Chapter 32 Sorin
CHAPTER 32
SORIN
“ T his isn’t working,” Scarlett sighed, sheathing her sword down her back and brushing back stray hair that had escaped from her braid.
They had been out in the training pits all morning, as they had been every morning for the last week. They spent the morning hours here. They spent their afternoons in various meetings with various people, and they spent their evenings researching until they couldn’t keep their eyes open or until other … distractions arose.
Scarlett had thrown herself completely into learning to ?ght with her magic and weapons in tandem, as she did with everything she set out to learn. And while she needed to learn to do so seamlessly, she was clearly frustrated that it wasn’t coming more naturally to her.
Sorin sheathed his own blade, closing the distance between them. “You are not going to master this in a few days, Scarlett. It is no different from how you trained to harness your power. You are still learning to do that, in addition to trying to ?ght with it.”
“I understand that, but you’re going easy on me. I don’t need you to do that,” she argued, her hands coming to her hips. “In fact, I need you to do the opposite.”
“Of course he is,” a male voice drawled from the stone archway, and they turned to ?nd Cyrus leaning against it. He pushed off the stones, coming toward them. “He’s not going to attack you, Darling. You’re his twin ?ame.”
“That is not why,” Sorin replied, reaching over to adjust a strap on the leathers she was wearing. The High Witch had gotten her another witch-suit along with the lighter-weight witch-leathers she preferred over Fae leathers or mortal armor.
She batted his hands away in frustration. “Then what, exactly, is the reason?”
“The reason, Princess, is that I do not want you tapping into your shadows and white ?ames as much, because you refuse to—”
“If you say feed , I am going to knock you on your ass,” she warned.
“Mmm,” he hummed. “My favorite kind of threats: empty ones.”
He caught the ?st that came swinging for his face a moment later, Cyrus chuckling beside them.
“And you say I throw temper tantrums,” Sorin teased.
Scarlett snatched her wrist back and stuck her tongue out at him.
And if that didn’t make him start envisioning all the other uses she’d found for that tongue lately …
Scarlett smirked at him as if she knew exactly where his thoughts had gone, and she likely did, considering his mental shields had been slipping more and more these last few days.
“You’ll never learn a thing if you are constantly stopping to do that ,” came Eliza’s annoyed voice as she came into the pit.
“I’m not going to learn anything because he’s too afraid to push me,” Scarlett retorted.
“As I have already stated, I am not afraid to push you. I am far more worried about the fact that you refuse to acknowledge the need to feed ,” he replied, watching the ire ignite in her eyes at the word. They were still silvery-blue, but muted and dull. She may refuse to acknowledge it, but she’d used her shadows plenty this last week. If she didn’t do something about it, icy blue eyes would look back at him soon. She’d still be able to access her Avonleyan gifts, but they wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as they could be. As they should be at all times really, now that they knew what they were dealing with.
She took a step away from him, and when he moved to regain that distance, his foot slipped out from under him, and he ended up on his ass, on a layer of ice beneath his feet. Cyrus and Eliza were roaring with laughter, and Scarlett leaned down over him with a wicked glint in her eyes.
“Tell me about empty threats again,” she purred.
His hand snapped out to pull her down with him, but she leapt back with a ?endish laugh, sending those very shadows he was so damn worried about raking sensuously down his face, his neck, his torso. It was as though her own fucking ?ngers were dragging lower and lower.
“It’s no wonder you aren’t getting anywhere if this is how you spend your training hours ,” Cyrus said. “Although, I shouldn’t really be surprised considering the things I walked in on during your magic training in Solembra.”
Scarlett sent him a droll look, throwing him a vulgar gesture.
Sorin had managed to get back to his feet, melting the ice beneath him, as Eliza said, “He is always going to go easy on you. He physically cannot intentionally hurt you. It would go against the twin ?ame bond.”
“He didn’t go easy on me when he was training me in Baylorin,” Scarlett grumbled.
“That’s because he was trying to deny his feelings for you and thought torturing you would help,” came a voice from the far shadows of the pit. A voice of silk and honey. And Scarlett whirled towards it.
Nuri appeared from a shadowed corner of the pit, and Scarlett was racing towards her. The two females embraced each other, their grips ?erce. Nuri was clad in her usual black, gloves in place, but her hood was down, letting Sorin see her eyes close as she held Scarlett close.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Scarlett hissed at the female.
“Here and there,” Nuri answered, neither of them willing to be the ?rst to release the other.
