by Sara Raasch
He blinked, and Ilena was there.
“Look at me,” she said sharply. He was leaning against a wall. A man stood behind her—Tyber? Were they in the temple sanctuary? He didn’t remember coming here. “What’s wrong with him?” she snapped.
“Too much energeia,” Ash told her. “It’s a longer story than we have time for.”
Ash was there. He clung to her voice as a thousand needles drove through his brain, and the darkness loomed again.
“I’ll get water,” Tyber said, and was gone.
Ilena cupped his cheek. “Madoc.”
His name on her lips nearly broke him.
“I’m sorry about Cassia.” His words were a strained whisper over the roaring in his ears. He needed to get it out before it was too late. “I’m sorry I didn’t get her in time.”
He siphoned in a quick breath of pain.
Anathrasa had known he was capable of taking a god’s power, just as she’d known it would kill him to do so.
He didn’t want Ilena to see him die, not after Cassia.
Ilena’s hands were on his face, her tear-filled eyes in front of his. She’d been crying. He hated it when she cried.
“I don’t want to hear you say that again, understand?” Her voice broke. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I never should have said those things. I didn’t mean them. She was your sister, and none of this is your fault.”
His throat twisted into knots.
“Petros is dead,” he told her. “Geoxus and Ignitus—they’re all dead. But Seneca—she’s not who you think. She’s dangerous.”
Ilena huffed in surprise, then muttered a curse. Her gaze lifted as a burst of shouts echoed outside the sanctuary walls.
“We have to go” came a deep voice from behind him. Was that Tor?
“Come with us,” Ash said to Ilena.
Hope whispered through him. Even that hurt.
“It won’t be safe here anymore,” Ash added. “People will be angry about what’s happened tonight. They’ll come for Madoc’s family.”
“I need to get Elias out of jail.” Ilena’s voice went thin. “I can’t leave my other children.”
“Then I’ll stay.” Madoc would hold out a little longer. He would give them time to hide.
“No.” She smoothed a hand over his head. Over his cheek. Tears streamed out of the corners of her eyes. “Madoc, it’s time for you to go.”
He shook his head. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t think straight.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going to take care of the family, and you’re going to take care of yourself, and we will meet again, I swear it on my life.”
“I can’t leave you here.” He forced himself off the wall to stand on his own, but his body was quaking. Knives sliced through every breath.
“You will,” she said firmly. “You’ll stay alive, whatever it takes. And when it’s safe, I will find you.”
He dipped his head against her bony shoulder, and she squeezed him tightly. But Ash and Tor were already dragging him away.
“Mother.” He struggled, but the shouts were growing nearer. He could feel fear prickling on the breeze. He could hear the chafe of metal from centurion armor somewhere in the distance.
“You’ve never called me that before,” Ilena said with a small, sad smile. She kissed his forehead. “You’re my son, and I love you. That’s what I meant to say before. I love you, Madoc. Now go.”
He blinked, and she was gone.
“Madoc.”
He startled at the sound of Ash’s voice. She’d come up beside him on the deck of the ship, but he hadn’t heard her approach. How that was possible he didn’t know. He could hear everything else with crystalline clarity—the wind filling the sails. Tor urging the captain to veer south to avoid Deiman fishing crews. The creak of every board and the slap of the waves against the siding.
It all pulled at him, demanding equal attention with the too-bright gleam of the moon and the rough, splintering wood of the ship’s siding beneath his hands. The only way he’d managed to stay conscious was by holding perfectly still. He could still feel the pulse of the gods’ energeia in his veins, the warring strength of his muscles with the mortal frailness of his bones. He couldn’t hold a single thought in his head.
Ilena.
Elias.
Anathrasa.
Petros and Geoxus and Ignitus. Dead. Dead because of him.
“Madoc.” Ash’s voice was softer now. He turned slightly toward her, finding she’d changed into a clean, white tunic and braided her long hair over one shoulder. Her mouth was a knot of worry, and the lines that creased her brow brought a jagged edge to his breath.
