“Whatever she claims I did, it’s not her fault,” I declare, drawing all eyes to me. “She’s just a silly, airheaded girl who will spread her legs for anyone, and her mother is a poppy-addled charlatan.”
The words are out of my mouth before I can even think of recalling them. They have to think Bethea isn’t worth anything, even if she’s worth something to me.
Never mind that I’ve hardly shown it before today.
Anger sparks in me, for myself, for these people holding us here … and maybe for my father, for what he said about me and my mother long ago:
Slut. Brat. Nothing.
Lady Acantha only regards us both with a level gaze. “We’ll see.”
“No,” I snap, “you’ll tell us what you want with us now, and then let us get back to our lives. We’re citizens of this polis as much as you. We have rights.” My temper is burning away the fog in my head.
She blinks, affronted. “By right of the law, you’re here to be tested, you insolent girl, though Marklos has already insisted you are a bloodmage and a uniquely powerful one at that.”
“Then give me the test and you’ll see that I’m not.”
“If you’ll pardon my asking, why are you trying to prove you aren’t?” Acantha assesses me from her high perch. “Wouldn’t you want to be a ward? Keeping citizens safe is a duty that shouldn’t be frowned upon, but that isn’t all we do. Some of us maintain the farms that feed the polis, the gardens that make it beautiful, or the veil that keeps out the blight. Some are celebrated craftspeople or liaisons to the palace. Why, some of us are even royals. You should be so lucky.”
I don’t shrink under the councilwoman’s gaze, but draw my shoulders back and stand taller. My hands are bound, my feet are dirty and bare, and I probably have vomit on my chiton, but I don’t care. This is my chance to give voice to what I should have all those years ago, before my father was taken. Before I betrayed him in my thoughts.
Without the use of my arms to gesture, I jerk my head at the smudge near Marklos. “I don’t want one of them.”
Acantha glances over her own shoulder, as if surprised to find a faint shadow there. “A guardian? They’re heroic citizens who have proved themselves in this life and after, and they are here to protect us. It might not be as clear nowadays, but it is a protection we need. Those without magic don’t always understand us. They used to be a danger to us.”
They still might be, given the chance. I keep hearing the screech of the woman in the market: Witch! And yet …
I arch a brow. “Are you sure guardians aren’t meant to put the people at ease more than they are you?”
Acantha’s shrewd gaze narrows. “Does it matter, if the effect is the same? Indeed, there is old-rooted fear on both sides. We have a power that shouldn’t go unchecked, that should serve the state, but that also shouldn’t shrivel in fear of the masses. Both sides rest easier with guardians in between. I assure you, they’re quite unobtrusive. Most of the time, one forgets their presence.”
I scoff. “Even when you’re in bed with someone? Maybe you get excited at the thought of a dead stranger watching, but—”
“Rovan,” my mother snaps, scandalized.
Acantha tilts her head at me. “Why do shades among the living offend you so? The goddess herself is the guardian of the threshold, straddling both life and death.”
I toss my hair. “Yeah, but she didn’t give us these guardians.”
“The first king did. Will you disrespect Athanatos now? He rebuilt our great Thanopolis from the ashes of chaos, brought many different peoples together under the safety of the veil, and created a paradise. It was he who first introduced the hematic arts into the royal family by marrying a bloodmage, who established bloodlines to make us stronger and used the pneumatic arts to bind guardians to us for our protection. The king respected blood magic and death magic equally, and found a way for them to work hand in hand. Why would you scorn such a gift?”
“Because those things are dead and wrong and—”
“I have heard such pointless rhetoric before,” she interrupts, her tone still more curious than offended, “and let me tell you, it leads nowhere you wish to follow.”
I shrug. “If I’m not a bloodmage, then it doesn’t matter.”
Acantha turns to my mother. “And what about you? Are you the source of this pernicious … and dare I say treasonous … prejudice, or did it come from, say, her father? You see, Marklos has a theory, implausible as it may be. He sent word of it as soon as your daughter arrived, which is why we’re all here.”
