Olivia narrowed her eyes. “So was the invasion of the capital and the murder of King Marcus ‘keeping your word’ as well?”
“Invasion?” He crossed his arms over his massive chest. “I am keeping the peace after the horrific regicide of our most beloved monarchs.”
She had heard tales of such “peace keepers” before, even of Gilles himself, who had “kept the peace” in Signy after clearing the area of bandits, seeking a “reasonable fee” for his unsolicited services. Leigh and Rielle had been tasked with ousting him.
“And is the next king inclined to be grateful?” she ventured.
Gilles sniffed. “It depends on how thoroughly I keep the peace.” He smiled at her, torchlight softening the austere black of his hair. “It’s a pity you can’t be allowed to survive after your friend’s capture. I enjoy your intellect.”
A murderer enjoying her intellect. She sucked her lower lip, guarding reckless words.
“We climb from low and humble origins as commoners, Lady Sabeyon,” he said softly, “but we have risen to great heights, high enough to gnaw at the scraps cast aside by the gods among men.”
She wanted to scoff, but she couldn’t. How far had she come from a thatched hovel, where she and her entire family had slept in one room? She could have lived comfortably at the Tower as a healer, a researcher, or a doyen, or perhaps posted in some village as a healer and one of the nouveau riche, but indeed, the air higher up seemed clearer, crisper, sweeter. And she had found herself advising the king of one of the region’s strongest nations, and loved by one of its princes.
What she wouldn’t do to feel James’s hand in hers again, to lay her head on his chest, content and carefree.
And now I find myself in a dungeon, awaiting my death. “A great rise, General, may beget a great fall. Take care where you step.”
He squinted, his eyes lit with an inner glow. “I will remember your cautionary tale, Lady Sabeyon.” He pushed off the bars and left the cell, locking the door with a click, and nodded toward the box on the floor of her cell. “Some consolation for you.”
With those final words, he strode down the corridor, leaving the torch behind.
Consolation?
Her gaze settled on the box, blurring as the minutes passed. One part of her wanted to open it; another didn’t. Perhaps it would keep her company here, mysteriously, until the drawn thread of her fate was finally cut.
How long had she been locked up? Days? Weeks?
She would die here, the first utter failure of an Archmage, a girl born into a family of fishmongers in Caerlain Trel’s Copper Bottom, who rose to Emaurria’s most decorated mage office only to end in the grime of a dungeon? She moved to wipe away her tears but yelped at the touch of her broken hands. There was nothing she could do.
Yet hope still glimmered in her heart. If Rielle came, there might be life after all of this, perhaps even saving the kingdom from the Rift, the tearing of the Veil, the return of every Immortal monster to have ever walked the earth. The end of mankind.
But unless Rielle came with an army to take back the palace for good, she would have to sneak in and out on Spiritseve, close enough to midnight to perform the rite.
But there was no way she could know it needed to be performed... And that it won’t be.
Even if it had become no more than a simple tradition to some, even if no one outside the royal family and Olivia herself knew the full extent of the Rift, everyone in Emaurria assigned significance to the Moonlit Rite. There was a chance.
You will feel it in your blood, Rielle. And you’ll know I wasn’t here for nothing.
She’d left one note, a shorthand for herself, in her room under runic protection. Even if Rielle didn’t come, the Divinity would send someone to perform the rite. It had to. If somehow the Moonlit Rite were performed, she could—
No. She shook her head. James. She could never go to her grave quietly while James suffered, and she remained the instrument of it all.
The box Gilles had brought sat, waiting in the torchlight, inviting her fingers to its lid. Consolation, Gilles had called it. Did James yet live?
To Gilles, which was the consolation? After such torture, was it life? Or death?
Her chest grew heavier with every shaky breath, and she crawled toward the box. Her broken fingers reached the intricate carvings on its surface before she could stop them. Pain wriggled up her arm.
James...
She had to know.
Breathing fast and deep, she raised the lid slowly, every muscle in her body resisting the pain with rigidity. With a cry, she threw it open.
