Page 73 of Tempest

“Mislia will forget you,” Summer said.

Drakos whipped round to face her. “I dragged Mislia out of obscurity. If it were up to you, we would be goat farmers and sailors, bowing to the light mages and their false gods.”

“Nothing wrong with goats.” Tanis draped an arm over Summer’s bony shoulders. “And I think you’re wrong, Wizard Iason.” She winked. “The name Drakos will be remembered. After all, his firstborn, Bazyli, is companion to the Starian king, and Hektor Drakos is one of the greatest mages who ever lived. He’ll always be known as the boy who brought down a tyrant.”

“Go home, friend,” Lazaros said to Iason, as he stepped forward and reached down to take the ends of one of Drakos’s chains. “Sleep well.”

Drakos turned his gaze to Iason, but there was a wildness in his eyes now, the fear of an animal in a trap. His voice was low, trembling. “You still have a chance, boy. It’s just an old woman and a slave.”

“You know, Sophie said she was going to teach me how to make a cake,” Levi said, placing a hand on Iason’s back.

Iason turned to him and smiled, feeling the movement tug at the scars on his face. “She did? Well, we’d better not keep her waiting.”

“I think I’d like to try a chocolate one,” Levi said, guiding Iason out of the mud. Iason heard Drakos let out a wordless cry behind him, but he kept walking, focusing on Levi’s hand on his back and the wind pushing him away from the beach.

And as he walked, the killer fell away, left in the mud with Leander Drakos. Iason looked up at the constellations hanging over Mislia, and he didn’t think of the boy who’d lost his sister or the killer who’d lost himself, but of the stars, how bright they were, and the scent of flowers in the garden.

They baked a cake with Sophie. There were too many layers, and they ran out of sugar for buttercream because Levi kept eating out of the bowl before it was done, and they stayed up until dawn with Iason cleaning sand off the floors and Sophie reading out loud from a book of puns while she lay on the counter, Argo peering curiously at her from the sink.

Then they went to bed, where Levi lazily kissed Iason until he fell asleep beneath him, a warm shaft of sunlight stretching across the room as the world moved on outside.

ChapterThirteen

Preparations for the former Archmage’s trial threw the entire settlement into chaos, with Lazaros hurrying to the Archivist’s at dawn most days and only returning long after the sun set. Levi and Iason would see him, sometimes, a solitary figure in black robes walking quickly down the beach. He was still sleeping in the same tent he’d been in when they arrived, despite all the houses that had been made livable. He’d insisted that they should go to families that needed more room, even though everyone looked to him and Summer as thede factoleaders of the new Mislia.

Levi had asked Iason if perhaps Lazaros was a masochist who just preferred discomfort, but Iason had posited that perhaps, after years spent behind the barred doors of a brothel, the tent represented freedom. The idea that he’d never be locked away again was worth more than a bathroom and a kitchen.

“I think he’s just too busy to move,” Sophie had said, shoving some bread and cheese into a napkin and buckling Argo’s harness over her shoulders. Iason had helped her come up with a design for carrying the little water dragon around in something more practical than a metal bucket, and while it was a bit unwieldy, she was pleased with the initial version and already thinking how best to make another. Argo had become so important to her that when Levi told her the other night, “He thinks of you as the most beautiful bubble that could ever be,”she’d burst into tears at the dinner table.

Iason had appeared mildly alarmed at her outburst, but later, he’d sighed and told Levi that he was just going to have to get used to it. He’d filed the paperwork with the Archivist to officially adopt Sophie, and that meant signing up for the whole gamut of her teenage years. She was already in the midst of her first crush—on Daphne and her boyfriend, Paris—so he was certain this was just the beginning of Sophie bursting into tears at the dinner table.

The morning of the Archmage’s trial, Argo managed to flush himself down the toilet. Instead of preparing himself for Iason’s inevitable dark mood, Levi found himself trying to summon a deeply confused Argo backwards through the sewer system while Iason drew on Levi’s power to make a magical net that would grab Argo before he went too far in the wrong direction. Between the two of them, they managed to drag Argo back out of the toilet, where a horrified Sophie promptly dumped him in the tub and scrubbed him clean.

By the time they made it to the square where the trial was being held, they were all in various states of disarray. Sophie’s hair was drenched, Argo smelled strongly of soap, Iason’s chiton was wrinkled, and Levi managed to slip out the door in just a skirt. When they fought through the crowd to where Lazaros and the others were standing by a makeshift barricade, Summer’s grim expression almost cracked in a smile.

“You wouldn’t be left behind, I take it,” she said to Sophie, who shrugged. “Good girl. Sit with us and Tanis will tell you what you missed.”

“I’m not too young for it?” Sophie asked, as Summer wrapped a bony arm around her shoulders. Tanis emerged with a cloud of smoke, sunlight shining on her scaled limbs.

“Not at all,” Tanis said. Iason looked like he wanted to object. “You’ll be fine.”

“So will you, you know,” Levi whispered to Iason. He could see the tension drawing tight in Iason’s body like a rope twisting in knots. “It’ll be over soon enough.”

Iason grit his teeth and said nothing. But when the Archmage was brought to the platform in the middle of the square, looking haughty and superior despite his threadbare robes and the manacles at his wrists, Iason reached for Levi’s hand. Levi took it, squeezing his fingers tight, and heard Iason release a shaky breath.

The trial was a strange thing to witness. Levi had heard of people just as terrible as the Archmage, and most of them either met justice at the end of a sword or avoided it altogether, living long, happy lives free of struggle. Perhaps a mortal watching the proceedings would wonder what kind of gods would allow that to happen, but there were no gods of justice. Even if a god did try to regulate morality in mortals, who would regulate the morality of the gods? Justice was something humans had to enact for themselves.

It seemed like they did it this time, though. Levi sat through an hour of speeches, watching the crowd as the Archmage stared silently into the middle distance. Some members of the crowd seemed distraught, even furious, at the sight of the Archmage in chains. But the rest were simply watchful and silent. It felt as though the entire country was holding its breath.

“Iason,” Lazaros said at last, and Iason jerked to attention in his seat. Sophie, who was sitting next to Summer at his other side, craned around him to give Levi a stern look.

“What?” Levi whispered.

“Go with him,” Sophie whispered back.

“I can hear both of you,” Iason said, and stood. He looked up at the Archmage. “He’s just a man.”

He followed Lazaros up the steps of the platform, and his hand slipped free of Levi’s grip. His footsteps sounded dull and muffled on the wooden boards as he made his way to the witness stand, and the Archmage fixed his cold, hard gaze on Iason.

---