“I had that under control,” Kerrigan told him.
Fordham sheathed his sword with a flourish. “I know you did.”
“But it was deeply satisfying, watching you point that sword at him.”
“He does not deserve to keep all of his parts intact,” Fordham said. “If he had argued at all, I would have happily relieved him of the ones he found valuable.”
“That would have been pleasant, considering what he was planning to do with them.”
“Indeed,” Fordham said, his face darkening. “The senators here are …”
“Vile?”
“They make the House of Shadows look like a dream kingdom.”
“That I’ve noticed. And I thought our world was terrible.”
He stepped toward her, drawing her against him. She went willingly. She hadn’t even noticed that she was trembling until she was cocooned in his powerful arms. His body pressed against hers, and she felt as safe as she had been in ages.
“Our world is terrible,” he breathed against her hair. “Terrible in its own way and certainly more terrible for you.”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Here, I’m a novelty.”
Fordham stiffened momentarily at the word. “Indeed. As am I. I never comprehended exactly how awful your existence was back home. I understood in the way that I could, but not understanding it for myself.”
“How could you? You had been raised to believe that humans and half-Fae were less than Fae. It took even getting to know me to see how you’d been lied to.”
“Yes, but until I came here and learned of the fall of the Fae, until I was just a commodity, until Iris …” He said her name as if it were poison. “I did not truly know the depths of your pain. And maybe it’s still a different sort of pain.”
She touched his cheek and brought his face down to hers. “It’s different but the same. We don’t have to endure the same pain to see it for what it is.”
“True. I say all of this as a declaration.” He stroked her wild red hair out of her face. “I was already with you to the end, but know that I continue on that path with renewed fervor. This torment must end for everyone if we are to live in a world fit for anyone.”
Tears sprang to her eyes at those words. It was exactly what she had always been fighting for. Not that Fae should be lesser. Only that humans and half-Fae should be raised up to an equitable place. All would prosper together. Rather than one at the expense of all others.
“I love you.”
He pressed a kiss to her brow. “And I love you, my mate.”
She shuddered at those words. “Can you still call me that when the bond is broken?”
“You will always be that to me. Bond or not.”
“But isn’t the bond important? Isn’t that what makes it real?”
Fordham drew her face up to his. He kissed one cheek and then the other. His lips drawing down her jawline and then softly to her lips. “I have lived a lifetime with that bond in my heart. I will live another without it so long as I have you.”
She pushed to her tiptoes, kissing him hard. “Good.”
“Did you think I would abandon you?”
“I woke up here, and you were gone.” She searched his face. “Only to find you’d been here months while I’d spent a few weeks at most here. It made no sense. Without the bond, I didn’t know what to think.”
“You share no bond with Tieran. Did you doubt him once you two joined together?”
“Constantly,” she said with a laugh, remembering the early days with her dragon. “But we learned to live together without it.”
“Then, you and I shall learn the same. I would have no one else but you.” Their fingers threaded together. “And you? Will you have me?”
“Forever and always.”
He pressed a kiss to her hand. Then, she threw her arms around him and kissed him properly, until they were both breathless from it.
A throat cleared noisily behind them. “Really? Kissing in the middle of all of this?”
Kerrigan broke away from Fordham to find Cleora standing behind them. “Sometimes kissing is necessary.”
Cleora snorted. “Well, now is not that time.”
Kerrigan laughed. “Fordham, allow me to introduce you to my spirit teacher, Cleora.”
“It’s a pleasure,” he said, bowing at the waist.
“Yes. Yes. Thank you. Let’s get somewhere more private before we continue this conversation. I don’t know how much time I have.”
“You never have time,” Kerrigan muttered under her breath.
“Then, don’t waste it.”
Cleora set the pace through the gardens and back into an area of the house that was blissfully empty. She navigated the corridors as if she had grown up here. Kerrigan had no idea where exactly Cleora had grown up. In fact, she knew little about the woman. She hadn’t even known that the university Cleora taught at was in Domara. Somehow that had never come up.
“You know your way around well,” Kerrigan noted.
“My presence is requested in Carithian often.”
“I didn’t know you lived in Domara.”
“When I realized you weren’t on the same plane as me, there was no reason for me to tell you anything about my world that wasn’t pertinent to our studies. We rarely had enough time to even cover what we needed to discuss.”
“No, we really didn’t.” She glanced at Fordham. “But you helped me find him again.”
“Only for us to be torn apart,” Fordham said.
“Are you going to tell me what happened to make you both end up here?” Cleora asked.
Kerrigan quickly explained the circumstances of their departure through a portal and how they had both ended up as tournament competitors. Cleora looked skeptical, but someone who spent as much time in the spirit realm as she did had to have a better understanding of how fragile the spaces between dimensions were.
