Chapter Eight

Chromatic Power

Gwynnifer Croft Sykes

Agolith Desert

Eleven days after Xishlon

Gwynn hurtles out of the portal’s golden depths and lands front-first against the stone floor of a green-torchlit cavern, its crimson walls marked with glowing emerald Varg and blue Noi runes.

Her palms smack down on cold rock, and then Mavrik’s hard body slams against her back as he’s thrown from the portal behind her. The collision of their bodies forces the breath from Gwynn’s throat, Mavrik’s palms slapping down on either side of hers, the edge of his wand hand brushing her own.

Invisible sparks race up Gwynn’s arm from that point of skin-to-skin contact, and they both shudder, her light magic once more unleashed and flowing into Mavrik’s lines in a spangled, prismatic rush.

Her eyes flick toward her wand hand, and she’s shocked to find it alight with pulsing color until Mavrik hauls his body off hers, breaking all contact. Gwynn’s light magery snaps painfully back to its trapped state, her lines straining to relink to his.

Heart skidding, Gwynn pushes herself to her knees, looks at Mavrik, and freezes, transfixed by the wavering lines of glowing color pulsing over his hand, as well. The cavern and Subland soldiers surrounding them fade to a blur, the forbidden Fae color hypnotic. Like sunrays diffracting through a bottle of oil . . .

Breathing hard, Mavrik lifts his wand hand and views the color rippling over it with wide eyes, his brow lined with sweat.

“What just happened to us?”

Gwynn rasps, holding up her own, color-infused wand hand.

He shakes his head, swallowing. “I don’t know. Wynter’s Wand . . . it linked our lines somehow. When we touch.”

He looks at her, awe blazing in his green eyes. “Gwynnifer, your light magic just protected us both from a direct lightning strike.”

Gwynn blinks at him, his words triggering a recollection from one of the Valgard armory’s countless books on magery—it outlined that Level Five Light Mages can’t be killed by light power, including a direct lightning strike.

“I’ve never been able to access even a spark of my power,”

she says, confused.

“But I can,”

he counters, seeming dazed. “When you grabbed hold of me, you flooded my lines with your magic and turned me into a Light Mage. Gwynn, you just saved my life as well as your own.”

Gwynn gapes at him, speechless. She crinkles her eyes to try to clear away the sparks of color flashing through them. “This thrall between us,”

she finally manages, “it’s difficult to think past.”

“I know,”

he admits, giving her an intense look.

The image of the Verdyllion is suddenly flashing in Gwynn’s mind, the desperate need to locate it surging. Forcing herself to focus, Gwynn scans the wan, battered-looking Smaragdalfar soldiers scattered throughout the torchlit cavern and zeroes in on Wynter’s pale winged form. Relief and alarm ignite—relief over the sight of the Verdyllion grasped in Wynter’s hand, and alarm over the way Wynter is slumped on the ground.

“Are you hurt, Wyn’terlyn?”

the slender Elf, Rhys, asks her in Alfsigr, Gwynn parsing the translation from the Alfsigr language dictionary imprinted in her mind.

“I am unhurt, Rhysindor,”

Wynter assures him, her black wings fluttering weakly. “My magic is simply depleted from creating so many runes.”

Rhys and the Amaz warrior Valasca help Wynter to her feet, Valasca’s Urisk companion beside them.

And then, as if drawn by the force of Gwynn’s gaze on her, Wynter’s silver eyes meet Gwynnifer’s.

The second their eyes meet, the Verdyllion’s spiraling length pulses with prismatic light, and a sizzling sting washes over Gwynn’s wand hand, kindling light power through her lines in raying, prismatic flashes. Gwynn gulps as Wynter’s eyes flutter then roll back as she falls sideways. Rhys and Valasca catch her in a flurry of concern. The taller, fierce-eyed Alfsigr archer who resembles Wynter, the lavender Urisk woman, and a knot of Subland soldiers close in around them and, together, they lead Wynter away through one of the cavern’s rune-lit corridors.

Drawing in a ragged breath, Gwynn glances down at her color-pulsing wand hand once more, swept up in the feeling that what’s happening between herself, Mavrik, Wynter, and the Verdyllion is like a maelstrom of light power brewing on the horizon. She turns to the disappearing triad of portals, only traces of their runic arches still wavering in the air.

An upswell of urgency tightens Gwynn’s chest as she meets the belligerent silver gaze of the domineering, female Smaragdalfar soldier with the half-shaved head who seems to be the Subland army’s commander. Lines of dark green metallic hoops pierce the woman’s pointed ears, glowing Varg tattoos blaze on half her emerald-patterned face. The cylindrical hilts of several collapsed Varg swords are sheathed at her sides, and a necklace with pendants depicting the emerald-hued Subland Goddess Oo’na and her white messenger birds hangs around her neck. She’s bracketed by two young Smaragdalfar Elf soldiers also wearing religious Oo’na necklaces, one of the soldiers a broad-shouldered, muscular young man with a furious expression; the other a refined-looking, lean man possessing a blade-sharp calm that feels dangerous.

