Chapter 9
Nine
Ivy
I’m shoved around in the dark, blinded by scratchy fabric wrapped across my face. It’s suffocating me.
I can’t draw a breath through it. I can’t tell where I am.
What in the realms is happening?
I have to get out of this. I have to tear free. I—
My feet thud onto a raised surface. Wooden boards. Something creaks overhead.
More footsteps thunder after me, as if on all sides. Their impact reverberates through the boards and into my legs.
I try to suck in air and only drown in the coarse fabric. I can’t feel my hands.
My throat strains with an attempt to cry for help, but my lungs are burning for breath. With another shove, I stumble to the side.
Then someone wrenches the fabric from my face.
It’s still dark—night all around me, glowing with distant lanterns. Voices murmur, maybe hundreds of them, but all I can do is stare at the man whose shadowed face looms over mine.
“You couldn’t keep hiding,” Stavros grates out, and lifts his hands.
All at once, he’s gripping a loop of rope. He jerks it down over my head, his metal prosthetic scraping my cheek.
“No,” I murmur. “No. I swear, I never…”
Never what? Never killed? Never hurt innocent people?
“We both know that’s a lie,” Stavros sneers as if he read my thoughts.
We do.
I always knew I’d end up here.
But my heart thuds madly as Stavros tightens the rope around my neck. The heavy cord digs into my throat.
I start to twist my head, but he catches it between his hand of flesh and his hand of metal. His voice is the darkest growl.
“You’re not going anywhere. Stay and take what monsters like you deserve.”
There’s nothing but ice in his eyes and his tone. It chills me right through to my veins.
He takes a step back and lifts his right hand to give the signal, his lips curling into a triumphant—
“Ivy!”
My body jolts, and my eyes open to more darkness. Darkness that’s also tangled with fabric, although this material is thin and silky, draped across my torso and legs.
I jerk upright, my hand flying to my thigh instinctively, but I’ve woken up here often enough that some part of me already recognizes what happened.
I’m in the outer room of Stavros’s quarters, on the sofa where I always sleep. It was only a dream.
My gaze finds the man who haunted me in that dream standing a few paces away, his arms crossed over his chest, his expression set in a glower. “You were mumbling and thrashing around. It was getting disturbing.”
My mouth tightens. “Sorry I disrupted your sleep.”
The other time the former general woke me from a nightmare, he leaned right in to shake my shoulder. He seemed mostly amused when I nearly sliced open his throat before I realized who he was.
He trusted that I wouldn’t actually hurt him then. He doesn’t now.
He knows how easily I could.
Not a single bit of magic squirms in my chest, though. There’s nothing about this situation it can fix, as even it is apparently aware.
Stavros shrugs, and a different part of my brain kicks in, noting that he’s only wearing an undershirt and drawers. The sculpted brawn of his arms and legs is on full display, his biceps flexing with the movement. “I’m sure my sleep is very high on your list of concerns. I’ll be fine now.”
I expect him to stalk away, but he pauses with just a slight shift of his feet. “What was terrifying you this time? Ster. Torstem and his cronies?”
My gut twists at the memory. An honest answer tumbles out before I can think better of it. “The hangman’s noose.”
Stavros’s stance goes absolutely still. He stares at me for a moment, all trace of the glower gone.
We also both know who’s most likely to lead me to that noose.
Does he have any idea how nervous I’ve been of him all along? Has it even occurred to him how much courage it took to stay here night after night, knowing how badly things could go wrong if he of all people discovered my secret?
Even when he’d warmed to me, even when he was being nice, I was still a little bit terrified of him.
It’s all out on the table now, though. I don’t have to hold back anything I’d want to say out of fear of what he’d realize if he reads between the lines.
Maybe it would help me re-earn his trust if he could see that I’ve considered his side too.
I swallow against the dryness of my mouth. “I understand, you know. Why you consider me a threat. Why you see riven as monsters. I don’t trust my magic either. Why do you think I’ve tried so hard not to use it?”
A little of the bite comes back into Stavros’s voice. “Why not turn yourself in, then?”
I grimace at him. “Because I haven’t been using it. I’ve kept it under control. If I really thought I was on the verge of being a danger to the people around me…”
“It doesn’t seem as if most riven think of themselves that way.”
“Most riven go insane,” I mutter, and hesitate. I’ve barely admitted what I’m going to say even to myself before.
