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The magus called Beast’s Bane, who drew down siritharand so could not be permitted to live, and who was a bastard and a warrior and a father-slayer, was also, impossibly, Stelian. His eyes were fire—they were searching the empty air where Scarab stood unseen—and that was enough to know for a certainty, but she knew something more about him, which she pushed, fumblingly, toward Carnassial in the simplest of sendings—no sense or feeling, just words.
She sent it to the others, too, who were out in the caverns and passages trying to form an understanding of what was happening in this place. She sent it to Spectral and Reave, that is, but caught herself before releasing, so abruptly and inadequately, this news to Nightingale, to whom it would mean… very much.
Scarab waited, breath held, as the magus sca
Confronted with the certainty of an invisible presence before him, he showed no alarm. His expression didn’t harden, but softened… and then—confounding Scarab to her core—he smiled. It was a smile of such pure pleasure and gladness, such breath-catching, unabashed happiness and light, that Scarab, who was a queen, young and beautiful, and had been smiled at by many a man, flushed to be the focus of it.
Except, of course, that she wasn’t.
When he spoke, his voice was low and sweet and rough with love. “Karou? Are you there?”
Scarab flushed deeper and was glad of invisibility, and glad she’d pushed Carnassial back from her mind a moment earlier so that he couldn’t feel the flare of heat this stranger’s smile had sparked in her.
His beauty—it was of the sort that made you fall very still and conserve your awe like a held breath. His power was part of it—the raw, wild musk of sirithar, forbidden and damning; just to breathe him in was an indulgence—but it was his happiness that pierced, so intense that she experienced it as much with her heart as with her eyes.
Godstars. She had never felt happiness like what she saw in him in that moment, and she was sure she’d never inspired it, either. Her first night with Carnassial in the spring, when the rituals and dance had ended and they had at last been left alone, she had felt his hunger and delight before he even touched her. It had felt like something real then, but, quite suddenly, it didn’t anymore.
This look was so much more than that, and the pierce became an ache as Scarab wondered: Who was it for?
Sendings pulsed back to her from Reave and Spectral, and from Carnassial, too—not Nightingale, whom she had still not told—and for an instant they overwhelmed her. Reave and Spectral were older, more practiced magi and telesthetes than she and Carnassial were, and one of their sendings—the two arrived together and tangled, so that Scarab couldn’t say which was whose—conveyed a reaction of staggering shock that actually made her blink and take a step back.
He spoke again, his brow creasing in uncertainty as his smile faltered. “Karou? Is that you?”
—Someone is coming.
Carnassial’s words, and on the heels of his sending, Scarab heard footsteps in the passage and moved swiftly to one side, which brought her up against Carnassial in a corner of the chamber. She felt him stiffen at the contact and draw immediately away—afraid of angering her with unsolicited touch, she supposed—and she was sorry for the loss of his solidity in the depth and breadth of this stu
Then a figure came into view.
She was a girl of around Scarab’s own age. She was neither a seraph nor one of the chimaera the seraphim here mingled with.
She was… alien. Not of this world. Scarab had never seen a human, and though she knew what they were, the actual sight of one was blinkingly curious. The girl had neither wings nor beast attributes, but instead of seeming like lack, this simplicity of form came across as a kind of stripped-down elegance. She was slender, and moved with the grace of a duskdeer drawing its first substance together out of midsummer shade, and her prettiness was of such a curious flavor that Scarab couldn’t say whether it was more pleasing or startling. She was cream-colored, and as black-eyed as a bird, and her hair was a shimmer of blue. Blue.Her face, like her lover’s, was flushed with joy, and dappled with the same sweet and tremulous shyness as his, as though this were something new between them.
“Hi,” she said, and the word was a wisp, as soft as the brush of a butterfly’s wing.
He didn’t answer in kind. “Were you just here?” he asked, looking past her and around her. “Glamoured?”
And this clicked into place for Scarab. Sensing a presence, the magus had thought it was this girl, invisible, which meant that the human could do magic.
“No,” was her answer. She looked tentative now. “Why?”
His next move was very sudden. He took her arm and pulled her to him, placed her behind him, and faced outward, peering into the emptiness of the chamber that was, of course, not empty at all. “Is someone there?” he demanded, in Seraphic this time, and when his eyes raked Scarab now, they held only what she had expected to see before: suspicion and the low burn of ferocity. Protectiveness, too—for the pretty blue alien he sheltered with his body.
With his body, Scarab noted with curiosity, but not with his mind. He put up no shield against animabut only stood there, strong and fierce, as though that made any difference. As though his life thread and his lover’s weren’t as frail as gossamers glinting in the ether, as easily severed as spidersilk.
—Are we going to kill him?came Carnassial’s sending, unadorned by any tone or sensory threads to hint at his own opinion on the matter.
—Of course not, Scarab replied, and she found herself unaccountably angry at him, as though he’d done something wrong. Unless you’d like to explain to Nightingale that we found a scion of the line of Festival and severed his thread.
As she almost had. She shuddered. To prove that she could kill, she had almost killed him.
A scion of the line of Festival.These were the words she had sent to Carnassial and Reave and Spectral but not yet to Nightingale—Nightingale who had been First Magus to Scarab’s grandmother, the previous queen, and who had twice sat veyanain grief and survived. No one else in the Second Age had survived veyanatwice, and Nightingale’s first sitting had been for Festival.
Her daughter.
Scarab might be queen, but she was eighteen years old, untried, and out of her depth. She’d come hunting a rogue magus, hoping to make her first kill, but what she’d found here was much bigger than that, and she would need the counsel of all her magi, Nightingale most of all, before she decided anything.
—Then we should go, Carnassial sent, ignoring her last barbed message. Beforehe killsus.
It was a good point. They really had no idea what he was capable of. So Scarab, taking a last deep breath of the electric musk of the stranger’s power, retreated.
40
ASSUME THE WORST
In fascination, the Stelians watched the unfolding of the next hour in the caves, and they learned many things, but many more things remained baffling.