“The children I came here with,”

Gwynn calls to the woman in a frayed voice, “where in the East were they portaled to?”

The Smaragdalfar woman’s eyes flash with a look of outrage. “Somewhere surrounded by armed Smaragdalfar guards,”

she bites out. “Away from Mages who crop the ears of children.”

Gwynn recoils from the woman’s brutal tone, as if it were Gwynn herself who sliced the tips from the children’s ears.

Disorientation and remorse spinning through her, Gwynn absently grasps her tingling wand hand, hyperaware of the reverberating effect of Mavrik’s touch. “Where are we?”

she implores, turning to him.

“The Sublands under the Agolith Desert,”

he answers as he rises to his feet, voice strained.

Gwynn freezes, his answer like a fist to the gut.

The Agolith Desert. Leagues and leagues and leagues away from home.

Her gut clenches tighter. The home I destroyed.

Bile burns Gwynn’s throat, and she struggles to swallow it back, swept up in the memory of her parents’ home being blown up by runes she, herself, marked.

Light-headed, she staggers to her feet, her attention yanked to her clothing as one of her sleeves falls away. Her gaze jerks toward the lines of charred, puckered fabric running down both sides of her sacred Mage blacks. Remnants of the storm spiders’ electrified Shadow power is still forking over the charred fabric in muted flashes of gray, her garb’s black threads fraying and gradually crumbling to ash as the remnants of Shadow power course outward, consuming the fabric. A sliver of Gwynn’s naked side appears, her body increasingly exposed . . .

Mortification explodes as she grabs at the fraying garb, her gaze snapping toward Mavrik as the side of his tunic’s collar drops, exposing his collarbone. Seeming surprised, Mavrik glances at it, then over his shoulder. Cursing under his breath, he grips his tunic’s front and tugs it forward, a few threads audibly snapping. The black silk tears away from his body, the entire back of his tunic destroyed.

Gwynn’s pulse skyrockets at the forbidden sight of his naked chest, all taut muscle with a trace of dark hair in its center, his deep green nipples exposed.

She meets his eyes in a flash of unsettling heat. Shame surging, she looks away, desperately clutching at the sides of her clothing to keep it from falling open or, even worse, off. A raw panic grips hold . . . being so exposed . . . seeing Mavrik so exposed . . . it makes her feel as if her center is coming unmoored.

Mavrik calls to someone in Smaragdalfarin, and she winces, her gaze now riveted to the stone floor as her heart races, her emotions too turbulent for her to focus on a translation. A melodic female voice answers him as Gwynn struggles to control her panicked breathing, her new reality crashing down with cyclonic force.

It’s over.

An irrevocable line has been crossed, leaving her unanchored and splayed open, body and soul. She’s an enemy of the Magedom now, an enemy to her own family, in unknown terrain. Surrounded by non-Gardnerians—people she was taught, her whole life, to view as Evil Ones, her recent contact with Bloom’ilya and little Ee’vee her first real connection to people outside of her closed Styvian Mage circle.

Is this how Sage felt? Gwynn agonizes, remorse knifing through her as she considers how she left her good friend to fend for herself when the Gardnerian wolves closed in around her in Verpacia. Without aid, without alliance . . .

“Gwynnifer.”

Mavrik’s deep voice jolts her from her tortured thoughts. His tone is forceful, but there’s an underlying note of compassion in it that has Gwynn raising her tear-burning eyes to meet his intent stare.

She blinks, thrown off-kilter again by the sight of him, his chest now blessedly covered, but by a vivid emerald Smaragdalfar tunic.

Gwynn inhales, the sight of a Gardnerian male dressed in forbidden Fae color a shock to her system . . . a shock to her lightlines. A tingle races straight through her lines, the verdant hue of Mavrik’s eyes intensifying the sensation.

“Here, Gwynnifer,”

a heavily accented and melodic female voice chimes in.

Gwynn turns to the willowy Smaragdalfar archer, Mynx, who helped Ee’vee through the portal, surprised to find the striking woman there. Mynx is holding out bright emerald Smaragdalfar garb to Gwynn, her gaze suffused with concern.

“I . . . I can’t . . .”

Gwynn’s face burns as she makes no move to accept the taboo clothing, afraid that if she stops clutching the edges of her long black tunic and underlying skirt, her sacred black garb will completely give way.

Mynx turns and calls out something toward a knot of male soldiers. One strides forward, casting a quick, wary look toward Gwynn before he unfastens his cloak and hands it to her. Mynx flicks her graceful hand at the soldier in a shooing motion, and he steps away. Gwynn catches a quick, unreadable look from Mavrik before Mynx sets the Smaragdalfar clothing down on the red stone floor before Gwynn, then straightens and holds the cloak out to its full expanse, walling Gwynn off from the rest of the cavern.

