“What?” I ask sharply.
With a sigh, Cal gets up and crosses the room. The opposite wall is all cabinetry, and mostly empty. He doesn’t have many possessions beyond his clothes and a few bits of tactical gear. To my surprise, he paces. It sets my teeth on edge.
“The Guard blocked every attempt I made to get you back,” he says, hands moving rapidly as he speaks. “No messages, no support for infiltration. No spies of any kind. I wasn’t going to sit in that freezing base and wait for someone to tell me what to do. So I made contact with someone I trust.”
Realization punches me in the gut. “Evangeline?”
“My colors, no,” he gasps. “But Nanabel, my grandmother—my father’s mother—”
Anabel Lerolan. The old queen. “You call her . . . Nanabel?”
He flushes silver and my heart skips a beat. “Force of habit,” he grumbles. “Anyway, she never came to court while Elara was there, but I thought she might once she died. She knew what Elara was, and she knows me. She would have seen through the queen’s lie. She would have understood Maven’s role in our father’s death.”
Communicating with the enemy. There’s no way Farley knew about this, or the Colonel. Nortan prince or not, either of them would have shot him if they did.
“I was desperate. And in hindsight, it was really, really stupid,” he adds. “But it worked. She promised to get you free when the opportunity presented itself. The wedding was that opportunity. She must have given support to Volo Samos to ensure your escape, and it was worth it. You’re here now because of her.”
I speak slowly. I must understand. “So you let her know the raid on Archeon was coming?”
He moves back to me with blinding speed, kneeling to take both my hands. His fingers are blazing hot, but I force myself not to pull away. “Yes. She’s more open to channeling with Montfort than I realized.”
“She communicated with them?”
He blinks. “She still does.”
For a second, I wish I had colors to curse with. “How? How is this possible?”
“I assume you don’t want an explanation of how radios and broadcasters work.” He smiles. I don’t laugh at the joke. “Montfort is obviously open to working with Silvers, in whatever capacity, to reach their goals. This is an”—he searches for the right words—“even partnership. They want the same thing.”
I almost scoff in disbelief. Royal Silvers working with Montfort . . . and the Guard? It sounds positively ludicrous. “And what do they want?”
“Maven off the throne.”
A chill goes through me despite the summer heat and the closeness of Cal’s body. Tears I can’t control spring to my eyes.
“But they still want a throne.”
“No—”
“A Silver king for Montfort to control, but a Silver king all the same. Reds in the dirt, as always.”
“I promise you, that’s not what this is.”
“Long live Tiberias the Seventh,” I whisper. He flinches. “When the houses rebelled, Maven interrogated them. And every one of them died saying those words.”
His face falls in sadness. “I never asked for that,” he murmurs. “Never wanted that.”
The young man kneeling in front of me was born to a crown. Want had nothing to do with his upbringing. Want was stamped out of him at a young age, replaced with duty, with what his wretched father told him a king should be.
“Then what do you want?” When Kilorn asked me that same question, it gave me focus, purpose, a clear path in darkness. “What do you want, Cal?”
He answers quickly, eyes blazing. “You.” His fingers tighten on mine, hot but steady in temperature. He’s holding himself back as much as he can. “I am in love with you, and I want you more than anything else in the world.”
Love is not a word we use. We feel it, we mean it, but we don’t say it. It feels so final, a declaration from which there is no easy return. I’m a thief. I know my exits. And I was a prisoner. I hate locked doors. But his eyes are so close, so eager. And it’s what I feel. Even though the words terrify me, they are the truth. Didn’t I say I would start telling the truth?
“I love you,” I whisper, leaning forward to brace my forehead against his. Eyelashes that are not my own flutter close to my skin. “Promise me. Promise you won’t leave. Promise you won’t go back. Promise you won’t undo everything my brother died for.”
His low sigh washes across my face.
“I promise.”
“Remember when we told each other no distractions?”
“Yes.” He runs a blazing finger over my earrings, touching each one in turn.
“Distract me.”
TWENTY-SIX
Mare
My training continues twofold, leaving me exhausted. It’s for the best. Exhaustion makes it easy to sleep and hard to worry. Every time doubt tugs at my brain, over Cal or Piedmont or whatever comes next, I’m too tired to entertain the thoughts. I run and weight train with Cal in the mornings, taking advantage of the lasting effects of Silent Stone. After their heaviness, nothing physical seems difficult. He also slips in a bit of theory between laps, even though I assure him Ella has it covered. He just shrugs and keeps on. I don’t mention that her training is more brutal, designed to kill. Cal was raised to fight, but with a skin healer in the wings. His version of sparring is very different from hers, which focuses on total annihilation. Cal is more oriented on defense. His unwillingness to kill Silvers unless absolutely necessary is thrown into harsh relief by my hours with the electricons.
Ella is a brawler. Her storms gather with blinding speed, spinning black clouds out of clear skies to fuel a merciless fusillade of lightning. I remember her in Archeon, wielding a gun with one hand and lightning in the other. Only Iris Cygnet’s quick thinking kept her from turning Maven to a pile of smoking ash. I don’t think my lightning will ever be as destructive as hers, not without years of training, but her tutelage is invaluable. From her I learn that storm lightning is more powerful than any other kind, hotter than the surface of the sun, with the strength to split even diamondglass. Just one bolt like hers drains me so fully I can barely stand, but she does it for fun and target practice. Once she made me run through a minefield of her storm lightning to test my footwork.
Web lightning, as Rafe calls it, is more familiar. He uses bolts and sparks thrown from his hands and feet, usually in splaying webs of green, to protect his body. While he can call storms too, he prefers more accurate methods, and he fights with precision. His lightning can take form. He’s best at the shield, a weaving crackle of electric energy that can stop a bullet, and a whip to cut through rock and bone. The latter is striking to behold: a fraying arc of electricity that moves like deadly rope, able to burn through anything in its path. I feel the force of it every time we spar. It doesn’t hurt me as much as it would anyone else, but any lightning I can’t wrench control of strikes deep. Usually I end the day with my hair on end, and when Cal kisses me, he always gets a shock or two.
The quiet Tyton doesn’t spar with any of us, or with anyone, for that matter. He has given no name to his specialty, but Ella calls it pulse lightning. His control of electricity is astounding. The pure white sparks are small but concentrated, containing the strength of a storm bolt. Like a live-wire bullet.
“I’d show you brain lightning,” he mutters to me one day, “but I doubt anyone would volunteer to help the demonstration.”
We pass the sparring circles together, beginning the long walk across the base to Storm Hill. Now that I’ve been with them awhile, Tyton actually speaks more than a few words to me. Still, it’s a surprise to hear his slow, methodic voice.
“What’s brain lightning?” I ask, intrigued.