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Rheave hums to himself and bares his teeth with a fierce smile. “He knows you got away, that you have your mind back. He’s afraid of you.”
The daimon-man is probably right. Of course Lothar wouldn’t take the chance that I could use the magic he was so eager to exploit against him. I should have realized that to begin with.
The effort I put into the jab of power was still expended—and still took some toll. As I turn my head, I think I catch a flicker of sapphire blue—soldiers, maybe daimon, coming to arrest us. I have to?—
I blink hard and look again through the stutter of my pulse.
There’s no one wearing blue at that corner of the square at all. The closest is a woman staring up at Lothar who’s got on a green dress.
I don’t entirely have my mind back, no matter what Rheave says.
So when a tingle of magic passes by me a moment later, my first instinct is to assume it’s another hallucination. But I wait, concentrating on the feeling, and it lingers.
I scan the square and adjust my position, taking a small step forward and then to the side to track the direction the magic is coming from.
As I follow my impression of it, a filmy figure swims into view, standing on the other side of the street we emerged from with his narrow face set in a mask of revulsion.
I tug on Petra’s arm. “Your father’s third magical advisor… What was his name? Tinom something? He’s here!”
“What?” She peers in the direction I’m looking. “Where?”
She can’t see him. He must be using some kind of distracting spell that I was able to overcome once I knew where to look.
Right. His specialty was illusions, wasn’t it?
He definitely doesn’t appear pleased with his colleague’s speech. I waver and decide to take a gamble.
Better to start adding to our allies than fling my own magic around again.
As I march straight up to the magic advisor, his gaze twitches to me with a flicker of surprise. I fix him with my firmest stare. “Are you on Lothar’s side, or are you ready to start saving the kingdom?”
Eight
Ivy
Tinom raps his sinewy hand against the wooden dining table. His face has gone ruddy beneath the thin fringe of his gray-and-white hair. “Whatever else we put in place, we need that blood-sworn letter.”
His voice rings through the sparsely decorated room with so much force I have to restrain a wince. My gaze darts to the narrow window overlooking the city street outside, where another evening is descending into night.
We shouldn’t have to worry. Tinom owns this tenement building in one of Florian’s wealthier middle-class neighborhoods as part of his family’s holdings, and the two apartments on the uppermost floor were vacant when the Order of the Wild swept into the capital. The magic advisor has been hiding out here along with a couple of devouts who escaped the purge at the Temple of the Crown, using his considerable skill with illusions to ensure his former colleague and Lothar’s new comrades don’t discover his refuge.
But we’ve taken shelter in apartments we thought were safe before, only to have to run for our lives. Since the moment the king declared me and my men enemies of the kingdom, we’ve had to constantly be on the move.
The only place we had any security was the hidden sanctuary for the riven, the Haven, where the only other sane riven sorcerer I’ve met taught me the basics of controlling my power. But that safety came with a different sort of price. We couldn’t interact with the outside world at all—and when we decided we needed to stand up to the scourge sorcerers again, Sulla tried to turn the Haven into our prison.
I never thought I’d miss the days of sleeping on Stavros’s sofa in his professorial quarters at the royal college, but that time looks strangely peaceful through the lens of my memory.
A flash that could be a flare of magic whips past the window—but no tingle of energy crosses my skin, and no one else reacts. I yank my eyes away from the hallucination, back to what’s real around the table.
About twenty of us have squeezed into the now-cramped room. Petra, her siblings, my men, and I are clustered around one end of the table. Tinom sits at the other end, flanked by the two devouts along with several soldiers and a couple of nobles he’s sure are loyal to the Melchiorek family.
We’ve spent most of the past day gathering this group of loyalists. It felt like we were making quite a bit of progress in the moment, but seeing the end result, I can’t help thinking back to the army of hundreds Lothar was able to send to cut down the king.
Of course, my men and I left that army in disarray, the most devoted of them cut down in battle themselves. But we only managed it by tricking the Darium soldiers stationed on the other side of the channel into doing most of the work.
We’re not going to get away with using that gambit twice.
Petra leans forward where she’s sitting, setting her elbows on the table. I can’t help being impressed by the increasingly queenly demeanor that’s come over her with more supporters to command.
