Chapter 1

Taland Tivoux

A slow melody played in the back of my mind, something that wasn’t quite music, I didn’t think. It was more her laughter.

Back when we were in school, and I had her in my bed, and we were under the blankets, and I was tickling her—and she laughed.

She laughed with all of her, every little bit, and now I could have sworn that that melody was playing in my mind. I heard it as clearly as if I’d gone back in time, but I hadn’t. I was fully aware of how much time had passed since those nights, what had happened in between. I was fully aware of the fact that I’d put her into the Iris Roe, had joined her, and we’d both almost died.

She had almost been killed by those bloodthirsty nothings that had been running after her when she had already finished the game.

Even now, in this strange state I was in, not conscious but not fully unconscious either, I felt the rage as I’d felt it then. Those damn fools . Had they no idea that she was the woman I live for?

That laughter continued in the back of my head, like it was the soundtrack to this movie playing in the center of my mind. A movie made of images, of thoughts that didn’t belong to me at all but somehow they were there.

“ What were you thinking, entering the Iris fucking Roe?!”

This voice came from somewhere outside, and that’s why it didn’t matter. That’s why I ignored it with such ease and focused, again, on those images, those thoughts.

In the fear that she’d felt all this time, but especially that night.

That fucking night when she’d followed me out of the party, to the Strongroom.

That fucking night when my life ended because I thought the person that meant everything to me was a liar.

I thought she’d betrayed me.

She hadn’t.

“ Wake up, you piece of shit—wake up!”

I knew that voice, that unimportant voice that wanted to take me away from what mattered. From those images in my mind—of her when she first saw me, the way it looked inside her head. When I first kissed her. When she first slept in my arms.

When she fell in love with me—almost as fast as I fell in love with her.

When she lied and when she cried and when she saved me from certain death.

She saved me.

“ You better open those eyes, boy. I know you’re awake.”

Hands on my face; strong hands squeezing me. My eyes opened a slit to see those of my eldest brother—identical.

He then slapped me twice. “There he is.”

But it didn’t bother me, the look in his eyes, those slaps, his gritted teeth—or even when Seth and Kaid grabbed me from wherever I was lying and pulled me up to my feet. My legs refused to hold me.

Why? Because I’d walked right across the Drainage. I’d walked right across the Whitefire challenge from the heart of the Iris Roe because I wasn’t strong enough to kill those players who’d come after Rosabel. I wasn’t strong enough to kill them all, so I’d had to walk on those pieces of bones to get her out of there because she couldn’t move. She was paralyzed by the colors of the Iris Roe that she drained.

Which made me wonder why.

That wasn’t what had happened to the victors of the game in the past. I’d watched all the footage available online—the players who’d drained those colors in the past four games had been perfectly fine afterward. More than that—they’d been powerful. Glowing with raw energy. Perfectly capable of walking out of the game by themselves.

I hadn’t had the time to try to figure it out, though. I hadn’t had time to think at all as I carried her out of the game through the Drainage because the Council—those rotten beings—hadn’t ended the game when she should have.

I bet they’d wanted to see more. They’d wanted the show to last a bit longer.

And I’d given them the show of their fucking lives.

Now, I was what they called Mud . The Drainage had messed with the energy inside me, the one that fueled the color of my magic.

I’d felt it, but that wasn’t all I’d felt.

So hard to explain to my own self now that I was thinking about it, while the boys sat me on a chair and Radock kept screaming his lungs out at me—words I didn’t much care to understand right now.

Hard to explain how I’d seen Rosabel from before. How I’d been inside her head, had seen it all through her eyes, even the moment when she decided to hit me on the head with that candleholder. I saw it, though the vision was blurry. I felt her as if we were one. As if we were the same person for a short moment, but it was long enough.

Hands on my hair. The pain shot throughout me and the anger followed, twice as powerful.

My eyes were on the face in front of me—Radock with his jaws locked and his skin pale, forehead dotted with beads of sweat.

“What the hell were you thinking, going into the Iris Roe, Taland?” he spit—must have been the fourth time. “Do you have any idea what could have happened if you were caught? Do you want to fucking go back to the Tomb, is that it? Do you ?!”

His loud voice made my ears whistle, but that wasn’t what concerned me. My focus was elsewhere still.

Was it because I gave her the magic she needed for that spell? Was that the reason why I’d seen into her mind like that?

