Madoc had seen Geoxus move this way during the last party, when they’d found Stavos outside, but he still couldn’t wrap his mind around it. In shock, he stumbled toward the moving room, and soon was in the carriage, cursing the slow pace of the galloping horses as they crossed the Nien River into the Olantin District where Petros lived.
As he reached his father’s villa, Madoc fought off a punch of unwelcome nostalgia. In the thirteen years since he’d been turned away from these doors, the memories he’d earned within had become tainted, and then so marred by hate that he’d had to stuff them deep inside. Stored there, they could seem not to exist, as if he had been born a stonemason and lived with Elias his entire life. But now Madoc remembered every night he had dreamed of coming back to this place and burning it to the ground.
His gaze lifted from the crowd that had gathered in the street. The stone walls that surrounded the estate stretched twice as high as he remembered in his youth. It was a protective measure, but though the outside seemed unharmed, that could only mean that the real trouble was locked within. Fear throbbed as his eyes lifted to the smear of gray smoke across the black sky.
Ash and Tor couldn’t be responsible. He’d told them he wanted no part of any plan.
Telling himself this did not ease the tension between his temples.
“Make way!” a centurion trumpeted as the palace carriage approached the opening gate. Inside, Madoc could make out a courtyard four times the size of the Metaxas’ house, lined with potted plants and orange and fig trees, and the stone fountain of Geoxus, water pouringfrom his outstretched hands, that Madoc had once dipped his feet in on hot days. It was broken now, into chunks of marble strewn across the charred grass.
Questions and shrieks of surprise sliced through the cool night air.
“What happened here?”
“Is Petros dead?”
Through the shouting, Madoc heard a familiar voice.
“Madoc!Madoc.”
He searched the crowd, spotting Elias behind the row of centurions as the carriage entered the villa grounds.
“Elias!” Relief flooded Madoc but froze before it reached his heart. Elias should have been at Lucius’s villa with the other attendants. Even if word had traveled quickly to the training barracks, it would have taken Elias a half hour by carriage to get here.
“Wait!” Madoc called to the driver, but they were already inside.
By the time Madoc stumbled out, the front gates were sealing with a screech of metal and rock. The crowd outside was muffled, and Madoc couldn’t tell if it was due to the partition between them or the sudden rise of energeia in his blood. It swirled like an angry tempest, needling the back of his skull with dread.
Slowly, he turned, gaping. The front wall of the house was still aflame, attended to by half a dozen servants carrying buckets of water. A team of soldiers were dismounting outside the stables, where silver mosaics of twin horses rearing up on either side of the barn entrance glimmered through the smoke.
A warning throbbed in Madoc’s temples. Too many conflicting emotions waited inside the house. He sensed them like sound, likesmell. Like the bright flash of colors at the market. Fury and rage warred with despair and the sharp pitch of fear had his back straight as an arrow.
There was something else too. Something he didn’t recognize. A void. A bleak, empty space, beckoning him closer. It felt wrong, and he wanted no part of it, but he couldn’t turn back.
Willing his anathreia down, he charged up the house’s steps and into the smoke, leaping over the scattered stones and burned bits of rubble and sprinting past a corridor lined by dark sconces on the wall. Madoc tripped over his own feet at the sight of it. His bedroom had once been down that hall. A space all to himself, with a bed twice as large as the bunk he squeezed into in the stonemasons’ quarter, which he used to hide under to escape his father’s wrath. He found Geoxus just beyond, in the atrium where Petros worked and took his meals. There were parties here, Madoc remembered. Food and drink. Music.
He’d forgotten about the music.
Now the table was overturned, the chairs were in pieces, and the moon shining through the open ceiling was the only light in the room.
Cassia, where are you?
“He’s safe!”
At his father’s cry of relief, Madoc stopped cold. Petros swept toward him, arms outstretched. For a moment, Madoc wasn’t sure if he meant to embrace him or crush him with geoeia.
“Where’s Cassia?” Madoc demanded. His own hands rose in defense, bringing Petros to a halt.
“Madoc!” A female shout sounded from the thick shadows on the far side of the room, cut short by the harsh crack of a slap against skin.
Madoc rushed past Petros toward the sound, ready to fight, ready to pull the energeia out of every god and mortal in this villa.
But as he approached, he didn’t find Cassia.
Five armed guards surrounded a block of stone, their weapons drawn as if expecting someone to burst through. Madoc thought part of the wall must have collapsed in the battle, but as he peered through the dim light he caught a tremor of movement—the twist of shoulders, of a person struggling to get free—and he realized the stone was a deliberate creation of geoeia. A prison encasing not one, but two people. The man, facing sideways, was trapped from the neck down, his jaw flexing with the effort to break out. One of his heels extended out the side of the rock, frozen, as if he was in the process of kicking free.
The woman beside him was stuck just below the shoulders, her arms and legs disappearing into the stone, her long curls stuck to her cheek, hiding half her face.