She had lost too much to be worried for him.
He set his gaze back to the black water. It stretched on and on, blending with the night sky in the distance.
“I can’t see Crixion anymore,” he said, voice cracking.
Her gaze stayed on him, warm, even without her igneia. “That doesn’t mean it isn’t there.” She placed two fingers on his temple, stilling the punch of his thoughts. “Or here.”
He tried to focus on home. On the good parts. On Ilena’s promise.
But he couldn’t hold on to them.
Her fingers drew away, and he tilted forward, wishing she was still touching him.
His shoulder twitched. Would this energeia ever subside? It had been hours since the ship had left the mainland, and still he felt like lightning encased in flesh. He had to get this under control so he could go back for the Metaxas. Ilena was in more danger now than ever. Elias needed him. If anything happened to them, Danon and Ava would be alone.
For a brief, weak moment, he wished Anathrasa was here to teach him how to shut this down. But he didn’t know where she was, or if she had survived the riots that had taken the city as they’d run.
Maybe it was the energeia inside him, but something told him she lived, and that the next time they met she would be stronger, more deadly.
“You need to rest,” Ash said quietly. He tried to cling to her voice, but it was swept away in the current of sound and sights. He blinked, trying to steady his breath. Trying to will down the fear of what he’d done, what he could do. What he might do next.
Strangle your doubt. It has no place in the heart of a weapon.
He wasn’t Geoxus’s weapon. He wasn’t Anathrasa’s either. But he was more lethal than either of them, because he could take their power away.
Where did that leave him?
What did that make him?
“I can’t . . .” He gave a dry, pained laugh. “I can’t let go of the side of the ship.”
Ash’s gaze dropped to his hands, and his followed. His knuckles were white, his fingertips tinged purple from the effort.
“What happens if you do?” she asked, her voice on the edge of the pounding in his head.
“I don’t know.”
The slight pressure of her fingers against his shoulder made him jerk. She went to pull away, but he quickly shook his head.
Her touch slid slowly down his arm, gentle and steady, and quieting each flexing muscle it passed. He focused on the cool feel of her fingertips, on the tiny muscles that bent each knuckle as her hand closed around his.
His breath came out in a hard pull.
“What if you hold on to me instead?” she asked.
His gaze shot to hers, and then back to his hand, where she’d softly begun to pry loose each of his fingers. Longing cut through him with the sharp point of a knife. He wanted to press his face against the groove of her neck. Fan his hands over the small of her back. Disappear in the scent of her skin.
But she was different now, and so was he. He had to be careful.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Still, she worked at his grip, until his right hand was free and his fingers were weaving with hers. Smooth skin met hard calluses; then her hand tightened around his.
The ship rocked. His breath came out in a shudder.
“I’m not going to break,” she told him.
He wasn’t so sure. He was barely holding himself together.
“Come with me,” she said.
The low beckon of her voice had him releasing the railing with the other hand. He followed her, aware of Tor’s narrowed gaze tracking him from the upper deck, and the swinging lanterns, and the unevenness of his own steps. Of the energeia searing through his chest, and his frantic efforts to keep it trapped inside so he wouldn’t somehow use it to hurt Ash.
The wind pulled strands of hair free from her braid, and they whipped across her straight back. Even now, she walked like a goddess. Even after she’d lost her igneia. Her mother. Her home and her god.
She had never been more divine.
His scowl eased as she led him to the steps below deck. He felt too big for the narrow corridor, clumsy, but her hand stayed in his and he did not let go. He held on to her as tightly as he dared. She had come for him in the palace when she should have run. She had fought for him when she had no energeia to fight with.
His head began to quiet, though his heart did not.
They came to a series of doors, latched so they wouldn’t swing with the movement of the ship. At the last one, Ash slid the bolt free, revealing a small chamber with barely enough room for the bunk against the far wall.
