27. Asha
Asha
Tobin’s voice washes over me, and I let myself drift towards the threads of his magic inside my memory.
Six of them.
“There are six of them,” I murmur. “My hand is in his chest.”
I tear my hand out of Ramon’s chest, and his light dies against my fingers.
Someone runs a spear of daylight clean through my shoulder.
“Daylight spear,” I hear myself say from a distance.
Blood climbs out of the channels I cut into my own throne room and ropes around the nearest god’s throat. I close my fist, and I watch him go a colour gods really shouldn’t.
The second hit takes me off my feet and into a column.
“Two hits. I’m down and then back up. Screams. The god who reaches for me loses the arm at the shoulder.”
“Did you draw straws? Which one gets the nasty job of finishing me off?”
“You are beyond the power of this realm, Anaxandra,” Zether says.
“I’m not hearing a problem. You only minded once I started to be more powerful than you. They don’t deny it. They move together now.”
I laugh, remembering the eye.
“Three more daylight spears. I took one of their eyes.”
“Good girl,” Hale mutters somewhere to my right.
“They put their hands on me, and they start to pull. My power. I fight.”
“Of course you did,” Leith murmurs. “You are a fighter.”
I fight it like nothing I’ve ever fought. I claw at the stone until the nails tear off my fingers.
“You don’t get to fucking do this,” I scream. “You don’t have it in you. You never did.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Anaxandra. You are banished from StormGate, condemned to a fate worse than death,” Zether says, close enough to look me in the eye.
“No!” I scream as the floor lets go of me. “I’ll be back, fucker, and you will die with your still beating heart in my hands!”
I jerk violently, remembering the feeling of nothingness around me and hitting the courtyard in the rain. My eyes snap open as I come hard against Hale’s fingers. I didn’t even realise he was touching me until then.
My body convulses as I let the climax control me. It’s better than feeling my exile, my death all over again.
I gasp for air, my body still trembling from the aftershocks of the memory and the climax. Hale’s fingers slow, but don’t stop, keeping me grounded in the present. Tobin’s silver threads pulse in my mind, anchoring the fragments of the ritual.
“Daylight spears,” Tobin murmurs.
“That sounds like they hurt,” Leith adds with a shudder.
I shoot him a death stare. “No shit, arsehole.”
He smiles. “Sorry, just thinking out loud.”
“That was the key. Daylight spears. No words?”
I shake my head. “No words. Daylight spears and their combined power. It was the intent behind it; they didn’t need words. Fuckers.”
Tobin absorbs that with a slow nod, his eyes tracking something I can’t see.
“Combined intent,” he says. “No verbal component. That’s harder to invert.”
“Why?” Hale asks, his fingers going still against me, but he doesn’t remove them.
“Because there’s nothing to reverse the words of.
The inversion has to come from intent alone.
” Tobin looks at me. “Our intent. Your intent to reclaim. Returning is passive. Reclaiming is active.” He gets up from the bed and moves to stare out of the window.
“Why daylight? Is the sun strong where you come from?”
I shake my head. “No, but it is the exact opposite of everything I was built on.”
“Darkness.”
“So we use midnight spears to return her?” Leith asks quietly.
“And our combined power and intent to return her to her rightful place,” Tobin says.
“We aren’t gods,” Leith points out.
“No,” Tobin says, turning from the window. “But we don’t need to be. We need to be the opposite of what they were. They used divinity against divinity. We use something else entirely.”
“What?” I ask.
“Power, death, fire and sight.” He looks at me with that controlled expression that means he’s already ten steps ahead and mildly irritated that the rest of us haven’t caught up.
“The daylight spears worked because they were the precise antithesis of your nature. They didn’t overpower you with strength. They used the right frequency.”
“So we need the right frequency in reverse,” Leith says.
“We need to strike with the exact inverse of what was used to exile her,” Tobin confirms. “Four sources. Four strikes. Combined intent, no words. The anchor opens, the Well responds, and her body rises to meet her.”
“I’m right here,” I say, waving my hand as he continues to talk about me, not to me.
“I’m aware.”
“That sounds simple,” Hale interrupts.
“It isn’t.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
I sit up fully, pulling the sheet around me as I can’t shake the memory of that pain and humiliation.
“Define not simple,” I say.
Tobin turns from the window. “The four of us have never combined intent before. Not in any coordinated way. Sex doesn’t count.”
“I beg to differ,” Hale mutters.
“The bond helps,” Leith says, ignoring him. “It’s already a shared frequency.”
“It will be useful. The four strikes need to be simultaneous. A fraction of a second off and the frequency fractures. If the frequency fractures, the anchor doesn’t open cleanly.”
“And if it doesn’t open cleanly?” I ask.
His silver eyes find mine. “You go somewhere that isn’t StormGate.”
The silence that follows that particular statement is unpleasant.
“Right,” I say. “So we don’t fuck it up.”
“That’s the plan,” Tobin states.
“Where do we get midnight spears from?” I ask a damn good question.