James had touched her with hands roughened by battle yet soft in their caress, his fingers long and elegant but capable of strength, his palms broad but gentle.
The same hand that had stroked her so lovingly lay nestled on a bed of sea-blue silk.
Chapter 25
Rielle squinted at the shops in the distance. Only the familiar grayed scrap of fabric hanging over the entrance marked the building as Donati’s.
As she entered, a haze of smoke clouded her vision, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim lighting. Several intimate alcoves accommodated six to eight people each, seated on sumptuous cushions and secluded by diaphanous veils in shades of aubergine, sapphire, and emerald.
Massive tapestries bathed the walls, depicting revelry, feasting, drinking, smoking, and swiving to excess, ripples of roisterous debauchery. Excess she’d already spent too much of her life drowning in. Such places had once held an irresistible allure, a promise of escape from painful reality to exquisite numbness.
False numbness.
Within the alcoves, patrons lay sprawled in disarrayed heaps, high on sen’a and the pleasure of resonance, revelers summoned from the tapestries behind them.
On the low tables tucked into each alcove lay trance pipes and pouches of dark powder: a higher state of being, reduced to fine grains to be smoked or consumed. Sen’a.
Her mouth watering, she took a deep breath and approached the counter. Here to talk, not to use. She placed her gloved hands on the uneven polished surface, scanning the room for Feliciano. Her gaze fixed on a half-full paper pouch nearby, and she drummed her fingers.
“Trance?” a breathy man’s voice offered.
A frail young man with dull eyes stood behind the counter. The clerk partook of the goods himself. Unsurprising.
“I’m here to see Feliciano.”
Feliciano famously had a lavish house in the city, but he’d always been hands on, especially when it came to sen’a. He would have spent most of his time here, in the thick of things.
“May I ask who wants to see him?” the clerk slurred.
“No.” She didn’t need rumor peddling her name linked to a resonance den.
The clerk lowered his head and peeked under her hood.
His eyes flashed an intense red. She tried to jerk away—too late. She’d seen such eyes before. Damned augurs, always prying where they weren’t invited.
A chill shook her body like wind across naked skin. She shuddered, shrugged deeper into her coat. It was still on, Divine be praised.
“Burning sands at your feet. A walk through desolation. A paradise of torment. Red water,” he announced, rocking. His eyes widened, vivid, blazing a fiery ring of destiny. “Red water.”
The augur shrugged back into his lazy stance.
Red water. She exhaled sharply. Augurs looked into the future and the past and spoke in fragments, riddles, and metaphors. Hopefully, whatever he’d seen was tucked firmly in the past. Divine knew she’d certainly spilled enough red water on missions.
“I’ll tell him,” he said. “Have a seat.”
A shiver rattled her spine as he turned and trudged to the back room. Better those eyes meet someone else’s.
The sound of melodic thumps drew her attention to her fingers.
They’d been tapping of their own accord. Damned sen’a.
She lowered her hand to her side
, looking out into the den for diversion until her gaze settled on an empty alcove.
The turquoise and magenta pillows there looked soft and comfortable, inviting, the sheen of their velveteen texture illuminated by a paper lantern above the alcove’s low table. Come, stay a spell, they said. The paper lantern bathed its immediate vicinity in faint yellow light but did little to brighten anything beyond the tray with two trance pipes, flint and pyrite, and other sen’a consumption accoutrements. Mere things. Not dangerous.
There’s no harm in sitting. She took a deep breath and made her way there.
Not a single person paid her any mind as she passed. Thank the Divine for small favors. The last thing she needed was to be seen associating with Feliciano again. Word of this visit would make a rousing farewell kiss to her dreams of the magister’s mantle.
At the empty alcove, she paused. It was only taking a seat. Nothing more. The cushions were softer than they looked. Comfortable. She rested her elbows on her knees, staring from beneath her hood at the trance pipe. It was long and elegant, despite its mean purpose.
