spell you did before with the Seran map? Find Vasili that way?” Niko asked.
“I—”
“Spell?” Liam tucked his chin in and raised his brow.
Niko winced. “I’ll get some air, let you two…” He promptly left the room for the courtyard, catching only the occasional raised voice from inside.
Leaning against the sunbaked wall, he folded his arms and tilted his face to the sun. Wherever Vasili was, it was unlikely he felt the sun on his skin. Was that why he’d so often tipped his face to enjoy it?
Niko would find him, whatever the cost. This thing between them, slippery as it was, it mattered. His letter had made that clear.
He cared. And by the gods, Niko cared in return, and it had nothing to do with stopping the flame and everything to do with saving Vasili from everyone and everything that had betrayed him.
Yasir collected Niko a while later and brought him into another small room, this one set up with a candle and map already in place. “Liam won’t be joining us.” Yasir waved Niko’s concern away, clearly not wanting to discuss it.
“He has you figured out.” Niko smiled lightly, hoping to alleviate at least some of the tension.
Yasir smiled sheepishly. “He’s kind and good and wonderful and deserves better. Which is why…” He picked up a candle. “Why I tried to distance myself. That clearly didn’t work. Anyway, let’s get this done.”
As before, Yasir dribbled wax onto the map and said the words, but this time with fresh confidence. When he’d performed the spell before, there hadn’t been any certainty it would work, but this time Yasir knew exactly what to do. He’d been with Vasili on the ship for months. More than enough time for the pair to explore what it meant to be a sorcerer. What other spells had they discovered together?
Feeling any kind of jealously was pointless, but like a fool, he felt it anyway. Although, had Niko spent weeks trapped aboard a ship with Vasili, he’d have probably shoved him overboard.
The small pool of wax shimmered on the map, near the dock, and as the cadence of Yasir’s tone changed, a tendril stretched from the pool’s edge and snaked through Seran’s streets, but instead of wiggling around bends toward the Yazdan house, it veered into the main arterial streets, quickly racing ahead until it crawled from the map and trickled over the side of the table to the floor.
Yasir’s murmurings stopped. “I don’t understand. It should have worked. I’ll try again.” Yasir picked up the candle again.
Niko spread his hands on the table and eyed the waxy trail zigzagging across the map. “We’re missing something…” The line taunted him. “Before he was taken, Vasili said the elves weren’t here by accident. He mentioned you. Do you know what he meant?”
“We saw them at sea, at least we thought we did. One of the deckhands spotted a flotilla along the coastline. Just a handful of ships. Vasili wanted to get a closer look. We watched them a while…”
He trailed off, and Niko prompted, “Was that unusual?”
“It was more the…” He clutched a fist to his chest. “More a feeling inside.” He laughed dismissively. “Sounds like crazy talk, I know, but I felt them watching us, like I sometimes feel Vasili watching. Like there’s something bigger and hungrier than us out there.”
Niko knew that feeling well.
“Vasili didn’t say what he was thinking, but I saw the change in him,” Yasir said. “That’s when he said to go back to Seran… to you.”
“He didn’t say to come back to me, though, did he?”
“Well, no. Because the both of you have convinced yourselves you hate each other when it’s clear to everyone else the opposite is true.”
“I do hate him,” Niko grumbled, looking again at the map. “He’s a pain in my ass.”
“Hm… If only that were true.” At Niko’s glance, Yasir grinned. “You walked right into that one.”
He ignored that comment and Yasir’s faux innocent expression, tilted his head, and eyed the wax trail from a different angle. “There’s nothing personal going on between Vasili and I.”
Yasir laughed.
Niko felt a small smile try and tug at his lips but quickly focused on the trail again and finding that royal pain in the ass.
If the wax didn’t have a direction, why follow the streets? Why not just run off the map? He circled around the desk and knelt where the wax had dribbled from the table. The line continued across the dusty floor, veering in places, and then it