Chapter Nineteen
Several things happened in quick succession. But they blurred into one for Cyrus.
Avexa leapt into action from her position by the castle steps—where she had been waiting for this moment, he realised too
late, poised with easy access to the platform and to Cyrus himself. She landed with instinctive grace, spear in hand, striding
towards the podium. Avexa did not acknowledge Max. Max did not stop her.
But Avexa still seemed so far away. Everything did. Cyrus was not standing in a crowded courtyard surrounded by people, gasps
and shrieks rising around him as they realised what was happening. He was not about to face a young champion already renowned
across the land for her fighting prowess.
Nobody else was there, nobody else mattered.
There was only Max, standing there on the platform and looking back at Cyrus.
His expression was completely blank. There was no hint of his Max in the indifferent man before him.
Cyrus could hear his own breathing, ragged and stilted, like it was catching on every bit of muscle and flesh between his lungs and his mouth.
He felt as though his chest had caved in on itself. The organ that usually pumped his lifeblood around his body had surely
fallen out of the cavity. It could not be safe behind his rib cage. It was on the ground by his boots, thrashing weakly as
a dying fish.
Avexa stopped in the centre of the platform, hefting her spear in her hand. It was that movement that finally shocked Cyrus
out of the stillness that had settled unforgivably over his limbs.
He couldn’t think about Max. He couldn’t let himself. He had to shut down that part of him, that stupid, stupid part of him, he had to move—
Cyrus started to shove his way back through the crowd. Guards had materialised at the top of the castle wall, at the metal
gate. Those who had already begun to flee the courtyard were being shepherded hurriedly through, but it was only a matter
of time before the gate was dragged closed.
And Cyrus had other problems. Some people ran at the realisation that a wrongdoer stood among them. In the Federation’s courtyard,
surrounded by reminders of Athaca’s best and bravest, others yelled and tried to get closer. As he stumbled towards the gate,
hands grabbed at him, seized a handful of his cloak. They were trying to stop him from escaping, and Cyrus couldn’t evade
them, they were all around him, closing in and grabbing for him, clawing—
Up on the platform Avexa raised her spear.
People scattered. His way cleared, but before he could make any progress a scrawny hand reached out and buried itself in the folds of Cyrus’s cloak, stopping him in his tracks and half-throttling him as he tried to shove forward.
Someone screamed close to his ear, deafeningly loud even above the cacophony.
Cyrus twisted desperately, trying to wriggle free of the clutching fingers, and as he lurched around, the platform came once more into sight behind him.
Max had vanished. That shouldn’t have been the first thing he noticed, but it was. There was no time to scan the crowd for
a familiar bronze head, because Avexa was looking right at him. Her arm reared, the muscles in her shoulder rippling. The
spear glinted in the sun as she threw it.
The person who had grabbed Cyrus was still clinging on to him—a man with wild, excited eyes, whipped up into a frenzy of exhilaration
by the potential of a fight. He had the wrongdoer, he bleated, he’d caught him, he wouldn’t let him go. Under the confusion
and the horror and the awful pulsing agony, there was finally a surge of fury.
If they wanted Cyrus, they could have him.
He whirled around, letting momentum drag the man with him. The fool didn’t let go even as he staggered with the force of Cyrus’s
spin.
Avexa’s spear slammed into the man’s back. For a second he was too shocked to react.
Then the man opened his mouth to scream, and a great spurt of blood frothed forth. The spray caught the people standing around
and Cyrus too, but they could save their squeals—within seconds he had his daggers out and finished the job, cutting the man’s
throat with vicious efficiency.
Blood sprayed out, a terrible scarlet arc. It was on his face, in his hair. Cyrus did not care.
He turned to face Avexa. She stood motionless on the platform, staring at him.
Behind her, Forwick was trying to scramble away.
Cyrus paid her no heed, his eyes locked onto Avexa’s.
He could feel the man’s blood on his mouth, trickling warm and wet down his lips.
He did not even realise that his eyes were glowing until the panicked cries from around him took on a new fear.
He had not called on his magic, not consciously.
It was simply there the moment he needed it, responding to his rage and the dreadful black chasm inside him that he did not dare acknowledge.
Avexa held his gaze for one beat, two. Her hand went to the sword at her hip, a slow, measured movement. Cyrus followed it.
