Chapter 8 Taera
Taera
Feeling returns to my fingers and toes in tiny shocks, cascading like cold water up my limbs. Strange smoke muffles my ears. Something rumbles beneath me, steady and rhythmic. I’m moving. I’m awake, but I can’t see through the haze—trapped inside some dream.
Icy dread fills my stomach.
I blink, but my vision remains dark. I focus on the bumpy jostling, the faint sway, and take controlled breaths. Where am I?
Ezran—where is he? Did he make it to safety?
Panic rises in my chest, even as my vision starts to clear. Narrow walls boxing me in. A moving compartment.
I lunge to my feet.
My forehead connects with firm silk.
“Don’t hurt yourself.” Blazing green eyes come into focus. The sharp, carved line of his jaw, of amused lips. Worst are those eyes: so brilliant they can only be magic, framed in golden lashes that shimmer like ripe wheat. His gaze draws me like a magnet—like the desert itself.
The hairs on my neck rise.
I’ve been taken by a mage.
I can’t blink, can’t look away. A face like that can only be an illusion. I should close my eyes like Ezran. But here, trapped with the mage, I’m beyond saving.
My body isn’t my own. A sickening detachment douses my fear, my horror, and I choke on thick guilt—the lurching nausea of failure. Ezran needs me; just yesterday I was saving his life. And Gramps…
Who will make his medicine, let alone pay for it? How will they pay for anything? Ez and Gramps are my responsibility, and I’ve left them. Let myself be kidnapped by one of them.
The warmth against my forehead is a gloved hand. His hand.
I jerk away, whacking the back of my head against the wall behind me.
Pain streaks down my spine.
“I told you not to do that,” he murmurs, his voice like hot silk.
Scrabbling for the furthest corner of the tiny compartment, I brace my back against the wall.
I’m still too close; he could reach out and touch me.
A bench lines each end of the compartment.
I slowly sink onto the nearest one. Opposite, the sands-forsaken mage lounges with an ease that terrifies me.
I can only stare.
His features are symmetrical to a fault, with tousled spun-gold waves of hair framing his face. His flawless tan skin shimmers in the dusk, unmarked by work or sun.
My breathing grows quick and shallow. Panic reshapes itself, no longer centered on Gramps or Ezran…
but on me. The lack of control over my own mind—the urge to lean in, to drink him up with my gaze…
It terrifies me more than the sand. I try to speak, to shout for help, but my mouth doesn’t cooperate.
Danger, my mind screams. Don’t move. Don’t tell him anything.
He must notice I can’t look away, because the edges of his lips quirk up.
I need to escape his gaze. Clamping my eyes shut, I swivel my head to the side. With him lodged in my periphery, I can open them again and I glue my gaze to the nearest surface: the smooth, white wood of the walls. The walls of a carriage. The outline of a door.
A way to escape.
My core is tense, ready to spring. I can picture it. The lunge, the tumble, the sand under my feet. But once he realizes my plan…
I tear my gaze away from the door and hold myself back. It’s like swallowing nails.
He has the upper hand. I don’t know where he’s taking me or how much time has passed. And he’s a mage. He hasn’t killed or cursed me yet, but it’s only a matter of time. He hasn’t even restrained me—he’s that confident.
The walls press inward on my head, my lungs.
I force myself to take shallow breaths. I don’t even try to hide my panic.
It’s better he thinks I’m too afraid to act.
I’ll only have one chance to escape before he binds my wrists and ankles, or worse, slaughters me with unholy magic. I need more information first.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask.
“To safety.” He winks, actually winks, an infuriating shimmer in his green eyes.
Safety? From what? Him?
Is he insane?
“What?” I croak. “Where—where are we?”
Smirking, he gestures to the blank wall. Like a piece of parchment, the boards begin to crease and unfurl, transforming to reveal a clear glass window.
My breathing stops. I can’t, I won’t, believe it.
The hot prickle of magic thickens in the air, and it’s like breathing in steam. Except it tingles inside my chest, sending shivers down my arms. I stare at the wall—now glass.
The window stares back. The shimmering pane acts as a mirror, echoing the blue robes across from me like there are two mages rather than one. I shudder, remembering how he split into copies of himself while fighting the gray mage.
I should look away, but the glass fascinates me. A terrible curiosity has me studying its reflection. The pane of the window is like a pool of calm water that has been lifted sideways. But its surface is sleek and cruel, without a single ripple, sharp like a knife.
It’s the only way to see where I might escape to.
The absurdity hits me: of being trapped with a mage inside a carriage and trying to look through a window of glass…
A manic laugh bursts free from my chest. This isn’t real.
The tightness in my neck loosens and I tilt forward to squint through to the outside world.
I don’t dare lean far enough to see my own reflection; even inside a dream, it feels too dangerous.
Persuading my eyes to see past the glare is more difficult than I expect, like trying to see double. A pinprick of light catches my gaze. A star in the distant sky. Focusing on that one speck, the rest of the world settles into view.
An endless expanse of sand beneath the thickening darkness.
No. No.
My heart trips, and I can’t breathe, let alone think. Numbness seeps through me. This has to be a dream, a hallucination.
“We can’t cross into the desert,” I whisper.
“We already did.” The mage says it like he isn’t ripping my entire world away.
We’ve crossed the line I swore to Mom I would never cross. And yet, seeing sand in every direction… it makes me feel whole. Like I’ve come home.
And it terrifies me.
Even if I escape the carriage, no one returns from the desert. Is it worth getting away from the mage only to give myself over to another horror entirely?
With nothing left to lose, blazing hatred hollows my stomach, and I tremble with fury rather than fear. My fingernails dig into my palms, the stinging pain lucid and welcome.