But it’s true.
My fingers curl into the sheet puddled around my waist. “I assume the insanity comes from using the power. So as long as I restrain myself, my head shouldn’t get muddled like that.
Sometimes… sometimes I think it’s a good thing the first time I realized what I could do, I killed my sister.
If it’d been a smaller act with smaller consequences, I’d probably have kept going.
I’d have hurt so many more people. This way the damage was mostly contained. ”
Julita speaks up from the back of my skull. Ivy… you can’t think any of it was right. You shouldn’t have had to deal with this mad power at all.
And yet I do have to deal with it. I can’t say my pain is worse than what I could have inflicted on hundreds of others combined.
Stavros’s jaw clenches. For a second, I think he’s either going to shout at me or laugh.
But when he speaks again, his tone is milder. “Is that why you took up your calling as the Hand of Kosmel? You said you had things you wanted to set right. You decided it was some kind of penance?”
“Something like that.” I look down at my hands. “I was born with a broken soul. I know that makes me a monster. But for as long as I’m able to… I’d like to be other things too.”
My body tenses, braced for the blow I’m expecting to come, whether verbal or physical.
Stavros props himself against the side of a nearby armchair, no longer looking as if he’s holding himself back from storming away. His arms come down, the one that ends in a stump resting on his thigh. He doesn’t wear a prosthetic to bed, of course.
He swipes the hand he still has across his mouth. “I suppose there are worse reasons.”
“So glad you think so,” I can’t stop myself from muttering and then snap my mouth shut.
I peer up at him tentatively through the darkness of the room.
He’s looking at me with the little twitch of his head that tells me he’s refocusing his vision.
Studying me rather than accusing me with his gaze.
His red hair and his eyes with their blue-and-brown-ringed irises both look nearly black in the dimness.
“You still don’t have any idea what Kosmel wants with you?” he asks.
I shake my head. “He hasn’t spoken to me since that night in the All-Giver’s tower.”
“Perhaps you should try to speak to him. He’s got a shrine right in that temple.”
My body balks instinctively. It was unsettling enough entering the Temple of the Crown, the largest building of worship in the country, when I knew the entire city was on the line.
To simply go in to try to chat with one of the godlen who should theoretically hate what I am, even if this particular godlen doesn’t seem to mind at the moment…
“Maybe,” I say. “I’ll see. He didn’t tell me anything all that useful the two times he did talk to me anyway.”
“Sounds like typical theology to me.”
Stavros straightens up again, presumably planning to finish the sleep I interrupted. The tentative peace between us feels as if it might shatter the second he walks out of this room.
I open my mouth, and the other topic I’ve been afraid to bring up leaps onto my tongue.
“I’m sorry about your friend too. I—I never wanted to remind you of any horrible part of your past. Was it the riven sorcerer you tracked down two years ago who was responsible?”
The first day I stayed in this room, the former general told me one of the riven had “butchered” his best friend. He has a more personal reason than most to hate me for what I am beyond all the atrocities the riven have inflicted on broader society.
Stavros stiffens. “No,” he says shortly. “It was—we were teenagers when it happened.”
Anywhere from ten to fifteen years ago, then, if he’s in his late twenties like he looks. A grief he’s being carrying about as long as I’ve mourned my sister.
“What happened?” I venture.
He takes a step back from me, his expression hardening.
“I was living with my mother as I told you I usually did. He was one of her supporting officers’ sons.
We had the idea we’d make an adventure of having a ramble through various towns in the area.
And we ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We were stupid and careless, and I didn’t realize until it was too late—”
Stavros cuts himself off. His voice goes totally flat. “We were stupid, and we crossed paths with a monster. That’s all there is to it. You don’t need to know the details to ensure you don’t end up doing the same.”
He prowls off into his bedroom without another word.
It’ll be okay, Julita says, her voice a little too quavery to be totally convincing. He’ll come around. He’s got to see you’re not like the other riven.
Does he? I don’t know about that.
I thought we’d made a little progress, but I might have dashed it to bits with my curiosity.
Exhaustion from my own interrupted sleep drags at my eyelids. I force myself to lie back down on the sofa and tug the blanket up to my chin, trying not to think about the conversations I’ve had with Stavros in this room that ended on much better terms.
Trying not to ache with the knowledge that he may never speak with me like an equal again, and I’m not sure that’s even unfair.