Page 131 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

As Julita lets out a soft snort, my gaze jerks to him. “What?”

“I thought I should check,” he says. “You didn’t want to before, and then you left quickly afterward. With everything else that’s happened, I can’t tell if the way you act with me has changed.”

I suppose it’s a reasonable question, Julita says.

Is it? It seems so absurd that it takes me a moment to pull my words together. “I kissed you. It’d be pretty ridiculous for me to have a problem with it.”

Rheave lifts his shoulders in a slight shrug. “In my observations, limited as they were, humans frequently get upset about things they did themselves. Sometimes they’re happy and then upset about the exact same thing in very quick succession.”

He looks down at his chest as if peering through it to his heart. “I’m only starting to understand how that could be.”

Julita outright laughs. And that’s a very reasonable point. The daimon has gotten quite wise.

I think he’s been wise all along, just in ways the rest of us weren’t used to.

I shake my head to answer his initial question. “I’m upset, but it’s nothing to do with you or anything I did with you. My head is pretty full with all my worries about my magic.”

Rheave knits his brow. “If you don’t use it anymore, then you should be fine, shouldn’t you?”

“We don’t really know that yet. And… it’s not that simple.” I make a face. “When I was refusing to use it before, it started eating away at me. Sulla said that if I’d kept suppressing it, my magic would have killed me. I’m supposed to find a balance… Just little things now and then. But I don’t know if I’ve already gone too far for that to work.”

He lets out a dismissive sound. “You’re still all right now. A little shaken up, but you sound like yourself.”

“That might not last if I keep tapping into my magic. Especially if I can’t keep a tight rein on it when I do. It’s like… It’s probably like the hold the scourge sorcerers have on you. You don’t totally control the magic that made you, so you never know when it might fuck things up.”

Oh, Ivy. Julita stirs at the back of my skull, her tone full of compassion. I’m sure you can still find a balance. The gods have to see how hard you’ve been working to set things right.

I’m not convinced that the gods have much say in my sanity. Kosmel hasn’t offered any solutions other than sending me to Sulla.

Rheave is quiet for a moment, absorbing the comparison I made. His voice drops even lower. “That is an awful thing. I wish we could break you free from your worries the way we’ll hopefully destroy the sorcerer who can affect me.”

I let out a rough chuckle. “No chance of that. This power is all in me. I can’t get rid of it, but I want… I want to be more than my magic.”

Those words reverberate through my body. The truth of them hits me like it hadn’t quite before I said them aloud.

That’s all I’ve ever wanted, isn’t it?

But even when I roamed through Florian, dipping in and out of people’s lives as the Hand of Kosmel, the power I was refusing to use seemed to taint everything. Knowing I had to keep it secret. Knowing my entire life was forfeit the second anyone found out that one detail about me.

Rheave grabs my hand and squeezes it tight. “You are more. If you asked me all the things I admire about you, I wouldn’t even consider your magic. Do you think mostly about the scourge sorcerers when you look at me?”

After all this time, I barely associate him with the fiends who made him.

I grip his hand in return. “No. They didn’t have anything to do with the parts of you that matter.”

“And your magic is the same.”

I can’t quite accept his statement that easily, but hearing him say it so firmly takes a little edge off the ache inside me. I drag the cool winter air into my lungs, and they don’t clench up against the breath.

Rheave doesn’t push for my full agreement. He simply walks on with me, his thumb trailing across the back of my hand in a gentle, continuous caress. Showing he’s here with me without expecting anything of me.

He was once a spirit creature with hardly any understanding at all of what went on between humans, let alone their darkest fears. And after that, he acted like a pedantic jerk in the grips of the scourge sorcerers’ control.

Somehow he managed to grow so far beyond his origins that it’s hard for me to imagine him being anyone other than the fierce and caring man beside me.

As the sun rises higher and the air warms from chilly to merely cool, not the faintest tingle of outside magic grazes my skin. I keep my senses alert for any hint of it despite my inner turmoil.

Hmm, Julita mutters as we prowl onward. Where did the fiends run off to so they could lick their wounds?

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