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I’ve been here before. That might be why I notice more details the second time around.
Or it might be the way I’m doing anything I can to avoid looking to the front of the room.
Heavy timber holds up the roof and lines the walls. Much of it is carved and painted in stylized patterns that shift from angular and sparse to whorled and intricate to smooth and heavy and back again as they wrap around the room. Woven and stitched hangings show still more varied designs.
I squint to compare the lean figures of a woven hanging with the blocky carvings behind it. Why do they work so well together when they should clash horribly? And why am I acting like a crazy person, staring into the shadows?
“You’re not listening. I don’t care what he said,” Cadence insists, annoyed. “Ravel is not a friend. I did not guide him here. Cole did not bring him or help him in any way. Neither did Ash. Anything he’s done, that’s on him, not us.”
“She’s right. I found my own way here. Vi—Cole—she saved my life. Saved a number of my people’s lives, too. But they’re still dying. We need more help. Hers, or someone like her, if you can’t spare her . . .” Ravel might be here asking for help, but he lolls back in his chair, nonchalant. Everything under control. No threat here.
I’m not convinced. Even bound and bedraggled, he’s dangerous. He never should have been able to find his way out of the city, never mind track me all the way up here. I avoid looking at him, desperate to avoid feeling anything at all, especially here, under the council’s scrutiny.
The elders of the Council of Nine watch, sharp-eyed and silent, as their apparent spokeswoman—my nemesis, Grace’s Aunt Rocky—turns to me. “You deny all involvement with this man?”
“I have nothing to do with him. I want nothing to do with him,” Cadence says.
They can hear her just fine—a faint silver glow lights their eyes and a dusting of mist hovers over their skin, proof of their connection to the dreamscape—but still they stare at me.
“Answer the question, child.” Susan’s voice is remote, her silver gaze just as inhuman as the other council members’ when she turns it on me.
I tighten interlaced fingers to keep them still. “I did not invite, guide, nor otherwise aid or encourage this person to follow us here.”
“That was not the question. What is your relationship?”
“He means nothing to us.” Cadence has escalated from mildly irritated to full on outraged.
Ravel raises an eloquent dark eyebrow over those startling gold eyes of his. “Flame?”
What do I tell them?
We obviously know each other, but how can I sum up our twisted history in a way they’ll comprehend? That small boy, watching—obsessing—over a stranger from afar, present at the worst moment of my—Cadence’s—life, when our parents were killed. And years later, his unexpected offer of protection when I needed it most. An ally I was so desperate to claim that I was willing to ignore his controlling, manipulative, even abusive nature.
But in the end, he’d willingly put himself in danger for me . . . been willing to die, even, to save me . . .
What was Ravel to me, really? More than a stranger, less than a friend, possibly an enemy, certainly devious, dangerous, willing to sacrifice anything and anyone he deemed fit—
“That’s enough,” the scarred woman says, lifting a hand.
An unseen hook digs into my gut and yanks. Silver glows at the edge of my vision. I hold my hands out, each finger limned in the same mist that shimmers over the councilmembers. “How . . . ?”
“You are one of ours,” she says, waving a hand in dismissal. “Just because you can’t access your abilities at will doesn’t mean we can’t. We needed your honesty. Now we have it.”
Wait, what?
Susan won’t meet my eyes.
I plant myself in front of her chair, rigid with the betrayal. “All this time?”
She shakes her head mutely. The elder beside her, Ash’s grandfather, reaches for me, scarves rustling. She raises one hand, just a twitch of her worn fingers, and he stops.
“All this training and struggling to access the dreamscape on my own, and you could have turned it on like flicking a switch?” I don’t yell, though the harsh whisper claws at my throat like a scream.
“You don’t understand,” says Cadence. “It’s not the same.”
Susan nods.
“Flame—” Ravel starts.
“You,” I whirl on him, and for once, I have no problem owning that stupid nickname. Fury burns through every inch of me. “You don’t get to speak. You don’t get to be here after you—you—”
“Flame, they’re dying.” His voice is ragged; his cocky attitude discarded like a crumpled mask. “We need you back.”
No. How dare he even ask? As if he’s the one who cares? As if I’d do it for him? As if it wasn’t my plan all along, wasn’t what I’d been working so hard for all this time, wasn’t—
“She can’t,” Cadence says.
The scarred elder echoes her nastily for Ravel’s benefit, or maybe for mine. “Remove him,” she orders.
The nearest elder reaches a mist-silvered finger into the air as if plucking an invisible string. Ravel’s searching gaze shutters. He slumps, bindings keeping him from toppling from his chair.
Part of me is relieved. The rest is furious. “What did you do? He wasn’t hurting anyone.”
Susan still won’t look at me. The others watch with austere disapprobation as if I’m a small child—someone else’s—throwing a tantrum.
“Does she need to be here?” one asks.
“They’re debating,” Cadence says when no answer is forthcoming.
I pace. Silver-glazed eyes swivel to follow in otherwise stone faces.
I’m tempted to turn on my heel and stalk out without another word. Ravel can fend for himself, or not. There’s no reason to make his fate my problem.
But what he said just before they knocked him out—I have to know more.
How many have died? And who? Faces flicker before my eyes: Ange, Lily, hapless Amy . . . Sam, who I barely managed to bring back to them. They have no way to defend themselves from attack, not without me.
Or someone like me.
I plant my feet against the darkness that rages at the edges of my vision. “Send a team.”
There’s no response. But this is what needs to happen. I’ve been trying as hard as I can, but even with today’s breakthrough, I’m way too far from the kind of power needed to save anyone, much less a whole city’s worth of people. I take the part of me that insists this is my job, my calling, my purpose, and shove it as deep and as far away as I can.
It doesn’t need to be me. It doesn’t even have to be Ash.
“Send help,” I repeat, louder. “He might not be a good person, but Ravel’s telling the truth. There are still people in that city that need saving. Send a squad to help them.”
The stone faces crack, one by one, though the silver doesn’t bleed fully from their eyes. “No.”
“You don’t understand. There’s no one there who can fight back. Why do you train your people to fight if not for this? Send them out before it’s too late!”
“Cole.” Cadence’s voice is tight, near breaking.
“The lost cannot be saved.” The response is inflectionless, coming from many throats at once, eerily like the layered, echoing tones of the Mara. “No more lives will be spent on that city.”
But one face reflects the horror I feel at their response. Susan’s forehead is knotted over eyes silvered with more than just magic.
“You can’t abandon them!” I plead with her alone.
But she’s not the one who answers. Her fellows speak as if with one voice: “The decision is made. As for the boy, he will be permitted to serve. Be thankful. In following you here, his life has been spared.”
I look at Ravel, limp and ragged and helpless in his chair and wonder if he wouldn’t rather have stayed to be eaten by monsters. Of all the people to be saved, why him?
No. I can’t accept it. I won’t.
“You have no choice,” Rocky says as the silver fades back under the elders’ skins—along with their spying ways, if I have any luck left. “You are powerless, and we have spent enough lives on that deathtrap of a city.”
I hunt for a sympathetic face, a way out of this nightmare, something, anything. There has to be some argument, something I can say or do to persuade them . . .
“You’re dismissed.” A flat, merciless order.
“No. I won’t just leave like—”
“As you wish.”
The floor rushes up to meet me.