Chapter 14 #2
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. I tightened my grip, accepting the apology without quite understanding it.
Carefully, I ventured another question. “Is that why she’s gone… mad?”
“Yes.” His other hand came up to cover mine where it rested on his sleeve, his palm uncomfortably hot against my skin.
“Levinica's magic is second sight. She sees visions. They're as murky as riddles, though they sharpen through touch—through connection. She’s never stopped searching for her son—for Dannis. Not in three hundred years.” He exhaled deeply, sadly. “Her grief… It’s consumed her.”
“How could the Full Circle decide something like that?” I asked, the memory of Levinica's despair still clinging to me. “How could they take a child from his mother?”
His thumb traced slow circles over the back of my hand. “I don't know, El.” He watched me for a long moment. “How did you do it?”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“In the mortal lands.” His gaze held mine, unwavering. “You cut off an arm to save a life. You took a head to save a village.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but he spoke first.
“You made the choice you believed would save the most people.”His thumb stilled. “This is no different.”
The truth of it struck like a physical blow.
Tears burned behind my eyes as faces flashed through my mind.
Every life I'd condemned. Every family left behind to mourn them.
Even the ones I'd tried to spare, I'd only doomed to a slower death.
Ayron Brighthall. His leg burning in the fire.
Had he survived the winter? Or had he died before the Veil fell?
Aedric's hand moved slowly over my back, the touch achingly gentle. “Levinica made her choice, El. She stood beside the one who tore this world apart. Don't pity her. She decided her own fate.”
How could someone choose that? Choose to stand beside something so monstrous, knowing what it meant?
Levinica hadn’t seemed cruel when I saw her—only broken, a grieving mother.
But that was who she was now. What had she been before?
When she’d stood at the height of her power, her brother seated on a throne of blood and terror?
The horror must have shown on my face, because he rose smoothly, pulling me gently to my feet.
I winced as the sea breeze brushed across my cheek. I lifted a hand to touch it, but the lightest graze of my fingertips sent pain flaring through me. I gasped.
“You’ll be fine,” Aedric murmured. He tilted my chin, studying the side of my face.
A faint embarrassment crept beneath his scrutiny, my thoughts turning unwillingly to my magic—to the way it had risen when I touched him, to how little control I still had over it, how it seemed to move with a will entirely its own.
Would I ever learn to wield it properly, or was there something broken within me that would always keep me from mastering it?
“El.” His voice pulled me back, low and suddenly grave. “I need you to promise me something.”
“Anything,” I breathed.
“No matter what happens,” he continued, “no matter what the cost… Rìan cannot know the truth. He cannot know what happened to Dannis.”
A frown pulled at my brow, and I regretted the movement instantly as the tender skin of my cheek protested.
“But Aedric… I don’t know the truth. I don’t know what happened to him.”
He scrutinized me for a long moment, his face unreadable. “Promise me.”
I hesitated only a moment before nodding.
“On your life,” he pressed. “And on mine.”
The intensity in his gaze sent a chill through me. “I promise.”
He exhaled slowly, some of the tension easing from his shoulders, his expression warming.
“Thank you,” he said, then gestured gently to the side of my face. “Now let’s take care of that.”
In the room, I moved immediately toward the vanity, wanting to see what was causing the persistent pain in my cheek, but Aedric stopped me with a soft sound of disapproval, angling the mirror upward before guiding me to sit at the edge of the bed instead.
He leaned down, pressing a brief kiss to my forehead, his familiar scent wrapping around me—burnt amber, rain on stone—but the smoke beneath it made my stomach roil.
“Don't touch it,” he murmured. “I'll have a healer send something up.”
I sank back against the pillows, forcing my hand to remain at my side.
He paused in the doorway. When I turned my head toward him, I found him watching me, and the look on his face—heavy with something like regret—caught me off guard.
“What is it?”
“I’m sorry,” he said weakly. “I didn’t mean…” His voice trailed off, and after a moment he offered a small, careful smile. “Get some rest. I’ll be back shortly.”
He closed the door behind him.
I tried to rest, but my mind refused to quiet.
My thoughts churned restlessly, circling back again and again to Levinica—to the way she'd reached for me, the desperation and savagery with which she'd lunged to seize me.
How unimaginable her suffering must have been, to drive her to madness over the loss of her son.
I sat up straighter. Something Hyperia had said in Thistra surfaced then, unbidden. When Veylan had spoken of Levinica's visions, Hyperia had dismissed them outright, calling them unreliable.
My pulse quickened.
If that was true… then what did it mean for the vision Veylan had shared with us? The one in which Levinica had foreseen my bond with Rìan being broken? Had that been one of the unreliable ones?
A quiet panic began to take hold as the thought unfolded, slow and insidious. I needed that vision to be true—needed it to mean something, to be more than the fractured remnants of a mind unraveling. But what if it wasn’t? What if we’d come all this way for nothing?
I was so lost in the spiral of it that the soft knock at my door startled me, my body jolting as though I’d been pulled suddenly from deep water.
“Come in.” I pushed myself upright, already expecting to see Aedric with something in hand to soothe the throbbing in my cheek.
But it was Hamish who entered.
“Elowen?” he began cautiously as he stepped inside, but whatever he’d meant to say died the moment he saw my face.
In two strides he crossed the room, his fingers closing gently around my chin as he turned my face toward the light. His expression hardened at once, his jaw tightening. Then his eyes met mine, and what I saw there was infinitely worse.
Sorrow. Helplessness.
I pulled back, heat rising in my face for an entirely different reason now. “It’s my fault, Hamish. I can’t control—”
“That bastard,” he muttered, his hand dropping to the hilt of his sword, his fingers curling around the pommel as though resisting the urge to draw it.
I blinked, stunned. “Hamish—”
But he was already gone, striding through the door and pulling it shut behind him, leaving me staring after him, confusion knotting in my chest.
What had I done? How badly had my magic marred my face? Was I disfigured?
I pushed myself from the bed and crossed to the vanity, tilting the mirror toward me. And when I saw my reflection—
The breath left me in a sudden rush.
The left side of my face was flushed an angry red, the skin already darkening with bruising beneath it, the surface raised and blistered along my cheekbone and jaw—burned. I leaned closer, my pulse quickening, trying to make sense of it—
And then I saw them.
Faint beneath the swelling, barely visible through the cracked skin and discoloration. Long, narrow, but unmistakable.
The shape of fingers.
The realization came slowly, sickeningly, settling into place piece by piece, undeniable.
The force that had thrown me into the sand. The pain. I’d thought it was my magic—but it wasn’t.
No.
Aedric—my Aedric—
—had struck me.