With a hard lurch, it reminded him of home—the bunks he shared with Elias and Danon—and he knew that even when he went back for the Metaxas, things would never return to the way they’d been.
Ash locked the door behind him and reached for the candle on a small table against the wall. Her hand paused over the blackened wick, and a pained grimace crossed her face as she reached for a match.
His chest heaved.
When the candle was lit, she tugged him toward the bed.
With a dry swallow, he followed her and sat on the edge of the thin mattress. She sat beside him. The brush of their knees sent a spark up his thigh that had nothing to do with energeia.
The porthole gave just enough light to soften the high bones of her cheeks and the wisps of her hair. He reached for one now, intending to tuck it behind her ear, but hesitated.
His hand was shaking. He dropped it into his lap.
Her cheek indented, as if she were biting it. “Stop trying to control it,” she told him.
He huffed. “Control is all I have.”
“No,” she said simply. “You have me.”
She moved closer—close enough for him to see each long lash around her eyes, and the soft slope of her nose. Her thumb pressed to his eyebrow, smoothing away the tension.
It loosened something inside him.
“Energeia listens to the heart, not the mind,” he said, thinking of how he’d nearly lost control taking Petros’s energeia. How quickly his father had plunged a spear into his gut with only a word.
That power was still inside him, and if he couldn’t stop himself, he might kill her.
“What does your heart want?” she asked.
You.
He didn’t look directly at her, afraid he wouldn’t see the same truth on her face.
“That’s not a simple question,” he lied.
“It’s guided you before. Why don’t you trust it now?”
Because I don’t want to hurt you. Because I am capable of terrible things.
But her words nestled beneath his skin and took root. His anathreia had not always listened to him, but when it had, it wasn’t because he’d ordered its compliance. It was because he’d felt something too strong to ignore. Ash’s grief. Jann’s hate. His love and fear for Cassia.
His love and fear for Ash.
All blanketed by a new terror taking the shape of the small woman who’d lived above him for eleven years.
He opened his eyes to meet Ash’s gaze. “I won’t be like her.”
Anathrasa.
He didn’t have to say the name. Ash knew.
“You won’t,” she said with certainty, her thumbs now pressing against his temple in a way that elicited a soft groan. “You healed me, remember? You wouldn’t have done that if you were like her.”
He wasn’t as sure as she was, but he remembered the force that had driven him toward her broken body. He hadn’t thought of what he would do in that moment. He’d only wanted her to be alive and unhurt.
When Petros had died, Madoc hadn’t thought to kill him; he’d only wanted to protect himself. When he’d stopped from taking his father as a tithe, it had been because of Ash’s face in his mind.
Intention is power, Madoc, whether it be a storm of rage or a whisper of regret.
He understood now what Anathrasa had meant. If the soul was the will of the heart, then he could never do Ash harm, because even with this strange, dangerous power, his heart belonged to her.
He leaned closer, and when her hands skimmed past his ears and traced lines down the back of his neck, he knew, finally, what he had to do.
“Can I kiss you?” he murmured.
Her lips parted. She nodded.
He lifted his hands, no longer shaking. His fingertips brushed her cheeks. As her eyes closed, a new power took hold inside him. He would not break this trust she laid out before him. He would honor it, and her, however he could. However she would let him.
Her pulse fluttered beneath her skin, beating like the wings of a butterfly, and his tunic pulled tighter across his back as she fisted her hands in the hem at his waist. She might have had her energeia taken, but she had more power over him than any mortal or god.
He closed the small space between them. His mouth found hers, a gentle sweep from side to side, the barest pressure. A question she answered with a sigh and a curve of her shoulder.
He leaned closer, finally moving that stray hair behind her ear, and kissed her, taking her full lower lip between his. As their knees brushed, the scent of honey water invaded his senses. His heart was pounding, but as his anathreia spread across his body, his mind quieted, and he could feel the different strands of energeia braiding together inside him.
