Chapter 21 #3
“Did Jevryn tell you I gave him oversight of Kyvren when he asked for it? Given all the little details that are so nicely coming together, now I know what you are, I imagine he asked for it because of you. At any rate, I gave it to him because Kiev promised he would make it worth my while. I don’t know what Kiev’s business there was, but I do know he wanted Jevryn to engage with him again.
“I suppose he ought to have been careful what he wished for, since it seems Jevryn finally killed him.
When I felt him die, I thought he would get away without delivering on his promise to me.
So I went to his home, hoping to find something useful, and I did.
I found his last living Shaman. And she was only too happy to tell me all about you.
A shame to have to kill her after, but I couldn't risk the information going further. "
Tira. A wave of sorrow washed through Nyx.
Tira had been so broken, in Kiev's home.
When Nyx had asked Jevryn to retrieve her, he'd told Nyx the woman had killed herself, because she'd been too connected to Kiev to survive his passing.
Nyx wondered now if he'd truly believed that, or if he'd known another councilor had been involved and had chosen not to tell her.
Loclyn walked forward, and only sheer force of will kept Nyx from backing up.
“So many things make sense now. Two councilors dead in such a short span of time, and no signs as to why, when we have coexisted for centuries.
We have our squabbles, of course, and the occasional assassination attempt is to be expected from time to time, but we have not lost one of our number since the dawn of the current age.
“But a child of Jevryn A-Morridahn explains so much.
You never love a child so much as you love the first one.
The rest of us, we have all had offspring throughout the centuries.
Enough to understand that we will lose them, to not grow terribly attached to them anymore.
Only Kiev and Jevryn avoided reproducing.
Until now. He hid you for so long, but Koral must have found out, didn't she? "
“Yes,” Nyx admitted, deciding that the easiest person to play was the one Loclyn would expect her to be—the girl she might have been if her life had gone differently.
A spoiled scion of one of the most powerful men in the universe, who expected there was nothing Daddy couldn't save her from.
“So imagine what Jevryn will do to you if you hurt me.”
“I would,” Loclyn allowed, “but seeing as how he would have to crawl out of the hole I dropped him into, I’m not terribly worried.”
Nyx felt the blood drain from her face.
Loclyn noticed. “Oh, you needn’t fear for his sake. He will survive. He always does. But it will take him weeks to claw his way free, and when he does it will be far too late to save you.”
“I haven’t done anything to you.”
“It isn’t about you. It’s about him. I am enjoying imagining how quickly he is ravaging his body to escape the trap I caught him in, because I told him exactly where I was going when I left him. I will enjoy more the look on his face when he realizes all that effort was pointless.”
Anger boiled up in her—that she was nothing more than a pawn to him, that this wasn’t even about something bigger, like the Harvester. It was only about hurting her father, and using her to do it. “Haven't you people taken enough from him?”
Loclyn laughed. “What? You mean his precious Arradin? Kiev may have meant that as a curse, but if he’d thought past his own short-sightedness he would have recognized it as the gift it is.
To destroy Arradin is to destroy this Station, and we cannot afford to lose one. Even one as insignificant as Earth’s.
“Arradin is untouchable in a way nothing a councilor loves is. Jevryn ought to be grateful. If I could take Arradin from him too, I would.”
“You hate him that much?”
“I do. Ask me how I know what your loss will do to him.”
She didn't, but he told her anyway.
“He cost me my firstborn.”
Interesting phrasing. Not he killed but he cost me. But however he said it, she knew from the look in his eyes that there was no reasoning with him. No appeals to logic or empathy would sway him. He’d come here to kill her, and he would not leave until he had.
But she needed time. She could feel, through her tie to Kaliaris, Tristen’s magic moving through the Station.
It had halted when it hit the Station’s Heart, and she didn’t know if he was talking to Kaliaris, or if he needed something from them that they weren’t giving.
But considering Loclyn had not yet reacted, she had to assume Tristen hadn’t yet cut his tie to the Station.
