Chapter Twenty
The room flickers out of existence around me, replaced by the temple from my dream. I hear a whirring, slicing sound, the sound of wheat being cut. It’s right behind me, approaching fast, just about to cut right through me—
Then the hallway snaps back into focus.
“Sylvie?” Taran is standing over me, his hand beneath my nose, checking to see if I’m breathing. “What happened? Are you alright?”
“I…I think so. You didn’t see that?”
“See what?”
“The temple?”
Taran’s eyes widen in concern. “I think you hit your head when you collapsed.”
“I collapsed?”
“We need to get you to a healer.” He helps me to my feet and tries to lead me away, but I stop him.
“I need this torch.” I reach out for it again, but I feel its hum of warning this time. “You want Ronan, don’t you?” I ask it.
“Sylvie, you’re not alright. Please.”
I understand why he thinks that. I’m talking to a torch. But it feels like Ronan. It wants Ronan. “I’ll bring you to him. You can sense him on me, can’t you?” A small hum of recognition. A barely perceptible flash. “But you need to let me hide you, or they won’t let me take you.”
It recoils at the suggestion, feeling just like Ronan being upset at someone daring to tell him no. “Just for a little while. I promise.”
Taran is pacing wildly, increasingly distressed. He’s debating going to get help, but then he’ll need to explain what we were doing down here somehow, and it would be much easier if I’d just come along, and…
I’m sensing Taran’s feelings.
“Is that your doing? Or is it me?” The torch doesn’t answer. I’m not sure that it knows. “Will you let me take you? He’s about to pick me up and drag me away.”
The torch hesitates, and then it gives an affirmative flash. I reach out once more with my shadows, and this time, it allows me to snuff it out.
It allows it, but it doesn’t make it easy. The strain on my magic is intense. I’ve got minutes, maybe, before I’m drained at this rate.
“You could make it a little easier, you know,” I say as I pull it from the torch holder on the wall. When I remove it, I see that it’s made of a different wood than the others, and there are carvings in a language I don’t know near the bottom. “Full of secrets, aren’t you?”
“Now will you come?” asks Taran. “Gods, he’s going to kill me if something’s wrong with you.”
And Taran’s concerned himself as well. Aww, Taran. We’re friends now.
“I’m alright,” I say, following after him. “I swear. This torch is connected to Ronan’s magic somehow. He’s meant to have it. He isn’t hidden here. I can sense where he truly is now that it’s snuffed—we’ll find them in a laboratory near the entry hall.”
Taran shakes his head, unsure what to make of what I’ve said. “You didn’t see yourself when you collapsed. You were talking in some other language; your eyes rolled back in your head. I thought you were going to die.”
“I’m alright,” I say again. “I can’t explain it, but I know it won’t hurt us. Although I’m losing my magic at an alarming rate. We need to hurry and get out of here, or I won’t be able to conceal it.”
Taran and I race through the hallways and the stairs, all but running any time we turn a corner and find ourselves alone. The torch is cool in my pocket, but the hum of it is slowly increasing.
It wants to be lit. It wants Ronan to find it. It’s impatient.
It has been waiting a long time.
We slow to a walk when we spot Ronan and Hypatia with a group of other alchemists exiting a room that smells strongly of woodsmoke and something herbal.
“There you are,” says Hypatia. “We were just getting ready to send out a search party.”
“We took a wrong turn, and then several more. This place is a maze,” I say, putting on a shy smile. “But we found my ring.” I hold up my hand to show her.
Ronan looks at me, and he can tell immediately that something is wrong. I do my best to project feelings of needing to leave as quickly as possible to him.
“I’m afraid you’ve missed most of the tour. I have time to show you one more refinery if you’d like to—”
“That won’t be necessary,” says Ronan. “I can catch her up on what she missed. Thank you so much for having me. I was truly overdue for a visit.” He offers his hand, which Hypatia bends and kisses, the tension dissolving from her shoulders as she straightens back up.
The tour must have gone well.
“Return anytime. Your majesty is always welcome here. We here at the Guild are committed to restoring the crown’s confidence in our work.” Hypatia seems to mean this genuinely, although I’m unable to read her emotions to see if she’s concealing anything.
I wouldn’t have the magic to do so even if I could control it. The torch is warming in my pocket despite my best efforts. At this rate, it’s going to reignite at any moment, and I’m going to collapse from exhaustion.
I feel it reach out towards Ronan, but I don’t feel recognition in Ronan’s own feelings. He can’t sense it yet, not while I’m suppressing it. But if it keeps reaching, I’m not going to be able to stop it.
