34 #3
She met him with eyes of melting innocence and offered him the biscuit tin. He took one with a mock-mutinous look.
“Still, if I might break with the fashion of a lifetime and be sincere . . . I know you destroyed your faculties to save my life,” she said, gentling her voice. “I’m sorry. I have some sense of what they meant to you, if not a good one.”
He answered with the kind of smile she’d never quite learned to feign—steady and solemn, but quite without sadness or self-pity.
“Don’t be. I had a choice, and I’d do the same again.”
“I know you would. That’s the problem with good fellows.”
“I’m not that good,” he said with a wry smile, setting down his cup. “I damaged my powers in defense of my comrades, true enough, but also in an act of war. Now that I’ve broken them for good . . . at least I did it in an act of healing. It’s time I had that surgery and laid it all to rest.”
She watched him from the corner of her eye, with something halfway between joy and mischief fizzing up inside her. It was a struggle not to smile when she knew she was about to make his day, and probably a good part of the next ten years to boot.
“I fancy you can do a great deal more without them than you imagined,” she said.
“Well, I have a good guide of the possibilities before me. There’s hope yet.”
There was no false cheer in his countenance. He means it, she thought. You were right. Too decent for his own good.
“Hope indeed,” she said, then came to her feet and strode to the desk. Her fingers prickled slightly as they closed around a glass sphere in the drawer. She hid it in her hand and turned back to the table. Then, with the oddest, joyful wrench, she set it down between them and took her seat.
Felix surged forward, eyes narrowing on the emerald arc that hung suspended in the glass. He came to one knee and examined it from side to side, intense with fascination.
“You found them?” he breathed. “Your faculties? Myria, you can have your powers back! All that time, and—”
“No,” she said, quite calmly. With that, she set the sphere on a saucer and slid it across the table toward him. He recoiled as if she’d shoved him a viper.
“You can’t,” he said at once. “They’re yours.”
“They’re no good to me. Vixius destroyed my arcana.”
“No, I saw, but . . . that doesn’t stop . . .”
“I lost them too long ago for my body to accept them. I want you to have them.”
“No. You have to try,” said Felix, springing up from his chair to pace the room. “You could use someone else’s arcana. Introduce it to your body slowly.”
“Felix—”
“You could even have mine! It’s not as though I—”
“Felix,” she interrupted. “I don’t need that power. I only wanted it because someone took it from me.”
“But . . . it’s yours,” he said, stopping to stare at her. He spoke like a man trying to explain a very simple mathematical proposition, unable to fathom why she couldn’t understand it.
“Yes, it’s mine,” said Myria, “and what belongs to me, I can give as a gift.” She took the sphere, tossed it in her palm and glanced to the balcony. “And if you don’t, I could always just throw it over the—”
“No!” he exclaimed, starting forward and forcing her fingers closed around the glass.
It took him a moment to spy the smile. He gave her a look of half-amused vexation, then dropped to one knee beside her chair.
She felt the tremor in his hands, and heard the long shudder of breath that escaped him.
There was suddenly a curious prickle in her eyes.
“Myria, are you utterly certain?” Felix asked quietly. “Once it’s done, there’s no undoing it.”
“I’m certain,” she said. “Lysander can do the surgery. Merge my faculties with yours. He says they’re perfect for the job. Since I lost them as a child, they’re still unformed. They’ll adapt to you—”
She broke off as he kissed her hand. When he looked up, his eyes were bright with something happier than tears.
“Myria, if you mean it . . .”
“Course I do,” she said, ignoring the absurd constriction on her throat. “I restored my old friends’ powers. I’ll be dashed if I don’t do the same for my new one.”
Felix’s lovely smile glowed brighter, until it seemed to overcome him. He took the sphere from her hand, set it on the table and pulled her up into an embrace.
“Oh. That was, ah . . .” she began reflexively.
“Not in the plan?” he asked, voice muffled by her hair.
“Not quite,” Myria confessed. It was a strange sensation. It suddenly occurred to her that she couldn’t recall anyone besides Cassia embracing her, and the latter usually came with menaces of cracked ribs. This was different. This was . . .
Rather nice, actually, she thought. A new smile touched her lips.
“Still . . . there are better things than plans, aren’t there, old boy?”
“From the mistress of the blasted things, I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Felix, drawing back to arm’s length.
“Yes, you seem the sort of chap who would,” she said, then winked and clapped him on the shoulder. “Now, how about we trot along to Lysander’s office and talk about turning you back into a magician?”
It had to be a mark of his elation that he didn’t even give her a withering look. He only beamed, took up the sphere as though it were some holy artifact, then offered her his arm.
They struck out into Carintheum, where the setting sun gilded the trees and turned the waters to a golden blaze.
Myria raised her face to the glorious warmth and smiled.
After three years of planning, fearing and hoping, it had worked.
She walked free, safe from the grayside and the law alike.
She’d won back what they’d lost, and perhaps—she glanced sidelong at Felix—just perhaps, gained something more besides.
Here’s to you, Hadria, she thought, turning her eyes to the first stars waking in the blue. A victory well won.