Or was it because of the Drainage? Had it messed with my mind somehow that I saw things that weren’t real? Maybe just wishful thinking, images my mind wanted me to believe to free me from the pain. The unbearable fucking pain of knowing the person I loved the most in life had betrayed me.

But no—it wasn’t it. I knew it in my bones that it wasn’t it.

What I’d seen was real. What I’d felt—all of it was real.

“Do you have a clue what I went through to get you out of there, you good for nothing piece of shit!” This wasn’t a question, and the slap that followed stung, but I still didn’t pay it any attention.

No, because this was more important. Those images. Rosabel in my arms, barely moving. Rosabel in my arms then, happy. Purely happy.

Rosabel in my arms now, begging me to stop. To go back. To not die.

Rosabel in my arms then, whole. Fulfilled.

Was it because those colors of the Rainbow had done something to her?

Or was it because I was Mud now?

A small price to pay because she lived. She was out of that place, out of the playground of the Iris Roe. I vaguely remembered the darkness, then the light. The people, Iridians from outside the gates, rushing to us to help me up those stairs.

I didn’t collapse until we were out, until the magic of the playground was no longer around me. Until I knew for a fact that we were out , and Rosabel was lying on the ground, chest rising and falling, alive.

It didn’t much matter what would happen to me then, but I should have known Radock would get to me. My brother was a very powerful man, and though I hadn’t counted on him to come to my rescue now when I’d betrayed them, ran from them and went into the Iris Roe without them knowing about it, I was glad he had. I was glad I wasn’t in prison.

Very, very glad, because she was out here, and where she was, that’s where I’d be. Always.

“All those strings I had to pull. You know better than to put me in this position, boy,” said Radock, hands on his hips as he walked from one side of the room to the other—a room I’d never been in before. A dark room with a black ceiling and a desk and plenty of chairs.

“Way to go, dipshit,” Kaid muttered from behind, slapping me on the back of my head exactly like he knew I hated.

And I would have made it a problem for him if I wasn’t so tired, so immersed in what I’d seen as I walked through the Drainage with Rosabel.

Those feelings, those images were real. She’d come to that school to spy on me, yes, but she’d never betrayed me. She’d saved me. The whisper she’d heard from the agent’s earpiece— shoot on sight. The way she’d dropped her purse and I hadn’t heard because the agents had had spells about them. The way she’d slammed the door on them when I still hadn’t entered the Strongroom to search for the veler, and when she’d decided she’d rather knock me out cold than to allow those agents to shoot me…

“And why the fuck are you smiling ?!”

Radock’s bloodshot eyes were in front of me, so wide they could pop out of his skull any second.

Well, fuck, I really had been smiling.

But how could I not?

She didn’t betray me, I wanted to say, but this was Radock. These were my brothers, and of course they wouldn’t understand. I’d be a fool to expect them to, so…

“I’m alive—why wouldn’t I smile?” I said instead.

Radock was a bit surprised— that he couldn’t argue with. “You’re a fool, brother. You’re a damn fool.”

If he only knew.

“You walked through the fucking Drainage. We saw you, dickhead. We saw,” said Seth, and he, too, slapped me on the back of my head lightly, because they could all see that I couldn’t move properly yet. I had no energy. I was starving. Not to mention my magic…

“A wanted felon walking straight into the Iris Roe with nothing but a charm in his pocket to shield himself—bravo, Taland. Bravo, you fucking prick.” This from Radock, but he refrained from slapping me again.

Meanwhile I hadn’t stopped smiling yet.

She never betrayed me .

“Are you so stupid as to carry her all the fucking way out of there just so…what, so you can get to kill her? Was that it?” Kaid spit.

“Are you Mud now, too? Are you seriously that stupid—did the Drainage really drain you, or was that just for the game?” Seth came in front of me, too, and then I was sliding to the side of the chair, not able to hold myself upright. My body wasn’t working all that well.

Cursing under his breath, Kaid grabbed my shoulder before I hit the ground.

“Speak,” Radock demanded. “Are you Mud, Taland?”

Yes, I wanted to say. Yes, I am Mud, and that’s perfectly okay.

Can you tell me where we are, where you brought me, so I can figure out exactly how far away she is right now? How far I needed to go to steal her from the rest of the world?

Except my mouth opened to say that word, just those first three letters, but something stirred inside me.

It was instinct, I guessed. The thought of magic made me want to reach for it without even realizing it, and when I did…

It was there.