“Go ahead and change,”

she prods.

Her heart pattering hummingbird-fast, Gwynn releases her hold on the sides of her garb, her mortified flush turning scorching as both her tunic and long skirt give way, along with her undergarments. The cavern’s cool air skims her sides, raising an uncomfortable sweep of gooseflesh.

Hands trembling, Gwynn hastily tugs off the remnants of her destroyed garb and, for the first time in her life, puts on nonblack clothing. She pulls the bright emerald tunic over her head and slides on pants of an equally vivid-green hue, forcing back a remembrance of the lines in The Book of the Ancients that condemn garb like this, and her for wearing it.

The image of the piles of color-edged Gardnerian garb being burned in Valgard assaults her mind as she glances down at the Shadow lightning–singed pile at her feet, feeling as if she’s drowning in the sudden culture shock of wearing pants—something Mage women are forbidden to do—her thighs encircled by fabric, the shape of her legs so brazenly on display.

She tenses, lacking the headspace to rapidly process this transgression, but she also knows she can’t stay hidden behind this cloak forever.

“All right, I’m done,”

she manages.

Mynx lowers the cloak, and her eyes make a swift sweep over Gwynn’s emerald-garbed frame. Gwynn hugs herself tight. Cheeks and neck burning, she meets Mavrik’s eyes across the cavern’s expanse. A flash of what looks like understanding lights in his, bringing the sting of tears to her own. But still, she can’t bring herself to approach him dressed like this, feeling as if her legs are naked before him.

Mavrik looks away and she knows, from the stiffening of his stance, that, unlike the others here, he truly comprehends the suffocating morass of cultural and religious upheaval she’s fallen into.

“Mavrik Glass,”

a sharp, Noi-accented female voice calls out, as several heavily armed Vu Trin soldiers enter the space from a side tunnel.

Noi soldiers, covertly active in the Western Realm Resistance, Gwynn surmises.

The Vu Trin glance briefly at Gwynn before launching into a stream of conversation in Noi with Mavrik.

Gwynn translates bits and pieces—“Summoned by Commander Fi Suur . . .”

and Mavrik’s response “. . . destroyed Mage armory”—before Mavrik is being led toward one of the cavern’s tunnels.

“I’ll be back soon,”

he calls to her, and Gwynn latches ahold of his promise like a lifeline as he disappears with the Vu Trin into the stone corridor’s rune-lit depths.

Shaken, Gwynn looks at Mynx. “Where did they portal the children to?”

she asks, hoping she’ll get an answer this time.

“I told you,”

the commanding soldier with the half-shaved head snaps in heavily accented Common Tongue as she knifes a withering glare at both Gwynn and Mynx, “they’re somewhere safe. Away from Crows and Maggots.”

Mynx stiffens and levels a scalding look at the soldier. “You don’t have to be wretched to her, Yyzz’ra,”

she bites out. “She helped destroy thousands of Mage weapons.”

“We don’t need the Crows’ help!”

Yyzz’ra seethes back before hurling out what sounds like a series of Subland expletives. Yyzz’ra’s outburst is met with a biting reply in Smaragdalfarin from Mynx that’s too fast for Gwynn to translate.

Yyzz’ra narrows her silver gaze on Mynx, her mouth twisting in an unkind smile. “You have sympathy toward the Crows and Maggots because you’re rutting with the Icaral’s brother.”

Spots of color form on Mynx’s cheeks, and she turns away, seeming cast into utter humiliation as Yyzz’ra barks out a mocking laugh and takes her leave down the tunnel with a number of Subland soldiers.

Mynx stiffens her jaw and visibly gathers herself, then meets Gwynn’s gaze. “I’m Mynx’lia’luure,”

she says, her tone shot through with real kindness. “You may call me Mynx, as the others do.”

They stare at each other for a protracted moment as Gwynn desperately tries to quell the slight tremble that’s kicked up all over her body. “Have you . . . shut down the Western portal system?”

Gwynn asks, motioning toward the portals’ blue tracings, only mist remaining.

Mynx’s silver eyes glint like battle-hardened steel. “We did.”

Gwynn catches a quick flash of anguish in her expression. “We got everyone out that we could.”

Gwynn can read the unspoken in Mynx’s splintered tone.

Everyone we could get out before the Mages cut off the escape routes, making life a living hell for those left behind. The Western Realm completely fallen.

A different sort of shame swamps Gwynn, filling her with rancid guilt—she’s broken free of the Magedom physically, but her mind and emotions are still ensnared by it, when she should be casting all of it aside. But she can’t help it. Just the act of wearing bright emerald garb—and pants—feels unmooring to the extreme.

“Come,”

Mynx says to Gwynn, a searching light in her eyes that feels like an undeserved port in a storm. “Let’s get you settled in for the night, and get you some food.”

