. But I do. I fear these things.”
Time. She was talking about time.
“I am not what you see, thief. I am not a hope or a dream of a better life elsewhere. I am something else entirely. Something hungry, and restless, and”—she looked up—“unforgiving.”
I leaned in close. I might not understand her riddles, but I knew fear when I saw it. Fear as deep as hers could kill. It had killed my sister. I couldn’t let it consume Shaianna. I barely knew her—she’d made sure of that—but I had to help one of us, and it wasn’t me. “If your people are dust and dreams and myth, then let them go.”
“You have made me wish it were that simple. But I am the last, and that burden is mine until my purpose is fulfilled.” She knelt forward and leaned gently into my side, tucking herself under my arm. Her hand settled lightly on my chest. “You have a good heart, thief. You surround it with guilt and anger, but the goodness is there.”
I gently pulled her as close as I dared and let the quiet settle around us once more. Outside, the city slept, and sleep soon tugged at the thoughts chasing themselves around my head.
Whispers filtered through my dreams. “Your good heart is not enough.”
Chapter Seventeen
Birds chittered outside the hayloft as dawn crept over the Inner Circle. Shaianna stirred when I moved from her side, but she didn’
t wake. With a little luck, I would return before she knew I’d left. Crouched beside her, I paused. Asleep, she looked younger, her expression light and unburdened. I moved a stray lock of hair from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. I had lost count of the times I’d cursed meeting her in the alleyway, but somewhere in all the madness, I’d forgotten to thank her for saving me. Because she had. I’d been surviving—not living—since I’d watched my parents burn. I’d been stumbling from one day to the next—in the street, in the workhouse, in the pleasure house—finding solace by screwing over those I considered more fortunate. I wasn’t like my sister. I wasn’t brave enough to put an end to my miserable life. If Shaianna hadn’t found me, death would have, because I’d been looking for it.
I climbed up to the icy rooftop, using the Inner Circle’s fondness for protruding ornamental brickwork, and navigated my way to where the winding narrow streets became familiar. Guards patrolled below, but they were unlikely to look up. If they did, their eyes would turn to the spire. The streets veined out in all directions, with the spire at its heart.
Pitched roofs, chimney stacks, roof terraces—it didn’t take long for me to find my stride. I remembered the house as bigger and somehow grander, but now it slouched, forlorn and abandoned at the end of a terrace of similar houses across from a closed store. The faded black mark stamped on the stones beside the door declared it ocra: contaminated by magic.
I climbed over the roof and down a solid iron downpipe to the rear courtyard.
I won’t stay long, I told myself. Just long enough to say goodbye.
The window glass in the back door cracked like thin ice. I arched my arm inside and flicked the lock. The table was set for breakfast, although rats had long ago eaten the food and upturned the bowls. A thick layer of dust painted every surface gray. After seven years, I could still see my sister playing with her doll at the table. If I listened, I could hear her voice and feel her little hand tugging on my sleeve.
The Heartstone Thief (Dragon Eye Chronicles Book 1) Page 15