Chapter 26
DIEM
The acrid smell of burning wool stung the inside of my nose, the thick smoke causing me to squint. A snap of my wrist brought a Meros breeze to carry it away.
“Get another,” I barked.
“We’re running out of chairs,” someone whispered behind me.
I looked back at the two snickering guards watching my progress—or lack thereof. Their faces immediately went slack, backs snapping straight.
“Then grab a table instead,” I snapped. “Or drapes, or pillows, or gowns. Grab anything that burns.”
Their dark blue eyes slid to each other, then to Alixe, who was standing nearby with a stern frown.
“You heard the Queen,” she said. “Get more supplies.”
“Yes, High General,” they said before scurrying away.
It bothered me that they looked to her, not me, for their commands.
It played on all my worst insecurities that I was too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced to lead.
Too mortal for the Descended, too Descended for the mortals.
Too rash, too fiery, too angry—or, when it came to Ophiucae, not angry enough.
My existence in a nutshell: forever too much yet never enough.
“Try again. You’ll get it.” Luther’s voice was strong but warm, meant to comfort as well as command.
Alixe grabbed the last chair from a pile of palace furnishings and set it in front of me. I thrust out my palms and closed my eyes.
“Burn,” I whispered to my godhood.
Burn, it answered back.
Magic flowed through my palms, sinking and spreading like an autumn morning fog.
“Try not to call on your Ignios flame or Lumnos light,” Luther said, coming so close behind me I could feel his breath catch in the tendrils of hair along my neck. “Use your magic in its rawest form.”
“Like crafting a shield,” Alixe suggested, “but to destroy, not to protect.”
Magic engulfed the chair in a shimmering dome. I envisioned wrapping the reins of my godhood around my wrists and yanking back to assert my control.
“Destroy,” I commanded.
Destroy, it purred.
My eyelids flashed with a brief red glow. When I opened them, the chair had become a pile of blackened debris. Alixe knelt beside it, poking through the ash, then shook her head.
My shoulders drooped.
Since returning from Ignios, I’d spent my days trying to craft the rarest substance in Emarion: raw, unforged godstone.
After creating a pile of it when I’d burned my family home to the ground, Alixe had come up with a clever plan to use it for armor, the only thing that might protect our soldiers from Ophiucae and his army of turncoat Guardians.
To do that, however, we needed more of it—a lot more.
Since I seemed to be the only person with the power to make it, that burden fell to me.
There was just one problem: I had no clue how.
On the first day, I’d tried crafting it from magic alone.
When that didn’t work, I gave it some fuel: chopped wood from the forest and broken pieces of Fortosian steel.
After that spectacular failure, Alixe had gingerly suggested we recreate the circumstances a little more closely by using furnishings from inside my home—which, in theory, was now the royal suite.
But, after a morning of setting fine furnishings ablaze, not a scrap of godstone had formed.
“Perhaps you need to burn something with sentimental value,” she said.
“That could be a problem,” Luther said dryly. He stared at me. “Is there any physical object you truly care about?”
As if my own body was trying to betray me, my hand flew to my neck, where the necklace he’d gifted me lay hidden under my tunic.
“That’s not the problem,” I insisted. “I didn’t care about the objects in my home, either. The clothes, the books—they were just things. It wasn’t the house, it was . . .”
“What that house represented,” Luther finished. I confirmed with a silent nod.
Alixe thought for a moment. “Maybe we should try doing this there.”
“No,” Luther and I said in unison.
Odd, I thought. I knew why I was avoiding the remains of our family home, but I didn’t know why Luther was so opposed. Did he think I couldn’t handle it—that it would put me right back into the dark, angry place I’d been after my father’s murder?
Did he not see that I was already there?
“If only we knew how the Kindred made it,” Alixe said. “There must be something about it in the Sophos archives. Perhaps Doriel can look.”
My stomach churned at the mention of Doriel’s name. Another thing I was dreading.
“The Kindred didn’t create godstone,” I said. “It came from the remains of the Everflame.”
“The Everflame was real?” Alixe asked. “I thought that was just a mortal folktale.”
I might have scolded her, if I hadn’t wondered the same. The Descended were proof that the Kindred had once walked the earth, but the mortals could only cling to blind faith through stories passed down over generations.
“Very real,” I said. “And the Kindred are as clueless as we are why it turned into godstone when they cut it down.”
