46. All Wrong
All Wrong
SERAPHAE
Consciousness came in pieces.
Wood pressed against my cheek. The smell of night air and something metallic. Probably my own blood. The rocking could mean that I was in a carriage.
My right hand shook when I tried to close my fist. Failed. Tried to open my heavy lids. Failed that too.
They didn’t kill me back at the cottage when they could have.
I was leverage.
The strike to my hand was meant to signal Caelan through the bond.
My throat burned when I tried to swallow. The muscles in my throat didn’t let me. The drug was burning through my blood.
We had planned for Mallas’s men, but we did not plan for this.
Aliza must have been intercepted and killed when she was bringing dinner.
There had not been additional guards because Riven would have been enough.
Riven.
My breath left me as my chest constricted tight.
Riven.
The last image I had was the blade at his throat and his eyes finding mine, and I couldn’t see him. I didn’t know—couldn’t know.
He was eating pie. Pie where he blew on it once before taking a bite. I had smiled at him because—
I gasped for air that didn’t come. A strangled sound came out of me like a slur.
Then my eyes shut.
My boots scraped gravel before hitting smooth stone.
I blinked hard and I opened my eyes.
Familiar cobblestones were beneath me, and at the edge of them were veyras, glowing in the darkness. We were back at the estate.
The courtyard looked wrong. Mallas’s men were nowhere to be seen. Soldiers in white armor lined the walls and opened the double doors as I was dragged inside. More men lined the corridors, all in white Winter armor.
My heart hammered against my chest.
As my head slowly began to clear slowly, I counted the soldiers. We were in Twilight. Those numbers were insignificant compared to Caelan’s army. But numbers weren’t what would win the war tonight.
It was leverage.
And Mallas was the one who had it.
The soldiers hauling me tightened their grip as they pulled me along the carpeted corridor toward the main courtyard. The one with the fountain and the silverbells.
Caelan was seated at a stone table. His eyes found me first.
Relief washed over his face, then the controlled expression he wore when things went horribly wrong slipped back into place.
Mallas, who sat across from him, stood when he saw me.
He beamed.
The smile of someone who had been waiting a long time for something, and it had finally arrived. As broad as it was, it carried no warmth.
I clenched my jaw.
“Ah.” He moved toward me, hands clasped behind his back. “There she is.”
His eyes flickered from my face down to my right hand, bloodied and trembling.
“Why is she injured?” He cocked his head at the guard to my right.
“T-the signal, Your Highness,” the guard said, voice cracking.
Mallas stared at him. The smile was gone. His hand shot out and gripped the guard’s neck.
I stumbled forward as the guard’s hold left me.
“I said a cut,” Mallas seethed. “That is not a cut.”
The guard tried to speak. Couldn’t.
Air pressed inward, and the guard made noises that sounded agonized and strangled.
I watched as ice bloomed from his neck, spreading to his face before encasing his whole body. Until he was nothing but a frozen ice sculpture with a face contorted with fear.
Mallas looked at me, a hideous smile back on his face.
“I do apologize for the lack of hospitality from my guard.” He spared a glance at the frozen corpse. “He won’t do it again.”
This was not the prince who welcomed me to his court.
This was a monster.
Caelan’s eyes were on me. I tried to tell him I was alright with my eyes. Pleaded with him not to do anything for my sake. His fist was clenched on the stone table, expression hardened, but he did not move.
“Are you going to tell me what you want, Mallas?” he said evenly.
Mallas’s eyes lingered on my face.
“Patience, brother.” He reached out to touch my cheek, and I recoiled. “Did you know?” his eyes roamed over my face. “That my mother was a witch?”
I said nothing.
“A very powerful one,” he said proudly. “The bloodline doesn’t always pass. Sometimes it skips a generation. Sometimes, it doesn’t.” His gray eyes glowed amber for a short moment. Long enough to be sure that I had seen it. The same amber as Maerith’s.
Maelor moved, armor clinking. Mallas’s men restrained him immediately.
Mallas turned to Maelor. “You should be grateful,” he said pleasantly. “I’m not killing you so you can watch.”
“Mallas,” Caelan’s voice was quiet and controlled. “Whatever it is that you think I owe you—”
“Owe me.” Mallas turned. The pleasantness left his face, and rage surfaced. “I don’t want what you owe me, Caelan. I stopped wanting that a long time ago.”
His smile returned when he looked at me, as abruptly as it had left.
“Mother and I were happy in Aurelion.” A laugh escaped him. “I was five when the king decided that I belonged in the palace.”
Caelan clenched his jaw and said nothing.
“She died outside the walls where the guards changed twice a day and the king visited when it was convenient. Because the queen of Primoria found a witch at court inappropriate.”
He sighed, suddenly nostalgic.
“I hated you from the beginning. When you lost control and Father sent you to the borders, I did grow fond of you,” he said to Caelan.
“Two black sheep of the family. Then you built a kingdom from the borders you were exiled to. Built an army that we all know answers only to you. And you became useful.” He spat the last word.
“You were supposed to die at the borders. Instead, you became a legend and I became a bastard that sat at the table because his brothers were generous enough to allow it.”
“I have never thought of you that way,” Caelan said.
“You didn’t need to,” Mallas said.