“Eat, Roachling,”

Yyzz’ra orders in the Western Common Tongue.

Feeling the inward sting of the slur, Gwynn looks warily to where Yyzz’ra sits amidst a circle of Subland soldiers around one of the large cavern’s multiple emerald-flamed bonfires. The bowls in their laps are filled with the strange, wormlike food in Gwynn’s own bowl, the fragrant steam wafting up from it smelling of rich spice and mushroom.

After a trek through several long, circuitous tunnels, they reached this heavily Varg-warded gathering cavern, and Gwynn immediately retreated into a solitary alcove just behind Mynx’lia’luure and her circle of soldiers.

Her emotions a storm, Gwynn glances up at the huge tree roots woven along the cavern ceiling, as they were throughout Valgard’s Sublands, a protective net of Varg runes covering the ceiling’s expanse.

Lowering her gaze, Gwynn focuses on parsing out the Subland Elf conversation, rapidly ascertaining that they’re positioned in an incredibly sheltered spot with the Agolith Desert’s thickest, most violently powerful storm bands surrounding the land above them—storm bands set down by the Zhilon’ile weather Wyverns of the East during the last Realm War.

To wall off the Magedom’s forces.

Awe overtakes her at the thought of the huge, deadly storm bands she’s only read about protecting the land above them.

“You still haven’t taken a bite,”

Yyzz’ra chides, breaking into Gwynn’s thoughts. There’s an unkind glint in Yyzz’ra’s eyes as she narrows them on Gwynn, a mocking smile on her lips as her eyes flick toward the bowl of food cradled in Gwynn’s lap. “Don’t fret, Roachling. It’s not a bowl of worms.”

“Stop, Yyzz’ra,”

Mynx’lia’luure retorts in Smaragdalfarin, her gaze flickering with censure. “She’s not calling you ‘Snake Elf.’ So leave off with the slurs and accusations.”

Yyzz’ra snorts a laugh, her gaze remaining fixed on Gwynn with a damning light. Gwynn tenses, a sting of shame racing over her neck for ever having countenanced slurs like Snake Elf, her past ignorance further cementing her outsider status in this new world she’s found herself in. A world the Verdyllion and the Watchers have led her to.

Yyzz’ra’s penetrating gaze swings to Mynx. “You just love the Crows and Maggots, don’t you? How many cups of tea have you given the Icaral’s brother? A full thirty?”

Anger fair crackles off Mynx as she gives Yyzz’ra a confrontational smile. “And what if I have, Yyzz’ra? What if I want to give Cael all the tea in the world?”

Yyzz’ra lets out a contemptuous snort. “Oh, it’s clear you’ve already given him ‘all the tea in the world.’?”

Mynx snaps something emotional in Smaragdalfarin that’s too fast for Gwynn to translate, then rises, fists balled.

Anger sparks in Yyzz’ra’s eyes. “Don’t you have first watch, soldier?”

Mynx shoots Yyzz’ra a glare before turning to Gwynn. “You did a brave thing, Gwynnifer, when you destroyed that armory and got those children out of Valgard. I, for one, am grateful for it.”

She casts the Subland Elves then Gwynn a worried look, obviously reluctant to leave Gwynn alone with them, before she walks off, her gait tight with tension.

Yyzz’ra launches into furtive conversation with the Elves in Smaragdalfarin, their gazes sliding toward Gwynn with wariness every so often. Gwynn tenses each time, her mind a haze of stress as she averts her gaze, not wanting them to surmise her ability to translate in her eyes.

“We need to take Oo’na’s Eyil’lynorin Shard away from the Icaral as soon as she breaks through the Northern Forest’s warding,”

Yyzz’ra says, her tone covert, Gwynn’s every sense prickling to sharper life over mention of the Subland name for the Verdyllion.

One of the soldiers shakes his head. “The Shard won’t allow anyone to send magic through it but the Icaral.”

Yyzz’ra’s fiery glare knifes into him. “Then we use the Icaral and the Roaches to get to Oo’na’s Great Tree, where our power will be amplified and we’re sure to be able to wield Oo’na’s Shard. Once there, we kill Vogel and his Black Witch and wall everyone out of the Sublands but us, including Wynter Eirllyn, her brothers, and the Roaches.”

“Yyzz’ra,”

the soldier gently refutes, “Wynter Eirllyn just liberated most of the Sublands.”

“Oo’na’s Shard liberated the Sublands,”

Yyzz’ra fires back. “Not the Icaral. The Shard has brought itself right to us, its rightful owners. We can’t trust an Alfsigr Elf with it. Just as we can no longer trust Mynx’lia’luure, who is quite literally in bed with an Alfsigr Elf.”

“You’re too hard on Mynx,”

another soldier puts in as Gwynn’s concern mounts. “She and Cael Eirllyn, they’re just friends.”

