Do you truly seek my power, Arlet?
“I told you—you are my friend. You are powerful. I see you for who you are. I know your pain. I wish, from time to time, that I could have some of that power as well,” I whisper. “I’ll do anything.”
Anything?
The voice curls through me like smoke. I can feel it pressing against my ribs, touching my pulse.
Once I give you my name, we are bound. I wish to be free from the awful pits from which I came. I wish to see the world. To visit. To roam through you.
“All right.” My voice breaks. “Just—please—don’t let him die.”
A long pause. Then, softer:So be it. But understand this, Arlet of no house: A name is a chain. When you speak mine, you invite the fire to remember you. Forever. The gods may fight over your soul once you die.
“Just…tell me.”
My name, the voice whispers, and the shadows coil tight,is Nehvaris.
“Nehvaris,” I repeat. “Lend me some of your fire.”
The world shatters open,filled with larger, billowing versions of the black flames. They fold inward until nothing remains of the amphitheater. There is no screaming crowd, no walls of stone, not even the open sky above.
It’s as though Vann and I have been swallowed whole, sealed inside a sphere of living fire that breathes with me, contracting and expanding in time with the frantic rhythm of my heart.
Yet the fire doesn’t burn. It presses close, warm but not searing, a shroud that hums in my veins like something alive and waiting. It feels as though I am suspended between threads of matter, stretched to my max, just straddling the line between pleasure and pain.
At last.
Nehvaris’s power curls through me, low and resonant, vibrating in my hollow chest where the Fuegorra stone once lived, an absence I have missed for quite some time now. No more chains. No more tethers.
You are more than their spectacle now.
My non-tethered hand flies to my ribs as if I can hold myself together. The fire shivers in response, a ripple that rolls across the sphere like a tide.
I want what you want, Red. To live. To rise. To never bow again. If the only way for me to live is through you, then so be it.
The promise tastes like ash and honey on my tongue. I should recoil, and yet part of me leans into it, desperate for the strength it offers after days of being torn open for the crowd.
We are kindred spirits. Two brides of the same monster.
I push away from Vann’s body and finally force myself to look.
And there he lies. I count two arrows in his back. I know how the Fuegorra works. I know that he would heal faster with a mate.
So I grab onto the first arrow and pull. It comes free easily, as if the magic is already pushing the shaft from his flesh. He groans. The wound is shallower than I thought, thank the gods. I make quick work of the other, but I feel a new type of pressure squeezing against me from the magic.
It hurts. The magic is starting to stab at my mind and make me falter.
With the last one out, I collapse next to him and let the fire go. It holds strong.
Through the shifting dark, Vann somehow pushes himself up. His silver hair clings to his temples, and blood slides down his shoulders, over his arms and his heaving chest. But still he comes, refusing to stop until his hands grip my shoulders.
“Arlet,” he says, voice raw and fraying, his gaze holding mine. “We need to leave.”
My legs buckle, exhaustion stealing the strength I thought I had left, and for a moment, I think I’ll collapse into the fire itself. But Vann is there before I let the fire descend over us, scooping me up as though I weigh nothing. As though he was not covered in his own wounds. His arms wrap around me, solid and unyielding, and then he lifts me into his embrace with a suddenness that makes the flames roar.
“I want to see what happens to the king,” I bite out.
The sphere protests, shrieking in a pitch that rattles through my bones, but it doesn’t strike him down. Instead, the walls fracture, fissures of light tearing open, until the fire peels back just enough to reveal the entrance to the arena.