His chest rose and fell rapidly, breathing hard. The glow in his eyes felt hot, almost painful. His hands trembled around
the daggers in his grip.
Then Avexa’s eyes slid sideways suddenly, and Cyrus realised a second too late that she’d been distracting him.
The elected champions had already been ushered through the metal gate for their interviews and their celebrations. Most of
the losing champions had gone too, to drown their disappointment in Durov’s taverns. The gate was nearly closed, preventing
Cyrus from escaping but also stopping anyone from rushing back in to fight him. It screeched to a halt over the cobbles as
the last onlookers streamed out in a panicked rush.
But from the remains of that crowd, a few figures lingered. Avexa was not the only one who had stayed behind. The Federation’s
latest graduates—their youngest, and hungriest—materialised like wraiths around him, shoulders forming an impenetrable wall,
hemming Cyrus in.
All this time, Cyrus had courted attention with faked battles, luring in audiences for maximum effect. But here at the end of it, there was no audience to gasp or cheer or boo. They all ran to escape, leaving wrongdoer and champions to their violence.
There were five—six?—seven surrounding him, watching with faces of stone. Cyrus’s head turned to the right, to the left, and
back again, but he recognised so few of them. They were so young.
But this wasn’t over. His magic still throbbed in his fingertips, and all he had to do was find the connection with the ivy
that grew all around the castle, and tell it to pull—
He felt the familiar purple fire fill his eyes, so intense it almost obscured his vision entirely.
But he heard Avexa’s roar.
“Do not let him use his powers!”
Too late, Cyrus wanted to say, you’re too late. The ivy was there, responding to his magic, inquisitive and eager to please, with its thousands of tendrils embedded into
the stonework of the castle walls and the keep itself. So much destruction could be caused if he could just—
And suddenly it was gone, all of it, his connection to the plant cut as swiftly as a scythe slicing through wheat.
A terrible blackness descended all around him, robbing him of every sense.
Cyrus was blind in an endless void of darkness, his hands thrust out helplessly as he tried to tether himself to the reality he knew.
The blackness seemed to push at his eyes, worming its way into his sockets.
Silence had its own roar, pressing in against his eardrums, a dreadful and unrelenting pressure.
His flailing hands found his eyes, his ears, tried in vain to protect them.
He had fallen to his knees, but he could not feel the cold stone below.
His daggers clattered to the ground, but he did not hear them fall.
He was crying out—he was screaming—but he could not hear a thing.
Whatever magic had caused this, it was so powerful that it sent his own magic reeling back into the darkest corners of his
mind, chased into shadows by a force far greater than any he could summon. This magic was in his head, coiled around his innermost
thoughts, insidious and inescapable. He was helpless to it. He was completely vulnerable. He was—
He was seeing something! Light, the barest spot of it, a million miles away and right in front of him. Cyrus reached for it,
swaying forward on his knees. The light grew closer and closer still. It flickered and Cyrus wanted to cry out, to beg it
not to leave him here, and the light must have heard him because it flickered again and then started to grow, taking shape.
Taking a wonderfully familiar shape, a sob squeezing out of his throat at the sight.
Max crouched before him. The edges of his body glowed and flickered with the same light. Cyrus was too busy drinking in his
face to care. There was the vaguest sense that he shouldn’t be doing that, that he should be angry with Max; angrier than
he had ever been with anyone in his life. But he wasn’t. How could he be? That face was more beloved than any he had ever
known. He longed to touch it, to trace the familiar lines of Max’s mouth, his jaw, his dimple. He wanted to press his forehead
to the crook of Max’s neck, feel the jump of his pulse, the only anchor Cyrus would ever need.
He reached out. But Max didn’t allow the contact, leaning back to keep distance between them.
“Cyrus,” Max said. His tone was so gentle. It made Cyrus want to cry. “Cyrus, what’s wrong?”
What could he say? Everything was wrong, everything, his every sense had left him and he was tumbling in a darkness he could not name. He could not find the words for it. His
thoughts were not his own. If he had a soul it was clenched in someone else’s fist, wrung out and lifeless.
Max watched him, his expression pitying. He stood, leaving Cyrus on the ground.
“Don’t go,” he choked out. “Don’t leave me—Max, you can’t leave me—”