The Whitefire Crossing (45 page)

As Simon’s wholly dependent, docile slave, Kiran would slaughter countless innocents and never even know the evil he did.

“Simon.” Kiran spoke softly. “Don’t do this. Please.” His voice was shaking. “Don’t do it, not this way. I’ll...I’ll help you cast against Ruslan. I’ll take your mark-bond, willingly.” The words were ashes on his tongue.

Simon’s knife hand stilled. His dark eyes locked with Kiran’s.

Please
, Kiran begged, with every spark of
ikilhia
within him. If Simon would only leave his mind intact, then even subject to the soul-crushing constraint of a mark-binding, he might find a way to subvert Simon’s plans in Ninavel.

“Oh, you tempt me, Kiran.” Simon cupped Kiran’s face, his thumb stroking away a drop of blood trickling down Kiran’s cheekbone. “But I see you with clearer eyes than Ruslan. I’ll have you by my side, but not as you are now. Lesser, it’s true, but safer.”

He finished cutting the sigil and stood. Hot tears burned Kiran’s eyes, matching the sting of Simon’s sigils on his skin. He jerked against the manacles, his breath tearing in his chest. There must be a way to stop Simon, to strike back—

Lizaveta’s heart-binding, so tightly woven into his
ikilhia—
he couldn’t alter her prohibition against self-harm, but if he could warp the shape of her spell just slightly, enhance it
there
, and
there
...the resulting pattern would also deflect harmful energies, enough that it might disrupt the flow of power Simon funneled into him.

Disrupted, the channeled magic would backlash in a cataclysm sure to destroy both him and Simon. He gasped as the heart-binding lanced warning fire through him. Curse Lizaveta! Death wasn’t his desire in this, only Simon’s defeat.

Lizaveta’s binding didn’t relent. Kiran twisted, panting. New dismay pierced him as he glimpsed Dev, silent and still on his crate. Success in his plan would mean Dev’s death, when uncontrolled power roared through Simon’s bone-binding.
I’m sorry
, he thought at Dev.
Iannis was right. Death is the only freedom for us.
Grimly, he fought the burning pressure in his head, struggling to weave a pattern in his own
ikilhia
strong enough to tug Lizaveta’s into the proper alignment.

Simon cut sigils into his own palms. He set the knife down and spread his hands, blood dripping into the nearest channels. One by one the channels snapped into life, the sullen red glow brightening into blazing fire.

Hurry, Kiran had to hurry, yet the threads kept slipping from his grasp, fire devouring his focus...

Simon knelt, his eyes shut and sweat standing out on his face. He reached one bloody hand to touch the binding charm on Kiran’s left wrist, and raised the knife over Kiran’s bare stomach.

Not yet, he wasn’t ready, oh please...“Simon, no—!”

The knife came down, and everything turned white.

***

(Dev)

Horror choked me as Simon brought the knife down. The bastard’s binding kept me frozen, unable even to close my eyes.

Kiran’s panicked shout turned to a ragged, agonized shriek as the silver blade tore through his stomach. All the lines on the floor blazed up so bright it was like staring into the sun. Just when I feared I’d be struck blind, the inferno of light abruptly dimmed. Simon had already pulled the knife out. Kiran’s blood was everywhere, black in the eerie light.

A violet flash outlined Kiran’s body in a deep, livid glow. Simon threw up an arm, stark surprise on his face.

Kiran screamed again, his voice raw. His body convulsed and arched off the stone so hard I thought he’d rip his limbs off. A great arc of blinding light snapped from his body to Simon’s. The lines in the floor flared up again, smaller arcs running from them to Kiran.

On my chest, the amulet burst into white-hot life, searing my skin through my shirt. A yell hung trapped in my throat as pain exploded in my head. The air in my lungs turned thick as molasses, my heart struggling against a tightening vise.

Simon screamed, a sound that filled me with savage joy. The arc between Simon and Kiran grew ever brighter until Simon seemed to be glowing from within, his bones a dark shadow beneath his flesh, his face a rictus of agony. The fire in my head mounted to skull-boiling intensity.

A soundless explosion swatted me backward into darkness.

Something heavy was crushing me. I groaned and struggled to push it away. My hands scraped against rock. Where was I, and why was everything dark?

Memory returned, and I froze. Then slowly, deliberately, moved my hands up to my face. Simon’s binding was gone, my body my own to command—but where was Simon? And oh gods, Kiran, with his gut slashed wide open...I stifled the urge to scrabble blindly against rock, and lay still, listening.

