FARON AWOKE TO REEVE STARING DOWN AT HER, HIS PALE FACE even paler.
There were dark circles beneath his blue eyes, and his short hair was a mess of brown curls illuminated by the electric lamps that brightened the room. When he saw that she was awake, he smiled radiantly, and Faron smiled back, relief cutting through her disorientation. Once, she would never have felt comforted by the presence of Reeve Warwick, but everything was so different now. She felt so different now. She touched his cheek, desperate for even that small point of contact. As her brain struggled toward wakefulness, she allowed this—him—to ground her. Her guiding star.
“It’s you,” she said faintly, tracing the line of his jaw. Hair bristled under her fingers, stubble that was not yet shaven. Something about that tickled the back of her mind, but she was still too lethargic to think. “You’re here.”
Since they had left Port Sol, she had seen no sign of Reeve in his own body. Iya maneuvered Reeve’s body from place to place, but Gael, not Reeve, was the only one who had previously emerged to help her. She had worried that he was too weak to control the body, that maybe he no longer existed at all. She’d felt him there, the one time she had skimmed Lightbringer’s soul, but that didn’t mean he was still there. It was a thought she hadn’t wanted to face, a failure she hadn’t been able to accept the possibility of. She hadn’t known just how scared she’d been until she saw him there, now, and tears stung her eyes.
“Are you all right?” Reeve asked, and for a moment it seemed as if his eye color was shifting from blue to hazel and back again. Light spilled into the room from behind him, making it hard to figure out if she was just hallucinating. “How do you feel?”
“How do I feel?” It took everything she had not to let those tears fall. His skin was so warm. His tone was so caring. It was more than she deserved. “I’m fine. I just—I missed you.”
“Aw, how sweet.” He reached up to catch her hand, yanking it away from his face. “Worry not. I’ve punished the two responsible for your injury.”
The words slapped Faron in the face like cold water. Her hand shook in his bruising grip. “Iya.”
“The very same.” That cruel slash of a smile appeared. His eyes were a blue as cold as death. How could she have ever mistaken that frost for the petal-soft lignum vitae blue of Reeve’s eyes? “Did you think I was Reeve Warwick? How humiliating for you.”
“Let go of me.”
He released her at once, letting her push herself up. Her arms trembled from trying to hold her weight, but she managed without his help. She was in a bed in the Hearthstone infirmary, swaddled in white walls and white sheets and the familiar smell of antiseptic. Her memories came flooding back, but, when she reached up to touch her nose, she found no broken bones or bleeding trails. Iya was sitting in a chair beside her bed, a notebook open in his lap. He closed it when she tried to sneak a peek.
“I healed you with a dragon relic,” he explained, leaning back in the chair. Behind him, a window was open to let in the moonlit nighttime air. “One of the very same you tried to acquire tonight.” Faron flinched, which only made his smile widen. “I’m not angry with you. I assumed you would try this sooner or later. The reason you found their souls so difficult to command is that I had already implanted them with an order to resist you. Had you kept going, all you would have done is kill them as our powers raged within their pliant minds.”
“Piss off,” said Faron.
“You grow more and more powerful every day. Tell me”—his voice lowered to a whisper, his face incandescent with glee—“how did it feel to control them? To taste their weakness and turn it to your advantage? How did it feel to play god?”
That hurt Faron worse than the punch. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And yet she thought of how victorious she had felt after that rush of power, how Noble and Ballard had been dying and she hadn’t cared at all. They’re the enemy, she told herself, but that defense sounded weak to her ears. Elara had gone to Langley for two months and had not only made friends but defeated Marius Lynwood without actually harming him. Faron had been with Iya for two weeks and she had already drawn first blood.
“I’ll let you get some rest,” Iya said in a smug tone. There was nothing else to say. His point had been made so sharply that Faron was still bleeding. “But I’ll have some free time in the afternoon if you’d like to continue gazing longingly at my vessel, hoping for what will never again be.”
“Ass,” Faron muttered.
“They really should,” Iya shot back—his face then mellowed into something mischievous, his eyes the clear blue of morning mist, affection dancing there, so familiar it made Faron’s heart clench—“write more books about your charm.”
They both froze. Iya looked lost for a moment before his expression closed off and he swept out of the room. But Faron was shaken down to her core.
Those words. Reeve had said them to her months ago, in response to the same insult. They had been at her house, and Elara had brought Reeve home with her. Faron had been unable to resist the chance to insult him, and his drawling sarcasm had infuriated her even more than the sight of his stupid face. The few times he decided to rise to her bait, he was casually witty and lightning fast in his retorts, as if he didn’t even need to think about them.
They really should write more books about your charm.
That was not Iya. That was Reeve. That was Reeve.
Just as Gael had come to her before, stopping her from incurring Lightbringer’s fatal wrath, Reeve had instinctively risen to her bait. He was alive. His soul was alive.
Iya was trying to hide it by lashing out and retreating, but he was losing control over the other souls in his body. She didn’t know how and she didn’t know why, but twice was a pattern that she could exploit. The fact that he hadn’t killed her for this yet meant that he still needed her—which gave her the opportunity she needed. If she could find the weakness in the prison he’d trapped Reeve and Gael in, she would have allies. She would figure out how to stop him, or at least incapacitate him. She would be a step closer to returning home a hero.
Faron lay back on her pillows, turning her face toward the winking stars and imagining that Mala was gazing down at her in approval.