Chapter 47
Audra’s chest heaved as her breath caught in her throat, and she made a strangled sound.
Zhaire. Showing up in a Zenaidan town.
She didn’t know how he’d done it, but he’d done it. He’d managed to mask his demon self to look like the fae. Only, it hadn’t quite worked on her, had it? Maybe her incras didn’t quite work on him. Or maybe, like everything else in her life, she’d just failed at those too.
The male with the black curly hair smiled, the incras he used not quite able to mask the smug tint to it.
The males didn’t wait for a response before sliding into their booth, the familiar Aithne demon beside Noel, his companion beside her.
“We’ve been waiting for your arrival,” said Zhaire.
“Waiting? How did you know we would be coming here when even we were not aware?” Audra inquired.
“I’m a seer, I see everything,” said Zhaire’s companion.
“Everything?” asked Audra, doubtfully.
“Alright, not everything,” the companion admitted sheepishly. “But I foresaw your arrival here tonight.”
“Is someone going to explain to me what’s going on? Audra, who are these males?” asked Noel, his frustration twisting his face into a scowl.
“I don’t know them,” Audra said to Noel. Then to the demons, “You both should leave.”
“I would love to; this tavern is awful,” said the companion cheerfully. “Come with us, and we can leave right now.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“My friend is getting ahead of himself. Let us begin with introductions. My name is Zhaire Rhaevon. This is my friend, Rook Allway.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” said Rook.
Audra and Noel stared at them.
Zhaire grunted. “This is usually the part where you introduce yourselves in return.”
“My friend already asked you to leave; we don’t need to tell you who we are,” replied Noel, coolly.
“That’s alright, we know who you both are. Noel Carda and Audra Evers, initiates at Holyvere Academy,” said Zhaire with a sly grin.
Noel’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Are you here on academy business? Nobody told us we were meeting anyone …”
Zhaire’s grin widened. “Academy business, yes, exactly. We are here to congratulate you both on your victories at the trials.”
Noel relaxed a smidge; this made sense to him. He ought to be congratulated on his victories.
“Noel, don’t listen to him—they are not affiliated with the academy,” Audra said.
“I thought you didn’t know who they were,” said Noel.
“I don’t.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Because we would have been told that we were meeting someone tonight,” Audra ground out.
“The academy doesn’t tell us much of anything, Audra,” said Noel. He turned to Zhaire and Rook. “Have you come to offer us more prizes?”
Rook smiled. “Yes, Noel. We have more prizes waiting for you; it’s just out front in the saddlebags on our horses. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
“Noel, don’t go anywhere with him!”
“Audra, stop being so rude,” Nole said, already halfway to the door, following Rook.
“Let them leave. Rook will just distract him for a bit so we can talk.”
“I don’t want to talk to you in public. You’re going to get me killed.”
“The barkeep won’t even remember we’ve been here when we leave. And your, uh, friend seems to have bought our cover story.”
“For one of the smartest initiates in the academy he really is dumb,” Audra said, crossing her arms in front of her chest. She glanced at the timepiece on her wrist. “I’ll give you five minutes before I go outside to make sure your friend hasn’t eaten mine.
” She didn’t correct him about Noel, who was not her friend; it was safer for him if Zhaire assumed he was. Probably.
“Five minutes. I can work with that.” Zhaire exhaled a breath, waving his hand, and a shield popped into existence around them. She assumed it would be the same as when he’d bombarded her on the training field. No one would see them nor hear them. Valuable magic, that.
She watched as he waited a moment, as though choosing his words wisely.
He began to fidget—though this didn’t seem like him.
She was used to his dripping confidence, arrogance even.
He smoothed a phantom wrinkle on the fabric of his shirt, which pulled tightly across his chest, hugged the thick muscles of his arm, before reaching up and tugging on the ribbon tying his locs back, pulling it free.
They fell to just below his ears, the front few framing his eyes in such a perfect way, you would think he’d spent eons in front of the mirror to get them just so.
His irises were as dark as the deepest, secret caverns, and just as unreadable, though they were flecked with shimmering sienna-colored auroras.