Luther gave me a strange look. “How do you know that?”
I immediately bit down on my lip, grimacing at my slipup. His shrewd gaze noted the gesture.
“Diem . . . who told you?”
The lie rose so easily—Oh, I read it somewhere, perhaps in Sophos. A safe, easy excuse. Plausible enough that even if he didn’t believe me, he wouldn’t dare admit it.
But lying to Luther this way felt too much like a betrayal.
He’d allowed me my secrets and my space.
He’d even swallowed his complaints when my trip to Ignios stretched weeks later than planned (though I’d known the second he received the news by the anger vibrating through the bond).
I didn’t want to repay his patience with lies.
I wasn’t ready to face what the truth would bring, either.
“Let’s stay focused,” I hedged, pointing to the burnt remains of the chair. “Any other ideas what I’m missing?”
Luther’s stare lingered with the threat that his question would not be forgotten. As tension thickened the silence, Alixe seized her usual peacemaker role and jumped in.
“After the Challenging, I noticed there were black rocks mixed in the sand on the floor. I assumed it had come from something destroyed during the fight, but now I wonder . . . what if you made godstone then, too? Was there anything similar to how you used your magic that day and the day your father was—” She stopped abruptly.
“Murdered,” I finished. “You can say it.”
“I’m sorry. I know you don’t like to think on it.”
“I think on it every day, whether I wish to or not.”
“Indeed,” Luther murmured, his eyes on the palace.
It was easy to forget that he also knew the pain of losing a parent in a violent way.
While I’d had the luxury—if one could ever call grief a luxury—of openly mourning my father’s loss alongside my brother while others offered their sympathies, young Luther had nothing and no one.
He hadn’t even been allowed to admit she’d existed.
I wondered if he’d ever truly grieved her, or if that fuse was still buried inside him, waiting for its chance to burn.
I shifted close enough for our hands to brush.
It was the first time we’d touched since the day I returned from Ignios.
If he hadn’t appeared the second I landed, his palms gliding beneath my cropped linen top and up my bare ribs as he helped me dismount Sorae, I wasn’t sure what I would have done to ease the bond’s desires, but it would have bordered on obscene.
Reluctantly, I began to pull back, but Luther’s fingers hooked in mine and held fast, pleading without words for me to stay.
“Our magic is fueled by emotion,” he said. “Perhaps that plays a role. Both of those days tested you emotionally.” He paused. “The night you returned from the island . . .” He trailed off, sensitive to Alixe’s presence.
I’d lost control then, too. Hidden in the clouds, I’d let my godhood burn with all the rage my heart couldn’t hold. But unless the people of Lumnos City had missed a hailstorm of black rock raining down on their heads, no godstone had formed that night.
I shook my head. Luther frowned. “Are you sure?”
Alixe backed away from the not-quite-conversation we were not-so-subtly trying to hide. “I should go check on the Ignios Descended.”
I tensed at the prospect of being left alone with Luther. “No, that’s not—”
“Good idea,” he interrupted. “We’ll keep working here.”
She gave me a brief salute, then set off for the royal hunting grounds where the Ignios refugees had set up camp, not far from the training field the Guardians had made their temporary home.
Seeing mortals and Descended living so closely together, and in such similar conditions, left me equally hopeful and afraid.
“The Ignosians have been busy,” Luther said, eyeing me like he could see my nerves. “They made pens for livestock, and they’ve already started planting some crops.”
“They said they want to be self-sufficient, with no outsiders’ help. They refused when I offered supplies to build houses. I worry they think this is all temporary and they’ll be going home soon.”
“Who knows, maybe Ignios City can be saved.”
“What if it can’t? They can’t live in tents forever.
Neither can the Guardians. I need to find all of them homes.
They need trades so they can provide for their families.
Schools for the children. And the people of Lumnos City, I need to help them rebuild.
And the other realms . . .” I rubbed my eyes as my chest tightened and my breathing sped up.
“They all need Regents and councils. They need soldiers, but the army is a mess. I need to fix that, too. And the half-mortals—”
“Diem.” Luther took my other hand, squeezing them both. “You got the people of Ignios to safety. That’s what matters most. The rest will come in time, after the war.”
I flinched. “I can’t afford to wait that long. I don’t have time.”
“Once Ophiucae is dealt with, then you—”
“I don’t have time!” The words burst out, shrill and choking, the cries of a dying animal desperate to escape its demise.