Chapter 10 #2
He is going to pull his punches, right? Surely he isn’t planning to actually spill my blood.
It’s getting harder to tell. Up until this point, my magic has kept to a persistent but low-level nagging, knowing I asked for this fight, that it’s not meant to be actually threatening. Now my power starts to prick more deeply at my innards for me to bring it to bear.
I make a few more testing jabs, but Stavros deflects all of them, coming on like a windstorm. I don’t have much choice but to vault onto the desk and leap from there right over his head.
One of the other men takes a sharp breath, but even that move doesn’t faze Stavros. He’s whirled around before my feet have even smacked into the ground. I nearly trip over them scrambling away from his renewed onslaught.
Gods above, he is a warrior through and through. I might admire his skill a little if he wasn’t attempting to belittle me with it.
Despite my sparse clothing, sweat trickles down my back. I feel like I’ve held my own far better than he could have expected—well enough to prove I don’t deserve his mockery.
But he’s still going to look down his nose at me if he wins, as if I can be blamed for not having the might of a war-hardened soldier.
If this were a real fight, if I thought I was battling for my life, I’d have already flung my knife into his chest or his gut. It’s a little hard to prove that without dealing a potentially fatal wound, though.
Well, sometimes a draw is plenty good enough to settle the score.
I weave and bob, but Stavros is boxing me in even more tightly than before, and there’s no handy desk at this end of the room. I can feel the impending moment when he’ll bowl me right over.
At any second, my power will attempt to disembowel me for ignoring its demands to help.
So I push into his attacks instead, picking my time, embracing the fight for my own purposes.
Stavros shoves me against the wall with his prosthetic hand. My right arm jerks up against his other wrist to slow the slice of his sword toward my throat.
Aiming the full intensity of his wild grin at me, he presses against my blocking arm to show how easily he could overcome my strength with the power of his bulging shoulders. His scent wafts over me, heated with a smoky peppery bite.
This close, I realize there’s something chaotic about his dark eyes too. The ring of deep brown around the pupil blends into a rich blue around the edges, as if his makers couldn’t quite decide what color they should be.
If he truly can’t focus his gaze that well, he’s doing a damned good job of faking it.
He swivels his blade to tap the flat against my throat. “And that’s where you’d be dead.”
I smile back at him. “And you’d be rutting with a stump.”
Stavros’s gaze snaps downward—to where my knife is poised just above his groin. Nothing but the fabric of his trousers lies between his dick and my very sharp blade.
If he’s honest with himself, he’ll have to recognize that I could have cut off one very important appendage before he managed to get his sword into my neck.
There’s a moment of silence as he takes in our pose. Benedikt breaks it with a whoop and a round of applause. “You two should start putting on shows. I’d pay good money to watch that again.”
With a dismissive sound, Stavros pushes away from me. He rams his sword into its scabbard and rakes his fingers through his dark hair, his expression gone coolly implacable again.
I like him better when he looks like a madman.
The thought shakes me as if I’ve been slapped. In the middle of revealing Julita’s death and sparring with the man both verbally and physically, I started to forget he’s the same smug general who smiled while a riven sorcerer like me swung from a noose.
I shouldn’t like him any which way. He really would slit my throat if he knew of the power I’m hiding.
Julita has gotten a little breathless. Oh, that was brilliant. He’s never going to live that down. Nicely played, Ivy.
Before I can decide how to feel about her eager praise, Casimir eases toward us again, his head tilted to the side with an amused air. “Well, I think we’ve seen that Ivy is at least fully capable of acting as your assistant. Unless you had duties that require sluggishness.”
“No,” Stavros says noncommittally. “She’ll do. But are we really going to do this? Send a petty criminal to mingle with your peers?”
I’d bristle all over again at the remark if he hadn’t reminded me what the whole challenge was supposedly about in the first place. “Just a second—”
“We need Julita,” Alek says firmly before I can go on. “And she comes with Ivy. That’s all there is to it.”
I cross my arms. “There is more to it. I get some say. Who says I want to ‘mingle’ with the lot of you?”
Alek stares at me. “But you just— What was the fight for, if you aren’t planning on staying?”
I wave my knife toward Stavros before tucking it back into my boot and reaching for my discarded petticoat. “For reminding him not to assume he can judge someone based on knowing a whole three things about them.”
