Chapter 33
Reagan
Iqbal didn’t drown, which Reagan later reasoned was for the best.
Stars gleamed above him in the blackened sky, their reflections shimmering along the rim of his glass as he swirled its contents. Only water, so he would be forced to keep a clear head while the elves tried, as they always did, to see how far they could push him.
Iqbal had been going on about some courtier Reagan had never heard of, smoking a roll of velmoria dust that left him with those typical golden rings around his irises.
Reagan let the pale smoke wash over him as he worked through a roasted duck and the fragrant contents of a hollowed pumpkin.
The anise was strong. He wondered who they were importing it from, doubting Banfgaard produced it.
He was considering that when Arun stood, radiating that warrior air, and struck a path toward Jane.
Reagan didn’t care about the nonsense Iqbal was saying, but he nodded at all the right moments while his attention drifted to the edge of the table. Arun offered Jane his hand with so much ceremony that someone might have mistaken it for a proposal. Reagan thought she smiled.
He lifted his glass to hide the involuntary curl tugging at his mouth.
“Join me for a dance?” Arun asked, his gaze roaming over the tight fabric outlining the narrow waist Reagan used to kiss every night.
Jane set down her glass and rose.
Reagan reminded himself that she loved dancing, and that Arun might as well have been a broom.
They left the table, threading toward where Finn and Maith had long since wedged themselves between the few other guests present.
Reagan waited for some cue that Iqbal had finished talking. Predictably, he hadn’t.
“What do you think, Reagan?” Iqbal purred, his voice wrapped around a smirk. “Sirens.”
Reagan cleared his throat. “I draw the line at monsters.”
Eldar’s brow lifted as he inhaled from his dust wrapper and exhaled smoke, saying nothing.
Iqbal laughed far too loudly. “I live for this sense of humour, but I ask if they are present in your home.”
“Luckily, no. Are your people used to them?”
Only those who had crossed the sea, along with a handful of noble relatives, occupied the long oak table and the small circle of revellers around it. Musicians played a traditional elven ballad while dancers spun beneath shifting magelights. Reagan wondered how many spies were among them.
Iqbal plucked a peach from the piled fruit and held it to Eldar’s mouth.
“They understand everyone needs a place to call home,” Eldar replied smoothly. “Even if you are not a mana wielder.” Reagan noted the shift, the resentment beneath it. “How are your own people? I hear you finally found a way around your blighted soil.”
He wondered what had driven their own staff away, based on what Iqbal had said earlier. Whether the sense of being a minority in the country had been the reason.
“Yes, it’s recovering gradually,” Reagan said. He had no intention of indulging this line of discussion. “But that is not the most pressing concern.”
“Let me guess,” Iqbal said lightly. “The girl slaughtered at your gates?”
Reagan clenched his teeth. “Yes. By the Order. Which is why I am here.”
“Because you need our help?” Iqbal pressed.
“I do. To find them. To learn where they’re hiding,” Reagan admitted. “I’m sure you already know the kind of threat they pose. We haven’t been able to find a lot on Giddeon Madden beyond his carefully worded petitions. But you excel at finding information no one wants out there.”
Eldar’s gaze fixed on him. “So you want to drag us into your conspiracy.”
“Drag?” Reagan leaned forward. “I would say I’m stepping into a conflict you have been standing in for years.
I would even wager your own people have suffered at the hands of Scions.
” His voice dropped, meant only for the Elven Lords and Anife, sitting next to Iqbal.
“Strange disappearances. People harmed.”
It was Anife’s face he watched now, solemn in a way that confirmed he had struck true.
“They will gut you too when it suits them, just as they gut humans and hybrids now,” Reagan murmured.
“They don’t gut us,” Eldar replied, his eyes flicking over the table to ensure no one else listened. “Not anymore.”
“They do,” Reagan countered. “Right under your nose. Just as they do under mine.”
“Let’s say we help you. What do we gain from it?” Iqbal asked. “Magisters to speak for the elvenborn?” His grin curved. “An invitation to the Mage Lord’s bed?”
Reagan let the corner of his mouth twitch. “All of that could be negotiated if you can lend us your resources. Although I assure you, you would grow bored of me in a week.”
“Ah, but what a week it would be.” Iqbal sighed, his gaze sweeping over Reagan. “But we may need more added to that list of offers.”
Eldar’s gaze cut to Reagan, lingering over his bare chest with a sharper intensity than Iqbal’s. He was the one who meant his words. “Iqbal is right. What can you offer to make risking our resources worth it?”
Reagan held his stare. “Try me.”
Eldar didn’t blink. “What about a bonding?”
Reagan barked a laugh before he could stop himself. Their faces didn’t change.
“Flattering,” he said dryly.
“Not with us,” Eldar replied. “With Anife.”
Her face was impassive.
Banfgaard had always been neglected by the wider estates, or so they believed, convinced their elven lands stood alone. A bond with a Mage Lord might grant them greater sway in a country where the majority was mageborn.
“That offer is far higher than what I’m asking,” Reagan said.
“Then release Atkus,” Eldar proposed, casual as though dismissing a trinket.
Reagan smiled, and there was nothing friendly in it.
“No. I don’t force my staff. But let me paint you a different picture.
” He abandoned the notion of reason and changed the angle entirely.
“There are five estates in this country where Scions can walk freely with little care about punishments. If three decide to tighten the noose on the Order, what direction do you think they will go? Where will they concentrate their slaughter?”
Iqbal sprang from his chair, propping his hands on the table to snarl in Reagan’s face.
“Easy,” Reagan murmured, unmoving even with the lord in his space. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Iqbal scoffed, some of the tension bleeding from him as he sat again, muttering about wilder arrogance.