The bodies writhing in adjacent alcoves appeared little more than shadows in a dream, their moans and languid, euphoric laughter ghostly amid the smoky fumes. And they were ghosts—ones who had long since forgotten the purpose of resonance was to prepare anima for greater endurance in service. Something she remembered. Remembered well.
Did they use magic at all anymore, or did they resonate only for the sheer pleasure of the preparation? Magic was anima structured, transformed, while resonance was primal—raw union. Is that how they lived, reduced to that primordial essence?
And none took greater pleasure in resonance than a spiritualist, whose magic ruled all anima. Feliciano had once told her resonance to a spiritualist was more immediate than reality—sight, taste, sensation, smell, sound—with each mage creating a different reality, depending on their magic and the shape of their lives. An experience other mages couldn’t even imagine. And enhanced with sen’a, that reality lasted months, even years, in the span of hours.
Some spiritualists spent their lives resisting the lure of the resonance dimension. And others embraced it, becoming anima gourmands, wasting away their years in euphoric inertia.
Feliciano Donati wasn’t a mere gourmand; he was a connoisseur.
Slowly, a slight figure approached from the periphery. Rielle reclined, her eyes fixed on Feliciano’s chiseled face, his lips curved up in the most placid of smiles, framed by his jaw-length black curls.
He sauntered toward the lounge and descended to the cushioned seat, splaying out lazily like a lounging desert king, dressed in a long black brocade caftan tied with a gray silk sash, loose pants, and flat leather slippers. He faced her with that placid smile.
“We meet again, Favriella,” he drawled pleasantly, with the alveolar trill typical of Sileni speakers.
She flinched, looking around to make sure no one had heard her name.
He glanced at the tray. “Will it be como di comsueto, the usual, my dear fiamma?”
The usual. She grimaced. Three years ago, when she and Leigh had been forced to part, she’d found solace in Feliciano’s Tower rooms, in the bowl of a trance pipe. Minutes, hours, and days had passed in resonance with Feliciano and his trancers, her only cognitive moments the hazy awakenings in Feliciano’s bed, when her fingers reached for the trance pipe of their own volition. There, in that dark, smoky room, she had tried to use sen’a, trance, resonance, and Feliciano to patch the wounds Leigh and her vengeful fiancé had left seeping.
It was a different time. A horrible, numb, lulling, comforting, rapturous time.
Even as she shook her head, she fixed her attention upon the trance pipe. “I need answers.”
Looking away with a pout, Feliciano shrugged casually. “For that, fiamma, I’ll require payment.” He rolled up his sleeve and held out a wan hand adorned with gold, on nearly every finger and his wrists. The abundance overflowed from his limbs to his neck, one of his ears, a nostril.
She peered down at the solitary black tablet in his palm. Concentrated sen’a. “I have money.” Take that instead. Please.
“As do I.”
She knew what he wanted. Tranced resonance, as always.
“Perhaps without the sen’a?” Her stomach churned, and Feliciano smiled. She held her breath, muscles taut, the fine hairs on the back of her neck raised.
“In another life, another time, fiamma. Do you wish for your answers?”
Inside her, a shrill voice cried a warning. Olivia had been there for her last time, helped her through the withdrawal—and she would never approve of this. She had elicited a promise never to use sen’a again. Promise me, Rielle, she had said. Promise me. Never again. Never again, or so help me—
But I need answers. Spiritualists were scarce, and Feliciano was the only one in Bournand, if not Emaurria. I need to know Olivia’s alive before I throw away the rest of my life.
Forgive me, Olivia...
Rielle swallowed. The black tablet waited in his hand. “You don’t even know what I plan to ask.”
“I know that I will have an answer.”
Feliciano did not move, nor did his repose falter.
“Isn’t there anything else—”
“What can you offer a spiritualist who has everything?” Feliciano gestured lazily about the room, the sharp angles of his body obvious beneath the brocade—he’d been remiss in eating again. Too long in the resonance dimension. “Spirit.”
She stared at the tablet. Such a small thing. It would be nothing, less than nothing, to accept it and render payment to him. Just once.
