he’d felt the sting of a cantrip.
“I see . . . it is not just my charm and good looks you were after,” he replied with the faintest hint of a sigh. “Very well.” He bent down, and touched the first ring of cantrips. The snap of blue power struck his finger.
The Young Pretender leapt back. “By the Blood!” He stared at Sorcha, and she—only just managing to conceal her smile—gestured to the next line of cantrips carved into the root of the citadel.
With a slow shake of his head, he obediently touched the next one. It went on for another hour, as they circled the foundations, testing the lines of cantrips.
“I think you are starting to enjoy this,” Raed grumbled in a slightly overly hurt tone.
“Starting?” Sorcha shot back, but applied a kiss to the end of his fingertips. “I promise I will make it up to you somehow . . .”
He stared down at her, those hazel eyes locked with hers, and the shiver that ran up her spine was not at all related to the chill in the foundations. Raed must have felt it too, because he smiled slightly before turning back to his task. “How many more to do?”
Sorcha flicked her eyes up. “I think we should go upstairs. I don’t know how the cantrips were breached; perhaps there is something Derodak can do that we don’t know about, something not written in any book.” That idea had been haunting her thoughts since the attack.
“Perhaps you’re right, I can think of—” Raed stopped suddenly, and squeezing past Sorcha in the tight confines of the tunnel walked to where it finished abruptly. The glimmer of the cantrips danced over his skin as he reached out to touch one that gleamed pale green. Nothing happened.
Sorcha hurried to his side, as Raed repeatedly touched the line. Still nothing.
They shared a look, and she dropped into a crouch to examine the cantrips more closely. “It looks like some kind of fissure opened up here,” she muttered, running her fingers over the surface of the rock, and feeling a sliver of a gap. “The cantrips here were added fairly recently to seal it, but . . .”
She stopped, suddenly, as her touch found a dip in the rock.
Raed swiftly joined her, leaning down on all fours to see what she had found. He brushed away a layer of gravel and rock that had been piled up along the edge between wall and floor. “Looks like a chisel has been used to knock the last few cantrips out and the damage was covered by loose earth. I would say rather recently.”
Sorcha sank back on her heels as the realization washed over her. “Someone in the citadel is a traitor . . .”
With everything else they had to deal with, now they had to watch their backs. She’d thought everyone she’d saved and led through endless portals to this place had shared her determination to preserve something from the shards of the Order.
It was possible here to let her feelings out. Sorcha leaned against Raed. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. “We have to find Derodak and the rest of our Brothers. We don’t have the time to ferret out a traitor. Besides, if they can hide from our Sensitives, then how do we even . . .”
“This is a distraction,” Raed replied, giving her a squeeze. “Derodak wants to harry you to a standstill. You mustn’t let him.”
They both stared down at the disturbed earth, which signified yet another problem. Sorcha relaxed into his embrace for a moment, letting the calming sound of his heartbeat become hers.
Then with a jerk, she got to her feet. “You’re right. Onward is the only direction we have.”
As they turned and walked back the way they had come, she slipped her hand into his. “Just don’t tell anyone, Raed. We can’t afford to start doubting each other now.”
“I know,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t keep an eye out.” He touched her shoulder lightly, almost a stroke. “Don’t forget I have more than one set of eyes.”
It was a strange world indeed where an allusion to the Rossin served as comfort—yet oddly enough it did make Sorcha feel better.
ELEVEN
A Traitor’s Smell
As a Prince of the Empire, the heir apparent, Raed had been taught from an early age to take care of the people of Arkaym. The fact that his own father, the Unsung Pretender, chose to lock himself away on a distant island and behave as if they didn’t exist did not factor into it. His beloved tutors and instructors had luckily been far more insightful than the man that had given him life.
Later on he’d been given his first command and then his first ship. Raed had immediately chosen to use them as a microcosm of the Empire itself and had lavished care and worry on both of them. However, in the last year their numbers had dwindled—some had even been killed right before his eyes.
Despite all of that, some echo from his childhood and his education still filled him with a feeling of responsibility for those around him. It was what made the devastation that was the Rossin so much harder to bear. Many times the Young Pretender had wished that he didn’t care; that way he’d be insulated from the worst that the geistlord could do. However, as he got older he finally understood he was what he was. He’d learned to live with the curse and learned to run.
When Sorcha went back up the Great Hall to be about Order business, Raed found himself returning to the room he’d spent half his time in this last week. It might have seemed a strange place for a person of Imperial blood to work, but in this citadel of Deacons it was the only aid Raed could offer. He was certainly not going to sit idly by and become known only as Sorcha’s lover.
The makeshift infirmary that the Brothers had created in the basement of the citadel was in fact one of the more pleasant spaces in the cursed building. Despite the fact that it was on the lowest level, it actually opened out onto a small inward-facing courtyard, which a sliver of sunlight punctuated for at least a few hours a day. Some very optimistic lay Brother had planted herbs in a container there, and the scent of lavender and mint filled Raed’s nostrils as he neared the infirmary. It made him think of his mother’s herb garden before he could stop himself. Scent triggered the memory of her down on her knees, in among the plants; nothing at all like the well-bred lady she was. In the garden she’d been the happiest, and thus it was the place he’d been too.
The Young Pretender walked swiftly past the flowering plants and into the infirmary itself. Compared to the scant Actives and Sensitives that Sorcha had been able to find, the number of lay Brothers now in the citadel was well over double what it had been when they left Vermillion.
The people had positively flocked to her, wherever they went. Though most of them had not the talent to become a Deacon, they had quickly offered to take on the cloak of a lay Brother.
Certainly, looking around the infirmary he could have almost imagined that they were in a regular Priory. Brothers in the gray of their profession bustled about, taking care of the sick and injured; though there were far more of the former than of the latter. Something about losing their runes and deprivations of the trail made Actives and Sensitives more prone to illness, and many were coughing up their lungs in the infirmary.
It was yet another worry that Raed knew had kept Sorcha from a good night’s sleep for months. The Young Pretender took up an apron that hung neatly on a row of pegs by the door and put it on without a thought to how it looked. Yesterday he had been learning how to make poultices from Brother Timeon, but he had no idea what was in store today.
“Raed Syndar Rossin,” Madame Vashill said, appearing out of a back room, also wearing an apron, “are you back so soon?”
One of the preeminent tinkers of her time the old lady might be, but she was also rather deaf. Raed leaned in close to her. “Can’t keep me away. I’d get bored if I stayed upstairs all the time.”
She nodded and then thrust a mortar and pestle into his hands. “Brother Timeon said you’d be back, but I didn’t believe him.”
The young lay Brother appeared as if summoned by the mere mention of his name. His flyaway blond hair looked as though he had been running his hands through it for hours. He probably had. “Oh, Sir . . . Your Maj—” Then he closed his mouth with a snap.
The Deacons had struggled at first to find a proper form of address for him, as their connection with the current Emperor meant they had an aversion to using his family name, title or anything else that might suggest he
