Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

Zarya knew that her presence would cause a stir, so she wasn’t remotely surprised when Arkon locked her in a cell under the doge’s palace. What had surprised her was Arkon himself.

She had expected a fat, balding aristocrat in wizard robes, the way the Varangian propaganda machine had always depicted him as.

Arkon was like his magic—razor sharp, with lingering hints of birch and smoke. He was tall, lean, and with a gaze that could cut right through you.

She had to reassess everything she had been told about him. Considering how closeted her life had become after agreeing to work for Arkadi, that wasn’t much. She knew the touch of his power though, and that told her so much more than any spy’s report could.

Zarya had been running for weeks and should have been taking the opportunity to rest. Instead, she was filled with an erratic nervous energy that had her pacing the cell over and over. It was separate from the other prisoners, and it was clean. A special suite as cells went.

Zarya was bored, and she wanted to talk to the sorcerer. After being adversaries for almost a decade, it was a strange kind of relief to meet him face to face. He had the definite look of someone who was up to no good. The kind of person whose smile said they would get you into more trouble than you had ever been in, and it would be the time of your life.

Zarya didn’t want to make her own life more difficult, but she’d had enough of being shut away. She shook off her cuffs, and with a few quick flicks of her magic, she opened the cell door.

Two guards were playing cards as she walked past them. Their gazes bounced off her like she was nothing but a sparkle of dust in the air.

The palace was enormous, and the servants who were still awake cleaning up from the ball didn’t lift their heads long enough to notice her take a bottle of wine off a table. She continued to walk the halls, sipping from the bottle and admiring the artwork.

She roamed until she felt the tickle of Arkon’s magic. The wards in the hallways lit up with the first brush of her magic.

"Not bad, sorcerer. Not bad," she murmured. Arkon clearly didn’t like visitors, and a lesser mage would have had quite the time trying to unpick the magic he’d used.

There was nothing ’lesser’ about Zarya. She curled a finger over a glowing thread of power and sent her magic wrapping around it.

She wasn’t going to undo all his hard work, and she didn’t want him to be disturbed either. She just wanted to be allowed in.

Satisfied she wasn’t going to set off any alarms, Zarya stepped through the warding and headed for the tall double doors. She didn’t bother knocking.

Zarya’s magic flickered in excitement when she stepped into the cluttered sorcerer’s den. Books lay on every surface with half-built pieces of artifice and piles of notes and journals. Arkon himself was lying on a red velvet couch with his feet propped up on a cluttered coffee table. He clapped slowly.

"Ninety-seven minutes and forty-two seconds. Much longer than I thought, Wolf Mage," he said, pressing a button on his pocket watch.

"I was trying to be polite," Zarya said and had another swig from her bottle. His razor eyes went even sharper.

"You do know the cell you were in was supposed to null magic."

Zarya tilted her head. "Was it? Didn’t notice."

Arkon gestured for the bottle, and she passed it over. He had a mouthful. "What do you want, Zarya? Really?"

She took the time to think about it. "A bath and food. Lots of food."

Arkon pointed to a door on the other side of the room. "Bathroom is through there. There are clean towels in the cupboard."

"Thank you. I’ll have my wine back," she said, and he handed it over. She glanced up at the wall covered in posters of her in various saintly states. They had been used as target practice and were full of scorch marks, daggers, and crossbow bolts.

"Just ignore that," Arkon said, red spreading up his neck.

Zarya chuckled and pushed a dagger handle lightly, making it rock back and forth.

"Don’t worry, sorcerer. You’ve been on my mind too," she said, leaving him staring after her. She had always enjoyed keeping him on his toes, and now that she had the pleasure of doing it in person.

After the chaos of the other room covered in books and papers, the bathroom was shockingly clean. Even the toothbrush and paste were lined up neatly on the corner. It had all the hallmarks of someone who had been forced to share a bathroom with a too big family and now had their own. Zarya knew the signs because her bathroom back in the palace in Kyiv had looked exactly the same.

Seventh child after all, she thought and huffed out a laugh.

Zarya ran herself the hottest bath she could handle and climbed inside of it with a hiss. She had been cold and dirty for weeks. The closest to clean she had gotten was a few rain showers and the occasional cold dip into a river.

She touched the two woven leather bracelets on her wrist and the tiny rune pendants hanging from them. She realized what she was doing and quickly let go.

She needed to focus on how to convince Arkon to help her. He was the most powerful sorcerer alive, next to her, and she would need every drop of his strength to go through with the plan that was brewing in her cluttered brain. She fumbled with the wine bottle with wet fingers and had another drink. Putting down the wine again, she slipped under the hot water.

Arkon would help her. She knew it from the spark in his eyes. It was an insatiable curiosity.

Zarya knew all about the power of that kind of curiosity. It was what had led her hundreds of kilometers across the Varangian empire to his door. Curiosity, and the burning need for revenge.

Alliances, she mused, had been built on less firm foundations.