She had asked Sorin about her every day. And every day his answer had been the same: Nuri had been busy tending to the children, making trips to the markets for necessities for them. But even he had been surprised the female hadn’t carved out some amount of time to come see Scarlett. He was told she’d checked in on her, on Cassius too. But somehow the two females always managed to miss each other.
“I know what ‘here and there’ means,” Scarlett replied softly.
“It is ?ne, Sister,” Nuri answered, ?nally pulling back, a half-smile tugging at the corner of her lips. She took a step back, drawing her scimitars from where they always sat at her sides. A wicked glint entered her eyes that Sorin recognized all too well. “Shall we?”
Scarlett drew the sword from her back, then pulled a long knife from her belt.
“None of your fancy magic tricks, Sister,” Nuri said, pointing one of her scimitars at her.
“No biting, Sister ,” Scarlett crooned back.
The two had already begun circling each other, their eyes assessing the other’s movements, watching for weaknesses that may have arisen since they last sparred.
“No coddling from your underlings,” Nuri countered, with a nod of her head in the direction of Sorin, Eliza, and Cyrus.
“I did not realize you needed so many rules in place to best me,” Scarlett taunted.
At her words, Nuri bared her teeth, her fangs absent, as she shot forward with the speed of her kind, but Scarlett was ready for it, meeting her blade with her own.
“Are we going to let this go?” Cyrus asked, his eyes on the females.
“I dare you to try and interfere with that ,” Eliza replied, her grey eyes bright with excitement at watching two of the Wraiths of Death spar.
Sorin crossed his arms, leaning back against the stone wall of the pit. They’d made their way over here, trying to give the females space as they’d reconnected. Every primal instinct in him was roaring at him to go ?ght for her, but considering he’d seen Scarlett pin the female to the ground with a dagger through the forearm, he wasn’t inclined to intervene at this particular moment.
“She can handle it,” Sorin ?nally said, a soft smile lifting his lips as he watched her duck to avoid a blow, before landing a clean kick to Nuri’s side and causing the Night Child to curse.
“She’s leaving her right side unguarded too long,” Cyrus murmured.
“I noticed,” Sorin said, having caught the same small mistake Cyrus was referencing. “If Nuri doesn’t capitalize on it, I will the next time we spar.”
Cyrus snorted a laugh. “She’s not wrong, you know. You’re going too easy on her. You need to push her, Sorin. Mikale won’t go easy. Alaric won’t—”
“I am well aware of what they will do to her,” Sorin snarled, embers ?ickering in his vision. She’d told him a little more over the last few days. Things that had been said to her while she was chained to a wall. Things that had been done to her when she was growing up, when she had been training to become Death’s Maiden. But not enough. Not enough for him to know her the way Cassius would. The way maybe even the Night Child she was currently sparring with would. In time, he would learn all those stories, but time was not a luxury they currently had.
He lurched forward as Nuri’s blade skimmed across Scarlett’s shoulder. If it weren’t for the leathers she was wearing, it would have been a deep slice into her skin. Cyrus’s hand clamped onto his shoulder, reminding him that this was a sparring match between friends.
“These are new!” Scarlett hissed in outrage, lunging forward.
“Obviously,” Nuri drawled, dancing backwards from her attack. “They need to be scuffed up a little.”
A soft snarl came from Scarlett as she attacked again, but she didn’t let up this time. She came for her again and again, forcing Nuri to block and retreat. And when the Night Child tried to dodge her next strike, Scarlett’s knife snagged on the collar of her tunic.
Nuri dropped one of her scimitars, reaching for a dagger instead, as Scarlett suddenly said, “I yield.” Her weapons hit the ground, and Sorin was running because Nuri didn’t have time to slow her attack. Her dagger was still coming down, and Scarlett was stepping into the blow.
“What the fuck is she doing?” Cyrus ground out, keeping pace beside him, but they wouldn’t be fast enough.
They were both raising their hands to use ?ames to stop what was about to happen, but shadows latched onto Nuri’s wrist, halting the dagger a mere inch from piercing Scarlett’s throat. Scarlett just reached up, brushing the dagger aside as though it were an annoying insect. Nuri had started laughing like the insane female she was, and Scarlett was reaching towards her.
Sorin opened his mouth to yell, to rage, to say something, but nothing came out, because what the fuck had she been thinking? He didn’t even know where to start.
Another raging female didn’t seem to have that problem, though. Eliza pushed between him and Cyrus, gripping Scarlett’s arm and spinning her around. “Have you lost your godsdamn mind?”