“Taland, answer me.”

I looked down at my hands over my thighs, covered in blood and grime, skin pale, the silver of my rings barely visible from dirt, my knuckles extra pronounced like I’d lost all my body fat in the Roe. And I couldn’t move my fingers no matter how hard I tried, but my magic was there.

It was under my skin, streaming through my veins with my blood. It was there.

“Taland, for fuck’s sake, are you?—”

“I don’t know.”

My voice was even drier than before.

I looked up at Radock, at his wide, bloodshot eyes, parted lips. At my other brothers who were confused, just as confused as I was.

Radock leaned closer. “How can you not know?” He grabbed my hands, raised them up. “You either have your magic, or you don’t.” He looked at my fingers, flinched. “Do you have Blackfire magic in there? Can you use it?”

Did I?

Could I?

“Give me a feather.”

Noise in my head, white noise. The image of her face was still at the center of my mind, but right now everything else had turned to a blur.

“You can’t even keep your head up,” Seth said.

“Give me your feather, Seth,” said Radock, throwing him a look that made Seth immediately reach for the raven feather he sometimes kept over his ear like an accessory.

Radock put the feather in my hand and closed my fingers around it. “Go ahead.”

They all stepped back.

I looked at my fist, the edges of the feather visible on either side. It was a big one, and it was ready to be used by Blackfire magic—to compress it, channel it, guide it. Magic was under my skin and it was reaching out for the anchor as it normally did, but something about it was… off . Different.

Not the intensity, but the feel of it. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the difference, but it was there.

“Just do a levitating spell—here,” said Kaid, putting a pen in my other hand. Just a pen. “Repeat the spell after me, can you do that?”

I looked up at him—he was no longer pissed off or smiling—they were all just curious now. Curious and impatient.

“ Tenta oris levio ten, ” he whispered the Iridian words of the spell to remind me of them—which wasn’t the issue at all. I remembered the spell just fine.

I whispered the words slowly, trying to tighten my fingers around that feather as much as I could. I had little to no energy inside me. I was…almost completely spent.

Yet the magic was there.

It slithered under my skin, answered my call, rushing for the feather as it should, but again—it was different. The speed of it was the same as always. The intensity, too, except the imprint, the trail of energy it left behind as it traveled down my shoulder— that was different. Like two of the same cars leaving tire tracks behind them that were only slightly different from one another. Only slightly.

Then came the pain.

It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t supposed to be there, that pain. It wasn’t supposed to feel like it was tearing itself off me before it released from my skin. I didn’t react, though—I was too surprised still. Too weak.

The pen rose in the air.

My brothers sighed in relief, but my eyes were stuck on the black flames coming out of my skin, paler than usual. More… brown than they were black.

Then they were gone, and only a little bit of the pain remained while the pen hovered in the air by magic. My magic.

My Blackfire magic that was still there.

Fuck, I wasn’t Mud at all. The Drainage in the game hadn’t been real—which made no sense. It had felt so real, all of it. My bonding with that eagle—how could that be fake? His absence had left a hole in my chest that I felt even now. So fucking powerful.

That dragon, all those deaths of elves and orcs were not fake. Every ounce of energy those bones in the Drainage had stripped me of had felt so real. My magic had shifted, had lost power before I started to see inside Rosabel’s mind, all those memories.

I’d felt myself get drained, and now this magic felt different, too—or maybe I was just too exhausted, too spent? Because that pen was still hovering over my palm.

“Fuck, you could have so easily been Mud,” Radock said, eyes closed, thumb and index fingers over them, his other hand around his hip. He looked terrified and relieved and sad at the same time.

Kaid and Seth, too.

“So, it wasn’t real,” Seth finally said.

The pen slowly touched my hand again, the last of my energy spent.

“Where…where is she?” I asked, and when I did, the fact that she wasn’t there with me made me panic. My heart skipped beats and my thoughts became blurrier still, my eyelids heavier.

“They took her,” Radock said, shaking his head, as if he wrestled disappointment now, too.

They took her. She was alive.

“Is she…is…”

Is she still Mud? I wanted to say, but my jaws were locked and my tongue suddenly refused to move and I found my eyes were already closed. I tried to use that panic as energy, as fuel to stay awake, to focus on Radock’s voice as he spoke, to try to understand him.

I couldn’t.

The dark consumed everything.