Page 117 of Incoronate
Cael looked at him for a long, suspended moment. “Perhaps,” he said simply. “But in the four decades I’ve spent in this Realm, we haven’t managed to find anything close to a loophole or a way out. So unless one of you happens to carry something other than Anakim magic, I wouldn’t go spending that hope just yet.”
Everything inside of me froze.
I turned the number over in my mind and immediately put it back down, because looking at it directly was not something I was capable of doing right now without completely unraveling, and I had already done enough of that today. The thought of being here for more than a few days, let alone four decades, made me want to crawl out of my own skin and die.
And then my mind snagged on the other part.
‘Unless one of you happens to carry something other than Anakim magic…’
He’d said it like it was laughable. A joke with no punchline. A throwaway line delivered the way you delivered a foregone conclusion; the conversational equivalent of a period at the end of a sentence that was never meant to be questioned.
I could feel Trace looking at me then, but I didn’t meet his eyes. I turned the chalice slowly between my palms as Cael’s words circled through my mind before settling somewhere that made my pulse go quiet.
Sanguinarium had been built by the Order. Their Anakim magic had created it, shaped its very walls and sealed it. And it was that same Anakim magic that was keeping everyone inside it powerless and trapped, stripping every ability at the door like a toll collected on the way in. That was the cage. That was what it had been designed to do.
But they’d made an assumption they hadn’t accounted for when they built the walls around this place. The same one Cael had just made without realizing it. The same one I had made without even noticing.
That we were all Anakim.
Except I wasn’t.
And if the walls of this place had been built to contain Anakim magic—to recognize it and refuse it, the way a lock refused every key except the one made for it specifically—then maybe we’d just been pushing against the wrong door.
When I glanced up a second later, Dominic’s gaze was already waiting for mine, quiet and still and thinking something he clearly wasn’t ready to say in present company.
“Right,” I said, setting the chalice down. “Something to think about.”
Trace met my eyes then, his pupils bleeding briefly into the blue before pulling back again. “Agreed. Luckily, we don’t give up that easily,” he said, directing the statement at Cael. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something once we’ve had time to rest and regroup.”
Cael studied the three of us for a moment, his sharp eyes moving between us with an expression that was harder to read than it had been a few minutes ago before pushing back from the table and rising. “I’ll show you the rest of the compound and where you’ll be sleeping,” he said, the bone at his septum catching the firelight as he spoke. “You can clean up before supper.”
The three of us got to our feet.
Dominic straightened his button-up shirt, his fingers briefly passing over the torn fabric where the stake had gone through it, with the air of someone adjusting a dinner jacket before a formal occasion. “We appreciate your generosity,” he said, and somehow managed to make it sound entirely sincere.
Cael acknowledged it with a single nod and moved toward the door without waiting.
I fell into step behind them. Trace slowed down a step to walk beside me, his hand slipping into mine. I tried to keep my mind focused on that, on our soulmate bond hummingcontently, instead of the other thing that was trying to muscle its way to the front of it.
There are things that grow in Sanguinarium, if you know how to coax them.
He hadn’t elaborated on what things he was referring to and hadn’t specified how. And now he was inviting us to stay for supper in a settlement where the only confirmed food sources were water hauled from miles away, mysterious coaxed vegetation, and a small population of carefully maintained humans.
As much as I was praying for vegetables, something told me that wasn’t what he was talking about.
38. A SPARK IN THE DARK
Cael’s tour of the compound lasted approximately seven minutes, which told me everything I needed to know about how much he trusted us.
Not that I could fault him for it. We were strangers who had shown up unannounced at the edge of his settlement with a vague promise of information and no real proof of anything. If our positions had been reversed, I would have done exactly the same thing—shown us the paths between the structures that gave the least away, steered us clear of anything worth knowing about, and called it a tour with a straight face. It was a smart move. The kind of thing you learned to do when you’d been responsible for keeping people alive long enough to get good at it.
What I did see of the smaller structures up close was enough to hold my attention. They were built differently than the Hold. Rougher, more improvised. Red stone fitted against dark volcanic glass wherever the obsidian hadn’t stretched far enough, the gaps between packed with compressed earth and strips of that strange reddish timber I’d noticed earlier. Here and there an entire log had been used as a crossbeam or a door frame, dense and dark with age, and the sight of actual wood, however alien-looking and far removed from anything I’d have called a tree back home, was startling enough that I had to stop myself from reaching out to touch it as we passed.
Our quarters were at the far edge of the settlement, tucked against the interior of the perimeter wall. One room. Low ceiling. The walls were bare red stone, unsmoothed and close, and the space had the quality of a place that had never been intended to feel comfortable, only sufficient and necessary.
It made me think about light switches. Hot water. Doors that locked. The small, unremarkable things modern life gave us that I’d never bothered to notice before.
The furnishings were about what I’d expected. A flat-topped block of dark stone near the wall that served as a side table, and opposite it, set low to the ground, a sleeping platform of reddish timber filled with packed earth and topped with what I could only describe as a mattress made of pure desperation. Salvaged fabric and clothing sewn together into something wide and flat and stuffed just enough to give slightly when I pressed my hand into it.