Yyzz’ra coughs out a biting laugh. “She let the Maggot into her pants! Ghuy’lon overheard them rutting. And Wynter Eirllyn cannot be trusted—at Verpax University, she was friends with the Black Witch! They even shared lodging. The same Black Witch who waged war on Voloi. Have you noticed that Wynter Eirllyn has stayed silent on the point of killing Elloren Gardner Grey?”

Yyzz’ra slashes the air with her hand. “You cannot trust the Maggots or the Roaches,”

she growls, casting a sidelong glare at Gwynn.

Swallowing against the knot in her throat, Gwynn retreats inward, her mind whirling from all this information. She looks down at the food, her stomach tightening as the steam’s fragrant spices waft up. Everything about it is unfamiliar—some type of blue-glowing mushrooms floating along with the wormlike shapes in the murky broth.

She’s landed in another universe here in the Sublands, she realizes, swallowing back a surge of choking anguish, unable to fight back the image of both the armory and her childhood home exploding with runic fire. Unable to bear the thought of her mother’s face when she takes in what her formerly beloved daughter has wrought. And unable to bear the thought of both her mother and father taking in the Wanted postings that will soon appear with Gwynn’s evilly rendered face on them beside Wanted postings for Mavrik Glass and Wynter Eirllyn.

That night, Gwynnifer lies in a small side cavern on a thin bedroll, a silent sob shuddering through her chest as she clutches her hair. A sudden scud of boots on stone has her swallowing back her raging emotions. Roughly wiping the tears from her eyes, she turns to find Mavrik standing in the rune-lantern-lit tunnel just outside of her cavern’s arching entryway.

“May I come in?”

he asks, and Gwynn nods, unable to speak, her throat too thick with turmoil.

Mavrik enters and sits down near her. She studies him, feeling like a shell of herself, stripped raw. She distantly notes that his hand has returned to its normal Mage-green shimmer. He leans back against the crimson stone, his intense gaze fixed on the small alcove’s opposite wall, his expression unsettled.

“The first few nights are the hardest,”

he states, the green lantern light just outside the shadowy space flickering over him.

Gwynn lifts her hand and stares at her black, looping fastmarks. A fasting that was everything to her. A fastmate who was everything to her. And her family . . .

The knot of grief in her throat tightens as she struggles to swallow the soul-shredding despair.

Her thoughts swing to Bloom’ilya and Ee’vee being held down and brutally mutilated. And the Smaragdalfar children fleeing East, Watchers perched on their shoulders. And suddenly, Gwynn is having trouble catching her breath for an entirely different reason, desperate to do penance for everything she was ignorant of for so long. Flooded by remorse she shuts her eyes so tight that they hurt.

A warm touch finds her cloth-covered wrist and she slides her hand up to grip Mavrik’s. A sparking rush of magic passes between them as her affinity lines open and weave into his, the sensation making them both shiver.

She opens her tear-soaked eyes to meet his intense green gaze, sparks of the same verdant color flashing in her eyes as she’s flooded by a sense of his power. She glances at their outrageously entwined hands, threads of prismatic lightning shivering over both his skin and hers, both of them seeming so frozen in awe over this sensation, this linkage, as they remain silent for a stretched-out moment.

“We need to find out exactly what’s happening to our magic,”

Gwynn finally says in a hoarse whisper. She knows she should let go of him but can’t bring herself to pull away.

“We do,”

he agrees, swallowing. “I’m trying to . . . get a handle on it.”

A breath shudders through Gwynn as she finds herself unable to control the tempest she’s set into motion.

What she’s followed the Watchers and the Verdyllion into.

“Yyzz’ra is planning to take the Wand from Wynter,”

she reveals. “When we get to the Northern Forest.”

His eyes widen. “You speak Smaragdalfarin?”

he asks as they hold on to each other, their power caught up in a magical embrace they both seem loath to break.

“My light magery,”

she explains. “Trapped as it is, it still gives me the power to visually imprint. I have every dictionary I’ve ever flipped through in my head. Every grimoire. Every military text.”

She gives him a searching look. “What did the Vu Trin tell you when you were gone?”

Mavrik hesitates, his jaw ticking. “Vogel’s story is true. Elloren Gardner Grey attacked Voloi, along with an army Vogel had hidden in the Vo Mountain Range. They destroyed the Wyvernguard and leveled Voloi. Thousands are dead. The Black Witch was struck down by the Icaral Yvan Guryev at the same time that some unknown force exploded the Vo Mountain Range housing the bulk of Vogel’s forces before they could emerge and destroy the entire East.”

Gwynn huffs out a hard breath. “And now, the Black Witch is being portaled to the Northern Forest?”

Mavrik nods. “We just got word that Lasair Fae working with the Vu Trin have detected Yvan’s fire power caught up in the lag of a Dryad portal and moving toward the Northern Forest, along with Elloren Gardner Grey’s Shadowfire. Both the Black Witch and the Great Icaral will soon be under Vogel’s control, if he gets hold of them before we do.”

