Page 235 of Mother of Death and Dawn

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Idid not get to ask any more questions of Caduan before he ran back out into the wreckage. When I tried, he only barked that we had no time to talk, only to fight. And in this, he was right. Ela’Dar had been ravaged. The beasts were nearly impossible to kill. The sheer number of them, and the fact that we had not been expecting them, brought the city to its knees in hours. Our dead turned on us so fast that we had no choice but to fight for our lives. Some tried to burn the bodies, only to send flaming corpses running through the city, spreading wildfires as they tore through houses and crashed through forests.

How many hours did the nightmare last? I did not know. Time became a distant concept as survival narrowed my thoughts.

It was long past nightfall by the time the city was under control enough for me to follow Caduan back to his rooms. He had spent part of the evening with Luia and Vythian, then Meajqa from his healer’s bed after he regained consciousness, whispering frantically about things I was forbidden from hearing.

When the door closed, I watched Caduan come undone, like sails collapsing on an abandoned ship. He sank down onto this desk chair, his head in his hands, while I remained at the door, breath still heaving and heart still racing.

“What was that?” I choked out. “What were those things?”

Caduan did not answer. Instead, he stood and went to his closet. He had thrown on an ill-fitting jacket, which covered his shredded shirt and… and all it revealed. He stepped behind a divider and tossed the jacket out from behind it, and then the tattered shirt.

“Tell me,” I demanded. “Tell me what just happened. Tell mehowthat just happened.”

“That,” Caduan said, far too calmly, “was the work of a Lejara. Creation magic, to be specific.”

A Lejara? That didn’t make sense. “But you have spent the last six months searching for the Lejaras.”

“Searching for the other two. Yes.”

“But if you already had one—”

“No one knew it was here. No one but me.”

My mouth closed. I could not see Caduan behind the divider, which made me angry.

“Why would you hide it?”

There was a long silence, so long I was ready to tear down the wall between us so I could force him to answer. “What were those things, Caduan?”

“The Aran queen took the Lejara. She must have used it. She would have known— I should have known she would feel its presence, considering how obsessively she has been studying such forces.”

“But how—”

“Creation is just as dangerous as death. More dangerous, perhaps. There is nothing more dangerous than life that should not exist.”

I felt so sick. “Why didn’t you tell anyone that you had it?”

“Because…” At last, he stepped out from behind the divider. He had a fresh shirt on, too white against his blood-and-sweat caked skin. He left the buttons open, revealing his body beneath.

I had not imagined what I had seen in the circular room. The lines of black covered his entire torso. They started at the center of his stomach and fanned out, spreading like rotten roots up his chest, collecting at his sternum and ending shy of his throat.

“What is that?” I asked, quietly.

I had never seen Caduan ashamed before.

“I did not tell anyone, not even Meajqa, about the magic I had, because I wanted to be able to use it as I saw fit without justifying that decision to anyone.”

“You used it to create the shades.”

Pain cracked every line of Caduan’s features. “Not just the shades.”

I looked down at my hands. My soft, mortal, living hands.

So many moments roared through me at once.

The shock and horror on Ishqa’s face the first time he saw me.How? How did you do this?

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