No sounds came to my ears other than the distant splashing of the stream. The darkness surrounding me wasn’t absolute, and as my eyes adjusted I began to make out shapes.

I was lying on my side, squeezed in a crevice beneath a jumble of rocks and the remains of Simon’s crates. Dim light filtered through the splintered wood of a shattered crate at the crevice’s end. I wriggled toward the light, praying the rocks would remain stable. Mother of maidens, but I didn’t want to die the terrible way Sethan had, my body crushed to a red ruin...

My chest scraped past a crate’s edge and I hissed and recoiled. My skin was blistered and raw where Kiran’s amulet had rested. No wonder—the damn thing had burned hotter than a live coal, before the cave fell on me. The amulet was cold and dull now, dragging over rock as I crawled. I tied a hasty knot in the chain to raise the amulet above my burn, and tucked it under the collar of my tattered and blackened shirt.

Aside from the burn, I had a host of bruises and a fierce headache, but nothing more. Not like Kiran. With a wound so terrible, was he already dead? Or if he yet lived, was he trapped in wreckage, his life bleeding away?

I struggled onward, ignoring scrapes and punctures from all the gods-damned metal rods and charms mixed with the debris. Most of the charms were strange to me, but I grabbed a few I recognized as useful. If Simon waited out there, I needed every advantage I could get.

Once free, I found myself near the mouth of the cave. Part of the cave ceiling had given way, creating the pile of rocks and splintered wood I’d just escaped from. The rockfall blocked my view of the interior. I edged around it, concern for Kiran warring with my fear of Simon.

But when I peered into the cave, I saw no trace of Simon—only Kiran, sprawled on his back amidst a scorched and darkened scrawl of silver lines. A few unmarred spirals on the cave’s far side still glowed like banked coals, enough to illuminate his slack face and shut eyes.

My gaze darted to his stomach—and I sucked in a sharp breath. The great wound Simon had inflicted was completely gone. Blood still blackened the waist of Kiran’s pants, and more lay in sticky dark pools beneath his torso. His manacles had vanished, though a few melted, misshapen slugs of silver glimmered on the stone where they’d been, and deep bruises shadowed his wrists and ankles. The silver that had marked his forearms had disappeared as well. A faint dark tracery was all that remained of the marks Simon had cut into his flesh.

He was utterly still, and with that corpse-pale skin of his, he looked dead, but who knew what a mage could survive?

Kill a blood mage...might as well snuff out the sun.
I spun in a slow circle, checking again for Simon. No question something had fucked up his spell, but much as I hoped he’d been blasted to vapor, I sure couldn’t afford to make assumptions.

A faint sound of footsteps, from the darkness of the meadow. Fuck! I dodged further into the cave. In all this wreckage, there had to be a hiding spot...there! A narrow crevice lurked beneath a boulder wedged over two half-destroyed crates. I threw myself onto my stomach and wriggled backward into the hole.

From the crevice, I could see most of the cave and part of the opening. The steady, measured footsteps grew louder, and I braced for the sight of an angry Simon. But the man who strode out of the darkness was a stranger.

He was tall, and wore a long coat of heavy leather, much longer than the sort outriders wear. He had golden skin and slanted eyes like a Korassian, but his hair was ruddy brown rather than black. The hair was long, Ninavel highsider-style, tied loosely back at the nape of his neck. He moved like a highsider, too, full of that easy arrogance.

Oh, shit. I knew one guy wandering around the Whitefires who’d match a Ninavel highsider’s description.

The stranger made straight for Kiran, walking over glowing lines as if they weren’t even there. I tensed. If this was Ruslan, Kiran was screwed, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

The stranger knelt and laid a hand on Kiran’s forehead, the way a den minder might check one of her kids for fever. He gave a deep sigh, and tight lines around his mouth relaxed. He took his hand away and pulled a thumb-sized crystal from his coat.

The crystal glowed red, and I bit back a curse. Ruslan or no, he was definitely a mage.

He leaned over Kiran, one hand holding the crystal above the blood mage sigil on Kiran’s chest, and his other hand hovering over Kiran’s forehead. Red light stained Kiran’s skin as if he’d been dipped in blood, and the dark bruising on his outflung wrist disappeared.

Kiran twitched and inhaled. The mage withdrew his hands, the red glow of the crystal fading back to darkness. He hid the crystal away in his coat and pulled Kiran half up onto his lap, Kiran’s head supported against his chest.

