house. He sensed them like sound, like smell. 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.
Ash.
Fear solidified into a ball of ice in Madoc’s chest.
Ash had come here to get his sister out, just as they’d discussed.
Petros came beside Madoc, a puff of dust rising from his toga as he batted it clean. “I feared for your life, son. They were so angry. So furious with you.”
Madoc flinched. “Where is Cassia?”
Ash’s face fell.
Panic skirted along the edges of his focus. Why are you here? What did you do? Where is my sister? He wanted to shout, but he had no voice.
The anathreia. He could make her tell him. He would pull it out of her.
But it had quieted again. Receded into that hole in his chest.
“What happened?” he managed.
“They came for you.”
Madoc tore his gaze away from Ash to a scowling Geoxus, barely distinguishable from the shadows just behind him. A glow began to emanate from his hand, a phosphorescent rock for light. Its growing brightness cast an eerie gleam over the damage as Geoxus pressed it into the wall.
“Me?” Madoc’s brows furrowed.
“No,” Ash shouted. “Madoc, that isn’t true. You have to listen—”
“Quiet,” Tor warned as a guard raised the blunt end of his spear to strike her.
“It was fortunate you weren’t here!” Petros motioned to the damage around them. “The Kulan gladiators climbed over my wall. We were shocked, caught completely off guard!”
Madoc could feel Ash’s eyes on the side of his face. When his gaze flicked in her direction, tears were glistening in her eyes, gathering dust as they trailed down to her jaw.
Ash and Tor couldn’t have come to kill him. They wanted his help—they’d said they needed him. Madoc had helped Ash. He’d held her grief in his hands, and when she’d seen the real him, she hadn’t looked away. She wouldn’t have betrayed him.