“The spell.”
Karis glares. “I can keep it up as long as I need to,” he says sharply, and tries not to remember what the man’s lips tasted like the night before. “Don’t avoid the question.”
“I wasn’t,” Ronan says with a fleeting grin. “The relics were used to trap the five gods in the first place, and we need all of them to break the binding. We have four of them already, and all we’re missing is the Dravansword. Any other questions you need the spell for? You’re looking…”
Karis is sure he looks stunned and shaken, no matter how he tries to cover it up. He shoves his trembling hands under the table. But it has nothing to do with overdrawing his magic, and everything to do with what Ronan’s been saying.
Everything Varaisn’tsaying.
“Two more things,” Karis says. “If you think you can handle it.”
“Hit me.”
“Why wouldn’t the bound gods say anything through their Voices?” He bites his lip, wondering if he’s revealing too much. “I mean, unless the binding is so strong that it cuts off that connection too…”
“I don’t know,” Ronan says. “None of the bound gods have had a Voice in two hundred years, but Voices are rare enough to begin with. A god finding one once in a century would be a good number. But I’ve studied the binding array too, and it has a silencing component. The bound gods couldn’t talk about the binding, even if they broke through to answer a prayer.”
Vara’s silences all fit together like strands of a spiderweb, weaving a shape Karis can finally see. The ache of sadness and indignation isn’t entirely Karis’s own. But there’s triumph, too, a furious satisfaction. Karis knows with every fiber of his soul that this revelation is why Vara sent him into Ronan’s prison cell in the first place.
Vara can’t speak. But he found a way to send Karis to the answers.
Ronan asks, “What’s the last thing?”
Karis was going to ask about casualties. He was going to ask about Brother Oscar and Sir Arthur, killed and wounded in Ronan’s quest for the Crown of Vara. But his mind is already whirling out of control, and he needs to decide for himself what Ronan’s answer means to him before he asks the question.
He might be willing to kill for Vara too, after all.
So instead, Karis leans his elbows on the table and props up his chin. Grins a winning smile, wide enough he knows his dimples are showing. “The last thing is, do you think I’m pretty?”
Ronan, the fucking bastard, rubs his chin like he has to consider it. There’s a dark heat in his eyes that hooks into Karis’s heart just as deeply as Radiance ever has, but with an entirely different flavor. And Ronan answers, with all the golden weight of the truth spell behind his words, “No comment.”
Karis’s grin widens, and he leans over the table. He’s about to press for more answers, when Ronan adds:
“You know, you cast this truth spell without a focus.”
?
CHAPTER TWELVE
RONAN
The truth spell scatters in motes of gold, and the color drains beneath Karis’s freckles. His bright widen—with fear, Ronan thinks, not with shock. Which is very, very interesting.
He decides it’s time to take the reins of this interrogation. But before he can ask anything, Karis bolts from the table.
Ronan lunges to seize Karis’s wrist, and when he yanks them to a halt, suddenly the room is far too small around them. They’re far too close together. Ronan’s heart hammers with the rush of movement and the afterglow of enchantment. With the echo of that deliberately distracting question.Do you think I’m pretty?
Karis doesn’t meet Ronan’s eyes. His ragged breaths tickle Ronan’s neck.
“I just told you a dangerous amount of information about me and mine,” Ronan says, feigning calm. “It’s only fair you tell me something about yourself, too.”
He waits through the long silence. Faint sounds intrude from the rest of the manor—a door closing. Voices in the loft. But inside this bedroom, there are only two souls held in tension. Ronan’s the one with a hand on Karis’s wrist, but he feels like he’s chained in place too.
Still tense, Karis stops trying to free himself. He looks up with a fierceness at odds with his pale face. “Coira asked if you were recruiting me. Are you?”
Ronan loosens his grip, to prevent himself from grabbing harder on instinct. “Everyone here chose to join. If you don’t want in, you’re free to just stay here until the unbinding is over, and then we’ll let you go.”
“That sounds pretty boring,” Karis says, the color slowly returning to his face.