Chapter 24
Cyra
Aramis’s face was the first thing I saw when my eyes fluttered open. I blinked, excited to see him for reasons I couldn’t grasp in my half-waking state, but when I tried to focus, his face faded away.
I blinked again and lifted my head. The faint whiff of smoke caught my nose, and I frowned.
“Cyra?”
I tried to place the voice calling my name. It wasn’t Bressen’s, and something strained in the back of my mind as I tried to recall why that realization sent cold dread seeping through me.
Axenus. The voice belonged to Axenus.
I turned my head and found his face as he came to stand over me. I was in my bed at Tide’s End. But why was Axenus here?
I looked to the other side of the bed expecting to see Bressen, but it was empty. I frowned and was about to ask Axenus where Bressen was, when the memory of Talyn slapping a caronium cuff on him and escaping through Magdalene’s portal came back to me.
I tried to jolt up to a sitting position, but my body didn’t seem capable of that movement, and I managed only a slow lurch.
“Where’s Bressen?” I asked, panicked.
Surgeon and Serise were in the room as well, one of them at the entrance to our antechamber and one near the doors to the balcony.
My attention swung back to the merman. “Axenus, where is he?”
His answer was a pained, apologetic look.
“Axenus!” I said, and the authority I infused in my voice wasn’t for show. It was the Hand of the Nemesis that spoke now. I needed answers.
“I…we don’t know,” he said. “Samhail explained what happened, but we haven’t yet been able to find out where the assassin took Bressen. We suspect Sandrian and Magdalene are in Rowe somewhere, but we haven’t been able to determine where.”
I sat silently in bed letting that news sink in.
Axenus seemed to be prepared for an outburst from me, but I didn’t move.
I remembered everything now from our failed attempt to capture Sandrian.
I remembered every horrible thing Magdalene had told me, and I remembered Talyn betraying us and taking Bressen.
Then I remembered the heat of the fire I’d created to manifest my own rage and hate. And I remembered the destruction I’d wrought.
Something squeezed the breath from my lungs.
Bressen was now in the hands of our enemies, and the only thing that was holding me on a hairs breadth of sanity was the certainty that if he was dead, I would’ve felt it in my soul.
Somehow, I knew he was still alive, and that knowledge was the only thing that kept me from burning the world to the ground.
That didn’t mean someone wouldn’t suffer for this. If I ever saw Talyn again, I’d kill her.
I didn’t have access to her right now, though, so someone else would have to serve as my outlet.
I swung my legs out of bed and stood up. They felt shaky, but I stayed upright. My whole body was numb, and it seemed to move as if by rote.
“Cyra?” Axenus asked. He sounded wary, which was wise of him.
I didn’t answer. I looked from Surgeon to Serise, and both seemed watchful as well, not for threats against me, but watchful of me myself. They both twitched the barest amount as I raised a hand in the air and began to draw a portal.
“Cyra?” Axenus asked again, confused now. “Where are you going?”
I didn’t answer but finished my circle and then widened the portal as it flared open.
“Cyra!” Axenus’s voice turned to alarm as the dark edifice of Revenmyer appeared on the other side. “What are you doing?”
I again ignored him. I liked and respected Axenus, but I wasn’t answerable to him. I wasn’t answerable to anyone but the Trinity, and right now the Nemesis was guiding me.
I stepped through the portal as Axenus called my name again. I turned to close it behind me, but Axenus quickly stepped through.
“Cyra, please…,” he said, but I shifted my attention over his shoulder to the two gargoyles who’d just stepped through the portal as well.
Axenus turned to them. “Help me stop her,” he said to them.
Surgeon and Serise looked at each other before the latter answered.
“It’s not our job to stop anything the lady wishes to do,” she said, “nor even to question it. We’re here only to protect her.”
She looked uncertain as she said this, but neither she nor Surgeon moved to stop me as I closed the portal behind them. Perhaps it was only Revenmyer that unnerved them…Or perhaps it was something else.
I turned and walked toward the prison. I only vaguely remembered where the wards began, but I could feel those I’d put up after our last visit to help bolster the prison’s usual ones.
Bressen was doubtful about how much help they’d be in keeping Magdalene out if she came calling, given that warding was one of her strengths, but we hoped my wards would at least slow her down enough for the prison’s seneschals to call for help.
I lowered my wards, then reached out to see if I could detect where the prison’s ancient protections began. I couldn’t pinpoint them exactly, but I felt they were close enough.
I raised a hand out in front of me and sent a forcefield blasting into them. I cried out as I was immediately thrown back.
