He balled his hands into fists and narrowed his eyes. “Elea is different.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Then you do not know her.”
“She is my sister,” Cyrene said casually. “I would think I know my own sister.”
“She is strong where people believe her to be weak. Kind where people expect her to be cruel. She knows how to defuse situations. She is cunning and imaginative and beautiful,” he spat. “She is not like the other sheep who cower. She leads.”
Cyrene paused and took a closer look at Kael. And not just considering the words pouring from his mouth, but the way he’d said them. The way the darkness seemed to recede just slightly. The way the mention of her sister seemed to almost…calm him.
“Are you in love with her?” Cyrene whispered.
“Jealous?”
“No,” she said softly. “Curious. I had thought it all a game. But you speak of my sister as if she was precious to you.”
“She is,” he said easily. “It is why she has been in my circle since you abandoned court.”
“You mean, when I threw you into a wall and knocked you out,” she asked haughtily.
“If that is how you want to remember it.”
“Ah, alternative versions of history. Same old, same old.”
“Our armies are on the battlefield while we stand here, bantering. I thought that you would want to get down to it,” he said with a raised eyebrow.
Cyrene shrugged. “In a moment. I have to think that you released the damper on our bond for a reason. That you wanted me to find you here. You purposely chose the Ring of Gardens. And you probably even sent the Voldere so that I would arrive here alone. Am I close?”
“It felt fitting.”
It did.
Being here with him where it’d all started did feel fitting. Like the Circadian Prophecy had always predicted it would come full circle.
“I remembered something recently,” she told him.
“What is that?”
“When I came here for Reeve’s Presenting and he was selected into the High Order, you looked at me.”
“Did I?”
“You did. I was young. Only thirteen at the time, but I felt drawn to you all the same. Do you remember that?”
He froze, and their eyes met. “Yes.”
“Did you know when I came for my Presenting what I was?”
He nodded. “I knew when you were thirteen. When you stared back at me across the throne room. I’d received my father’s book the year before after he passed. I knew about magic then, and I could sense our connection.”
“I thought as much.”
“Why do you bring it up now?” He matched her steps as she circled the marble pavilion.
“This has been going on a long time, Kael. Don’t you think it is odd that it came down to us? To the second son of a king and the third child of two lords. We wouldn’t be who I would have chosen.”
“Viktor was the second son,” he said with a shrug.
“Was he?” Cyrene asked, stopping in her tracks. “I didn’t know that.”
“He mentions it in his book.”
“Huh. I’m not sure if Serafina was the third in her family, but it would make sense.”
She paused, considering what that meant. The ramifications that even their birth order was fitting. How it all seemed like divine intervention to get them to this moment, two thousand years after the first bond had been put together.
“You are stalling,” Kael said, his voice low.
“I am trying to put the pieces together. To figure out why we are here. Why this must happen,” she told him.
“That doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered, Cyrene. All that matters is that we are here. And I will defeat you.”
He withdrew his sword from the sheath. Shadowbreaker hissed as it was released. The Tendrille steel unyielding. The ruby bright red in the hilt that called to her and begged for her magic.
“That is my sword,” she bit out.
He smirked. “Then come and get it, Domina.”
She assessed him. The growing cloud of magic. No more but no less than he’d had in Tiek when he attacked her in the throne room. He hadn’t had blood magic. Or at least, nothing of significance in a while. He hadn’t killed Elea or Alessia or Kaliana. He had no advantage against her, as Malysa had ordered him to take. They were evenly matched.
She settled into a fighting stance and removed her Hohl blade from its sheath across her back. It was a beautiful weapon, forged of the same metal as Shadowbreaker. Both of the weapons hummed to her in greeting. But she would get back her weapon before this was through.
“That does not belong to you,” she said, raising her sword. “You stole it, and you will give it back.”
Kael lazily swung Shadowbreaker before jumping down off of the marble pavilion and engaging her. Their swords clanged against each other. Hohl meeting Tendrille. The metal of the gods from two different continents connecting for the first time. It was glorious, if not completely frustrating.
“You will have to tell me where you got it,” Kael said, bringing his face close to hers. “It’s perfectly balanced.”
She snarled and yanked back, throwing her weight around and bringing her sword in again. But this battle was never going to be won with swords. Kael was the better swordsman. He had been training since he was a child. He could dance circles around her.
The sword was just an extension of her magic.
And she intended to use it that way.
When their swords came together again, she unexpectedly slashed downward and then threw her magic into the form. The ground beneath them shook. The perfect concentric circles wavering as she worked to destroy it. And Kael.
He fell to a knee as he tried to regain his position. But then was quickly back on his feet and jumping toward her.
His eyes had turned from their beautiful blue-gray to something much darker and more sinister. The gray taking over the irises and turning them a murky, disconcerting color.
“We could have been on the same side,” he snarled as he threw a blast of darkness at her.
She pushed through it with a slice of her air magic. “No, we couldn’t.”
Then she threw a shower of flames at his face. He ducked and rolled effortlessly, bringing his sword up. She was a half-second too late. Shadowbreaker traitorously cutting through the sleeve of her fighting leathers and drawing blood in a crisp line down her arm.
She cried out and then hit Kael with an energy blast.
She ignored the pain that now lanced down her left arm. Glad that it wasn’t her dominate arm. That she could still hold the sword and control her magic.
Kael had moved backward a scant few feet, but Shadowbreaker had dispelled much of her magic. “You try to deny me, Cyrene. But it always comes back to me. Always.”
“That is because you are a homicidal maniac,” she shrieked at him. “We come back together over and over again because you keep trying to kill me and everyone that I love!”
“You are delusional. We could have ruled side by side. Our power would have been infinite.”
“I’m delusional?” she asked derisively, dodging his next blow and opening up a wound on his thigh. “Do you even hear yourself?”