Chapter 10
T he water stings my cheek, and I wince.
I regret the action immediately.
Sin’s face betrays the anger he’s masking, and his grip on my jaw shifts to gently tilt my head to the side so he can better press the warm rag against my battered eye and swollen cheek. “Stubborn, witch,” he exhales.
I refused to let him mend my face or call for a healer. After Dusaro was escorted to the dungeon, the elves sprang into action, rounding up the kingdom troops and asserting command over them while Sin settled back in with his council. Healing tents have been set up in the western courtyard, and several more healers were sent to the barracks to tend to the ones too maimed to move.
Torin lost a lot more men than us, but hundreds of elves and shifters sacrificed their lives yesterday in the hopes that reclaiming Blackreach would lay the groundwork for a future that promises freedom for their children, and their children’s children.
I have not allowed myself to mourn our losses. They are not mine to grieve after all, but perhaps those apathetic thoughts will deepen into sorrowful ones once the last of the blood magic fades from my veins. The initial burn has cooled, but it will be another couple of days until it subsides completely.
Alistair is being tailed, something Sin saw to immediately, given the bloodwitch is notorious for not suppressing his violent appetite. Though, I have wondered how much of the Black Art’s orders were motivated by the well-being of others, and how much was merely because Sin knew it would irritate Alistair to be watched so heavily.
I am thoroughly exhausted, and so is Sin. He does not need to exert more energy by healing a non-life-threatening injury. I healed the lacerations marring my arms and legs, but face trauma is one better left to those more experienced with mending magic. Sin is neither a mender, nor in any shape to be treating me after enduring healing treatments for the deeper injuries he sustained. I refuse to ebb his strength further.
After a brutally long day and a much-needed wash in his private bathhouse, we retired to Sin’s bedchamber. Our bedchamber. I tuck one leg beneath me, the silk of his deep wine-colored sheets cool against my bare skin, and my white nightgown a stark contrast to the blood-soaked leathers I began the day in.
“The healers are needed elsewhere far more than I need them here. I’m hardly at risk of perishing from a bruised face.”
Sin dabs the warm cloth against my face again, and this time, I bite back the wince. “Hold this while I call for some ice,” he orders.
I grab his forearm before he takes more than a single step towards the door. “Stay.”
My voice comes out meeker than I intended, the sound a feeble, broken thing, and one I don’t like coming from my mouth at all. But he must have heard something in that single word, because for once, the Black Art takes pause. When Sin turns to face me again, something has softened in his expression, even if I can’t quite place what . A single nod, and he sits back down.
We’re quiet for a long while, and yet, I hear so much in the silence between us. Feel it in the way his fingers stroke my arms in lazy sweeps, the way his nose nuzzles my ear through my hair, the way his shoulders finally lower.
We are closer than we’ve ever been to righting this world, but so many obstacles still stare back at us. Ileana will address the kingdom guard tomorrow, and the capital city later this week. There will be many that protest the return of the dark mage, that will refuse to bow to the shifter king.
We are not in a position to offer clemency. The last of kingdom blood has yet to be spilled, and that knowledge has my betrothed restless.
“What torch?” I finally ask, breaking the silence.
“Hm?”
“Earlier with Dusaro… he said he thought you were dead because a torch extinguished. What does that mean?”
Sin sighs. “How much do you know about the Black Rite?”
“Only that it’s how Adelphia selects who to bless.” Sin once told me that he only performed the Rite out of obligation, after the goddess scorned his father who had served as Ephraim’s Hand for decades. In hindsight, now knowing that it was Dusaro who killed the late Black Art, it is no wonder she did. The gods are wrathful, and I’m quite certain there’s no surer way to piss one off than by murdering their chosen.
Adelphia would have sensed both magics in Sin’s veins when she touched him through the Rite, and yet, she picked him anyway. The goddess of the arcane chose a man whose blood was half-beast, a Son of Slaine. Perhaps the stories the acolytes rattle off in town are not fully founded in fact. Perhaps the prejudice against transcendents is a trait that is entirely human.