I expected to hit the ground, but I fell into a pair of waiting arms that caught me. A moment later, Surgeon set me back on my feet.
“My lady,” he said, “I certainly don’t question your actions, but may I suggest that trying to blast through the wards like that won’t work?”
Under other circumstances I might’ve smiled at the way he’d framed his advice as a question, but I didn’t need him to tell me my approach wouldn’t work.
“I’m not trying to get through them,” I said. “I’m trying to get someone’s attention.”
“Of course, my lady,” he said, stepping back.
I turned back to the prison to see I had indeed gotten someone’s attention.
A figure emerged from the front doors and hurried toward us across the narrow path over the water.
I could tell it was Hettie from the shape of the figure and the fly-away hair, even if the robes of orange and lime green didn’t suggest who it was.
Hettie reached us and took a moment to survey our small party before she spoke.
“My lady?” she asked. “Is there something I can help you with? Where is Lord Bressen?”
“Lord Bressen has been taken by our enemies,” I informed her. “I need to speak with some of your prisoners to find out what I can about where he might’ve been taken. Lower the wards.”
It was an order, not a request, but Hettie didn’t move at first.
“And they are?” she asked, eyeing the three people behind me.
“My bodyguards and Lord Bressen’s emissary,” I said, not taking my eyes from the older woman’s.
“Please, don’t let her in,” Axenus said to Hettie, and I glared at him.
“Mind yourself, or I’ll send you back to Tide’s End,” I told Axenus. To his credit, he returned my glare with a look of defiance.
“I’m not just Bressen’s emissary,” he said to me. “I’m your friend and your mentor, or so you’ve told me. And I’m asking you not to do whatever it is you’re planning to do.”
Something twinged inside me. Whether it was his confirmation of our friendship or the pleading in his voice that spurred it, I wasn’t sure, but it made me pause.
I shook the doubt away and turned back to Hettie.
“Lower the wards and let me in,” I said to her, “or we’ll see how long they can stand up to a Hand of the Nemesis.”
Hettie considered this a moment before she nodded. She reached out, and the wards quivered where she touched them until a passage opened to admit us.
I strode forward, and I felt Surgeon and Serise on my heels. I also felt their shock and remembered belatedly that Bressen had never told them what I was. They didn’t ask any questions as they followed, though.
I assumed Axenus followed as well, but I didn’t know for sure until we ascended the stairs toward the prison, and he stepped up next to me.
“Cyra, please,” he said. “Bressen wouldn’t want you to do this.”
“Do what?” I asked. “You don’t know what I’m planning to do.”
“What are you planning to do then?” he countered.
“Visit some old friends.”
“Cyra, don’t.”
“Stay outside if you want,” I said, “but I’m going in.”
We followed Hettie into the foyer and through the door that led to the main part of the prison.
“I assume you’d like to see Lady Glenora again,” Hettie said.
“Not yet. First I need to visit Clarice of Sedonia.”
“Cyra, no!” Axenus said. He put himself in front of me, forcing me to pull up short. “I can’t let you-”
His words were cut off with a grunt as I sidestepped him and loosed a small forcefield that pushed him out of my way.
I strode forward again, half remembering the way to Clarice’s cell. All around us, the walls began to pulse, and a commotion rose as the demoni stirred. Surgeon and Serise stepped in closer to me, and I felt their anticipation of a fight like a vibration.
“The demoni won’t hurt me,” I told them.
As if on cue, a weight settled on my shoulder, and I turned my head to see my little demoni sitting there. It dug its claws lightly into my shoulder to hold on as I walked.
“My lady!” Serise exclaimed as she noticed the creature.
I held up a hand to stay her before she could swat it away.
“It’s fine,” I told her. “This is Blink.”
I hadn’t really meant to name the creature, but it came to me as I remembered its asynchronous blink pattern.
“Blink?” Serise asked.
She let out a sound of surprise a second later as the demoni demonstrated how it had gotten the moniker.
“Why…why does it ride on your shoulder like that?” she asked.
I turned my head slightly to glance at the little creature out of the side of my eye. “I don’t know. Convenience?”
Hettie barked a laugh. “There’s nothing convenient about demoni.”
Indeed, she kicked out as she said this at a small horde of them that had materialized in the corridor before her. They dissolved in a swirl of smoke and reformed to the side out of her way.
Surgeon cried out in pain behind me, and I turned quickly to him.
“They’re freezing cold,” he said as he rubbed his fingers. “One of them grabbed me when I reached out to touch the wall.”