They weren’t words of encouragement or gentleness. Gilene brushed his hand from her cheek. “Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
“Then we have an agreement.”
His eyes warmed. “I know why Beroe sent you, Agacin. Even beyond the fire.” He levered himself carefully off the pallet, leaving her puzzled by his enigmatic remark. He groaned under his breath and pressed a hand to his side, head hanging low for a moment before he gained his feet.
Doubt and compassion had risen within her. Even with her help, she didn’t think he’d escape Kraelag alive. The fact he’d survived the rigors of the Pit this long testified to his prowess in combat. Still, cracked ribs left even the toughest warrior vulnerable, and Azarion’s movements lacked their casual grace from the night before. If he had to fight his way out of the city, he was dead.
When the guards opened the cell door, Azarion’s shoulders slumped, and he shuffled to one of the cell’s far corners, his movements as hesitant and slow as an old woman’s. Astonished, Gilene caught his quick, warning glance. He might be injured, but this show of weakness was merely an affectation.
She didn’t look back when they took her from the cell to rejoin the condemned women in a common cell closer to the Pit.
They had passed the day in the stifling prison, serenaded by the applause and jeers of the crowd, the howls of injured and dying animals, and the clash of sword on shield as gladiators fought to the death.
Now, with the crowd swelling the seats ringing the arena, baying for their blood, the women wept and prayed to indifferent gods.
In their awning-covered balcony high above the masses, the emperor and empress lounged on couches in the shade, attended by a small army of servants. They were too far away for Gilene to make out their expressions, but she saw the emperor raise and lower his hand, signaling the final Rite of Spring—the immolation of the women—to begin. The guards tossed lit torches onto the pyre and fled from the arena floor.
Each year this nightmare played out the same way. The signal, the torches set to the kindling, the crowd’s roar of approval, the cries for mercy from the women struggling against their tethers.
Tears washed Gilene’s cheeks. She found sanctuary within herself, the call to fire that ran through her spirit in rivers.
Witch-fire, the villagers named it. An ancient magic woven into the flesh and fabric of a single girl child born each generation in Beroe. No one knew from whence it originated or why only one woman from every generation in a small village inherited it, but the village elders had kept its secret close and had deceived the Empire for decades.
Gilene summoned witch-fire to join the flames consuming the kindling surrounding her. She breathed the acrid smoke of charring wood and the burning dead. Deaf to the victims’ laments and the spectators’ applause, she concentrated on the internal river of magic, captured its flames, and swelled it to a ravenous creature that bit and clawed at the cage of her will. Smoke and heat swirled around her. She ignored both, bound by the rise of power.
She shrieked as the fire erupted around the pillar’s base, then shot skyward in a column of white flame. It fountained back to the ground, servant to her silent bidding, incinerating within and around it in an instant. The sacrificed women, the pillar to which they were tied, the dead upon which they stood—all turned to ash in the space of one breath to another. Flames shot toward the stone firebreak surrounding the Pit and protecting the spectators in the lower seats. Still, many of those fled, not trusting that the wall would contain the hellfire tide that clawed at its unyielding surface.
Only Gilene stood untouched within the conflagration, now cloaked in another illusion. Freed, she leapt off the burning platform and sped through the fire, nothing more than flame herself to the eyes of the exuberant crowd. Spirits of the newly dead fluttered past her. She thought she glimpsed Pell’s vaporous features before the hot wind generated by the fire shredded the apparition.
Power leached from her like oil from a broken lamp. By the time she reached one of the deserted entrances to the catacombs, she was stumbling and bent with the urge to vomit. The cool interior offered respite, and she collapsed against it, sloughing off her disguise.
Her trial wasn’t over. Gilene wiped the sweat and tears from her face and straightened from the wall. Fire exacted a steep price for its subservience. She didn’t have much time left before that price left her helpless. She exchanged one illusion for another and descended into the underground. The clusters of guards ignored her, uninterested in an old slave who clung to the shadows as he went about his daily tasks.
Azarion occupied the last cell at the end of one of the long corridors branching off the underground’s main hub. Once more Gilene incanted a spell and became the much-despised Hanimus.
Her vision turned hazy at the edges. She flattened her palm against an archway to stay upright and concentrated on the illusion. The chief handler’s appearance proved the most difficult she had ever attempted.
A solitary soldier monitored the hallway. When he saw Gilene lumbering toward him as Hanimus, he straightened from his indolent pose and saluted. Her luck held when she gestured for his keys. He dropped them into her waiting palm without question.
Azarion regarded her from the cell’s narrow window. Gilene unlocked and opened the door, stepping aside just in time as the gladiator rushed the opening. The guard had no chance to cry out before Azarion grabbed his head and snapped his neck. He dropped to the ground without a sound. The years of traveling to Krael’s capital and witnessing its casual cruelties had left Gilene hardened to many such sights, but her stomach still roiled at the sound of cracking bone.
Unfazed by the killing, Azarion stripped the soldier of his breastplate, helmet, and weaponry and tossed the body into the cell. He caught the keys Gilene tossed him with a nod of thanks.
Torchlight cast his sublime face in sharp relief, transforming it into a skeletal mask made even more macabre by bestial-bright green eyes. Gladiator, Pit fighter, he’d probably shed enough blood to fill a dozen washtubs.
A jagged ache pressed needles into her right thigh, hip, and lower back—the first warning of the agony to come. She flinched and surrendered her illusion of Hanimus with a moan.
“Woman?” Azarion gave her a puzzled look.
She ignored him, intent on escaping the city before the price of her magic brought her to her knees. She assumed the illusion of the old slave again and turned her back on Azarion. “Our agreement is met, gladiator,” she said over her shoulder.
“What is your name?”
Fresh air and the promise of escape gave her tired feet wings. “Forgotten,” she murmured as she hurried away from him.
His gaze burned holes between her shoulder blades as she fled back the way she came. An invisible fire licked at her leg and back, slowing her stride and making her whimper. She cast off all illusion just as she escaped the catacombs. By the time she merged into the flow of foot traffic on the narrow streets, she limped.
Sanctuary, personified by her two brothers and a pony cart, waited at the nearby Fell Gates. Nylan’s face twisted into a fierce frown when he saw her. She was so close. Each year she fell into his arms and sobbed on his shoulder as he and their younger brother, Luvis, settled her into the cart for the trip home. This year would be no different.
Sick with pain and desperate to reach her siblings, she barely heard the thunder of hoofbeats or the panicked shouts of the crowd behind her. Nylan’s horrified expression and Luvis’s shouted “Gilene, look out!” made her pivot.