“The entire Prophecy in Vogel’s hands . . .”

Gwynn murmurs, horrified by the ramifications.

Mavrik launches into his history with Yvan Guryev and a description of his work, for years, as a double agent for the Vu Trin. How Vogel sent him to assassinate Yvan, and how Mavrik worked with the Vu Trin to fake the Great Icaral’s death, inflicting substantial enough wounds on Yvan to fool Vogel’s multi-eyed raven spy—wounds that Yvan later healed with his Lasair powers.

Mavrik grows silent, but that fierce edge to his gaze is undimmed. It’s heightened, in fact. “I need your help, Gwynn,”

he says with unvarnished force. “And not just to break through the Northern Forest’s Dryad wards so we can free Yvan and strike down the Black Witch. We’re concerned that Vogel’s Shadow magic will soon be powerful enough for him to take control of every fasted Mage and Zalyn’or-imprinted Alfsigr Elf via their fastlines and Zalyn’or necklaces. He’s already done it on a small scale. Wynter read his intent briefly, while she was imprisoned by a Zalyn’or necklace. Vogel tried to overtake her through the necklace but fled when he sensed her empathic ability to read him.”

Gwynn tenses, needing to force calm in the face of this mounting nightmare, suddenly hyperaware of her own fastmarked hands and wrists as well as Mavrik’s. “How can I help?”

she inquires.

Mavrik gives her a level look. “For years I’ve been working on trying to break down the spells embedded in both the fasting spell and the Zalyn’or necklaces to no avail. You have a library of grimoires in your mind. Perhaps if we work together—”

“The fasting and Zalyn’or spells,”

Gwynn cuts in, “they’re unbreakable. The magic too solid. Too brilliantly fused when set.”

“They have a similar magical base, yes,”

Mavrik admits, holding up his fastmarked hand, “but Gwynnifer, we have to find a way to fight this.”

Even though the odds are insurmountable, he means. Gwynn’s heart thuds against her chest as she thinks, once more, of all the Urisk and Smaragdalfar children. Of the nightmare bearing down on all of them. And, once more, of her and Mavrik’s fastmarked hands and wrists.

“I’ll help you,”

she vows, lips trembling.

Her stubborn rebellion abruptly implodes, cracked apart by the sheer force of trauma and exhaustion, and she finds herself blinking back tears.

Mavrik’s grip on her hand tightens, his magic winding around hers in an enthralling rush, the intensity of its flow mirrored in his eyes. “Gwynn,”

he says, “I know what it is to lose everything.”

Gwynn nods, his presence and the feel of their combined magic the most tenuous of anchors. But then, he gives her a conflicted look, his grip on her loosening, and she can sense him readying himself to leave.

“Please . . . stay?”

she asks as she tightens her grip on him, knowing this request is unspeakably outrageous. Knowing she’s just crossed a million lines, asking this male Mage she’s only just met . . . whose power her magic wants to merge with . . . to stay by her side tonight. But in this moment, the chasm inside her feels too great. Too terrifying to handle. No solid ground anywhere.

“All right,”

he concedes, his voice barely a whisper as he lets go of her hand.

Their magical connection snaps away, and she immediately feels bereft, her retrapped lightlines straining toward him once more. Mavrik lies down beside her and silently offers her his wand hand, palm up.

Tension ignites.

Her pulse quickening, Gwynn slides her fingers through his once more, and multicolored sparks streak through her vision as her magic releases into him and they both stiffen against the rush of energy coursing through their entwining lines. Her emotions laid bare, Gwynn’s lips start to tremble, and hot tears brim in her eyes.

“I won’t leave you,”

Mavrik assures her, his tone holding the force of a vow, their fingers and magic tightly linked. “I won’t leave you, Gwynnifer.”

She nods, weeping silently, as she once again pictures her parents finding their home destroyed. The armory destroyed. Choking back the agony of what she’s done, of what she knows she’d do again, she soon finds herself drifting off to sleep, Mavrick’s intense green gaze the last thing she sees before she’s lost to the dark.

Gwynnifer wakes up in Valgard, sunlight streaming through her bedroom’s circular window. Disoriented, she turns to find her fastmate, Geoffrey, in bed beside her, his drowsy green eyes set on hers with loving affection, a gentle smile tugging at his lips.

No Shadow-gray glow around his irises.

A sob of relief bursts from her chest. It was all a nightmare. All of it. A monstrous dream in which all of Gardneria embraced the Shadow and devolved into a nightmare of cruelty. But none of it was real. And now she’s back in her safe home, her safe life.

Swept up in elation, she slides her arms around Geoffrey and draws him close, kissing the nape of his neck, nuzzling him, before bringing her lips to his.

Geoffrey seems surprised by the kiss for a moment before he begins to return it, lazily at first, as if he’s half-awake . . .

Then intently seeking.

Then hard and deep.