“Can you make these portals yourself?” Cleora finally asked once they reached an empty room and closed the door. “Could you do it now?”
Kerrigan shook her head. “Not only do I not have any magic, but I also couldn’t have done it before. The portal we fell through had been in Alandria for thousands of years.”
“But you turned it on?”
“Well, yes.”
“Hmm,” Cleora said contemplatively. “Without magic?”
“I didn’t do anything. I stepped up to it, and it started working.”
“Plus, you stopped Tarcus,” Fordham reminded her.
“Yeah, but that wasn’t … I didn’t use magic.”
Cleora tilted her head. “What happened with the senator?”
Kerrigan explained how he’d used his magic on her in the gardens. Cleora sucked on her teeth in distaste, but her eyes widened when Kerrigan said she’d broken from the spell.
“Have you done anything else like this?”
She hesitated. “I mean … yes. The woman who first captured me said that I had magic resistance. I woke up from whatever her powers were hours earlier than she’d expected. And someone else tried to use magic on me.” She didn’t want to break Danae’s trust and tell them about her truthtelling, but it was more evidence. “She wasn’t in control of her magic at the time, but was trying to get me to reveal my past. I was able to stop her.”
Cleora’s eyebrows rose even higher. “A truthteller?” she intuited easily. “Truly? Who is it? Do they work for a Doma?”
Kerrigan bit her inside cheek and shook her head. “I can’t tell.”
“She forbid you?”
“No. She’s a friend.”
“A truthteller,” Cleora mused. “And you broke out of her spell?”
Kerrigan nodded. “With the truthtelling and with Tarcus’s commands, it felt like there was something pushing against my mind, and I found its weakness and broke out of it. I just thought it was magic resistance.”
“Hmm, indeed,” Cleora said. “You are a mystery.”
Fordham considered them both. “I hadn’t thought that the portal turning on was magic use. Would you say it was?”
Cleora met his eyes and nodded. “Absolutely.”
“And all the rest that she said?”
“Yes.”
Kerrigan blinked. “But … they took my magic.”
“Perhaps they did. Perhaps they didn’t.”
For the first time since the horrible day when Bastian had forced a circle of thirteen to draw her magic out of her body, she felt hope. Magic was such an intrinsic part of who she was and always had been. Even a sliver of hope was worth all the torment she’d gone through.
She reached blindly for a chair and sank into it. “You think I still have my magic.” Her eyes searched out Fordham’s. “Could we still have the bond?”
“What bond? A crux bond?”
“A mating bond,” she whispered.
Cleora glanced between them uncertainly. “I see. I don’t know much about Fae. There aren’t enough of them around anymore, and the libraries were mostly burned. So, I can’t speak on a mating bond. But if the magic is still there, the bond could be there too.”
“How … how do I find out if I still have magic?”
“You haven’t been able to consciously use it since the circle of thirteen?”
“No.”
“Not even reaching the spirit plane?”
“No.”
Cleora sighed. “I don’t know how much I could do here. We’d need to go to Rhithymna. I have the tools at the Emperor’s Academy to do the testing there, but not here.”
Kerrigan deflated. “And to get them back?”
“I’ll do my best,” Cleora said with a sad sigh. “This is unprecedented territory. It might take some time.”
Time. The one thing they were short on.
“Right. I guess we should focus on winning the tournament first.”
“What exactly are you going to do about that?” Cleora asked. “There’s only one victor. And I know Vulsan. He’s been my patron for a long time. Once he makes a proclamation, nothing short of He Who Reigns himself can stop him.”
Kerrigan shrugged. “We’ll figure it out. There’s still time.”
Cleora looked doubtful. Kerrigan hardly blamed her. They needed to figure out what to do about the tournament that didn’t involve one or the other dead, but she didn’t see any easy options. Vulsan was a problem. She’d made a spectacle of him with her fight. He wasn’t going to let her get away with it. He’d stack the deck to win. And what would she do to win? Kill her mate? She couldn’t do that. It would destroy her. She pictured herself on the arena floor, Vulsan pointing his thumb down and forcing her to drive a sword through Fordham’s exposed chest. She shuddered at the thought.
“That’s only partially what I wanted to talk to you about,” Kerrigan said, pushing the thought out of her mind. She’d never do it. Never. “There’s more.”
“More?” Cleora asked. “What more could there be?”
“My father sent me here for a reason. Not just to get help, like I said.”
“What reason could that be?”
“He’d been here before.” She glanced down. “Eighteen, almost nineteen years ago.”
Cleora blinked once slowly. “That’s your age.”
“Yes. My mother is here, and he said she could help.”
“How could she help?”
