He has to give Karis a choice.
?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KARIS
Karis wakes up the next morning with an aching head and a vague certainty that something has gone terribly wrong. The feeling is familiar enough; he doesn’t have much experience with alcohol, but it’s more than none. He blinks his eyes open, then squeezes them firmly shut. The light does unsettling things to his stomach.
Burrowed into his pillow and blankets, he sorts through the events of the night before. Coira announced it was wine and cheese night, and—
And too many glasses later, Ronan escorted him upstairs. And his lips tasted sweeter than Karis ever imagined.
Groaning, Karis covers his head with the pillow. Which makes everything even worse, because even though all it smells like is laundry soap, it’s stillRonan’spillow. He flings the pillow to the other side of the bed and sits up, hands over his face.
“O Benevolent and Radiant One,” he says weakly. “Can you just go ahead and smite me now?”
The only answer is divine, judgmental silence.
Karis intends to stay in bed indefinitely, stewing in hungover embarrassment, but eventually Dansa stops by with a glass of haliblossom tincture. She doesn’t say anything or look at him funny, which means either that she’s a fantastic actor or that—as he should have guessed—Ronan is a mature adult who hasn’t gossiped about Karis’s humiliating antics to the rest of the group.
Karis isn’t sure why he cares so much about what these people think of him. They might be nice, with wine and cheese night and a cute cat, but they still kidnapped him. Ronan still makes Karis shiver every time they’re in the same room, a deep-seated sense of—fear, that has to fear, right?
Even if Karis really wants to kiss him again. A thrill runs through him as he sits in Ronan’s bed, remembering the rasp of his short beard against his chin. He touches his lips and thinks of how appalled everyone in the order would be.
The look of shock on Neradt’s face might be worth every bit of the danger.
The tincture eases the headache and cures the nausea, allowing his hunger to finally make itself known. Around noon, he can’t force himself to dawdle anymore, and he descends nervously to the kitchen.
He’s almost disappointed that Ronan’s nowhere in sight. Evain and Dansa are looking at books in the loft, and Coira’s attempting to brush Alice’s stomach in the parlor, while the cat tries to squirm away. Melanne’s nowhere to be seen, and Karis wonders if she’s with Ronan. He pulls together a belated breakfast from what he finds in the kitchen. The forks and knives are all in a locked drawer, so he has to cut his sandwich with the side of a spoon.
After eating, he reemerges into the parlor and finds, between the fireplace and the stairs, a door he’s never seen before.
Pulse picking up, he glances around downstairs. Coira is out of sight, the cat’s hairbrush abandoned on the sofa, and telltale swearing sounds from up the stairs. Nobody else is around to stop him from stepping forward and inspecting the door.
Aside from its sudden appearance, the door is utterly ordinary. Dark-stained wood like all the other doors in the manor. When Karis reaches out towards the barely-open seam, he doesn’t feel any change in airflow or temperature. His fingers graze the edge, and there’s no magical recoil. Just smooth, ordinary wood. The hinges whisper smoothly as he pushes the door open, revealing a narrow set of stairs twisting downwards.
The stairwell isn’t lit, but light shines from around the corner. Karis doesn’t stop to think before moving forward. As he descends,somethingtrembles through his soul. Hooks into the deepest parts of his magic, and pulls.
The stairs open onto a room, and the only part Karis sees is a table with five black boxes set on it. Each box is a different shape and size. The longest one is open; the other four are shut. Karis stumbles forward, drawn irresistibly to one in particular. It’s about a foot wide, square, and half a foot tall. He doesn’t know what material it’s made out of, but the surfaces gleam without reflecting. From it emanates a light and warmth that he’s only ever felt from the god riding inside his head.
Radiance.
“Vara, what is this?” he whispers.
The god’s only answer is a hum of excitement mirroring his own. Karis reaches out, and the edge of the box feels like—nothing. It’s solid, there’s pressure against his fingertips, but it feels neither warm nor cool, neither smooth nor rough.
The lid doesn’t move when he tries to lift it. He turns it around—it isn’t heavy—searching frantically for a latch, something he can gain purchase of, something he can break. Suddenly, intensely, heneedsto open this box, to see and touch the thing inside, to become—
A firm hand on his shoulder yanks him out of his daze. Karis blinks up at Ronan, and has no idea how long he’s been in the room.
Ronan’s gaze flicks from his lips to the black boxes. “You can sense it even through the telliron.”
Karis swallows, his throat dry. The box still calls to him. “What is it?”
He isn’t surprised when Ronan answers, “The Crown of Vara.”
The door wasn’t open by accident. Ronan wants him to see this—and the other boxes must be the other relics. They haven’t been sold for profit; they’re being kept. Karis takes a deep breath and says, “Tell me everything.”