Page 6 of A Legacy of Wrath and Reckoning

The man sighed softly and Zylah made her decision. Cleared her throat and took a soft step closer. Dark eyes met hers; in the dim light, for a moment, Zylah feared he was one of them—a vampire. Shock settled across the man’s features, one hand rising to his chest, resting over his heart.

“Pallia?” His voice was hoarse, barely audible. His eyes scrunched shut, then he opened them again. “What are you doing here?”

Zylah could have leaned into the lie. Let him believe she was her grandmother. But lies had never served her well in the past. The man didn’t move, as if perhaps he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

“My name is Zylah,” she said, taking a tentative step closer. “Pallia was my grandmother.”

He uncurled his legs slowly, yet still, Zylah took a step back. “Arioch,” he said with a grunt as he pushed himself to his feet, stepping stiffly off his plinth into the dirt. Though he looked no more than a man in his thirties, if he had known Pallia, he was centuries old.

Which meant—“You’re not Fae, are you?”

A sad smile tugged at his mouth. “I am not anything, Zylah. Not anymore.” He studied her carefully, taking in her tattered clothes, the scar that no doubt marred her face, and she wondered if he was deciding what to make of her just as she was of him.

Then he turned, and for the first time, Zylah saw his back, the twin stumps that jutted from gaps in the leather at his shoulder blades, marred skin stretched so thinly over shattered bone. She sucked in a breath at the sight. Zylah had seen these kinds of stumps before, after a Fae in the uprising back in Virian had had her wings hacked off.

“Ranon did this to you?”

Arioch followed her line of sight, glancing over his shoulder and nodded sadly. “Ranon did many things.” His gaze slipped back to her face, assessing. “Water?” He disappeared behind the plinth, and Zylah readied herself to run, but he returned a moment later with a leather pouch, keeping his distance as he handed it to her with an outstretched arm.

He didn’t trust her, not entirely. That made two of them.

She reached for the vessel, sniffing at the water out of habit but detecting nothing untoward laced within the liquid. It tasted different from the water Raif had been bringing her, collected directly from somewhere within the maze, she suspected.

“Ranon did this to you, too, I gather,” Arioch said. It was as much a statement as it was a question, but one look at her torn, bloodied clothes would have been enough for him to make assumptions.

“Ranon. His daughter. His grandson. Take your pick.”

“His daughter?”

Zylah nodded. There was something familiar about him. The curls, perhaps. The leathers. And then realisation struck her. “You came through the strange pool in the sky.” The sketches she’d seen in the book Nye had shown her, back in the Aquaris Court. “You came with all of them. You’re Imala’s lover.”

Arioch met her gaze. “I was one of them.” There was a bitterness to the way he said it, but Zylah wasn’t about to question him, not when the logical conclusion from that statement was that if Arioch had been one of Imala’s lovers, Ranon had more than likely been another. “I am…was… Seraphim. Angel, in some dialects. But Ranon took my wings. Left me here to rot. Alone.”

Torot. How many years had he been there, trapped in the maze, with no way out? She held out the canister for him, but he shook his head. He still studied her with an air of suspicion, though Zylah couldn’t say she blamed him; she doubted he’d had many visitors over the years.

“Keep it,” he told her. His brows narrowed, as if he was considering his words. And then, “There is no easy way out of this place without magic, Zylah, and that you are still standing here before me, tells me you have none.”

“It’s…” Temporarily missing? How did she explain it to him? “Evading me.”

“You are so much like your grandmother.”

There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask him, so many he might possess the answers to. “Why… why did Ranon do this to you?”

Arioch gave a dry laugh and rested a hand over his heart. “Because he coveted my mate above all else.”

Zylah sucked in a sharp breath at the word, forced herself to focus instead on everything he’d said. “Imala?”

A bittersweet expression fell over Arioch’s face, his eyes softening. “Sira.” He breathed her name like a prayer, like he hadn’t dared speak it in some time.

It was an effort to compose herself, but Zylah focused on all she knew of the original nine, her head throbbing with the implications of his words. Sira and Ranon had been the ones to start a war, she’d been taught. She tucked those pieces of information away as she watched the remorse settle over the Seraphim’s face. “Coveted her… so he cut off your wings and trapped you here?” Cold dread speared its way through her veins. Her blood had released the Fae responsible for Arioch’s predicament. For his years of suffering.

Arioch closed his eyes again, and Zylah wondered if it was Sira he saw. “Cutting off my wings was not punishment enough, though he had stolen my mate from me first.” His eyes flicked open, so much loneliness in them that Zylah almost had to look away. “I cannot die, not through lack of trying. And I cannot escape. You are the first, theonly… in years.” He looked at her as if he couldn’t quite believe his eyes, and Zylah understood how she must have seemed to him, the image of her grandmother. Like a fever dream, almost. The years he must have been alone, the decades,centuries. Her heart squeezed at the thought.

“When my magic returns, Iwillget out of here. And I will gladly take you with me.” He had done nothing to wrong Ranon, nothing but exist. And he had suffered for it.

The Seraphim nodded sadly. “I would like that very much.”

“Can you tell me—” Zylah began, but a blinding pain brought her to her knees, muscles locking up tight, teeth clamping together until she could taste copper. Hands in the dirt, a dark haze dancing before her eyes, Zylah fought the urge to vomit. A warm hand lightly rested on her shoulder and she flinched at the touch.

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