“I don’t know what you mean—” my mother starts.
“Ah, here he is. You’ll have to excuse him. He’s not moving as quickly these days.”
A man enters the hall. He has a limp, his cane clacking on the marble tile, and a richly embroidered green himation covering his arms and head. But I can see bits of bright silver-streaked dark blue hair peeking out from the hood. And despite the deep lines in his face that weren’t there before, I would recognize those features and that voice anywhere.
“I don’t see why I need to—” He breaks off at the sight of me and my mother.
“Silvean?” My mother’s cry is disbelieving, desperate, and … betrayed. She takes a few staggering steps toward him and then lurches to a stop. “You’re alive?” she gasps, and then covers her mouth in horror. Maybe because she realizes what she just betrayed.
Marklos’s face splits with a grin. “Silvean, do you know this woman? Or perhaps her daughter? Don’t you think she might look a little like you?”
My father’s gaze shoots to me, and it feels like an arrow piercing my chest. He didn’t recognize me at first, but now he can’t look away. His golden eyes pore over my face like it’s the lines of a book he desperately needs to read.
Look away, I beg silently.
He manages, but I feel a tearing sensation as he does.
He turns back to Marklos, sounding only slightly shaken. “Let’s not dance around each other. I’ve never seen this woman or this girl in my life.”
“She’s seen you,” Marklos says, gesturing at my mother. “She knows your name, and yet you haven’t left the confines of the palace in … what … thirteen years?”
Twelve and a half. It’s been twelve and a half years since my mother and I watched my father get hauled away, seemingly dead. Not that dead, apparently. Bloodmages make for miraculous healers, and the king would have the best serving at the palace, then and now, so my father must have been revived after his captors brought him to the brink of death.
Twelve and a half years doesn’t explain how worn he looks, but there are more pressing things to worry about.
“You see,” Marklos says, “I was there thirteen years ago, when we found you, the infamous Silvean Ballacra, rogue bloodmage of Skyllea. I was guarding the back of your house, so I didn’t get a good look at the woman or the child you were hiding with. Perhaps that was for the best, since I survived while many of my fellows did not.”
I certainly didn’t recognize the captain, but that’s no surprise. I was so young when I would have last seen him, and there was such chaos.
My father shrugs, more ease coming back into his shoulders and his voice. “If this is her, I honestly don’t remember. That woman meant nothing to me, and her child wasn’t mine. It was proven.”
“Then you won’t mind if we test this woman and her daughter for blood magic right here before the council?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not,” Marklos echoes. “After all, you’re so happily married to Princess Penelope and ensconced in the palace, though still no luck on a child yet, am I right? Ten years you’ve tried now? You have been trying?”
A pit opens up inside me. I feel like I’m falling. My father is married to a …
“Princess?” my mother says faintly. She’s trying to bear all of this quietly, but I can see the strain is nearly too much for her. It breaks my heart.
I would give anything to get my mother ou
t of here. Funny, since we both, just a day ago, would have given anything to see my father again. That was before discovering that he’d joined the royal family.
We couldn’t have known. Outside of the palace, the affairs of the king’s children or his children’s children are kept private, at times down to their betrothals—kept especially private, apparently, in the case of a once-fugitive bloodmage from an enemy kingdom marrying into the family. That, and I’ve avoided hearing about royals my entire life because I hate them. But Marklos obviously knows the details.
My father’s stony expression cracks once again, and heat escapes in his words. “That’s none of your fucking business, Marklos, and I’d thank you to keep your mouth closed before I shut it for you.”
“Still fire in there, eh? I figured you were just pretending to be asleep,” the captain says, seeming to enjoy himself. “Which is all the more reason your bloodline should be preserved. It would be a shame for the polis to lose it simply for lack of a blood heir.”
Without further delay, he seizes my mother’s hand, withdrawing one of the long silver needles topped with a skull that I remember from all those years ago. He probably wants to discount my mother as a source of magic first.