Heat shoots down Gwynn’s spine, sparks igniting on her lips in response to the surprising level of passion running through that kiss, sparks bursting through her every line.

Geoffrey’s never kissed her like this before.

She lets out a moan and surrenders to the kiss, thrills to this new, wantonly insistent Geoffrey, his usual hesitancy gone. An excited shock sizzles over her skin as he rolls his body onto hers and coaxes her thighs apart, his body rapidly firing up, responding to her so quickly when she’s used to Geoffrey’s usual slow workup.

And his effect on her lines . . .

She arches against this new, assertive Geoffrey, wraps her legs around him, his desire pressing against her with startling pressure that sends flares of pleasure raying out from the contact, his arousal so quick, so intensely hard . . .

Abruptly, Geoffrey rolls off her.

“Gwynn,”

a rough voice says, thickened by what sounds like mingled desire and conflict. A lower-pitched voice than Geoffrey’s.

A voice that is not Geoffrey’s.

Alarm shocks through Gwynn’s system, and her eyes bolt open as she’s jerked violently out of the half dream to see Mavrik beside her. A glowing prism of hues pulses all over his lips and the base of his neck, the streaks of color practically incandescent in their intensity. He’s sitting up and has put some distance between them as they stare at each other with mutually stunned expressions.

Mortification explodes through Gwynn as her sleep-fogged mind assembles what just happened.

“We . . .”

Mavrik swallows, his face flushed, lust still swimming in his eyes along with a look of discomfort. “We must have been dreaming.”

Gwynn sits up, her head spinning, her thoughts cast into turmoil.

What just happened? Those things she dreamed . . . did she do them with Mavrik? That kiss . . .

She can’t speak, the shame too tremendous.

She reaches up to massage her swollen lips and sees rainbow light reflecting from her mouth onto her hand.

“I woke fully when you . . . threw your legs around me,”

Mavrik rasps. He bites at his light magic–infused lips. “Gwynn, I thought it was a dream . . .”

“I . . . I thought you were my fastmate,”

Gwynn stutters, her flush heating to a scald, the shame intensifying.

“I’ll sleep somewhere else,”

Mavrik offers hastily, rising to his feet, and Gwynn notices, with heightening embarrassment, the lingering evidence of his arousal.

Because I threw myself at him so unforgivably.

Wildly distressed, she imagines what her family’s priest would say as if he were here. She can imagine those judgmental, condemning eyes. And she’s certain Mavrik must feel the same way about her.

He hesitates, raking a hand through his tousled hair.

Hair I tousled, Gwynn thinks, her flush growing so hot it feels like a sickness.

“I’ll . . . I’ll keep my distance from you,”

Mavrik offers, the multicolored glow on his mouth constricting to forking threads of color. “I’ll never let that happen again. I promise you. I’ve never pushed myself on a woman . . .”

At first, Gwynn is thrust into confusion by his words before she realizes, with stunned comprehension, that he’s not angry at her. He’s angry with himself.

The radical idea calms an edge of her distress.

“Mavrik,”

she ventures, seeming to startle him by her use of his name, “I believe you.”

He shakes his head. “I did not mean to attack you. I’m so sorry, Gwynnifer.”

Heat spreads down her neck as she remembers the thrilling feel of him. His unfamiliar, excitingly aggressive kiss. How she wrapped her body around him, her magic straining toward his, unforgivably wanting more.

“I didn’t mean to attack you either. I’m sorry,”

she apologizes.

“I don’t feel attacked,”

he insists with a look of wild contrition. “Gwynnifer, the moment I realized what was happening—”

“I know. I stopped, too, the second I realized,”

she agrees hastily as he hovers near the cavern’s entrance, color still flashing over his lips. Her own mouth tingles, and she realizes they probably look the same.

“What I just did,”

he says, sounding tortured, “it was dangerous . . . your fastlines . . . we could have . . .”

Gwynn glances down at the dark, looping lines, the claustrophobic feel of a cage descending. More and more these past months, she’s felt this way about her fastlines, but never as strongly as she does now. Now that she knows Vogel might break into their fasting spells . . . control them both through them . . .

It only adds to how disoriented she feels in this moment.

Lost and beyond redemption.

“I’m homeless,”

she manages hoarsely, lips quivering. “In every way.”

The energy between them shifts, Mavrik’s eyes taking on a pained, commiserating look. “You are,”

he says with firm compassion. “But, Gwynn, you’re not alone. You’ll go north with us. In a way that involves absolutely no one throwing themselves at you.”

He gives her a pointed, contrite look before letting out a hard sigh, then lifts his wand hand and considers it. “It seems like Wynter’s Wand of Power . . . it bound us more intensely than we realized. I had a clearer sense of the strength of that binding . . . in your kiss.”

