Katya met her gaze with large, sad eyes. “It’s so sad. She was in love with a boy at Magehold when she was young, but Grandmother took him away from her. Kept him locked up, so that Auntie would do as she wished. I heard Grandmother think about him often, but I didn’t know who he was, until today. Aunt Elsha thought that he was gone forever, and that is why she wouldn’t stop. She thought there was nothing left for her in the world.”
She glanced at her aunt’s body, then said, “I could never hear her thoughts before. She kept everything so quiet and hidden so deep inside of her, I don’t know if she even knew it was there. But something broke inside of her, today. The broken thing exploded within her, slicing through her until she was only rage and ruin.” Katya drew in a deep breath. “She said that in her thoughts. ‘I am rage. I am ruin.’ She kept saying it, over and over, like she was trying to convince herself of it. But the thing that she wanted loudest … she just wanted to be loved again.”
Devery coughed wetly, and Gemma looked up at him with a rush of panic. If she hadn’t known any better, she’d have thought the man standing with his arm around the little girl was Devery’s father. He had aged three decades and was getting older before their eyes.
“Hey, beautiful,” Devery said, as he reached up to brush a tear from her face. He groaned as if that much movement had pained him. “It’s not your fault. Elsha chose her path. We all choose our path.” The weight of everything that had ever passed between them—the precious and the painful—was encapsulated in his expression.
She met his gaze, and a sob slipped from between her lips. “You’re getting so old.” A sad, fearful chuckle escaped her.
“What?” he said, grinning lasciviously. “You don’t find older men attractive?”
She wrapped her arms around his fragile frame and breathed in the smell of him, afraid to let him go.
He leaned into her and said, “I chose my path, too. Don’t cry for me.” She could smell his skin and feel his breath against her neck, and though he didn’t look the same, she would know this man anywhere.
“Gemma,” Katya interrupted, tugging on Gemma’s shirt sleeve. “Papa … I think I can fix it. But I need some help.”
The little girl was so full of hope, even now. She still thought that stories came with happy endings. Gemma didn’t think that there was such a thing, as she heard another sob force its way out from between Elam’s lips. His chance for a happy ending lay dead on the floor, and hers was aging before her eyes. She watched as Elam went to join Wince in mourning what would never be and her heart broke into more pieces than she could count. She cried into Devery’s shoulder as he trembled against her, soaking his shirt with tears he’d asked her not to shed.
“Will everyone please listen to me!”
Gemma jerked away from Devery as Katya’s voice, amplified by a tiny silver mark that shimmered before her mouth, echoed throughout the throne room. All eyes turned toward the little girl whose hands were on her hips. Her eyes flashed with exasperation in a way that reminded Gemma so much of Devery that her heart ached with love for the child.
“I know you’re all sad,” she said, staring straight ahead as she continued. “I’m sad, too.” Her voice trembled, just a little, as she continued. “Though my grandmother and aunt were wrong in the way they did things, they weren’t wrong in why.” Her voice dropped a little as she said, “And I loved them, in their own way. They deserved that much.” Her gaze shifted to the mage women who had been captive for so long. The mage women that Gemma had completely forgotten about.
Katya looked at Devery and said, “I think they might be able to help you, Papa, but we have to help them, first. They’re screaming, inside. They’ve been screaming for a long time. Since the day I arrived in Yigris, I’ve been listening to their screams.”
The blunt horror of that statement hit Gemma like a punch to the throat.
Katya stepped forward and held her hand out. The silvery mage mark disappeared and her voice returned to normal. “May I have your knife, please, Gemma?”
Gemma handed the knife over to the girl, who seemed to have aged a decade before Gemma’s eyes. The day’s events would have changed her, left their mark on her in the unpredictable way that tragedy does. Gemma could only hope that Katy had seen the difference between letting love raise you up or allowing it to tear you apart. All she could do was serve as a guidepost. The rest was up to Katya.
“Great-grandmother.”
Gemma watched as Katya knelt beside one of the mage women. Gemma thought it was the one she had seen with Tollan in the Black Chamber, the day they’d first met. That day felt like a lifetime ago, and maybe it was. The woman she had been had died that day and she would have to learn what kind of woman she had become.
“My name is Katya Nightsbane. I am the daughter of Devery, son of Brinna. I’m going to free you, now. Please remember that I mean you no harm.”
Katya stretched out the mage woman’s arm and pointed to a lump near the crook of her elbow. “I need to cut that lump out and remove the gold that’s in there. This might hurt a little, Grandmother, but soon it will all be over.”
Gemma glanced at Devery, who shook his head in response. Katya sliced through pale, parchment-thin skin, and squeezed out the small lump of gold. It flashed with dozens, if not hundreds, of mage marks. Then they faded and died, leaving only a chunk of pure Yigrisian gold sitting in the palm of her hand. She spat on it and threw it as far away from her as she could.
Then Katya began to draw a mark upon her great-grandmother’s skin, and the cut began to heal on its own. Gemma watched as the woman before her began to transform. Katya looked up and met serious indigo eyes that had been nearly colorless a moment before. The mage woman’s pale, wrinkled skin grew pink, and her white hair turned a honeyed brown as they all watched in open-mouthed amazement. Thin lips lifted upward into a smile as the mage woman’s eyes met Katya’s.
“Oh, you are very special, indeed. Aren’t you, grandchild?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GUILDHOUSE
Gemma stood in front of Guildhouse and watched as the last of the supplies were loaded into the wagon. She was sure her city would sleep more soundly knowing that the foreign mage women were finally free of their borders and it felt something like a happy ending—the mage women finally going home.
Devery rounded the corner of the porch and grinned slyly up at her. He took the stairs two at a time, and even if he wasn’t as agile as he had once been, at least he was no longer stooped and rapidly aging. Hannai had refused to replace the mage marks he had once borne, but she and her surviving daughters had guided Katya as she used her magery to make him seem like a man in his twenties once more. He would age at a normal rate and live a long life. He and Gemma would have many years together.
As if he were reading her thoughts, he took her hand and ran his fingertips over the mage mark on her forearm. It was a part of her now, unless Katya undid the mage work. Gemma would remain faster, stronger and with more cunning and stamina than anyone else she knew. She would grow old at a snail’s pace.
“I still can’t believe she marked you with my name. It’s so … I don’t know. It feels … wrong.”
Gemma shook her head. “It wasn’t wrong to Katy. You told her to help me, and the person she trusted most to do that was you. She wove all of your most endearing qualities into one mark.”
Even Hannai could not explain exactly what Katya had done when she’d marked Gemma. The older mage speculated that Katya had never learned the boundaries of her imagination. “If the child believes it can be done, then she can make a mark that makes it true. She believed in her father, and so it was with him that she marked you.”
Devery worried that it resembled some sort of mark of ownership, but Gemma didn’t see it that way. If anything, she saw the opposite. Katya had given her a piece of Devery to keep inside of her always. That, too, somehow felt right.