Good. The last thing Reagan wanted was a physical confrontation while he was still wearing half a shirt.
But it was not a jest. He knew he could take both elven lords. His wield was stronger, even if they were physically matched, and they knew it too. That knowledge made this conversation even heavier with resentment.
The allies were a partial bluff. He had Erisea, but still didn’t know where Aisling, the Lady of Vaelon, stood regarding the Order.
Iqbal rolled another velmoria stick, and Reagan leaned forward, keeping his voice cool.
“I’m being practical. I don’t want your estate to suffer the consequences of our progress. But that requires your support as well.”
They looked at him as though he had spat in the faces of their goddesses. Eldar, however, was not as volatile as his partner. For all his pride, there was recognition in his gaze.
“We will think on it,” he said curtly.
Reagan leaned back, far from satisfied. He wished he had held this conversation with a level-headed emissary, someone who might have sought common ground, instead of forcing an alliance by backing proud lords into a corner.
His eyes drifted to Jane. She still danced with Arun, magelights glimmering over her hair, casting the copper into the colour of fire. Arun leaned close to her ear, whispering something.
Reagan felt a burning pressure rise inside his body, but for a moment, he allowed himself to imagine what courting would mean for her life.
He forced himself to consider whether everything would be easier if she chose an elven warrior instead, someone who would not place a target over her head, no burdened position. A man who could protect her.
The thought seized him by the throat. He rose from his chair and strode for her before it could choke him. She was mid-turn when he reached her, a little breathless from the dance. The music was slow, and they both stilled.
“Dance with me?” Reagan asked, extending a hand.
“This song isn’t even over,” Arun chimed in.
“She looks too bored to finish.” Reagan let his voice drop low, poisoned by the jealousy burning him.
He might have seen her mouth twitch if his gaze hadn’t been fixed on the elven warrior.
Jane shrugged one shoulder. “I have to. I work for him.”
He hated that, but he still smirked at Arun, who was not pleased, though he assented. Not without holding Reagan’s eyes once more, as if he wanted to say something.
The nearly finished song faded, and the next began.
When Reagan drew her into him and she rested her head against his chest, the rest of Vassar Island could have sunk beneath the tide, and he wouldn’t have noticed.
He was giving away everything with this dance, all the ways she mattered to him, his face far from guarded.
He didn’t care. He wanted every dance, every night.
“These musicians play back home too,” he murmured.
“They’re very good,” she replied. Her voice told him she hadn’t entirely recovered from the siren scare, for all she allowed him to see.
Reagan considered what they were doing, how completely Jane unwound whenever she danced. “Do you want to give them a show?”
At the offer, her eyes brightened, her gaze darting around them before returning to his. “What are you thinking?”
She probably assumed this was an emissary-lord move, and he decided not to correct her. “Follow my lead.”
Reagan hadn’t made it to twenty-five as lord without learning how to command a dance. He had attended dozens of balls and led hundreds of women, not all of them with her skill.
Reagan knew that the same way he needed to run, Jane needed to dance.
So he tugged her closer, lifted their joined hands, and spun them across the grass-covered ground. The cold green blades underfoot helped carry her, sliding their feet to the music until their surroundings blurred.
Stars burned like silver pinpricks against the black sky, and the smell of brine in her hair filled his lungs.
Her fingers bunched lightly in his shirt. Jane followed his lead easily, so easily that his mind had space to raise concerns.
If they found the Order’s hidden locations and followed their movements, they could wait for a misstep. They needed real proof to justify dismantling the Order. They would gather the previous cases of leniency toward mageborn transgressions versus hybrids.
Still, any actual change might take years. He would need even more time to truly move the needle regarding the deep-seated hatred.
Was this cause salvageable at all, or would he be staking all their lives on a dream that would never come true?
He would have to do this while bonded to someone else, because he had failed. Because he couldn’t find an argument that would keep Jane here unless she showed them she could wield at will.
It would likely be better for her, present less risk to her life, with no threats like Clodagh Foley at his gate. If they hurt Jane again, what would stop him from answering with violence? Would that save her, or pull her straight towards an earlier grave?
He tugged her closer the next time he swept her. It didn’t help. His thoughts didn’t relent.
If she stood beside him, she would become a signal fire for the Order’s rage.
Sweat broke across Reagan’s back, not entirely from the movement.
The music surged toward its final beats, tense and fast and sombre as his own mind, and she was slipping from his grasp.
He had to move her out of the path of hatred and pain in the only way available to him.
In the last seconds of the sequence, he caught her by the waist, braced her, and she understood. As the ballad’s crescendo reached its peak, he lifted her. Jane pushed upward, using his shoulders for leverage, until her stomach levelled with his face, and he twirled her through the final turn.
The last notes faded. Her face was flushed, her ribcage lifting with each breath, and she smiled down at him. The sky behind her was awash with stars, none coming close to shining as brightly.
Reagan slid her down the length of his body, her skirts catching on his bare chest as he lowered her, the flimsy fabric bunching, and the front of her underwear grazed his lower stomach.
Perhaps it was the velmoria in the drinks or the smoke they had inhaled tonight, but Jane made a low sound and let her mouth rest on his chest. Kissed it.
Reagan shut his eyes, still breathing hard from the dance. He wanted to peel that dress right off, wanted to lick her whole until she shook.
Want after want after want.
She steadied on the ground, her smile waning as she took in his face.
He could protect her. He already had. And already failed.
He let go of her waist and stepped back.
Choosing her would be the most selfish act of his life. Not choosing her would be a slow kind of misery.
So he said, “You were right.”