The breath of aereia from air divinity. The strength in his muscles and bones—bioseia and geoeia, he now knew. Hydreia flowed through him like water in his blood. Growth, floreia, came from plant divinity.
And finally, he found the warm pulsing glow of igneia.
He summoned the heat in his veins, drawing it behind the paper walls of his ribs. He parted Ash’s lips, and the sweet taste of her brought a rush back to his ears. He pulled her closer, his hand trailing down her back, to the side of her waist. He kissed her more deeply, with everything he had. Every speck of fear. Every drop of joy. He kissed her until Deimos disappeared, and the arenas were empty, and the pain gave way to that steady ache of fire. She gasped for breath, and his mouth found her neck, a spot just below her ear that made her shudder and dig her fingers into his shoulder blades.
And then he let go of his control.
The energeia swirled through him, warm now, a soft pulsing glow. It pushed through his hands and his fingers and his lips. Through his breath. Through her skin.
What does your heart want?
You.
Her hands were warm against his back, leaving trails of heat straight to his bones. Then she was kissing him with a fevered passion, sliding onto his lap, her hot thighs bracketing his hips. Her fingertips heating through his shirt.
Burning.
She gave a staggered gasp, and he stopped at once, unsure what the sound meant. She jerked back, and he caught her around the waist before she fell, so intently trying to read the wonder in her round eyes that he missed the blue flames flickering from the palms of her hands.
“Look!” she cried. “Madoc, look!”
He was looking. He was grinning. The light from the candle was out now—it was inside her, dancing in the palms of her hands.
“You did this,” she said in wonder.
It is as simple as breathing. In and out. That is the way of energeia.
He’d given a
piece of his soul to Ash, and in doing so returned her powers.
He wanted to shout in excitement, and weep, and punch a hole through the black night sky. He wanted to kiss her mindless and rush home to save his family. He wanted to sail on and find allies in the other gods and unite the world.
He gave a small shrug.
In an instant, she had him wrapped so tightly against her that he could hardly breathe. He didn’t care. If this was how he died, he would die happy.
She pulled back. “Are you all right?”
“You’re asking if I’m all right?”
But he was. The ache in his head was gone. His muscles no longer twitched. His bones didn’t hurt.
“I’m fine,” he said, surprised. He was alive, severed from his home and any god who tried to claim him, and it didn’t matter, because for the first time in his life, he felt whole.
He didn’t need Geoxus or Anathrasa. He didn’t need Petros, whispering in his ear that he wasn’t enough. He didn’t need to hide behind the curtain of Elias’s power. He had his own power, and he could trust himself to use it.
Ash hugged him again, and kissed his neck, and as the moon crossed the sky, the ship rocked, carrying them farther from the chaos in Deimos and closer to a wild, uncertain future.
Together, they would survive this war. They knew what it was like to be broken. They knew what it was like to be remade.
They were strong. And now, they would be ready.
Acknowledgments
Set Fire to the Gods has been six years in the making.
The first spark of an idea started at the 2014 RT convention in Dallas. Everything we are now, everything this book became, originated there, where we were eating cake in a hotel room and went, “Hey, we should write a book together.” It was a game at first, but over time and a few (thousand) emails, we fell in love with the characters and created something neither of us could have imagined all those years prior.
A massive thank-you goes out to our agents, Mackenzie Brady Watson and Joanna MacKenzie. This book underwent many concept shifts, and your careful reads and guidance are the reason Set Fire became what it is today.
To Kristin Rens, who became “Editor Kristin” and who we adore even though she spells her name wrong (ahem . . . KristEn). Thank you for taking on our Magical Gladiator book. For shuffling Ash and Madoc into working order. For pulling out the details that had gotten lost over the aforementioned six years of development and telling us what parts were best. You are a goddess of editing energeia (editeia?).
