26 To Be Caged
Lightning was easier to summon in Edessa’s wet cold, the thick humidity wafting off the lower floor of the horreum especially conducive to building a charge. It sizzled around Noceo in a sinuous web. He showed no signs of pain; they had both known it too well.
“Let’s manage this without the theatrics, this time.” Kadra examined Sarai’s features, wiping the blood from her lips to pin his brother with a homicidal smile.
Cool amusement filled Noceo’s eyes. “By all means. You—”
Kadra flicked a finger. The lightning cage shrunk to seize his brother in brutal coils.
Noceo screamed as tendrils sizzled up his torso.
Once, there had been a time when he had done everything to protect his brother from this fate at Clevsin’s hands.
Yet, it had come to this. Dalvia froze like a trapped animal, breath coming fast.
“Did you really think that you were my equal?” Kadra wondered conversationally. “You needed hostages to keep us on an even footing at the Aequitas.”
“Ever the show-off!” Fury and fear seeped from Noceo in waves, voice flooding with power. “Stop this. Now!”
The world warped around Kadra, the command trapping his head in a vise much stronger than that at the Aequitas. Blood vessels burst behind his eyes, flooding his vision with crimson. Damn.
“You threw us all away,” Noceo croaked, skin peeling from the burns on his neck as he stumbled toward Dalvia. “Now you play the martyr.”
Is that how you’ve chosen to remember that night?
Eleven years and a few spare months separated them from the past. A chasm had broken open in his chest when he had forged a path down the mountains, evergreens standing in silent nighttime vigil to witness the end of the only friendship he had known since childhood.
“I threw nothing away,” he bit out, surprised at the hoarseness that coated his voice. “Did you forget that so easily?”
Noceo’s bitter snarl morphed to faint bewilderment. As if he’d stepped into one of the worlds Kadra saw at the edge of his vision, and could neither make heads nor tails of it. A sickly flush darkened his cheeks. “But you…” he tottered.
Movement flashed. Dalvia planted herself in front of his brother as a shield, supporting his sagging weight. “Don’t,” she said quietly. “Please just let him go. You know as well as I do that you’ve a greater threat at hand.”
Kadra considered her, trading a resigned glance with Sarai. “Your choices are your own. But I’ll ask you again. Do you wish to leave?”
Anguish and something older, pained, coagulated in her eyes. Too loud for indecision but too muffled to be a choice. A scream that didn’t know its way out. “Let us go.”
A bitter thing, sentiment. He nodded. The air immediately split.
Snow blew in to catch on his hair. He glimpsed the manor beyond where Noceo would undoubtedly lick his wounds.
Dalvia looped an arm around the suddenly mute man’s shoulders and drew him in, stopping when he disengaged from her and staggered onward.
She paused at the mouth of the portal, a dark silhouette veiled in flurries, hands at her sides.
Komis, its harsh mountains, and fierce ice couldn’t touch her.
She was pieces to the wind and would never put herself back together.
The past and this manor had caged her, and she believed in nothing outside those bars.
He waited by the portal for a breath. A final question, because Wrath did have him right, and the past fettered him. He would never know how much of this he could have changed.
She walked on. The portal closed behind her.
He entered the horreum with Sarai. There was no speaking of doom to those who sought it. His woman, his people waited.
He would avert theirs.