Casimir makes his protest in a gentler fashion. “You said you wanted to help—that you don’t want to see the scourge sorcerers succeed. There’s no better way you can do that than by helping our investigations right here.”
“You mean by doing way more than any of you have had to. Would you toss aside your whole life to spy on people who hate you?”
“None of us hate you,” Casimir says.
At the same moment, Stavros guffaws. “So eager to get back to thieving?”
I cast my gaze toward the former general and give the courtesan a pointed look. Stavros rolls his eyes skyward. “I don’t hate you. I will think less of you if all that showing off was only for your ego.”
I wrinkle my nose at him. “And why were you doing it, exactly?”
Before he has to answer, Alek speaks up again. “But it’ll affect you too if the scourge sorcerers get bolder. If they draw more people into their cult without being checked. You must know about the Great Retribution—”
“Yes,” I snap. “We do hear the stories even in the gutter.”
But his comment hits on the reason I came here in the first place, the reason I listened to Julita at all. All the people these four men don’t care about, who’ll suffer more than they could conceive of if the godlen burn the continent in punishment all over again.
Julita remains unusually silent. Maybe she’s giving me space to make my own decision.
It’s not as if it’s any secret what course of action she’d prefer.
If she insisted, I think I’d put my foot down and march right out of there. But faced with nothing but the turmoil of my own thoughts in my head, I hesitate.
“I’m not saying no. I just—it’s a lot. You could at least give me a chance to think about it before you start building plans around me.”
Benedikt pipes up. “I’d say she has a point.”
Stavros sinks into one of the chairs and sprawls out his legs. “Think away. But I do have a staff meeting where I’ll be missed happening in an hour.”
“Wonderful,” I mutter. Why am I even considering their scheme? I should walk out of here like I intended and put as much distance between me and the whole college as—
A vibration passes through the air, so faint I don’t think any of the men pick up on it. The sense of it quivers through my broken soul.
But they couldn’t fail to notice the cracking sound or the spidery line that abruptly splits through two of the stones lining the unplastered basement walls between two of the shelving units. A rain of fine dust and a few pebbles drizzle onto the floor.
Benedikt shudders. “Those damned daimon.”
“They can’t help it,” Casimir says. “They’re unsettled—even more than we are.”
Alek’s expression has tensed. “It’s only going to get worse as the scoundrels get bolder with their sorcery.
We can’t know how long it’ll take before the godlen themselves realize.
They can’t pay close attention to every single gift they dole out across the continent, but if those gifts start being used to challenge their divine power, it won’t escape their notice for long. ”
The scholar’s gaze fixes on me. “Helping us will be a sacrifice, but how is it not worth it? Do you really want to find out how the godlen will judge you if they discover that you could have stood in the way and didn’t?”
If he thinks the threat of godly punishment is going to sway me, he couldn’t be farther from the mark. If they ever pay that much attention to me, I’m toast for reasons already long established.
But his words shake loose something else inside me, like a crack splitting down my center to let a small glow of unexpected hope seep through.
It would be a sacrifice.
A huge one. I’d pretty much be giving my whole life over to preventing a catastrophe that both offends the gods and could destroy thousands of innocent people.
If I pull it off… If I make myself the key to exposing the conspiracy and seeing the despicable sorcerers brought to justice, while risking my neck the whole time… Could I walk into the Temple of the Crown and ask for a blessing?
Would the godlen believe I’d earned the boon of having my soul healed, my magic wiped away, and my past crimes forgiven?
I’ve never imagined there was any way I could fully absolve myself even in my own conscience. This—this is an opportunity that doesn’t come along in most people’s lifetimes.
I’m never going to be another Signy, brandishing my sword on a mountaintop against the forces of oppression. But I can play hero just like I can play noble, right?
And as heroes go, playing is essentially the same as being if I can manage to see the task through.
My mind darts to the realities of the life I would be leaving behind. The dark attic with scraps of fabric for a bed. The constant wariness as I roam the streets.
There’s my makeshift family of the fringes too, but I’ll be serving them even better if I prevent another retribution than by tossing a few coins their way.
A swell of resolve rushes up inside me. I wet my lips and push the words out before I lose my nerve.
“All right. I’m in.”