He took the bracelet from my still-open palm and gently fastened it around my right wrist—the same hand that bore my mother’s old ring. I flipped my palm over when he was done, looking at the two of them together.
“Perfect match,” Raihn said. “You’ve completed the set.”
They did look nice together. But more than that, it felt good to have one more connection to the past that had been taken from me.
“Thank—”
A sudden shock jolted through me. I gasped, lurching upright, pressing my hand to my chest.
My hand—My chest—
“What?” Raihn was already half-standing, one hand on my arm, ready to call for Alya. “What is it?”
I didn’t even know how to answer that question. I felt… strange. The last time I’d felt this way, it was when I’d looked down to see the Heir Mark tattooed over my chest. My breath came in rapid gasps. My hand, my throat—“burning” wasn’t quite the right word, but they— I forced my hand away from my throat, splaying it out flat, doing my best to hold it steady through the tremors.
Raihn and I stared down at it.
“Well, fuck,” he whispered.
Fuck, indeed.
Inked over the back of my hand, in a triangle formed between the ring and the bracelet, was a map.
62
ORAYA
All this time, I had been trying so desperately to decode my father’s past, my father’s secrets, to find the power I needed to reclaim my kingdom.
How fitting that in the end, it was my mother who gave me the answer.
Raihn and I hastily set up the mirror, dripping my blood into it and summoning an extremely relieved Jesmine. Vale, Mische, and Ketura joined her, and we called Alya into the room too, showing her the map on my skin.
Once the initial shock wore off, Alya seemed equal parts proud and sad when she pieced together what she was looking at. It was a spell, she explained, forged into the metalwork of the jewelry, only to be activated once all three were worn together by its intended bearer.
“My sister’s magic,” she said softly. “I’d recognize it anywhere.”
She touched the bracelet—an affectionate caress.
“Too smart for her own good, that one,” she muttered. “Always was.”
“Wouldn’t Vincent have known if the ring was enchanted?” I asked. “He was a powerful magic user, too.”
“Of Nyaxia’s magic, yes. But he wouldn’t have had enough experience with Acaeja’s to know what to look for.”
A lump rose in my throat, my thumb sweeping over the little black ring. The one token he’d allowed me to have from my former life. Little did he know.
The map on the back of my hand depicted the House of Night, or at least a small part of it—Vartana in the bottom left corner, Sivrinaj in the upper right, and a little star marked at the top center, right over my knuckle. No town or city existed there. It was right in the middle of the desert, nothing but ruins.
Ruins that still managed to be uncomfortably, dangerously close to Sivrinaj.
“Do you have any idea what this could be?” I asked Alya.
I knew what I hoped it could be. I didn’t want to dream. It seemed like too much to possibly wish for.
Alya tilted her head, thoughtful.
“In the end, she was scared,” she said. “Scared of whatever she was helping him do. I remember that. She never would tell me the details, but I know my sister. I think—I think she was growing afraid of what that kind of power could do in the hands of someone so distrustful, especially if he was the only one who had access to it. Perhaps, she may have given you a path to that power too, just in case, knowing that your blood may allow you to wield it.” A barely-there smile—a little sad, a little proud. “I can’t say for sure. But I can imagine that.”
I let out a shuddering exhale of relief, and with it, a flood of affection for the mother I barely remembered.
She saved us. Goddess, she saved us.
“That’s if Septimus hasn’t already gotten to whatever this is,” Jesmine pointed out. “Whatever power he’d given Simon wasn’t of this world. I’m certain of that.”
But Alya shook her head firmly. “Based on what they described, what you saw wasn’t any creation of my sister’s. It sounds like cobbled-together magic. An activator hacked apart to force it to work with something it wasn’t intended to.”
“An activator,” Raihn repeated. “The pendant.”
Mische looked proud of herself—because this had always been her suspicion.
“From what you’ve described, it sounds like it,” Alya said. “I’d assume that Vincent would have created multiple activators with Alana’s help. And any of them, used with the right magic, could be twisted and modified to work with a power similar enough to their intended target. But it would be ugly, and it would be dangerous. Probably deadly to whoever used it, eventually.”
I remembered Simon’s glazed-over, bloodshot eyes and shuddered.
Yes, that was certainly ugly. He’d looked like he was already mostly dead.
“So Septimus only got a piece of what he wanted,” Raihn said, “in the form of the pendant. It worked enough, for now. But it means it’s unlikely he has what he really came here for.”
“Meaning that the god blood, if it exists,” I added, “is probably still out there.”
I curled my fingers and gazed down at my hand, shifting it beneath the firelight. The strokes of red shivered slightly, like moonlight through rippling leaves.
“This all sounds,” Vale said, “like a lot of conjecture.”
“It is,” Raihn replied. “But it’s also all we have.”
“I accept that sometimes we need to act based on what we don’t know,” Vale said. “But what I do know is that Simon and his armies will be coming for us at any moment, and if they meet us now, they will win. I know that they’re searching for you both, and this map takes you right by Sivrinaj. I know that if you go there, they’ll know, and they will come after you with far more power than you two could possibly fight off alone. So if we choose to make this our gamble, then it will need to be a big one.”
A wry smile tugged at the corner of Raihn’s mouth. “How big, exactly?”
Vale was silent. I could practically see him questioning all the life decisions that led him to this moment.
“We all converge there,” he said at last. “Whatever men we have left, ready to meet them one more time. We hold them off while Oraya... does whatever she needs to do. And we pray to the Mother that whatever she finds there is powerful enough to buy us a victory.”
I felt a little nauseous.
Raihn threw back his head and laughed.
“Oh,” he said. “Is that all?”
“I told you it was a big gamble,” Vale said, annoyed.
“What else can we do?” Mische asked, grabbing the mirror and tipping it toward her. “If Raihn and Oraya go by themselves, they get killed. If we wait for Simon to come for us, we get killed. If we attack Sivrinaj again, we get killed.” She threw her hands up. “It sounds like this is the only option that gives us a tiny little chance of maybe not getting killed.”
“Other than surrender,” Jesmine pointed out, which earned a face of disgust from every single person in the conversation.
“If we surrender,” I said, “they kill us all, anyway. And that’s not how I want to go.”
At least this way, I’ll die doing something.