Which is fine by me. My mother won’t even have to discreetly prick her own finger this way with the hidden needle she’s no doubt carrying. I feel eyes on me, and not just those of the other council members. I glance up and catch a flash of my father’s golden gaze before he looks away.
It was only for a second, but his expression brings back memories with a fierce potency. He’s telling me to do as he taught me.
I’m already planning on it. I’ve gone this long without his guidance, haven’t I? I don’t need it now.
My mother’s test is over in a heartbeat. “No magic,” Marklos declares. “The girl didn’t get it from her mother.”
“You’re assuming a lot,” I snap, turning to expose my bound arms. At a nod from the captain, a warded man nearby cuts my ropes with a swipe of his fingers. I want to rub my wrists, but I hold out my hands before Marklos can try to take them. I want him touching me as little as possible. Luckily there’s no more blood on my burned palms, just tight, raw-looking skin.
The captain moves slowly, holding my eyes and then studying my hands as he lowers the needle toward one of my fingers, making sure I’m not sketching any sigils. He likely thinks I can’t because of the drug, but he’s being thorough.
He doesn’t know I can sketch this one—if only this one—without twitching a finger, picture it as clearly in my mind as if drawn in blood, or call it forward even in my sleep.
Move.
Blood wells on my fingertip around the needle’s point. Marklos carefully dabs it up and examines it. The entire hall is silent.
“Well?” Acantha demands.
“Damn it,” Marklos growls. Because, of course, my mother’s blood—which I borrowed both twelve and a half years ago and just a moment ago, moving it from her finger to my own in droplets too small to spot—doesn’t have any power in it.
“See?” I say, unable to rein in my grin. “I told you I’m not a—”
Marklos backhands me, snapping my head sideways and causing black stars to explode in my vision. Before I know what’s happening, he unsheathes his dagger and draws it across my palm in a burning slash. I cry out, trying to wrench my hand away, but he doesn’t let me. There’s no way I can withhold the flood of blood, not with how deep the cut is and how badly my skull is ringing.
The captain jerks my wrist, whipping a red splatter across the marble in front of us. At his gesture, it turns to fire that burns brighter, hotter, and more violently than if fueled by a barrel of pitch. Anyone nearby has to back away from the inferno.
“Now do you see?” Marklos cries.
That’s all he manages to say before he’s lifted off his feet and thrown across the hall. He slams into a marble pillar with a sickening wet smack.
I see my father’s arm outstretched before him. It’s shaking.
“Never touch her,” he snarls, and his fingers twitch to sketch more sigils. But before he can, he doubles over as if in pain, then collapses to his knees. He’s immediately surrounded by wards, and I can’t see what’s happening no matter how I try.
Marklos peels himself off the pillar, clutching his head and leaving a misty red outline of his body behind on the white marble. My father moved the captain using his blood, just how I slowed Bethea’s fall, except so forcefully that some sprayed out the back of him, never mind what’s now oozing through his fingers from his cracked skull.
That doesn’t stop him from finally saying what he’s wanted to all along. “This,” the captain snarls, pointing a bloody finger at me, “is Silvean Ballacra’s daughter, and probably the most powerful bloodmage in the city, second to him.”
For a moment, there’s silence. And then shouting as I’m swarmed by wards, my arms seized. I can’t spot my mother in the writhing chaos, but I hear her scream my name and then—agony in her voice—my father’s name. Struggling against my captors, I catch a glimpse of my father dragging himself to his feet with his cane. Between the sound of my mother and the sight of him, I feel like I’m tearing in half.
None of the wards try to hold my father, either to help him up or to restrain him. And then I see it: the pale hand resting on his arm that’s attached to nothing but air. No, not nothing. It comes from the shadow at my father’s side.
His guardian. My father has been warded. Of course he has, if he’s now part of this world and living in the palace. I just hadn’t had the chance to realize it yet, to spot the smudge of darkness behind him. Now it’s all I can see, even after the ghostly hand vanishes back into shadow.