His voice was quiet, almost but not quite shy. “I wanted to begin with an apology … about my earlier visits—especially the one during your training … exercise. I was callous and rude. I shouldn’t have been so forward. I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t go through all this trouble just to give me an apology.”
He dipped his head in acquiescence. His lips parted in a smile, the points of his fangs in full view. “When I said I’ve been waiting for you … I didn’t just mean tonight. I’ve been waiting for you my entire life.”
Audra shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “So, you’ve implied before …”
“I know, but I’m changing tactics, alright? Work with me here.”
“Go on, then.”
“My people have a prophecy …”
Audra groaned. “If I could go the rest of my life without hearing the word ‘prophecy,’ it wouldn’t be long enough.”
Zhaire’s chuckle was dark, filled with hidden meaning. “Believe me, that sentiment resounds within me more than you know. And I wish I didn’t have to be the one to tell you this. I wish I didn’t have the weight of my own prophecy weighing down my shoulders.”
Audra hated to admit that she was intrigued by the thought of another bearing the weight of a prophecy. “How so?”
“My people have a prophecy, one that spans thousands of years. One day, the royal heir of the Veiled Realm shall free their people from imprisonment in the lifeless land of the dead, take the magic forbidden to them, and lead them back to the land of Ever Life. But you see, this prophecy can never be realized alone … The royal’s prophecy on its own, without its counterpart, is useless … ”
Audra suspected where he was going with this, but she let him continue.
“Without the very Heir of our enemy’s prophecy, the Cycle Heir, the royal’s will never come into fruition.
His prophecy is doomed to be unfulfilled.
You see, this Cycle Heir must make a choice: follow the path of all Cycle Heirs who’ve come before, choose the fae, and by doing so, gift them another cycle of magical reign, depleting the rest of this world of magic that, by rights, should have been shared with all.
Or reject the fae’s prophecy and choose the Veiled Realm’s—break the cycle of death and greed, lead our people to victory so together, we might live in the sun once more. ”
“You want me to help the demons in the underworld defeat the fae?”
“Yes.” He winced. “No. I want you to end millennia of the fae’s control over magic, their siphoning and hoarding of a natural resource meant for all to access.”
This sounded oddly similar to the conversation she’d just had with Noel.
“This is not how the world began; in the beginning of time, the seasons were shorter and were not entwined with magic at all. There was no fae or demon or human; we were all the same being, living in harmony in a world without harsh seasons, alongside a pantheon of gods who loved us all equally.
“But one day, a faction grew covetous of magic, greedy.
They felt that they were the superior people, that their gods, who tended to them and had begun to prefer them, were better, more important, and that not every creature should have access to magic.
These gods, you see, had begun to view this faction as superior to the others, and if their chosen were ‘better’ then that meant they, as gods, were superior too.
The chosen ones rejoiced in this. They planned in secret with their gods for hundreds of years, planned to break the world and remake it in their own vision.
“One day, they performed a ritual and succeeded in rending the world in three, breaking the seasons, and siphoning the magic from the earth herself, ushering it into one vast well where they could guard what they coveted, control it, ultimately binding it to a Wellspring at the heart of the land of what is now called Zenaida.”
“In three?” Audra asked, mind reeling. “The three realms?”
A nod of confirmation. “They stole the ability to harness magic completely from one people and banished them to forever roam the earth without it. Without magic, these people could no longer converse with their gods, and they cried out, begged, and pleaded for help. The gods were gods and could not love beings who could not hear their songs or dance with them, and so they turned away from them, abandoning them to join the pantheon as a new caste of lesser gods. Better, they thought, to have some worship them than be without entirely.”
“So … these people eventually became human,” Audra said, her voice strangled in her throat.
Zhaire nodded. “As for my people, one goddess, who could never abandon the souls she was tasked to harbor, managed to protect us.
As much as was within her power, though we would be forever changed.
Before the others could siphon our magic completely, the goddess of Death and Night shielded us by splitting our realm away from the other two and merging it with their domain, the underworld, where previously only the dead could enter.