“Will what I did last?” Perian asked anxiously.
She glanced at him and then back at Kinan. Finally, she said, “I cannot say for certain. But I think not.”
Cormal stiffened, and Kinan’s face was a mask, trying to give nothing away.
“Can I keep doing it, then?” Perian demanded. “If… if he seems to be fading or something?”
“…Perhaps,” she conceded after a moment.
Trill asked, “But I’m right that he will always be threatened by demons?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered immediately. “Wraiths, nightmares, carnalions. Even the lesser demons will be attracted to so much exposed energy. Unlike the other demons, they cannot draw it out without harming the living host, but there is no living host to get in the way. The energy is simply… available.”
Fire and water.It was everything Cormal didn’t want to hear. Well, it sounded like Perian might be able to keep helping Kinan, and Cormal knew that he would, but it wasn’t… it wasn’t at all what he’d hoped for.
“You said that energy is meant to be contained. Is there nothing that can be done to get his body back?” Cormal asked desperately.
“Nothing that I am aware of.” She considered for a moment. “Well, perhaps a Life Mage could direct his energy into a new host.” Her smile wasn’t particularly nice. “Of course, you’d need a newly dead body for that.”
There was an explosion of sound around the room as they took that idea in. No way to get Kinan’s body back, but they might be able to put him in another one?
“How sure are you that it would work?” Cormal demanded.
“I am entirely uncertain. To my knowledge, the situation has never occurred before.”
“Whoa, we can’t justfinda dead body!” Molun protested. “Where would you even look?”
Brannal asked the practical question. “If the body died of natural causes, would the Prince be safe in it?”
Yannoma shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Well, what if someone was fatally injured but then Perian or Trill healed them afterwards?” Molun asked.
“For it to have any hope of working, they could not be long dead,” Yannoma said.
Perian turned to look at Molun. “You mean I could have saved them but didn’t because we wanted the body?”
Molun made a face. “Oh, no, of course not—”
“We shouldn’t be hasty,” Arvus said, his voice a calm rumble in the somewhat frantic room.
Trill, Brannal, and Perian all started talking at once.
There was another option, though, wasn’t there? There was almost no chance they would be able to find the body they needed through any random chain of events. No, they’d either need to kill someone, which no one in this room was prepared to do, or—
How weird would it be for Kinan to have a body again but have it not be his? He’d carried his sense of self with him through all this time of being energy. His body had grown with him, and now he wouldn’t have that?
But he’d be able to touch again. Surely, they could figure everything else out—the Queen, the succession, all of it—if Kinan were whole.
Cormal swallowed and turned to Yannoma. “I volunteer.”
The room went eerily silent.
“What?” Brannal demanded.
“I volunteer,” Cormal repeated, not looking away from Yannoma, though he could feel the weight of everyone’s eyes on him. “I’m young and healthy, and we both know that you can drain me. Take my energy out so that Perian and Trill can put Kinan’s energy in.”
There was another brief moment of silence, and then the room exploded in exclamations and protests.