“Have you ever seen a god?” he asks.
I look at him with one eyebrow cocked. “Have you?”
“No. But I’ve felt one. The ceremony isn’t held in public because truthfully, it’s not much to behold. The Rite is… it’s personal. More like a feeling. We bleed upon her altar—our blood is the most sacred thing one can offer as there is no magic in this realm that can mask our essence from a god.
“I was nervous—so fucking nervous—that Adelphia would take one look at my blood and oust me to the council. I waited and waited, expecting her wrath, her judgment , but her refusal never came. So no, I’ve never seen a god, little witch,” he murmurs, voice thoughtful, “but I remember what her magic felt like when it first entered me. It was cold. Freezing. Like being stuck on the highest peak on the longest day of winter. It was so cold, and it just kept getting colder and colder, and I thought my very blood was being frozen solid. I thought she was killing me. Slowly. Cruelly.
“It’s what I would have deserved. But then as fast as it began, it stopped. And I knew. I knew she had chosen me. I could feel her in parts of me I didn’t know existed, her magic so tightly wound with my own.
“But no one else could know the validity in what I experienced. There is no physical change, nothing to prove that I wasn’t just a power-starved son to a scorned father that saw an opportunity to call myself the chosen. That’s why we have the torch, a gift from the goddess herself. It cannot be touched by mortal magic. And when she released me from her grasp that day, she left only two things behind. The freezing caress of her power tangled with mine, and a brilliant flame roaring to life atop that torch.”
I stir in his arms to look at him, finding his melancholy tone reflected in his forested eyes. “When I stabbed you with the dagger…”
He nods, confirming my suspicion. “It snuffed the flame. Without Adelphia’s magic bound to me, the torch would be without its light. It would never reignite of course, but my father wouldn’t have known that. He would have seen that fire go out and thought I was dead. Though it’s no wonder he didn’t call for a new Rite. Adelphia denied him once, and there was never a chance he’d allow somehow else the opportunity to be chosen and seize that power. Not when he finally had everything he’d ever wanted.”
I sit with his words for a moment, rearranging them in my mind to try to make sense of a world where a father would witness their son’s final breaths snuff out and remain so unbothered.
“Your father is callous and cruel, Singard. Healthy people do not cause the kind of torment he has. Healthy people do not cast their children aside, or shame them for existing as they were created to be. You never needed to look for worth in some goddess’s blessing.” I shift onto my knees and take his face between my hands, forcing him to look at me. Needing him to hear me, really hear me. “You are not him.”
His eyes turn stormy, and lightning runs through my teeth at the sight. “I have lived in my father’s shadow for so long. I’m not sure how to”—he clears his throat—"how to live outside of it.”
“You have outshined his shadow for so long. Dusaro would have never sacrificed his power for the greater good.”
Sin growls, the sound going straight to the ache between my legs. Even now, when we are hours past exhaustion, desire thrums through me. “Do not mistake my motivations for anything more noble than they were, love. Every choice I’ve made was for you, and you alone.”
I run a finger across his lips, noting how the skin there is so much softer than the rest of him. “Your heart is not as black as you think it is.”
He catches my hand, his mouth skimming my fingers. “Just because I have made alliances with those I have wronged in the past does not mean my resolve, or my heart, ” he snarls around the word I used, “has softened. These alliances are necessary. For now. But do not mistake me for someone who would not turn on them the second I thought those alliances put you in more danger.”
“You say that as if I’m not capable of protecting myself.”
“You’re not, Wren,” he growls. He doesn’t pause, not even as my mouth parts in disbelief at what he’s just said. “Our enemies may see you as nothing more than a blood-crazed monster, but I know your heart, and it is too pure to betray who you must, when you must.”
He reaches up to cup my jaw, his thumb rubbing a soft circle on my non bruised cheek. “I have no qualms about being the villain, love. I just no longer wish to be yours.”