He gives me a smile that screams breaking-and-entering.
“I’m going to hate the answer, aren’t I?” I say with a sigh.
“Blackridge has a chamber that holds weapons the calibre of which we are talking about. If there are any in the academy, then they will be in there.”
“And if they aren’t?”
“Then we make them.”
We lock gazes, and I see that is Plan Z. “Why not just do that anyway?”
“We don’t have the thirty days it will take to ensure we get a full cycle of the moon.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I grumble. “I’m hungry and tired. I can’t go on a raid now.”
“Food first, then sleep,” Hale says, taking control of the things he is good at.
“Food and sleep,” I repeat, testing the words. “And then we rob Blackridge.”
“And then we rob Blackridge,” Hale confirms, already pulling his shirt back over his head with the casual confidence of someone who has never once considered that a plan might fail.
I stare at him for a second, then drag myself off the bed and root through my drawers for clean, dry clothes and pull them on.
Leith is already dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, looking at nothing in particular. He is running calculations behind the stillness. I know that look now. It means he’s identified a problem and decided whether to share it or solve it quietly.
“Say it,” I tell him.
He looks up. “Blackridge’s chamber won’t be unguarded.”
“Obviously.”
“And he’ll know the eclipse is approaching. He may have already moved anything useful into a holding chamber.”
“Which is?”
“A place where they can reach them if the event arises.”
“The event being?”
“Global realm network catastrophe.”
“Right,” I mutter. “But they would still need to be accessible, so maybe that’s a good thing?”
“He wouldn’t be so careless as to leave them where students can steal them,” Hale states.
“Yep, because the gods forbid that he does anything to actually help us.”
Tobin’s expression doesn’t change, which is an answer enough.
“It’s strategy.” He moves to the window again and looks out at the rain-soaked courtyard.
“Blackridge’s priority is SilverGate’s survival and the integrity of the realm network.
Ours is getting you home. Those two objectives overlap in exactly one place. ”
“The eclipse,” I say.
“The eclipse. Which means anything that serves both goals simultaneously, he may allow. Anything that serves only ours, he’ll obstruct.”
“But we are attempting this outside the eclipse.”
“Exactly,” he says with more weariness than I’ve ever heard from him.
It’s not good.
I pull a jumper over my head and shove my arms through the sleeves. The warmth is immediate, but inadequate. The memory of the exile sits behind my eyes in sharp fragments.
I’m going to enjoy what comes next.
“Food,” I say, because if I keep thinking about it, I’ll do something Tobin would qualify as stupid.
Hale opens the door, and he and Leith step out. I turn towards it but don’t get very far when Tobin’s hand grips my arm gently and turns me towards him. “Wait.”
“What for?”
“This,” he says and bends down and brushes his lips over mine before plunging his tongue into my mouth. I open up for him immediately.
His hands come up to cup my face, tilting my head back, and I let him. The kiss is unhurried, deliberate. He takes his time, his thumb tracing my jaw, and I feel the silver threads of his magic pulse once against my skin.
When he finally pulls back, his silver eyes search mine for a moment.
“What was that for?” I ask.
“So you know I won’t falter.”
“Falter in what?” I croak.
“The mission to get you back home.”
“It never crossed my mind.”
“Not yet, but it will. You will doubt all of us because if this goes wrong even by a second, it will fail.”
I hold his gaze for a long moment. “I won’t doubt you,” I say, and I mean it, which is the terrifying part.
He nods once, releases my face and steps back, the controlled mask sliding into place.
I turn and walk out of the room before I say something embarrassing.
The corridor is cold and empty, rain hammering the narrow windows at the far end. Hale and Leith are already on the stairs, their voices carrying up in low fragments. I follow, trying to shake the last residue of the memory. Zether’s face. The stone letting go of me. The nothing.
The dining hall is quieter than usual when we push through the doors. A handful of students scatter their attention across plates and cups, pretending they aren’t watching four creatures who look like they’ve collectively survived something catastrophic walk in from the rain.
We have. They just don’t know the half of it.
I drop into a chair as Hale loads a tray with the kind of dedication that suggests this is a spiritual practice for him.
Tobin sits opposite me with the rigid posture of someone pretending he isn’t exhausted enough to face-plant into his own soup.
Leith takes the chair beside me and stays quiet. His silence isn’t empty. It presses at the edge of my awareness, cool and watchful, which is becoming annoyingly comforting.
Hale returns with enough food for a siege and sets two plates in front of me.
I stare at them. “Do I look like I can eat all that?”
“You look like you should.”
I pick up a fork because he has a point and because I’m hungry enough to eat the table if it comes with sauce. The first bite nearly makes me groan, but I refuse to give Hale the satisfaction. He stares at me anyway, smug as sin.
“Don’t look pleased with yourself,” I say around a mouthful.
“I fed my goddess.”
It pleases me that he thinks of me that way and acts on it.
I know I don’t doubt him, not once, not ever.