Ghehera had not found the village of Solchran.
They had been so sure of their ability to do so, and yet they had not. And while this task had not been Anjhela’s job nor her responsibility, somehow...
Somehow, it was.
Anjhela stalked through the black stone of the lower hallway, her back straight by nature and straighter by nurture, her awareness of the deeply gouged glyphs and weighty overhead rock subsumed by her awareness of change.
A shift in power. A shift in favor.
Because she had not yet broken Trevarr. She had nearly destroyed him, but that wasn’t at all the same thing.
Too many mudbloods dared to glance her way before scurrying aside. The mendihar vibrated beneath her skin, challenging her as it had not done for years. Even the lumes remained steady, failing to flicker in their awareness of her presence.
She didn’t hesitate at the heavy door to the main consolation chamber, but slapped her hand against the latch plate, slamming it with a surge of personal power. Her power.
The ’bloods in her peripheral vision shrank away, suddenly wiser. The latch gave way with a crack, its component parts clattering to the ground as the door opened.
Anjhela stalked into the room with every bit of her usual predatory grace. “Do you even know what you’ve done?”
He leaned against rock with his hands in his lap, the manacles with their silvered glyphs weighing them down. His hair still fell in uncharacteristic disarray, but his face showed little of its recent bruising and his injured leg lay less awkwardly before him, no longer propped so much as simply in repose.
But of all that, it was his eyes that caught her attention, inspiring a trickle of fear so unfamiliar it took her a moment to recognize it. It took another moment yet to recognize why, especially against the backdrop of his carefully neutral response to her—his inscrutable expression, his passive posture and acknowledgment of her prowess.
But his eyes...
They held a spark. An awareness. Not so much hope as...
Intent.
“No,” he said finally, without sounding as if he cared. “What have I done?”
“You,” she fumed, struggling to keep the silky smooth edge of her voice. “You and your disappearing village. You’ve changed everything for me. For all of us!”
“Anjhela,” he said, lifting his manacled wrists in meaningful gesture—those, at least, remained raw and weeping. “It wasn’t mine to do. Even without these.”
“Don’t pretend to be stupid.” Her fist clenched, trapping the mendihar with a technique she’d considered outgrown years earlier. “Don’t insult me that way. You or that little sklarr friend you never dared tell me about—it’s all the same thing. It has been, for years.”
His faint shrug stirred the k’thai braids hidden in the mass of his hair. “He isn’t mine to command, Anjhela. I released him when your half-bloods came for me.”
He said it as if he wasn’t quite one of them any longer. As if he wasn’t as half-blood as any of them. Anjhela’s supple scales turned rigid in her rising fury. “He is behind this! You are behind it! You will be the undoing of me!”
“That,” he said, unaffected by her anger, “would only be right. Given how much of me went into the making of you.”
Anjhela closed the distance between them in two swift strides, her freehand lashing out to slap him with all her considerable strength. “You DARE!”
His head rocked back, hitting stone with audible impact. His lip bled; his eye trickled an involuntary tear. But she’d only dazed that spark, not extinguished it. He met her gaze evenly enough. “It may be a truth not before spoken,” he said. “But it is still a truth.”
She whirled from him, so incapacitated by emotion as to be without rational thought. She had no tools for being in this state; no one ever drove her to this state. No one had ever had the means.
Except Trevarr. Always Trevarr. And until now, he had never employed them.
But he was still the one in chains, and the one bound by silver and glyphs. He was still the one so recently injured unto death...as little as it sat upon him now.
Anjhela turned back to him, eyes narrowed—seeing again not just the details of his person, but the overall impression of him. She said flatly, “He’s been here. He’s helped you.”
Trevarr lifted one shoulder. “He is free, nortreya.”
Once beloved. Anjhela stiffened at that blow, even knowing how much it revealed. Her response instantly stripped her bare of the distance she’d put between them, and of the power she’d since assumed.
Trevarr had mercy at that. He pretended not to notice. “The sklarr can no more get in than I can get out. You know the truth of that.”
Anjhela’s spinal scales rippled with a cold grue; a premonition. She regathered herself with effort, forcing her clenched hand to relax—opening it without losing control to the mendihar. “When it comes to you,” she said, her shoulders still stiff, “I’m not sure we’ve ever known anything at all.”
~~~~~~~~~~