“That’s why you wanted to kill me?” Caelan asked.
“Originally, I did want you dead.” Mallas tilted his head at Caelan. “Then I learned about your secret.” He looked up to the sky. “Two centuries of untamed magic, sitting above a kingdom, held in place by a man with exceptional self-control. Turns out, you were able to reach it all along.”
Mallas produced a dagger.
Caelan moved.
Mallas spun. “Na-uh.” He clicked his tongue and grabbed my chin. Caelan froze, then sat back down. “You stay right there, remember?”
He dropped my chin and grabbed my wrist.
“Do you know what happens when you forcibly break a bond?” He turned my wrist. “It’s a fragile structural thing.
The magic that holds it is essentially load-bearing,” he said this to me.
“When you remove it without consent, something shifts to compensate.” He traced a finger along the ink. “Control, for instance.”
My head snapped to him.
He didn’t just want Caelan dead. What he wanted was worse.
Mallas turned to Caelan. “I want the world to know exactly the monster you are. I want you to lose everything. Your control. Your reputation. Your kingdom.” He grinned.
“I want you to watch as it happens.” He looked at me.
“If you cooperate, I’ll let her live once the bond is gone. You have my word.”
He pulled me forward.
Caelan was on his feet before I had registered the movement.
Mallas pressed the dagger against my throat.
“Sit.” His voice didn’t change. “Or I put this through her now and we end you both quickly, which also achieves something. It’s just less satisfying.” He looked at Caelan. “I prefer the version where you’re alive and suffering.”
Caelan sat.
My heart hammered in my chest.
Mallas was going to kill everyone in this kingdom if Caelan lost control. Hundreds of people.
I moved for the dagger in Mallas’s hand—
—ice froze over my hand halfway.
A scream ripped out of me, the ice burning against my skin.
Maelor roared, shoving one guard to the ground while another two tried to restrain him.
Then ice froze from his boots up to his thigh. He clawed uselessly toward us, screaming Mallas’s name.
Mallas laughed. He turned to me and took my face in his hand.
“That wasn’t nice.” He unfroze my hand. “Do that again and the dagger goes through your artery, okay?”
My chest rose and fell, and I spat at him.
He didn’t even flinch. He removed his hand from my face to wipe his, then took my chin in his hand again. Fingers gripped hard on my jaw, he forced my face toward Caelan. Then he pressed a kiss to my cheek and held it there for a moment, looking directly at Caelan over my temple.
“Reach for it,” he said.
“He won’t,” I said. “He won’t endanger his kingdom.”
Mallas pulled back and looked at me with something like fondness. “Oh, Sera.” He glanced at Caelan. “I think he’d burn it down for you.”
“Caelan.” My voice cracked. “Don’t do it. Do not reach.”
Caelan looked at me with the expression of a man fighting an internal battle. Two centuries of composure gone.
Mallas pressed a dagger to my throat. “Last chance,” he said pleasantly. “Reach and she lives, or don’t and you both die.”
The conflict in Caelan’s face crumbled away to raw terror, then resolve. With one shaking hand, he opened his palm.
No.
Air pressed inward and the warm summer night suddenly began to feel cold. Too cold.
“Caelan!” I screamed.
“Shhhhh,” Mallas pressed his face to mine. “Don’t interrupt the show.”
A rush of something that felt vast and old filled the space. The trees around us curled in.
The dark sky drained, a trail of shadow or smoke sucked toward us, into his palm.
Then Mallas started chanting.
Ancient. Voices layering the same way Maerith’s did.
His blade dug into my neck.
Darkness peeled away from above little by little until all that was left was ordinary night.
Caelan stilled, and so did everyone in the courtyard.
Shadows swirled around him with subtle white flashes of lightning, eyes like a blue storm. The air felt heavy, dense, and wrong. He stared at his hands, waiting for it to rip out. For what happened two centuries ago to happen again.
It didn’t. His magic only hovered around him.
“Caelan,” I breathed.
He looked at me, shock and relief flickering in quick succession. His magic was controlled. He was controlling it.
Before either of us could react, Mallas suddenly stopped chanting, and I felt it in the bond.
The ink on my wrist blazed red. Hotter than it had ever been. Then a pain I had no category for, as if it were being torn along its seams.
The bond broke.
I felt it go.
A sound came out of me that I hadn’t planned and couldn’t stop. The grief of losing something that had been part of you so long you had stopped knowing where it ended and you began.
Tears ran down my face without my permission.
The black ink that I wore on my arm, that had become a part of me, began to unravel. The lines peeled away, lifting into smoke before dissolving in the air.
My hand reached out on its own, grabbing at it uselessly.
The world tilted as I folded into myself. My palm pressed against the cobblestone, nails breaking as I dug into the ground. A hollowness opened behind my chest.
“No,” I cried.
Every exhale felt like surrender.
Caelan’s knees hit the ground with a crack. Shadows poured off him like smoke. He tried to stand again and failed.
Power surged, crackling upward, lightning dancing around shadows.
His head snapped up, breathing hard like he was drowning in air. The blue in his eyes was gone, taken over by a depthless black.
“Caelan,” I called out.
He did not answer.
His control had always been a blade he pressed at his own throat. And now that control was gone. The magic was here to do what it always threatened to do.
It took.