Kerrigan swallowed hard. “I’m not sure yet. I have a hunch based on what I’ve seen here in Domara, but I haven’t trusted anyone with the information to confirm it. Have you heard of Keres Andromadix?”
Cleora went pale. “Keres Andromadix is your mother?”
She nodded. “That’s what my father said.”
It was Cleora’s turn to sink into a chair opposite her. Her gaze swept Kerrigan, as if trying to make out her features for the very first time. “You’re her daughter.”
“I think so. Why? Why do you look like that?”
“Kerrigan,” she said slowly, “do you not know who Keres is?”
Panic set in. Was her mother a terrible person? Had she slaughtered thousands? Was that why her father had tried to keep her hidden? Was it not Vulsan who was the true monster, but her mother?
“Do I want to know?”
“Keres Andromadix is the daughter of the emperor,” Cleora said. “The first child of He Who Reigns. And the only one without an heir.”
Kerrigan heard the words. She felt them click into place. All the things she had known, but hadn’t really slotted together. The question she’d had about whether or not she was Doma and dismissing it. Her refusal to ask questions about Keres when she had discovered who He Who Reigns even was. It all came to a head here.
She was the daughter of Keres Andromadix. Her mother was the daughter of the emperor. Which made Kerrigan not only the granddaughter and only heir, but also … a Doma.
“I’m a Doma?”
Cleora blew out a harsh breath. “It would explain a lot.”
“What exactly does it explain?”
“Your spirit abilities for one. Few have that sort of access. Let alone a half-human, half-Fae girl from another world.”
“We had another spirit user a thousand years ago,” Kerrigan argued. “She had my same abilities.”
“And she might very well have been a demi-Doma as well.”
“Oh,” she whispered. That seemed reasonable somehow. It explained why there weren’t more. “So, I’m half-Doma, half-Fae.”
“We don’t really use those terms. You’d be a Fae-touched demi-Doma, but considering your parentage”—Cleora’s eyes widened—“I doubt your powers would be that diminished from a full-blooded Doma.”
The insinuation hung in the room. Heavy with meaning and weighted with uncertainty. Not to mention eighteen years of hardship over her mother’s abandonment.
“But if I have these powers—had,” she corrected, “then why did … why did she get rid of me?”
“That I can only guess at. Keres and Vulsan have been trying to conceive a child to be the heir to He Who Reigns for … decades.” She sighed. “Some might consider you that heir, and Vulsan would never allow that.”
“He tried to kill me,” she said softly. “My father said that Vulsan came looking for me in Alandria. If he finds out who I am, he’ll definitely kill me now.”
Cleora nodded. “With certainty.”
“So … what do I do? Is Keres here? Could you get me in to see her?”
All the possibilities suddenly opened up before Kerrigan. Maybe she didn’t need this fight. Maybe she didn’t need a gift from the gods to get home and help her people. It had only been her plan B after all else fell apart anyway. Her mother was supposed to be the one to help her. Kivrin must have known that Keres was a Doma, that she was the Doma. He must have known that she could end this war with a sweep of her hand if she wanted to. Now that Kerrigan was this close, she couldn’t back down.
But Cleora was shaking her head. “I have no idea where Keres is. She doesn’t normally come to the gladiator tournaments. She always said battle was one thing, but for sport was another matter.”
Kerrigan had said much the same. She felt the difference in the arena compared to the battlefield. But still, disappointment crept in …
“How do I find her then?”
Fordham’s hand came down on her shoulder. He’d been silent through this interaction, untroubled by her parentage and the potential consequences of her being a Doma. “We have to win.”
She glanced up at him. “Plan B then?”
He squeezed her shoulder. “It was always a long shot. We make our own way.”
“Always,” she whispered.
Cleora glanced between them with another heavy sigh. “I’ll do research on your magic and Keres. I’ll see if there’s something I can dig up. Try to stay alive in the meantime.”
“Thank you,” Kerrigan said, reaching forward and clutching her hand.
“You’re the best student I’ve ever had. I have to help. And really … anything to go against Vulsan.”
Kerrigan laughed at that. She couldn’t disagree. “One more thing: can you break the crux bond between Fordham and Iris?”
“Can I see it?”
Fordham took a half-step backward before forcing himself to stillness. His finger slipped around his neck, and for a second, a golden light illuminated a collar. Kerrigan felt sick at the sight of it. There was no reason that he’d have to be restrained like that. What a monster!
Cleora blew out another harsh breath. “This is … good work. Iris is thorough.”
“Yes,” Fordham said, his voice rough.
“I’ll look into it too. My brother might know more about this work. I’ll see what I can do. I’m just sorry that I can’t give you more.”
“You’ve done enough,” Kerrigan assured her. “More than enough. You’ve given us hope again.”