The judgment on Jon’s face when he’d accused her of using sen’a or trux flickered in her mind. Paladins did not pollute their bodies with the likes of sen’a. Would he turn away from her in disgust if he knew? Would he hate her for what she was about to do?
I can’t break my troth to Most Holy Terra on a mere whim, he’d said.
Even if she disgusted him, if he hated her, if he kept his distance, she had to do this. For Olivia’s sake. And for her own.
After a long, slow drag of her glove, she reached for Feliciano’s offering. The sen’a tablet was small and hard, but soon, it would bloom like a floret of ecstasy uncurling into a thousand blossoming bouquets, soft petals that would eventually harden to thorns beneath her skin. She shivered.
With a trembling hand, she raised it to her lips and held it there for a time, taking a deep, venerating breath before she accepted it into her mouth and swallowed. As it descended down her throat, she closed her eyes.
When she looked back at Feliciano, he was holding a goblet of wine out to her.
Time folding. She must have welcomed it, because its warmth still burned inside her as she peered into the mostly empty goblet in her grasp. She threw her head back into the pillows and rubbed her face against velvet while her hand dropped into his. The goblet clinked to the floor and rolled with a metallic whirl that faded... faded... faded...
The draw dragged at power in her veins, anima to anima. Feliciano’s pulled hers, seeking connection through their fingertips. She waded through the phantoms clustering at the Veil, shouldering through, and attracted his in return until they made contact. Inside, the luminance of her azure anima took on a violet aura—Feliciano’s—and shimmered. Finally, a ripple of pulsating energy erupted, bringing with it the promise of pleasure.
That pleasure spread languidly like an overflowing cup, saturating every corner of her until she trembled on the cushions, her skin sensitive to the faintest breeze. Far away, someone opened a door, and as the fresh air kissed her skin, she quivered. Feliciano exhaled deeply, and the chill of his breath reached her—a puff of air from the flap of a moth’s wing, her head swimming with bliss as she writhed.
She forced her eyes open, and her vision blurred. A strand of hair before her, her own, came into and out of focus.
Her eyelids fluttering, she shook with sensation, and beyond that strand, she sa
w her hand on a turquoise pillow, relaxing and contracting. She rolled her eyes in Feliciano’s direction. He sat with his head thrown back, and his closed eyes tightened in pleasure. Her view of him multiplied as he became two, four, six Felicianos, and she shut her eyes, frowning to contain a moan from the shiver that ran through her, flowing along her spine like the Divine’s own caress.
Chasing the sensation, she focused on her shimmering anima and the pleasure that radiated from it, reveling in its throbbing for a time that stretched minutes, hours, days...
When she opened her eyes, her field of vision was narrow, no more than a dim slit of gossamer, tapestries, and a lit lantern. She reached up to touch her face, her hands deviating from their intended path until they dumbly felt her tense cheeks at last, bringing her to the slow conclusion that she was beaming from ear to ear.
She shook her head and laughed, intending only a chuckle, but somehow, it amplified and lasted for what felt like an hour, lasting until long after her teeth had grown cold from the exposure to the cool air.
“Fe... li... ciano.” She rolled her head to face him.
He peered at her, a smoking trance pipe hanging from his lips. “What I wouldn’t give for your now low tolerance, fiamma,” he said between puffs. “Ask me your questions.”
Questions...
She rolled her head back and blinked, trying to remember them. Her eyes jarred open, and she was cold, so cold, and alone. Feliciano was gone, and a heavy woolen blanket covered her. She tried to sit up, but her body refused to cooperate, and she collapsed into a fleshy heap.
Hands caressed her face—she looked up at the person they belonged to.
“I’d forgotten the rush of resonance with you—a quaternary elementalist.” Feliciano peered down at her, seated upon the lounge, casually sipping some wine. “The ends, heights, and depths of the universe, fiamma.”
“Olivia Sabeyon.” She swallowed. “Does she live?”
He shut his eyes and, for a moment, glowed violet. When he looked at her again, his irises were purple. “She lives,” he said, his voice an eerie harmony, “but her anima is bound.” He blinked, and the glow disappeared.
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