She nodded. “We were.”
He’d been doing a good job of ignoring the cold, but now a chill crackled down his spine. “You caused the ice storm, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she replied simply.
His gaze flicked again to the young man beside her, eyeing him now with intense curiosity. He was very tall, with a strong jaw, amber-colored eyes, and dark blond hair long enough to brush his shoulders. The boy eyed Magnus with interest, an eyebrow raised.
“Who are you?” Magnus asked sharply.
“I am Kyan.”
“What are you doing with my sister, Kyan?”
He cocked his head. “Many things.”
Kyan’s short, disrespectful reply infuriated Magnus, but he held his anger tightly to his chest. “Where’s your new husband, Lucia?”
“Alexius is dead.”
He snapped his gaze back to her. “What?”
“He’s dead. He and Melenia both.”
Melenia. The powerful Watcher who’d visited his father’s dreams, advising him to build a road that would lead him to the Kindred. Up until now, Magnus had assumed that the king was still impatiently waiting for her to contact him again.
It seemed King Gaius’s days of immortal guidance were over.
“Were you the one who killed them?” Cleo asked from several paces away. Magnus tensed at the sound of her voice.
“One of them,” Lucia replied calmly.
Magnus knew how powerful Lucia’s elementia was, but he also knew that it was often uncontrollable, so much that she’d been afraid of it. She’d worried that her magic had made her evil, but he’d always reassured her that nothing about her could ever be evil.
Did he still believe that?
Lucia looked sharply to the other princess. “I’m surprised to see you here, Cleo. I was certain you’d be long dead by now.”
“Alive and well, thank you,” Cleo replied through gritted teeth.
“Magnus,” Lucia said, turning back to him, “you should take more care in selecting your company. That girl will put a dagger in you the moment your back’s turned.”
“Trust me, I’m well aware of that,” he said with a nod.
“And yet you let her live.”
“I believe she could still prove useful to me.”
“I disagree.”
He ignored Cleo’s soft grunt of disgust. “Why are you here, Lucia?”
She raised a dark eyebrow. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
Her chilly demeanor, coupled with her emotionless admission that her precious golden Watcher was dead, had put him on edge. This wasn’t quite the brother-sister reunion he’d imagined, nor was this the same Lucia he remembered. “You just told me you didn’t know that I was here, so clearly you’ve come home for another reason entirely. What is it?”
“This isn’t my home,” Lucia said, glaring at the palace with displeasure. “It never was, not really.”
“You’re wrong. This is as much your home as it is mine.” He eyed Kyan with wariness. “Why don’t you and your new friend come inside, where it’s warm?”
With his right arm still bound in a sling, he reached for her with his left hand, but Lucia stepped backward and closer to Kyan.
“Not just yet,” she said.
Magnus’s hand dropped back to his side.
“We’ve been told that, somewhere on these grounds, there’s an ancient stone wheel,” Kyan said. “I want to see it.”
A stone wheel? Immediately, the wedding gift Lord Gareth presented to him during their royal tour came to mind. The lord had boastfully claimed that the ugly wheel carved out of seemingly ordinary rock was a valuable piece of history with ties to the Watchers.
“You must have been misinformed,” Cleo spoke up before Magnus could reply.
Magnus turned and frowned at her, their gazes meeting for a brief moment. He swore he saw a silent warning move through her cerulean eyes.
Don’t tell them anything.
A glimmer of a memory flickered in his mind, a connection he hadn’t made until this very moment. The Auranian library was home to a much more diverse collection of books and topics than the Limerian library. Over the centuries, ever since Valoria had ruled, Limerian kings had ordered many volumes about legends, goddesses, the history of elementia to be destroyed. However, various radical groups had managed to salvage an impressive number of books, sending them down to be part of Auranos’s vast collection, where they would be safe.
Recently, Magnus had taken to reading everything on the subject of magic that he could find. It was the least he could do after the king had revealed the shocking truth that his mother was not Queen Althea, but his former mistress, Sabina, a scheming witch whom Lucia had killed.
If this was true, Magnus needed to know what it might mean for him, what effect this witch’s blood could have on his life and his future.
Magnus had read that there once was a time when immortals were able to come and go from the Sanctuary as they pleased, in both hawk and human form. Some of those immortals carried on affairs with mortals, and some of those affairs resulted in children. Because those children, and their children’s children, were the result of an immortal pairing, they all potentially held a small amount of elementia within them. Those who possessed those traces of magic were witches, and the vast majority of witches were female.
Too bad. A part of Magnus had been intrigued by the possibility that he might have traces of magic within him.
But this was unimportant at the moment. What was important was the memory of an illustration he’d found in an ancient book, which depicted the gateway the immortals used to enter Mytica from the otherworldly Sanctuary.
A gateway that looked a great deal like a stone wheel.
He cast another glance at Princess Cleo and narrowed his eyes.
Just how much do you know about this, princess?
“Princess Cleo is correct,” Magnus said after several moments of silence. “Your information is faulty. Don’t you think you’d remember such an object if it really existed here, Lucia? You spent sixteen years wandering these grounds at my side. Remember?”
Lucia and Kyan exchanged a look, grave and filled with silent understanding. When she returned her attention to Magnus, something in her expression had softened. Her lips curved into that sweet smile he remembered so well.
“Of course I remember,” she said. “We had such a wonderful childhood, didn’t we?”
“The parts that included you were wonderful.” He hesitated. “I know you can’t forgive me for . . . many things I’ve done. But my only wish is for us to find a way to move past these mistakes. One day I hope you can see me again as you once saw me—as your brother and your friend.”
“What an unusually sentimental thought for you, Magnus.” She raised an eyebrow. “But are you certain that’s all you want from me anymore? A chaste friendship between siblings and nothing more?”
His heart had begun to pound. “Lucia . . .”
She drew closer and took his face between her warm hands. “The knowledge that you loved me so deeply is the only truth I’ve held on to in the last weeks. I was a fool to deny my feelings for you all this time. I see that now.”