Carra groaned, still sounding thoroughly furious with herself, as Thomil wrapped her in a hug. “Why did we have to watch?”
“Well, you didn’t have to,” Thomil laughed, his own voice so cracked with emotion that he scarcely recognized it. “Ridiculous girl.”
A few of his tears fell into Carra’s hair, and she blinked sodden eyelashes up at him. “You’re crying, too. A lot.”
“Yeah.” Thomil pressed a palm to one of his eyes, oddly unable to stem the flow of tears. “I am.”
Carra sniffed. “Did you love her?”
Thomil had to be honest in memory of Sciona if nothing else. “I did. But you know, we’re Kwen.” He shrugged. “Our fate is to love, and lose, and lose, and lose…” He drew a deep breath in the vain hope that it would quell the grief. “But we keep going. This is nothing new for us, Carra. We keep going.”
Even as he said the words, they felt weak. Because Sciona had been something new. She had brought summer to a part of Thomil that should have frozen to death on the lake with his tribe. And now she was gone too.
In the end, it was Carra who said, “She probably wouldn’t have wanted us to stay up here waiting to get caught with all her spellwork.”
“You’re right.” Maybe this was as bright as hope could burn in a city like Tiran before turning to blood on the ground, but having hit the activation key, Thomil had to keep hope burning as long as he could—for Carra and for Sciona’s memory. “Help me pack this up, and let’s get out of here.”
It wouldn’t be easy to slip through the city while Kwen were being detained for just showing their faces on the streets, but staying put would ultimately be a death sentence. When the dust had settled, someone would think to ask who Highmage Freynan’s accomplices had been. Someone who still lived would remember that her assistant had been a Kwen who kept his head down but had still been a touch conspicuous when he ran errands around the university campus in his brown and white coat. Someone would go into the university’s list of employees and find his address, then interrogate everyone who had ever known him.
Thomil and Carra had both understood the consequences that would come for them—consequences they probably couldn’t outrun—but they were the last and most stubborn of the Caldonnae, so they would try to outrun it anyway.
“So, what are we doing with all this?” Carra said, cramming the bundles of notes and diagrams into Sciona’s travel case alongside the spellograph.
“We’re dropping it in the West River,” where the weight of the spellograph would sink it to the bottom.
“What if we don’t make it as far as the West—”
“We’ll make it,” Thomil said, “but there is a backup plan.” He pulled a red-capped cylinder from his pocket and jammed it into the case between the stacks of paper.
Thomil had just seized the lid of the travel case to pull it closed when a familiar shape caught his attention—white robes fluttering with the quick strides of a mage in a hurry. Two white-clad figures were approaching from the far side of the rooftop.
“Speria,” Thomil breathed.
It was an old Caldonnish hunting command, meaning simply vanish. And Carra did—but not before gripping the spellograph in both hands and whisking it away with her. As she slipped into the shadow of the water tower and presumably down the stairs behind it, Thomil turned to face the advancing mages.
Renthorn came into focus first, then Jerrin Mordra, trailing a few steps behind him. Neither of them seemed to have noticed Carra slipping away. In fact, they barely seemed to register Thomil, their green eyes fixed on the light still blazing around the Magistry.
“The little witch really did it!” Renthorn marveled. “Right under our noses!”
“God!” Jerrin Mordra’s expression could not have contrasted more starkly with Renthorn’s elation. “Oh, God have mercy!”
“God favors the merciless, Tenth. He always has.”
The light from the blazing Magistry illuminated a disturbing sight: Renthorn’s expression, stripped of all pretense of civility. Pure glee.
“You know what this means, little Mordra?”
The younger mage was too choked with horror to form words. He could only gape in horror, pale as spellpaper.
“You and I are the last highmages left in the world,” Renthorn said. “We are the High Magistry. And I…” His lips peeled back in a quivering grin. “I am Archmage Supreme!”
“What is wrong with you?” Mordra’s voice broke. “You knew this was going to happen?”
“Well, I’d guessed, based on the sort of spells Freynan was developing and the books she took from the library. I didn’t think she’d actually pull it off with only a stupid Kwen to help her.”
“You knew!” Mordra’s horror turned to rage. “Renthorn, our fathers are in there! Our friends—”
“Were,” Renthorn corrected. “Our friends and fathers were in there. All the real competition, anyone who might have kept us down.”
And it was suddenly clear to Thomil why Jerrin Mordra had been the one spared Renthorn’s betrayal. The younger mage wasn’t competition for Renthorn the way Sciona, Tanrel, and Halaros had been. He was a follower, a disciple to bring into this new regime Renthorn had planned on the back of Sciona’s sacrifice.
“Mitigate me now, Father!” Renthorn hissed at the fading light and screams. “Contain me now!”
So, the next leader of Tiran rode to power on work that wasn’t his, Thomil thought ruefully. Here, truly, was a mage after his forefathers.
“Now”—Renthorn’s green eyes turned to the open travel case, then to Thomil—“Tommy, dear, where’s the spellograph?”
Carra had been smart not to burden herself with the entire case full of papers. The spellograph contained the spellweb that had siphoned the High Magistry into the barrier—the information Renthorn really wanted—which was why Thomil had to keep him here, talking, for as long as he could. Each moment Renthorn was distracted was a moment Carra had to dispose of the spellograph and get herself somewhere safe.
“Sorry, Highmage,” Thomil said in his blankest servant’s voice. “What spellograph?”
“Come now, Blighter. You’re not smart enough to lie to me.”
Thomil briefly considered attacking Renthorn, but both highmages had their staffs in hand, and Sciona had explained in detail what those multi-purpose conduits could do. Thomil could physically overwhelm one mage before the staffs came into play, but the second would almost certainly strike him dead. And once Thomil was gone, the next logical step would be to leave the roof in search of the spellograph, putting Carra in danger.
“I keep tabs on all magical equipment registered to my department,” Renthorn said, “and I tracked an unauthorized spell activation to this location. Freynan physically couldn’t have been the one to activate the spell, and there would have been no way for her to time it beforehand from her cell or Bringham’s custody.” Narrowed green eyes took in the case of notepapers and the radio still crackling softly alongside it—all the pieces an accomplice needed to complete Sciona’s final act of defiance except the spellograph. “You hit the final key, didn’t you? Where is it?”