“I’m ?ne,” Scarlett said distractedly, trying to turn back to Nuri, who had managed to stop laughing like a godsdamn maniac. She was watching Scarlett with curiosity, but Eliza wasn’t done.
“You are clearly not fucking ?ne,” Eliza snapped. “You nearly had a dagger shoved into your throat.”
“But I didn’t,” she replied, her eyes ?xed on Nuri.
“Scarlett,” Sorin ground out from between his teeth.
She shrugged out of Eliza’s grip, turning back to fully face Nuri. Her hand came up to wrap around a necklace that had slipped out when Scarlett’s sword had snagged on the female’s collar.
A spirit amulet.
On a white chain with silver running through it.
“You have had this for years,” Scarlett murmured to herself.
“Yes. Since it was gifted to me by Alaric,” Nuri said, watching Scarlett as carefully as the rest of them were now.
Scarlett’s eyes ?ew to hers. “Alaric gave you this?”
“Yes, when I was a child. I was ecstatic because it was like yours and Juliette’s,” Nuri replied.
Scarlett’s eyes went wide at that, and she turned, dropping to her knees and beginning to write in the dirt.
“Not this again,” Cyrus muttered.
Sorin lowered to his knees beside her, relieved to ?nd her writing words in the dirt instead of Marks.
On one side she had listed out various bloodlines: Shifters, Night Children, Fae, Witches, Mortals, Avonleyans. Across from that were names: Tula, Nuri, ?, Juliette, ?, Me.
“A child of each possesses them on a chain of wind-kissed stone,” Sorin muttered.
Scarlett looked up at him, her eyes bright with excitement. “They have always been trying to get home.”
“They have always been trying to get to you,” he said. He could hear the tentative awe in his tone.
“Alaric didn’t even know what he had,” she whispered, before a laugh of disbelief slipped from her lips. “I was around nearly all of them for years. Years. So was he, and he had no godsdamn idea.”
“Are you saying our amulets are some of these keys?” Nuri demanded from where she still stood. Eliza and Cyrus were looking on, shock on their features.
“Yes,” Scarlett answered, glancing up at her before going back to the list. “If you’d been around these last few days, you’d know of my suspicions.”
“I have been around. Taking care of the children while you’ve been playing all-important queen,” Nuri bit back.
A snarl had Sorin’s lip curling up, and Cyrus had taken a step towards Nuri. One look at her face, and Sorin knew she was only half-joking. Nuri just gave him a taunting grin.
Scarlett ignored the verbal jab though, her attention completely returned to her list. “I had one. Tula had one and is a full-blooded Shifter. Juliette had the Witch key, and Nuri possess the Night Child one. That leaves a mortal key and Fae key, but that is only six bloodlines. There are seven keys. What could the other be?”
“Maraan?” Sorin supplied.
“I cannot imagine Eliné would have entrusted a key to a Maraan. That would be a little counterproductive,” she mused, sitting back on her heels.
Nuri had walked around them, stopping beside the writing. “Tula had one of these?”
“Yes,” Scarlett answered. Sorin could tell by her tone she was only half-listening, lost in thought like she often got when she was working something out. “She found it hidden in the Lairwood House the night she was held captive.”
“The night Juliette died?” Nuri clari?ed.
Scarlett’s eyes ?ashed to hers before quickly darting away once more. “Yes.”
“So where is Juliette’s now?” Nuri asked. “She must have been wearing it that night, and Sybil never got to see her body …”
Scarlett’s eyes closed, and she tried to hide the slight grimace, but he saw it. He saw that it still cut deep, even though Juliette was, for all intents and purposes, still alive.
Scarlett …
Her eyes opened, locking on his. I’m ?ne, came down the bond. Then she cleared her throat before she said, her voice quiet, “I do not know. My best guess would be somewhere in the Lairwood House? We need to ?nd out what Mikale did with her body after that night.”
“And the other two?” Cyrus asked. Sorin glanced up to ?nd his Second had gone to the same place his wife had, trying to work out a puzzle with the answer just out of reach.
“I need to think on them,” Scarlett answered, pushing to her feet. “The others were all close. I’ve been around them for years.”
Sorin had gotten to his own feet. He was about to ask if she had any ideas, when a loud roar had them all reaching for weapons. The sound shook the pit, small pebbles shaking loose from the stone archway. Sorin was reaching for Scarlett, pulling her into his side, while Cyrus and Eliza closed in around them. Even Nuri had moved to their back, her fangs snapping out.
Another loud roar pierced the air, and shadows were swirling around them all, shields of ?ames joining them.