“Calm down,” I mutter as we walk away from Hypatia.
“I’m sorry?” asks Ronan.
“Not you. Fuck.” My pants are smoking. I pat down the flame, trying to act as if I’m checking to make sure I have everything I brought with me.
“Something burning a hole in your pocket?” says Ronan with a wink.
The torch is very pleased with itself. I roll my eyes at it.
“Sorry, darling, I’m going to need something of yours for just a minute,” I say, giving Ronan a meaningful glance.
And then I siphon his magic. I reach out and tug on his power, sensing it like I did when I split the shadows the first time, and I draw it back into me, turning his light into darkness.
The torch responds greedily, urging me to pull on this particular thread.
“My love, I believe you’re taking quite a lot,” says Ronan, an edge in his voice. “I’m not going to make it through that door if you’re not careful.”
“Then we’d better hurry, hadn’t we?”
Taran gets the door for us, and the second it closes behind us, I run for the carriage. “Get in. Close the door and the curtains. Hurry!”
The carriage driver takes off in a rush, jolting us into motion as I pull the torch from my pocket. It falls from my hand, tumbling to the carriage floor.
I draw on the last bit of Ronan’s magic to keep it from igniting. “I told you to wait!” I yell.
Ronan looks at Taran, confused as to who I’m talking to. “Show me what you’ve stolen, my delightfully devious darling.”
I pick up the torch from the ground, keeping it snuffed with considerable effort. “Be gentle. Don’t scare him.”
“Sylvie, you’ve stolen a stick? Are you talking to a stick?”
“She collapsed. She hit her head. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know if we could trust them—”
“Ah!” Ronan cries out as the torch bursts into light, the last of our magic gone.
“Be careful. It’s a little intense—”
Ronan collapses back into his seat as he touches the torch. His mouth falls open, words spilling out in a language and voice that isn’t his own. His eyes roll back into his head, and his body convulses, his legs shaking violently.
“Ronan!” I scream. I pull on his magic, trying to bring him back to me, but there’s nothing there. The only thing that feels like his magic nearby is this damned torch.
“This is what you did. Exactly,” says Taran, his hand covering his mouth. “You came out of it in a few seconds.”
And Ronan does too. He stops moving, his mouth closing and his eyes snapping back to me. “The temple.”
“I saw it too.”
“The temple?” asks Taran.
“A dream we shared. Were you being chased?”
Ronan nods. “By someone with a sickle.”
A sickle. That’s what that sound was. A sickle cutting through grain.
“How did you find this?” Ronan turns the torch over in his hand, looking at the carvings on the bottom. “I don’t recognize this writing.”
“I was looking for you. It felt like you. It still feels like you, like a mirror of you. I could use my physical shadows with it. Ronan, I think it understands me.”
To my surprise and delight, he agrees. “It’s intelligent but not human. Like Kira.”
Taran remains unconvinced. “I think we ought to put it somewhere well out of the way until we find out what it is. It drained your magic, Sylvie. It might be dangerous, something made by the alchemists to trap you.”
“I don’t think many of them know what it is at all, or it wouldn’t have been where it was. They hid it in plain sight. They couldn’t have known I would find it. Ronan, do you think any of them are trustworthy enough to ask about it?”
Ronan shakes his head. “The only thing I’m certain of after today is that they want me to think they aren’t up to anything.
The magic suppression research is going as we expected—they’ve made little progress, but they’re certain a breakthrough is just around the corner as long as I leave them alone and let them do whatever they want.
I’m certain they’ll defy me the second they think they can get away with it. They had this in plain sight?”
“In a hallway underground. There were other ordinary torches nearby.”
“Sir, we have a more urgent problem. Sylvie spoke with an apprentice who heard Cyrus telling Zara to keep something hidden. We searched the Guild Mistress’s chambers, but it’s a disaster in there.
They could have hidden half of the secrets in the realm, and we’d never know it.
” He tells Ronan about the spyglass and the secret compartment in the desk, but like me, Ronan can barely take his eyes off the torch to listen.
“It’s a strange fire, isn’t it? The color is wrong.”
“That’s what I said.” Taran hadn’t believed me, but he’s a water-born, after all. He doesn’t see the subtleties in the light that Ronan and I do.
“This could be insane, but do you think it’s Vayla’s torch?”
Oh, gods. Of course. The goddess Vayla—the ruler of the gods, the goddess that Ronan supposedly embodies as her representative on earth—gifted the first Selarans a torch to guide them.