Gwynn swallows and nods, surrendering to their full honesty with each other. “I stole the Wand from the Valgard armory when I was quite young,”

she confides. “I could feel it calling to me. Looking back, I thought I was simply being dramatic, imagining myself part of some great Mage story where I rescued the Wand from demonic forces. It turns out, I was right. I was truly in possession of the Great Wand of Myth. But in the end . . .”

Her throat constricts, caustic remorse rising. “I betrayed my closest friend, Sage Gaffney. A fellow Bearer of the Wand. Because I believed in the Mage faith.”

Mavrik studies her, his expression turning hard and stark. “I enlisted in the military as soon as I came of age and went to war, then watched a group of Fae get cut down. By soldiers I had aided by transporting supplies and weapons to them. Because I believed in the Mage faith. During the same deployment, I witnessed Urisk being herded into wagons so they could be shipped to the Pyrran Islands. I was told they were all criminals. But I could tell they were just families. How can a child be a criminal against the Magedom? And their cries and screams . . .”

His face constricts and he looks away, his jaw hard as stone, his whole body brimming with pent-up tension.

“How old were you?”

Gwynn asks in a near whisper.

“Eighteen,”

Mavrik says, grimacing.

“How old were you when you turned against the Mages?”

she presses.

He swallows and fixes his eyes on her, a lethal light entering his gaze that sends a chill down Gwynn’s spine. “Eighteen.”

They’re quiet for a moment, tension tight in the air.

“How old were you when the Wand first came to you?”

he finally asks.

“Twelve,”

she says before pulling in a deep breath and launching into the story of her time with the Wand. Conveying the whole of it as faithfully as she can. Mavrik listens patiently as she relays the story of her time with Sage, the Light Mage. And how, in the end, she unwittingly and unforgivably betrayed her.

He’s quiet for another long moment as she grows silent, adrift in turmoil.

“You’re equal to this,”

he finally states, emphatic. “You managed to keep the Wand from two of Vogel’s Shadow-bound pyrr-demons. They’re incredibly powerful, Gwynn. But you managed to elude them and send the Wand to safety in Halfix with Sagellyn Za’Nor when you were just a girl of thirteen. You saved a Wand of Power from falling into Vogel’s hands. The same Wand that just freed the bulk of the Western Sublands. The Wand Vogel very much wants to get his hands on. And you helped us take down the Gardnerians’ largest wand armory and military library, even though you knew it would result in the destruction of your family’s home. Even though you knew you’d become a hunted outcast. Believe me, you’re equal to this.”

Gwynn holds his stare as a strangled sob lodges in her throat. “I don’t know what my family will do. What they’ll think of me.”

“They’ll Banish you,”

he states, his expression blade hard.

Protest rears up in Gwynn, quashing her tears. “They would never—”

“They’ll Banish you, Gwynn,”

he insists, an impassioned ferocity entering his eyes. “Harden your heart. Don’t wait to do it. I made that mistake.”

The choking feeling grabbing at her throat intensifies. Gwynn can barely breathe around the thought of her mother and father performing a ceremony marking her dead to them.

“I . . . I’m not sure I can,”

she admits.

“You have to,”

Mavrik counters, his gaze filled with sympathy. “You can.”

She nods, blinking back tears as she holds his kindred stare, this Mage who walked away from Gardneria for an unknown future, as well. She glances at his fastmarked hands and wrists, barely able to get the question out, but she has to know. “Are you truly fasted?”

She knows, from his small wince, that he catches her subtext.

Are you still with her in any true way?

“No,”

he says, his lips twisting with derision. “Not for years. She believes. In everything the Mages are doing. Helps them, even.”

The information strikes deep. And overcomes Gwynn’s storming hesitation.

“Mavrik,”

she says. “Please, stay.”

Mavrik looks probingly at her, then concedes with a tight nod before lying down against the wall, too far away to touch.

They lie there for a while, his eyes locked with hers, intensity crackling through the air between them, magic crackling between them as turmoil churns through Gwynn. The last thing she hears before sleep claims her is Mavrik’s low, drowsy voice, murmuring, “Gwynn . . . I should wandtest you. Our magic . . . it’s been upended by each other.”

“I’ve never had access to my own power,”

she murmurs back.

“But that was before the Wand linked us. I should test you while touching you. And without touching you, as well.”

“All right,”

she says. Lost to the magical tension flashing between them, she dares to voice the forbidden. “I want to hold your hand.”

Mavrik lets out a harsh breath and looks at the ceiling. “It’s best that we don’t,”

he says in a constrained voice before giving her an intense look. Gwynn reluctantly nods, all too aware of the fastmarks all over their hands.

As well as the prismatic color still sparkling over both their lips.

Did you ever love your fastmate? she wonders, her grief for Geoffrey slicing through her. Is your heart broken like mine?

The devastating emotions churn, and Gwynn’s heart fractures against them, so painfully that it’s a blessing when her eyes finally flutter closed and she falls to sleep, the Verdyllion Wand-Stylus strobing in the back of her mind all through the night.