And she wanted that tie severed before she made her move.
The councilors might not have much control over the Stations, but any amount was more than she wanted if it came to a physical altercation.
Her best option was to distract him until Tristen removed his control over the Station and then isolate his entire party in a doorless, windowless room.
He’d felt safe coming here because he’d known he could neutralize Griff.
In any other Station, taking the Avatar out of play would be enough.
Because the Stations were designed to allow the Guardian control of the Station only via the Avatar.
But she had altered her bond to the Station and changed the rules of the game, and Loclyn didn’t know that.
She needed to keep him talking. “And if you have another child? Will you want them to pay the cost for what you're about to do?”
Loclyn shrugged. “Later children are like the loves that come after your first. Each one means a little less, until eventually you hardly notice it when they pass.”
She licked her lips, stalling. “Aren’t you worried I might prove to be my father’s daughter in more ways than one?”
Loclyn gave her a pitying smile, as if he were a professor letting a poor student down gently. “If you were, everyone in this room who is not me would already be dead.”
She thought back to being in this very room before they’d left to find Tristen, of Morgen telling her she was too soft to kill a plant without reason. “You’re right,” she told Loclyn. Not because she didn’t have her father’s magic, but because she wouldn’t use it with the same abandon he would.
He relaxed, almost imperceptibly. He thought she was both confirming that she didn’t have Jevryn’s death magic, and accepting her fate. “I will make it quick,” he promised her. “It isn’t you I wish to hurt.”
His magic gathered and she couldn’t wait any longer for Tristen to figure out what he was doing and cut Loclyn’s thread.
She opened the floor, dropping Loclyn and all his people into the basement room she’d once created to drop Seth into so he wouldn’t antagonize Jevryn.
Or she tried to. Loclyn’s Devoted dropped through, but he still had his connection to the Station and he fought her, dropping slower than the others, feet then knees then hips sinking into the floor.
If it came down to a mere contest of wills in their control of the Station, she would win.
But it wasn’t. His magic clamped her and drank.
It was nothing like when Maruca had siphoned from her in the Shadow Market.
That had been a small thing, possible to mistake for simple tiredness.
This was agony. As if he’d drained her vitality in a single gulp.
The pain jolted her so fully into her body she couldn’t hold her connection to the Station.
Loclyn rose out of the floor. His magic arced through her like an electric current, disrupting her system.
Her Hidden workings, as second nature to to her as breathing, became difficult to hold.
She fought to maintain them, but every time Loclyn’s magic pulsed through her, she lost one.
Her chaos thorns appeared. Her portal magic bracelets became visible.
One by one, her portal anchors lost the magic that made them anchors, becoming lost to her. The one outside her Station. The one in Bryn's throne room. In Jevryn’s home. In Tristen's.
Her legs gave out and she dropped to the floor, falling onto her side, but she stubbornly clung to the works she could not afford to lose.
Her anchor in Serenity's room, the only way she had of reaching her sister.
The Hiding on Alihana. The Hiding on the Harvester.
The ones on Kaden and Morgen and Tristen.
But her grasp was tenuous. Hidings that had been nothing but background noises for so long she barely noticed them, as light to carry as a feather, became too heavy and slippery to hold.
She lost Serenity first, the working so far from her, on the other side of the universe.
A new kind of pain tore through her as it faded—her little sister would never understand why Nyx vanished from her life.
Then she lost Alihana. Then Kaden and Morgen and Tristen, the first two of whom had started running at Loclyn the moment Nyx screamed.
If she'd managed to keep those Hidings a little longer, maybe it could have all been over. Maybe Kaden could have separated Loclyn’s head from his body with a single stroke of his sword, and she could have watched Loclyn die like any other man.
But Kaden and Morgen become visible to Loclyn before either could land a blow, and his attention diverted from her long enough to grasp them.
She knew exactly what her own screams had sounded like because theirs would haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life.