crouched beside the portal, reaching toward the starry sky of his home.
My heart twisted, ached, the cracks of grief splitting wider. I slid along the tub’s edge, careful to keep weight off my ankle, and reached down. Taking his hand, I pulled it into my lap and held it tight. For a long time, I sat there, holding on to him in the only way I could right now.
His fingers twitched, startling me from a pain-filled doze. I looked down.
His eyes cracked open. Dark irises stared at me.
“Sahvē,” I murmured, using the same demonic greeting he’d once given me, weeks ago on another occasion when he’d been recovering under the hot water.
“Sahvē.” He blinked slowly. “I am not dead.”
“Ezra arrived right as …” I couldn’t bring myself to reference Zylas’s near death. “Eterran healed you.”
He frowned. “Saved by a Dh’irath? I do not like it.”
His chest moving with slow breaths, he closed his eyes. I squeezed his hand, worried that his skin felt cool despite the hot water splashing over him.
I inhaled deeply. “Zylas … tell me about Ivaknen.”
“Ivaknen? Why?”
Zylas crouched at the portal’s edge. Reaching for it. About to leave me.
“Because I want to know.”
“Now?”
“Why not now?”
Grumbling, he straightened his legs as much as he could in the tub. “When a Dīnen is summoned, his vīsh … the power of Dīnen, it thinks he is dead. It goes to the next Dīnen. If he returns home, the vīsh will not come back to him. He cannot be Dīnen again, but he cannot swear to new Dīnen.”
My mouth quirked down.
His dark eyes slitted open. “Ivaknen are older than Dīnen. They have respect, because they survived. They have had victory over the hh’ainun. To be Ivaknen is to have pride and power.”
“That … doesn’t sound so bad,” I suggested, struggling to interpret his grim tone.
He tilted his head toward the spray of water, letting the hot droplets run down his face. “Ivaknen have respect, but they have nothing else. No place to be, no House, no purpose.”
The word sparked in my mind, as though I should understand something about the way his husky voice ground through the syllables.
“Some Ivaknen find a purpose. They have sons or give advice to new Dīnen. But other Ivaknen wander. They wander and wander, nowhere to go, nothing to do.”
My hand curled around his forearm. “But you still want to go home? Even though you’ll no longer have a House?”
“Var.”
“Why?”
His dark gaze slid to me. “What else can I do?”
My breath caught. I could see my neat handwriting on a notebook page, a translation of Myrrine’s journal entry: He looked at me with sadness, with a resigned heart, and asked, What else is there?
I forced myself to breathe. Ignoring my crumbling heart, I pressed his hand between mine. “If you want to go home, I’ll make it happen. If those sorcerers could open a portal, so can I.”
“Their vīsh did not work properly. It tore the īnkav and then it broke.”
“Something wasn’t working right,” I agreed. “But we’ll figure it out.”
He studied me for a long moment, then relaxed against the tub and closed his eyes. His fingers curled around mine, and I held his hand against my stomach, trying not to wonder how long this closeness would last before he was gone … forever.
I stood over my link chart. Socks had knocked the flashcards askew, but they were close enough to their original positions. Claude’s name sat in the middle, the short list of facts I knew about him mocking me.
I lifted his card out of the arrangement and set my pen to it. Jaw tight, I added new notes.
Stole grimoire pages to open a portal.
Forced Zylas into a contract.
Involved with something called “the court.”
What is his goal???
I underlined the last line three times, then added a star for good measure.
Claude’s goal. His ultimate aim. Whatever it was, it was driving everything that had happened to me since my parents had died. My fear now was that Claude was getting close—dangerously close—to achieving his goals, and I still had no idea what his plans were.
Whatever he was up to might not have anything to do with me. Maybe our paths had only crossed because of the grimoire, but the grimoire was my responsibility, and he was using the stolen pages. Not to mention he’d killed my parents, and I wasn’t about to forgive and forget.
I replaced the card in the center of the chart, then pressed my pen to the one where I’d detailed the