Page 210 of The Incendiary

“Were you across the Brinnean Sea?”

His body went rigid.

“What’s over there?” I approached carefully. He was so unnaturally still that I feared he would lash out. “Does it have something to do with the deal you and Molochai made?”

Simeon didn’t move.

“I need you to tell me, Simeon.” I stretched my arm to gently touch his shoulder. “Why do only our bloodlines—ours and Molochai’s—have power? What did you do?”

He jerked away from me and searched until he found a pen and a half-used piece of paper then began to write, his hand shaking. When he finished, the pen slipped and clattered to the floor as if yanked from his grasp by an insistent and invisible entity.

“Simeon?” I gasped. “What’s going on?” But he was already fleeing the room. For the first time, instead of hatred and remorse and distrust toward my uncle, I felt fear. Not of him, but for him.

His script was barely legible, letters jagged and overlapping in unnatural ways. It took me a moment to decipher it, but I wanted to vomit once I did.

I fear she can hear everything I say.

And below it…

We never should have made that deal.

“Simeon!” I shouted, bursting after him into the hallway. “Molochai said there was a bargain. What…” I glanced in both directions, but he was already gone. I stood, alone in the hallway, wracking my brain for anything that could explain his behavior.

Like Simeon, Molochai had said many things that didn’t quite make sense. I cycled through everything I could remember, both months ago in Brinnea and during our encounter the other night.

One thing, in particular, came rushing back.

There’s a larger war to be won than the war between two old friends.

Greater than Simeon. And Molochai?

She is searching for you.

The paper dropped from my hands.

I ran to my bookshelf and threw open The Book of the Selvaren, nearly ripping pages as I flipped to the back and counted the blank ones as if I hadn’t opened this book a hundred times.

Twelve gods. Thirteen blank pages.

Thirteen.

Wracked by shudders, I stumbled back two steps before regaining balance. I lifted my hands to my throat at the memory of cold, inhuman hands. Echoes of a voice, ethereal and feminine but terrible and deadly, reminded me…

I can teach you more than he can!

Dread needled into my skin. Gavin was right. Simeon was hiding something. I’d spent the last few months asking why he was refusing to tell me things. I’d never considered that maybe, for some reason, he physically couldn’t.

But who had the power to steal words from the mouth of a sorcerer?

SIXTY-TWO

ARYELLA

The night before the wedding, I could barely sleep.

Gemma, Marin, and Mina arrived bright and early, with my silk-and-satin long-tailed dress, sheer veil, and everything else they needed to make me the perfect bride for my betrothed and my people.

“Is this what you want?” Marin asked me as she fastened one of about thirty pins in my hair, done up in curls too intricate for my liking. Fitting for a royal bride, though. “This feels… quick.”