The house vaporized, taking with it every material possession that had ever mattered to me. Drawings, journals, art, books, weapons—all the treasured objects our family had collected over this brief, happy lifetime together.
Gone.
Just like him.
Even the clothes on my back burned away, leaving me naked in the center of an inferno of unearthly power.
With my mother’s disappearance, there had been grief, but also hope, however distant and unrealistic, that she might return. But there was no returning from this.
No hope left at all.
I screamed until my throat was raw. I clawed at my chest, desperate to tear my own heart out to stop this unbearable pain. My power flared brighter, and I burned, and I burned, and I burned.
My body felt weightless in the worst kind of way, like being shoved off a cliff. I was plunging to my doom, caught in the agonizing anticipation of that final, painful end.
Shouting penetrated the haze of my grief. A woman’s voice, then a man’s, then inhuman snarls.
A moment later, two hands wrapped around me. An immediate feeling of safety told me instantly who it was.
He knelt beside me and gathered me into his arms. His clothes had burned to ash, though somehow, his skin was unscathed. I was too broken to question it. I laid my palm against the scar on his chest, then buried my face in his neck and wept as my magic consumed us both. With every tear that spilled from my cheek to his skin, he gripped me tighter, held me closer, laying tender kisses on my temple and hair.
He didn’t say a word, and I was grateful for it. I could not have born any false assurances, however well-intentioned, that everything would be fine.
Things would never be fine. Not ever again.
For hours, I sat in Luther’s arms, burning and sobbing, screaming as the excruciating pain of loss devoured me whole. I had the vague sensation of a well inside me slowly draining. My sorrow flooded out with my magic, leaving me hollow and certain I would never again feel whole.
Eventually, the sky turned dark, and my power faded to embers. Luther rocked me in silence, curled up at the center of a smoking crater. The heat faded from my skin, and the chilly night air set my body shivering. He rose, still cradling me in his arms.
“If you’re not ready to see Teller, I can take you to the lodge,” he offered softly, his voice coarse with emotion.
I shook my head as fresh tears pushed through my closed eyelids. “I have to tell him.”
He nodded and pressed a long kiss to the top of my head. I felt him climb onto Sorae’s back, then the breeze of the wind as she took flight.
I stared at the ground as we flew away. My beloved home was gone forever, replaced by a circle of black, a scar on the earth to mark the unhealable wound on my soul.
I had been crafted here. I was born a lump of molten metal, shaped by my mother, honed to a point by my father, engraved on the hilt by my brother. I had so foolishly believed the trials of the last few months had been the final firing that would harden me into a righteous sword of justice.
But that had only been the beginning. That had been the pounding of the blacksmith’s hammer, the grinding against the wheel until my edges were sharp and my aim was true.
This night—this was the fire that had forged me. And someday soon, when the burning glow of my grief cooled away, I would show my father’s killer, and all of Emarion, just how deeply my blade could cut.
Chapter
Thirty-One
Four days passed.
Teller and I holed up in my rooms, cycling between numbness and a grief so acute it felt lethal. Telling him our father had died was awful. Telling him how, and why, was infinitely worse.
Mortal lover.
Half-breed.
Rebel scum.
This was because of me and the Crown on my head. Because I had not lied, or kept silent, or played the game well enough to avoid making enemies.
Someone else murdered our father—but I had killed him.
Teller’s heart was forgiving by nature, and if he did blame me, I doubted he’d ever admit it. He held me as I cried myself to sleep, and he allowed me to do the same for him.
But I knew.
I still hadn’t told him what I’d learned about our mother, and every night, I laid awake agonizing over that decision. The prospect of seeing her again was a hope he badly needed, but if something happened before she could return… I could not bear to make Teller grieve her loss a second time. Especially not now.
Though time had stopped ticking for the two of us, the rest of the world moved cruelly on. The missed schoolwork Lily brought home for Teller began to pile up, and although the House Receptions had paused while I mourned, if I delayed them any longer, I would be forced to extend the Period of Challenging another thirty days.
I would have welcomed that, but one evening, Teller broke down in tears and confessed that he was suffocating with anxiety over the Challenging, and he could not truly breathe again until it was over. There was no sacrifice I would not make to spare my brother further pain.
So today we would both claw our way out of our dark pits and face this broken new world.
“Are you sure?” I asked as Teller rifled through a pile of clothing Eleanor had gathered for him. “I’ll talk to the school if you need more time.”
“I can’t miss any more class. Losing my notes put me too far behind as it is.”
Fresh guilt tore through me. His school notes, filed into the drawers of his desk at home, had been reduced to cinders. Yet another thing I’d taken from him.
“I can walk with you to school, if you want,” I offered. “Just like old times.”
“I’m walking with Lily,” he said brusquely before disappearing into his new bedroom to change.
With our home destroyed and nowhere else to go, Teller had been forced to move into the palace. There were several smaller bedrooms in my royal suite—a relic of the harems of past Crowns—and I had insisted he take one so he could remain under the watch of Sorae and my now significantly increased contingent of guards.
I suspected he’d rather stay in the family wing with the others his age, but until our father’s murderer was caught, I could hardly stand to let him out of my sight.
“I can make the Corbois cousins give you their notes,” I called out, “or I can have the school delay your exams, or arrange for tutoring, or—”
“Diem.” Teller reemerged from his room with a stern expression. “Enough.”
Something had changed in him these past few days. He looked so much older now, the boyish lightness gone from his features, as if our father’s death had shoved him firmly into manhood.
And that voice… the Commander’s voice.
The strong set of his jaw, the deep command in his tone—suddenly it was not my brother standing in front of me, but my father.
My shoulders shook as a sob broke free and rattled the pile of shards where my heart once sat.
Teller tugged me into his arms. “We’ll get through this,” he whispered, his own voice beginning to crack.
I nodded and pulled back to see fresh tears brimming in his eyes, still swollen from days of weeping. “You reminded me so much of him just now.”
“Because I raised my voice?”
“Because you were begging me to stop annoying you,” I said, and we shared a quiet laugh between our sniffles.
“Comparing me to him is the best compliment you could ever give me,” he said gently. “Even if it is for losing my patience.”