Page 53 of The Prince's Mage

She could not stay in Areator. But what if she was too weak to pull off her plan?

It was time to face the facts.

She wasn’t going to recover. She was never going to even reach the minuscule strength she’d had before. It was a lost cause. She always had been.

And it changed nothing. She would either be granted the miracle of being able to pull her plan off or she would die trying.

Chapter19

MARCELLA

Three mornings later, Gavril opened the trunk and pulled the Heart out, setting it on the table in front of Marcella. She raised an eyebrow and looked up at him while Aimilia had her notebook ready. Marcella said, “You’ve already looked at me and the relic a thousand times.”

She still hadn’t told them the name of the relic. They hadn’t asked. Based on what she’d heard from Nikias earlier, she didn’t think they fully understood what a relic was.

They couldn’t. They were Inimicus. Not even Gavril, despite the fact that he’d been learning the High Priestess Hagne’s prayers.

“I’m not going to be the one looking this time,” Gavril said. Instead of taking the seat beside her, he sat across from her once again. He held his hands out, palms up over the Heart, and gestured for her to stretch hers out as well.

Marcella rolled her eyes and did so. Like always, she followed Gavril’s instructions, casting a rune to create a little ball of pure vitae and holding it in her hands, and to her surprise, so did Gavril, with his people’s rune and two hands instead of her one. Aimilia immediately cast the rune she’d been using to observe and measure Marcella’s vitae levels and immediately started scribbling down the results.

Gavril and Aimilia spoke back and forth in their language so fast and technically Marcella couldn’t follow it, but the more they spoke, she could see a grin starting to spread on Gavril’s face and after a few more phrases, Aimilia was smiling as well. “—finally ready.”

“—way to know is to try,” Aimilia said and nodded at Gavril.

Gavril turned to Marcella with the grin still all over him and said in her tongue, “You can drop your rune.”

Marcella did so, sitting back in her seat. “What did that prove?”

This was the first thing Gavril and Aimilia had actually gotten excited about. She didn’t know if she should be concerned or relieved.

Aimilia had told Nikias they were close. But close to what? And even if they were, Gavril’s parents wouldn’t listen to it. They wouldn’t listen if Asentai herself appeared before them and told them there was no corruption in the clan mages’ vitae.

Gavril pushed himself out of his seat and said, “Everything.”

He then lifted one hand, tucking the other behind his back and closing it into a fist. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and then started casting.

With one hand.

Marcella gasped as his vitae lit up the air in the shape of the rune she had just cast. He was casting with one of her people’s runes.

And then, a tiny, wobbly little mushy ball of vitae hovered in his hand beneath the rune he had just cast. A rune that was impossible for him to cast.

Aimilia let out an excited, shrill laugh and clapped.

Marcella’s chair fell over as she stumbled back out of it. Her eyes didn’t leave the rune and vitae hovering in the air above Gavril’s hand. The rune wasn’t quite right, a little sloppy and lopsided, which was why the ball of vitae wasn’t a perfect sphere.

Gavril banished the rune and his vitae vanished into the air, and there was a little bit of sweat forming on his brow, but he was otherwise beaming brighter than the sun. He started rattling off in his language immediately, “—knew it. I knew it—the secondreligo—I was right. Ha!—time I was right—hasn’t been for nothing—did it—secret—our magic—none—ever did!”

Aimilia immediately picked up her notebook and started running for the door. “I’ll get Nikias. This can’t wait a second longer.”

Everything was moving too fast for Marcella. She was still staring at the empty air where Gavril’s rune had been. A clan rune cast by an Inimicus hand.

That wasn’t possible.

Just like it wasn’t possible for her to simply summon a fire by speaking and flicking a closed fist without her fingers moving to cast a rune the way the Embrai Elemens did. Just like it wasn’t possible for an Embrai Elemens to move their hand and speak the right word and instead of creating fire move the earth like the Stonai Elemens did.

They were incompatible.

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