Page 79 of Angel in Absentia
She kept her head raised, watching as he drew one finger against her open palm as his other fingers pinned her hand. The spire on the silver sharpened so that she could feel the coolness of the blade. Just before it was about to cut her skin, at that exact point of sharpness, the blade withdrew again into his fingertip and circled her palm again.
“One small cut, and in a manner of days, you’d be one of us,” he whispered, playing a dangerous dance of sharpness and pressure against her palm. “I took your kingdom. I would gladly give you mine.” He leaned toward her again as she felt the subtle pressure against her skin, the blade so sharp it might cut her at any moment. His voice was low, and for a moment she thought she might feel that sting of his hands. “I think it could benefit from a gentler hand,” he whispered. “Someone to give it life, just as you have given me life. A heart, perhaps. I don’t imagine Loda should keep you all to itself. Return to the forest with us. Why prolong the inevitable? This city is a burden you don’t have to carry any longer.”
He lifted the blade, smoothing over the spot gently and then removing his hand and returning to where he sat without another word. She could almost sense his smile, knowing he’drattled her, and admitting in the darkest recesses of herself that he’d tempted her.
Clea exchanged glances with Iris, who continued watching from the other side of the room. Clea wondered how she would explain their interaction and the feelings it stirred. She took a deep breath to soothe herself and gather her thoughts. Ryson seemed to sense it beside her because his smile widened in a subtle way.
“All you have to do,” he whispered, still facing forward, “is say my name. That one concession is all I ask.”
“I say it often,” she whispered back. “Alkerrai al Shambelin,” she repeated, slow and practiced, taking every measure to annunciate the sharpness of the title.
He chuckled somewhat humorously, drumming his fingers across the stone between them. The sharp points of his fingertips only showed themselves as his fingers hit the stone, before withdrawing again, creating a strange ripple of silver off his fingertips as they moved.
“Good then,” he whispered back. “In that case, I’ll demand more than just the mercy of my name. You will beg.”
She had no response for that, her body too tense to offer the loose dismissal of a laugh or a scoff. She could only sit and bear the weight of a threat that did anything but truly frighten her. She wanted to whisper the words,Make me, but something about his words, despite some underlying playfulness, felt too real for mockery.
She was convinced that to dare him meant he very well might make her, without the deterrent of publicity or any otherreservation. He might pull her from the throne right now, and her own people, whom she’d apparently transformed into traitors to her own cause, would applaud it. Her own people would be eager to usher them off, thinking she would hold him captive with her body when instead what stirred deep and powerful was her own yearning to beg. He spoke to that part of her as if acutely aware it existed, playing with it, cultivating it, inviting it out to the forefront and causing the facade of control she wore, the facade she always had to wear, to tremble and crack, eager to collapse inside of her where it might find respite it had never been offered before.
She blinked and shoved the thoughts away with all the force she could muster, suddenly eager to leave, to get out of this chair and out of his presence. As if a prayer was answered, a messenger ran into the space, shuffling past all the people in a hurry before whispering to them both.
“There are people in the tunnels. Hundreds of people. From Ruedom,” the messenger said.
Clea rose slowly, trying to avoid inciting panic. She exchanged glances with Ryson, who rose with her.
“In what capacity?” she whispered.
Soldiers? Warriors? Had Dae and Catagard managed to gather the resources they’d needed? Had Ruedom Veilin come to battle the Insednians?
No. They were in the tunnels.
Clea spotted blood on the messenger’s clothes, and then she knew, looking at Ryson in horror.
Refugees.
Chapter 24
Cast of the Spell
T THE UNDERGROUND city gates, torchlight revealed them: the refugees of Ruedom. Clothes shredded. Faces hollow. Mothers carrying children. Civilians and soldiers missing limbs. One woman cradled a piece of broken masonry as if it had been her home. Some ferried their own severed appendages and limbs as if unable to let them go.
Every survivor had stories, stammering, broken stories. The Ashanas had come, but more than that. It had been the wave they were expecting in Loda.
A beast taller than the walls had broken them down with a roar like metallic thunder. No warning. No mercy. The city, the best fortified on the continent, had fallen in a single night.
The refugees flooded the tunnels and soon the streets of Loda. Clea felt sucked into their tide, nothing existing beyond the river of pain and the compulsion she felt to heal them. The intensity of it possessed her, and with each healing, she was drawn deeper and deeper into the mire of their calamity until she was at moments convinced she’d been there with them during the attack.
One of the council members called Clea and Ryson for a meeting. Clea knew only by the feeling of Ryson’s hand on her shoulder. She looked up from her most recent healing and beyond him to the council member.
The obligations of her station called, but she looked back at the vast crowd huddled in front of her. She was on her knees, white and gold dress soiled in the earth, hands stained in blood. Her eyes, glossed with silent tears, flickered back up to Ryson.
“You’ll have to drag me away from them,” she whispered, and it was not a threat, but an honest fact, her hand coiling through his without thinking.
His eyes flickered down to that motion, her bloodied fingers clasped around his wantingly, and he eased away as if he too was now threatened to be pulled under the tide she swam in.
“I’ll go,” he offered. “I’ll come for you when we’re done.”
Clea nodded, and thanked him, releasing his hand before returning to the people ahead of her. She dove into her healings, her ansra stirred into a torrent of powerful intent that blinded her. Relieved of her responsibilities in the war council, she was liberated in her blindness, allowed to do at last what her nature called her to do.
