Cormal stared down at his toes until he realized that he couldn’t totally feel them anymore, and then he yanked them out of the water. He frowned down at the wrinkly skin and wondered how anyone anywhere thought that water was a better element than fire.
He conjured a flame to dry off his feet, which took longer than just using a towel, but he didn’thavea towel because he hadn’t been expecting to have a bath. He also hadn’t been expecting to lob a fireball at a prince today. There could still be a dungeon cell with his name on it.
Had Prince Kinan genuinely thought that Cormal needed to calm down, and this was the best way he could think of to make him do so? Where he’d been safe and secluded and no one had made a fuss? Or by the time Cormal got to dinner, was everyone going to know that he’d lost his temper in spectacular fashion?
He was feeling extremely cautious by the time dinner came around, but Cormal had promised himself that he would always go to the dining hall unless he was dining with the royal family. Brannal hadn’t always attended, especially once Perian had been here, though they’d come more at the end. (An opportunity for Perian to feed on more than food?) Cormal wasn’t Brannal, andif there was any chance that he was going to build a rapport with the Mage Warriors and Warriors, he needed to spend time with them.
It hadn’t worked yet, but he kept reminding himself that these things took time. (Fire and water, why did you have to wait so long when you were being patient?) He thought of Brannal’s first year of being Summus, of all the work that Cormal and Molun had done to support him and to keep him from falling apart.
He sniffed, swallowed, and told himself that he absolutely did not miss the man, and he certainly didn’t wish that he had someone like that to support him now.
Somehow, Delana telling him that he was an idiot really didn’t have the same effect.
No one seemed to treat him any differently than normal at dinner. Which was, unfortunately, not to say that he was suddenly treatedwell, but he wasn’t treated badly. People were… strictly polite, for the most part. They all called him Summus (asshole), and it was absolutely nothing like the dinners they’d had with Brannal.
Actually, the dinners they’d had with Brannal were maybe a little bit closer to this, although Molun and Arvus had often been there, and Molun with Brannal always had a softening effect. But what theyweren’tlike was the dinners with Brannal andPerian. Those were the ones that Cormal couldn’t seem to stop comparing everything to, even as he told himself that he didn’t want anything like that—how could he, when they represented having a carnalion in their midst, tricking all of them?
There had been a lot of laughter, a lot of happiness, and of all things, what Cormal would have called a lot of energy and high spirits.
It might be true, but is it everything?
Curse the Prince for even putting the thought in Cormal’s head.Yes, Cormal was more than just an ass, but how did thatcompare to actually being a carnalion and being able to suck the life out of people? Surely that was vital enough to overcome everything else?
Cormal’s conscience prodded him a little.Hewas capable of killing people, and he couldn’t truthfully say that he was perfectly capable of controlling himself at the moment. If the Prince hadn’t been the one to find him, Cormal might have seriously injured someone, or even killed them, if things had gone really wrong.
Perian had sat in the dungeon for days, and he’d never actually tried to escape. Cormal had been perfectly prepared to burn him to a crisp the instant he felt anything like a drain of his energy. He’d kept his distance as best he could, but there had been moments when he knew he was probably too close. Not once had Perian attacked. Not when they were in the corridor together, not when they were alone in the room when Perian was pulling energy from other people—not enough to harm, just enough to help the Prince and Princess.
Cormal had lived in the castle since he was six years old; he was more familiar with the rhetoric than probably any other novice who’d ever come up through the ranks of the Mage Warriors. They knew everything there was to know about demons, didn’t they?
Then why was Perian such a cipher? Why was he so different from what they’d been taught to expect? It wasn’t just people’s collective stupidity and the man’s ability to seduce them, was it? He couldn’t seduce the entire castle, surely, even though Cormal had accused him of that at one point.
But if that was true, if that was part of theeverythingthat Cormal had apparently not been paying enough attention to, then what did it mean? Where did that leave them? Were they picking apart his father’s legacy and breaking the very foundation upon which the Mage Warriors had been built? Andif they didthat, what would they be left with? What could they expect from the Mage Warriors and the Warriors who protected the country?
Surely, nothing was worth that risk. Surely, one person, no matter how much he’d managed to weasel his way into the hearts of the people around him, wasn’t worth making that sort of change.
On top of the risk of tearing down their whole foundation and starting over, what if they werewrong? What if they took that monumental risk and then Perian proved to be just what Cormal feared? What then? Would that not truly be the destruction of everything?
Hedidfeed from humans. Hehadkilled a man. (A terrible man. But still.) That couldn’t be forgotten.
But is it everything?
He realized that he was staring down at an empty plate. He didn’t remember eating anything. Unsurprisingly, no one had noticed his introspection, and he made his way back to his room feeling more alone than he had in a long time.
That tends to happen, a snide voice said in the back of his mind,when you drive your oldest friend off and turn most of the people in the castle against you.
He went to his father’s workshop again and safely lobbed fireballs, because at least no one got hurt when he did it down here. Then he spent another few hours going through every book that talked even vaguely about magic, trying to come up with an answer to the impossible question.
How did they make the Princesolidagain?
It was an absurd question, really. Cormal had felt absurd writing it to the Head Mage at the Great Library. But he was sure the Prince didn’t feel it was silly. Cormal thought of those booted feet untouched by the water. The Prince had been unable to interact with the external world since he was sixteen yearsold. That was an unconscionably long time to have gone without human touch. And Cormal was deeply afraid that there was nothing he could do to change that. But he wouldn’t give up.
They were all looking through the books. Every single Mage Warrior was scouring every book on magic that they had in the library and the workrooms and the store rooms and every private book that any of them owned. The Queen had ordered them to find out how to help her son, and they were doing every single thing they could to make that happen.
Every single thing?Cormal’s conscience pricked him again. There’d been someone who’d helped him, and Cormal and the Queen had banished him.
Books. They were looking through every tome ever written by any Mage or Mage Warrior in history. Unfortunately, a lot had been lost in the Great Cataclysm. The burning of a large part of the Great Library had meant that there were texts that were gone forever and could never be recovered, but there were still thousands of books, and no one had read them all. They might be a pain to read in the Old Tongue, but it would be worth it if they could discover anything that might help them.
It felt like a losing battle, though, this fight to find a way to affect a human body when the entire basis of their understanding of elemental magic was that theycouldn’tdo that. The elements could interact with the world around them. They could affect the outside of a person’s body (burn it, wet it, cover it in dirt, blow up against the skin, and so on), but they couldn’t do anything inside a body—and he couldn’t imagine what they could do when there wasn’t a body at all. Life Magic had been able to heal human bodies, but Life Magic had been lost since the Great Cataclysm. All they had now was Elemental Magic, and the Prince demonstrated every day how none of the elements could touch him.