“Open your eyes for me, Kiranushka. My brave son, child of my heart,
ardeshka savoi,
wake for me now...” He spoke softly, his deep voice marked by a far stronger version of the faint accent I’d heard in Kiran’s, and stroked Kiran’s hair with a gentle hand. Kiran whimpered and turned further into the circle of the man’s arms like a child seeking comfort. The man tightened his hold, his expression shifting into a deep and bitter tenderness.

Surely I’d been wrong—this couldn’t be Ruslan. But if not, who in Shaikar’s hells was he? Something about him was familiar.

Kiran’s eyes opened. He gasped and thrust himself away in a convulsive, frantic movement.

“Ruslan! Let me go, let me—” The words were panicky and breathless.

I stared.
This
was Ruslan? The way he’d healed Kiran, held him...it didn’t fit at all with my mental image of the master Kiran had tried so hard to escape.

Ruslan released his hold. The tenderness vanished, replaced by a cold amusement uncomfortably reminiscent of Simon.

Kiran scrabbled backward until his back fetched up against the cave wall, his eyes fixed on Ruslan the way a man watches a snake he expects to strike.

“Calm yourself, Kiran. You have nothing to fear from me.” Ruslan spoke soothingly, but an irony underlay his words that made me uneasy.

“You lie.” Kiran’s voice shook.

Ruslan smiled at him. Gooseflesh rose along my arms. The sharp cruelty in that smile outmatched Simon’s.

“How could I not be pleased? Simon Levanian, destroyed...I had long desired his death, but he hid behind the Alathian border wards like a child behind his mother’s skirt.” Ruslan’s rich voice dripped contempt. “So I forgive you your foolish rebellion, since it provided me such a wonderful opportunity.” His smile softened, gaining a faint echo of that disconcerting tenderness. “You played your part bravely and well.”

Kiran’s face showed confusion to match my own. He looked around at the scorched and broken lines on the floor, as if seeing them for the first time. His eyes lifted to the pile of rock and crushed wood. He paled, looking sick, and his lips formed my name.

I didn’t dare give him any sign I’d survived. Whatever Ruslan’s game, I couldn’t play against a blood mage. Simon had proved that beyond a doubt.

Kiran’s gaze shifted to the drying blood on the stone. He twitched, one hand going first to his stomach, then to the sigil on his chest. Shock harrowed his face.

“The backlash—I should be dead. But Lizaveta’s binding, with a pattern so close to what I needed to disrupt Simon’s spell—that was deliberate, wasn’t it? And when I warped her pattern, a deeper spell triggered that diverted the worst of the backlash away from me through the mark-binding link...” Kiran’s voice died away to a whisper. “You...from the beginning, you
planned this?
” He pushed himself to his feet, his eyes wild.

My stomach seized as nagging familiarity resolved into memory. The blood mage I’d seen after leaving Bren’s place, his cold amusement when he’d held my gaze—the same man stood before me now. Awful certainty filled me. When Ruslan had seen me that day, he’d known exactly who I was. Shaikar take him, I’d been a blind token from the start. My only comfort was that I wasn’t the only one. Pello hadn’t known Ruslan’s plan, which presumably meant Lord Sechaveh hadn’t either.

Ruslan’s face was full of arrogant triumph. “It was a difficult task, that heart-binding. Subtle enough to escape detection, yet strong enough to reflect enormous power, and leave you alive...oh, we spent many long nights working on it, Liza and I.” A faint, reminiscent smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Everything else was easy. I merely arranged with the
nathahlen
you contracted with for passage—Bren, I believe his name was?—for word to reach Simon of your intention to go to Alathia, and he did the rest.”

Bren and Gerran, working direct for Ruslan...oh gods, that explained so much. I’d thought them crazy for dealing with a mage like Simon, but Ruslan must not have given Bren a choice.

“But...you tried to stop me! The avalanche, and the storms!” Kiran’s face was gray.

Ruslan shrugged. “I had my part to play, lest Simon grow suspicious. I also wanted to keep you...motivated.” He gave Kiran a gently condescending look. “Do you really think you could have left Ninavel and reached Alathia so easily, had I desired to prevent it?”

Gods all damn it, even after I’d realized Pello hadn’t been the threat he seemed, I’d still thought myself so clever for beating Ruslan to the border. Blind token, ha. Total fucking idiot, more like. I’d had not a glimmer of anyone’s true intent.