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My glimpses of the future are never more than a minute or two ahead of the event. All I have to do is hold myself braced and ready?—
I’ve missed a couple of exchanges between Petra and the provinca, but my attention doesn’t fail me. My eyes catch the instant the guard adjusts his stance to lunge forward.
He springs at Petra with a hoarse cry and a hiss of his blade from its sheath—and I hurtle between them at the same moment.
The dagger clangs off my metal prosthetic. I slam my knee into the man’s belly and wrench his wrist behind his back as I shove him to the ground.
Sweat cools the back of my neck. My heart hammers as the iron flavor of panic laces my mouth.
There’s no need for fear. I intervened in time.
My monarch trusted me, and I didn’t fail her. I played this game of swords as well as I ever have.
But even with the relief of that knowledge sweeping through me, I need to play politics too.
Yessaine cried out in the moment. When I lift my head to meet her eyes, she’s staring at her guard, white-faced with horror.
“Baldric,” she mumbles. “He’s been in our service for nearly a decade. He’s never spoken—never acted?—”
I firm my voice to its most authoritative tone. The voice that commanded armies of thousands against our greatest foes. “Scourge sorcery is like a sickness. They’ve infected more people than we can guess with their toxic claims and ideals. Lothar and his followers must be stamped out now, before they spread their poison even farther.”
Petra speaks up after my last words. “And we will conquer them as Stavros did this traitor in your midst—if those who have the means to stand with us will do so.”
Yessaine shakes herself. “I…”
Romild touches her arm. For a brief moment, I’m worried she’ll pull her mother back into hesitation.
But there’s a reason I would have seriously considered the provinca-to-be as a potential assistant if Ivy hadn’t claimed that position by necessity.
My former pupil squares her shoulders. “Mother, we have to. They’re barely asking anything at all. We should do more. You didn’t raise me to cower when there’s work to be done.”
The provinca exhales sharply and matches her daughter’s stance. “Indeed, I didn’t. Queen Petra, you’ll have your messengers—and all the soldiers I can offer, when you need them too. Let’s take back our country.”
Thirty-One
Ivy
Ilean my hands against the tabletop as if I can push more information out of the polished wood. “What about the other scourge sorcerers you met in Florian? What talents did you hear of that they could wield?”
Filip rubs his hand across his mouth, knitting his brow as he thinks. His shoulders have slumped during our conversation as he’s admitted how little the higher-ups in the Order of the Wild let him in on their larger plans.
“I know there was one who had some kind of gift for heat,” he says. “She could use it to burn people to encourage them into compliance or destroy things the others didn’t want seen. At least a few had gifts for stirring emotions—trust or fear… There was a man recruited at the same time I was who could run twice as fast as anyone should be able to for short distances.”
At the other end of the table, Alek nods. His quill scrawls across the notebook where he’s recording everything the defector can tell us about the Order’s plans and abilities.
He writes the last word and glances up. “I suppose just about any gift could be useful to the Order’s aims in one way or another.”
Filip offers a miserable grimace. “They wanted to bring in as many people as they could. People with gifts who could expand them with the scourge sorcery, people who didn’t have gifts just to spread the word and silence anyone who argued…”
He looks down at his hands. “I was so stupid to get caught up in their talk to begin with. I wasn’t brave enough to give more than a few toes for the small gift I got, and somehow I thought I deserved to make it more?”
I don’t know how to answer his self-recrimination when the fact that so many people have gotten swept up in Lothar’s treacherous conspiracy frustrates me beyond end. The best I can offer is a brief shrug. “Maybe that small gift will make some difference against them now.”
It seems unlikely. Growing crops a little faster isn’t going to win over those who are already caught up in the Order’s propaganda.
Even his former colleagues couldn’t find much use for him if they sent him off on this potentially suicidal spy mission.
It’ll be a perfectly good talent when we have peace, though.
