“This could explain where that anomaly came from, as well,” Kadaki said, looking thoughtful. “The amount of magic a magic-eater consumes could disrupt the axis. That probably means there will be more anomalies if we don’t get rid of it.”
“Let’s worry about anomalies after we get back home.”
She looked around the room, noting the grate in the opposite wall where the canal water was draining. The canal was a dead end. Probably the first of many.
“I envy your optimism,” she said. “Or is it arrogance? Is this an Ysuran trait? You’re all so used to everything going well for you that you can no longer imagine failure, is that it?”
Her teeth had started chattering as she spoke. Neiryn stepped closer, letting fire stream from his hand in a jet beside them. Steam began to rise from their clothes. This much spellcasting was tiring, but Kadaki was right—the ambient magic of the axis helped. “No. It’s because things go poorly so often that I can’t allow myself to dwell on failure. All I can do is keep trying to fix things. It’s not optimism, and it’s not arrogance. It’s survival.”
Kadaki stared into the fire, her gaze distant. Her hair began to curl as it dried. Her face grew pink with the heat. Soon their clothes were mostly dry.
She’d lost her remaining sock somewhere during the escape from the magic-eater, he noticed.
“What if we die down here?” she said quietly.
“I know for a fact you’ve faced down death many times before. What’s one more time?”
She shook her head. “Not like this. Not without my magic. If I had power like I used to, I could have taken us out of here already.” A look of extraordinary darkness and defeat crossed behind her eyes, hidden beneath a mask of indifference.
She was different now than he remembered her. She’d changed in five years, and not for the better. He did not remember seeing this despair in her ever before. She had always been serious, always pragmatic, and perhaps not exactly happy, but ambitious. Determined.
Losing her abilities was breaking her, slowly and painfully.
He let his flame dwindle and go out. The darkness that followed was absolute. The steam and heat in the room remained even after the blaze of fire was gone.
“Neiryn?” Kadaki said, a quaver of worry in her voice.
He took a step closer, closing the gap between them, wrestling with the impulse to hold her tightly and find her lips in the dark, regardless of her so-called marriage. What if she was right? What if they didn’t make it out? What if these were the last moments of their lives?
But then, he remembered her words in the hallway at the house a few nights ago.Pathetic,she’d called him.Villain.
He sighed, taking a step back. “Can I tell you something I’ve never told anyone else?” he said.
There was a slight shifting of fabric. A small breath. “Yes?” Her voice was apprehensive. Suspicious.
“I wasn’t born with the ability to use Aevyr’s fire.”
There was a pause. “A birth defect?” she said, surprised.
He made a face.Defect.“You could call it that. Most sun elves start getting fire magic in their adolescence. I waited a long time, hoping I was just a late bloomer. I tried triggering it in all kinds of ridiculous ways. But it never came.”
“It’s not unheard of,” Kadaki said.
“No. But no one else I knew was deprived of Aevyr’s fire, or had ever met anyone who was. It was only me. My family took me all over the country in search of a healer who could help me. It’s a bit of an embarrassment to have a defective child, you see. You can imagine how desperate I was to rectify the situation.”
He kept his voice light to hide the bitterness he still felt over it, though he guessed Kadaki saw through it. To be without fire as a sun elf was devastating. Fire was their gift from the sun goddess. It was what made them sun elves. It was a core piece of their culture, their history, their biology. As he’d grown up, the slow realization that he would be doomed to live his life without it had been agonizing.
“The healers poked and prodded me for years. They did a lot of tests, a lot of things to try to induce the fire in me. It was all a huge waste of time and energy; none of it worked. They eventually gave up.”
“So what happened? You have Aevyr’s fire now.”
“There is a very large axis in Ysura, on Mount Uriethwyn. You are familiar with it?”
“Of course.”
“There is also a remote temple to Aevyr there, high on the mountain, in the remains of another Auren-Li settlement. A priest told me to go there and meditate and pray until the fire came to me.”
“And that worked?” She sounded skeptical.