A deep stillness settles over the dark blur. It almost seems to be looking right back at me.
Feeling drains from my body, leaving me numb. I shudder involuntarily.
Lady Acantha calls for order until everyone falls quiet. She sits in a pillar of sunlight. “While most unexpected,” she begins in a normal voice, clearing her throat, “this is most fortuitous.” She turns to my father, who leans heavily on his cane for balance. “You desperately need to pass on your bloodline, don’t you, Silvean? It looks like we finally have an heir of your blood to allow it. Though, by the sound of it, she’s not turning out to be any more biddable or loyal to her polis than you.”
“This is not my polis,” he hisses, panting with effort.
“But it is hers,” Acantha says with a brisk nod toward me. “And perhaps she will be made fit to serve it with the right guidance. And with a guardian, of course.”
A guardian. I will be warded, just like my father. This is everything we wanted to stop. I’m not sure what the councilwoman means about my father passing on his bloodline, but I know it can’t be good, not with that look on his face.
He meets my eyes. There are tears in his. “I’m so sorry, love,” he says.
And then he collapses.
I let out a wild cry, a terrible emotion sweeping me up on its crest. Before I can lunge for him, Marklos makes another one of those twisting, slashing motions with his hand—plenty of blood on his fingers to aid him—and I join my father on the floor.
4
I’m having a curious dream. At least, I hope it’s a dream. I’m laid out on a cold stone slab in a dark room, naked save for a white sheet draping my body up to the shoulders. A few candles surround me, illuminating a haze of incense drifting in the air like a low fog and casting faint light on my too-pale skin. I look dead, and someone is chanting something that sounds suspiciously like funeral rights nearby.
I can see all of this, because I’m not really in my body, but floating above and looking down, as insubstantial as the incense. Am I a spirit, cut loose from my flesh? Am I actually dead—a shade? With the weight of my physical form has gone all my earthly cares. I really don’t mind that I might be gone.
“You’re not dead,” says a calm, deep voice.
I turn—th
ough turn isn’t really the right word. Rather, I redirect my focus, and suddenly I’m in a black stone chamber with no doors or windows. The room with the stone slab, the chanting, the candles, and the incense have all vanished. I’m somehow standing on two feet in a body that isn’t quite substantial. Thank the goddess I’m clothed in a simple white chiton and not naked, because I’m not alone.
A man stands in the chamber with me, in the shadows opposite. When he sees he has my attention, he shifts forward into better lighting—which is still minimal but enough for me to make out his features.
Black hair falls in curls to his shoulders, tucked behind his ears by a dull silver circlet. His face is beardless except for a slight shadow of stubble on his pale skin, and he appears to be in his early twenties. He almost looks normal—though abnormally striking—except he wears a strange knee-length chiton all in black, layered with a breastplate, sword belt, and skirt of featherlike strips that I’ve seen warriors wear—pteryges, I recall—all in black leather. Bracers of the same material, with silver studs, adorn his forearms, studded black leather greaves his legs, and black sandals his feet. His eyes are no color I can detect, like his pupils have swallowed the irises.
“While you’re not hard on the eyes, you’re also kind of creepy,” I say.
“But you’re not afraid,” he says. It isn’t a question.
“Maybe I would be if I weren’t dying.”
He shakes his head gently. “You’re not dying, either.”
“Then what is this?”
“You’re somewhere in between the living world and the underworld. Your spirit has been guided here after your body was placed into a near-death state. But you’re still alive.” His voice is so flat, so calm, my first impulse is to disturb it, like throwing rocks into a still pond.
Caution, I tell myself. Aloud, I say, “Why was I brought here?”
“Because I wanted to introduce myself. My name is Ivrilos.” He holds out his hand.
I eye it, remaining on the other side of the chamber. “I’m not sure I want to meet anyone who requires all this for an introduction.” I hesitate. “Especially someone who doesn’t know that colors exist in the world.”
In the Ravenous Dark Page 4