“What is that?” Scarlett murmured, her eyes darting around, searching for the source as intently as the rest of them.
“I do not know,” Sorin answered. “Nothing should be able to get in here. Not with the wards around the Black Halls.”
Another shadow fell over them that had them all looking towards the sky, where the sun was being blotted out by something massive gliding on black wings. It banked, clearly circling around to come back to them, and Sorin was pulling Scarlett in tighter.
“Is that …” Scarlett asked, the shock on her face matching what Sorin was feeling.
“That is not possible,” Cyrus muttered, but he had lowered his weapons, just as Sorin and Eliza had.
The ground shuddered around them when a huge, scaled body landed on the ground several feet away from them. Sorin gripped Scarlett’s waist, steadying her as she stumbled at the rocking of the earth beneath their feet.
There was a snort and huff that had smoke furling from the giant reptile’s nostrils. Its vertical pupils were surrounded by glowing yellow irises, and they were ?xed on them. It had to be at least twenty feet long, and the creature tucked its wings to its side as its barbed tail thumped the ground behind him.
“It’s a dragon,” Scarlett breathed.
“It is Ranvir,” Sorin corrected quietly.
“You know the dragon?” Scarlett asked, looking up at him.
“He is Sargon’s spirit animal. His brother, Ejder, is Arius’s,” Sorin replied.
“Why is he here?” Scarlett asked, disentangling herself from his grasp, her head tilting as she studied the dragon before them.
“My best guess is that he is here for Cassius,” Sorin answered.
Scarlett’s gaze swung back to him. “You think he is Cassius’s spirit animal?”
Sorin shrugged, the others standing in shocked silence around them. “It will not surprise me if he is.”
Scarlett’s gaze went back to the reptile. His deep green scales glinted in the sun, and it huffed again. She took a step forward, but Sorin gripped her arm, halting her.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to say hello,” she answered, looking back at him.
“You are not touching a dragon, Scarlett,” Sorin replied, giving her an incredulous look.
She looked back to Ranvir. He was watching her intently, and he lowered his head slightly, as if inviting her to pet him. “I think he’d like it,” she said to Sorin, trying to tug her arm from his grip. “Maybe he would take me ?ying.”
“By the gods,” Sorin swore. “No, Love. You are not riding a spirit animal.”
“But I’ve ridden Rinji,” she argued.
“Yes, but Rinji is Luan’s spirit animal, and he was with us.” “So if Cassius is with me, I can ride Ranvir?”
“He is not here for Cassius. Not in the way you are thinking,” came the High Witch’s stern voice. They turned to ?nd her standing several paces behind them, her lips thinned as she looked upon the dragon before them.
“How do you know?” Scarlett asked, her gaze returning to the dragon, who was watching them all carefully.
“Bonding takes place in Shira Forest, not here,” Hazel replied, ?nally moving forward. “But Ranvir is already bonded to another. Unless he has passed, Ranvir is not here for a bonding ritual. However, his business here is likely Cassius.”
Scarlett tried to take a step forward again, but Sorin’s hand tightened on her arm. She shot him a glare over her shoulder.
“He will not hurt the queen, Prince,” the High Witch said. “He knows who she is. He knows whose blood runs in her veins.”
“And whose blood is that?” Sorin asked tightly at the same time that Scarlett asked, “What business does he have with Cassius?”
The High Witch seemed to glare at the dragon before she met Scarlett’s gaze. “Ranvir is here on behalf of the one he is bonded to.”
“And who is that?” Scarlett pressed.
The High Witch’s lips pursed once more before she answered, “Cassius’s father.”
“What?” Scarlett demanded, jerking free of Sorin’s hold and closing the distance between herself and the High Witch. Eliza and Cyrus tensed beside him, clearly still as leery of the High Witch as Sorin was, despite what she said about being close with Eliné.
“Cassius’s father was unaware of his existence. Ranvir’s arrival would tell me that is no longer the case. Since he cannot come here himself, he sent his pet.”
Sorin choked down the laugh at her referring to a giant dragon that belonged to the god of courage and war as a pet.
Scarlett started to say something else, but she stopped short, as if suddenly realizing something. “Why are you down here? You haven’t left Cassius’s side since we arrived.”
For the ?rst time Sorin could ever remember, a small smile lifted on the High Witch’s lips. “I came to ?nd you. He is waking.”
Scarlett went preternaturally still. For a few brief seconds, it seemed she did not even breathe, but those seconds gave Sorin time to reach her side where he barely caught her hand before she Traveled from the pits.