“What do you want from me?” I demand.
He arches an eyebrow, then lets out a soft breath of laughter before his full lips tilt into a grin.
I steel myself. “Tell me.”
“Why?” His velvet purr sends shivers up my spine, and my lips part as I stare.
I blink myself dazedly out of it, clenching my jaw so I can summon a proper glare. “What the sands do you mean, ‘why’?”
His grin stretches, smug and lazy. “Will you believe anything I tell you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why bother?” He shrugs, perfectly unaffected.
I choke on anger. “You think I should trust you?”
“Of course not.” He chuckles, a low, delicious sound that crawls over my skin. I ignore it.
“You kidnapped me.”
“Whose fault is that?” His eyes flash bright and unnatural.
I gawk at him. I’ve heard magic can drive a person to insanity, but this twisted nightmare makes it visceral. I need to get out of here, but am I in more peril alone—lost who knows how deep in the desert?
I reel the panic back in. He hasn’t physically hurt me. Yet. His plans for me must be worse.
He has a lean figure, taller than I am, but not built to muscle me into submission.
In those immaculate blue robes, he even appears delicate, more beautiful than handsome.
Not the kind of brute I would worry about overpowering me—except that he doesn’t need to.
Those robes won’t let me forget how deadly he is.
I need to learn all I can, even if I dread asking.
“You’re a mage,” I whisper.
His eyes flash, smile disappearing. “Magician.”
I shrink back and try to sound meek, unthreatening. “Aren’t they the same?”
“I’m nothing like that sandsmuggler, the mage, back in your village.” His gaze spears mine, blazing and furious, too bright. Too much.
His appearance is just another weapon. I can’t trust anything I see.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“I’m Nikolai. You’re Taera.”
A chill rolls up my spine. “How do you know my name?”
He smirks. “Magic.”
I soften my voice to a whisper. “You could just… let me go.”
“And waste all those amulets for nothing?”
I blink. Amulets? The word means nothing to me but I press on. There’s momentum to his answers. “Why did you take me?”
His gaze sweeps over me, slow, assessing.
“You have magic.”
His words make no sense.
Slowly, I shake my head. “You have the wrong person.”
He leans forward. “The real question,” he says, “is how you remained hidden until now.”
My breath catches at the nearness of him. I’m utterly alone and trapped in a small space with a gorgeous, lethal magician. I hate how much he affects me, leaving me equal parts afraid and something else I refuse to name.
“I don’t have magic,” I whisper. “I’m nothing like you.”
“Oh, really?” His eyes flare like stars. “Let’s see.”
The power of the desert floods into me, the weight of the tides crushing me.
I hadn’t realized the thin walls of the carriage were holding it back.
The whispers seep through the wood, but they don’t just hiss.
They sing, swooping up and layering together into songs I can’t understand, but know deep in my bones.
A convulsive shiver rips through me, my nerves alight, and I writhe at the pure, pulsing energy—excitement I can’t quench.
It awakens me like sunlight.
Nikolai lets out a hissed exhale, and the voices—the suffocating pleasure of their embrace—retreat.
I’m panting, my fingers curling and uncurling and not quite my own. I clasp both hands tightly together, trying to catch my breath. The air inside the compartment smells of sand, of sweet metal, but it’s gone stale. The crackling power is no longer inside the carriage with us.
“You have magic,” the mage says, cheeks flushed, voice breathy. “Or you wouldn’t have reacted like that.”
I shiver violently. I can’t have magic; I won’t.
Magic belongs to the desert, wielded by cruel beings like mages.
I would never accept that awful power. But I don’t think he’s entirely lying.
I do believe the rush I felt. It’s what the desert should feel like—what I’ve always imagined it would be like to give myself over to the sands.
Which means even if I escape this carriage…
It’s like the night grows darker within the compartment, and it’s suddenly very cold.
But I won’t give up.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask.
“To the Halls of Glass.”
I’ve never heard of a place named after glass itself. Like a tribute to the desert. It turns my stomach. But if we’re going to the other side of the sand, maybe I’ll be able to escape into the forest or over mountains and someday find my way home?
“Why—why are we going there?” I whisper.
“You need to be trained.”
I stare at him, blinking.
Nikolai rolls his eyes. “In magic.”
He’s taking me to a place for mages. Magicians. Whatever word they dress the horror in. To become one of them.
No. I expected torture, pain—never that he might want to turn me into a monster.
I’d rather let the desert devour me.
“We arrive at dawn. You should sleep,” Nikolai says. He stretches out like a cat, reclining into the darkness.
Sleep? I’m drawn tighter than a bowstring.
Slowly, disturbingly, the magician’s presence becomes bearable as I replay his words.
He’s no longer the greatest horror I can imagine—a whole hall full of those like him, who worship glass and try to convince me—torture me into joining them.
I’m being dragged toward everything I fear and hate, the same monsters that took Mom.
For the first time, I’m grateful for the lure of the desert. It will make it easier to let the dunes take me instead.
I steady myself and watch the mage for signs that he’s asleep.
But then I think of Ezran and Gramps waiting up for me.
My heart breaks. If the desert takes me, they’ll never hear from me again. Can I abandon them so completely? Ezran, stubborn, reckless, already wants to hunt for relics. My disappearance might spur him to hunt for me as well.
The aching helplessness is too sharp, I have to squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t have the option of giving up. For my brother, I have to escape. And not just into the endless sand.
I’ll travel with this mage to the other side of the desert if I have to, I’ll wait for an opportunity. If necessary, I’ll even play along.
Let him underestimate me.