Chapter Twenty
The room flickers out of existence around me, replaced by the temple from my dream. I hear a whirring, slicing sound, the sound of wheat being cut. It’s right behind me, approaching fast, just about to cut right through me—
Then the hallway snaps back into focus.
“Sylvie?” Taran is standing over me, his hand beneath my nose, checking to see if I’m breathing. “What happened? Are you alright?”
“I…I think so. You didn’t see that?”
“See what?”
“The temple?”
Taran’s eyes widen in concern. “I think you hit your head when you collapsed.”
“I collapsed?”
“We need to get you to a healer.” He helps me to my feet and tries to lead me away, but I stop him.
“I need this torch.” I reach out for it again, but I feel its hum of warning this time. “You want Ronan, don’t you?” I ask it.
“Sylvie, you’re not alright. Please.”
I understand why he thinks that. I’m talking to a torch. But it feels like Ronan. It wants Ronan. “I’ll bring you to him. You can sense him on me, can’t you?” A small hum of recognition. A barely perceptible flash. “But you need to let me hide you, or they won’t let me take you.”
It recoils at the suggestion, feeling just like Ronan being upset at someone daring to tell him no. “Just for a little while. I promise.”
Taran is pacing wildly, increasingly distressed. He’s debating going to get help, but then he’ll need to explain what we were doing down here somehow, and it would be much easier if I’d just come along, and…
I’m sensing Taran’s feelings.
“Is that your doing? Or is it me?” The torch doesn’t answer. I’m not sure that it knows. “Will you let me take you? He’s about to pick me up and drag me away.”
The torch hesitates, and then it gives an affirmative flash. I reach out once more with my shadows, and this time, it allows me to snuff it out.
It allows it, but it doesn’t make it easy. The strain on my magic isintense. I’ve got minutes, maybe, before I’m drained at this rate.
“You could make it a little easier, you know,” I say as I pull it from the torch holder on the wall. When I remove it, I see that it’s made of a different wood than the others, and there are carvings in a language I don’t know near the bottom. “Full of secrets, aren’t you?”
“Now will you come?” asks Taran. “Gods, he’s going to kill me if something’s wrong with you.”
And Taran’s concerned himself as well. Aww, Taran. We’re friends now.
“I’m alright,” I say, following after him. “I swear. This torch is connected to Ronan’s magic somehow. He’s meant to have it.He isn’t hidden here. I can sense where he truly is now that it’s snuffed—we’ll find them in a laboratory near the entry hall.”
Taran shakes his head, unsure what to make of what I’ve said. “You didn’t see yourself when you collapsed. You were talking in some other language; your eyes rolled back in your head. I thought you were going to die.”
“I’m alright,” I say again. “I can’t explain it, but I know it won’t hurt us. Although I’m losing my magic at an alarming rate. We need to hurry and get out of here, or I won’t be able to conceal it.”
Taran and I race through the hallways and the stairs, all but running any time we turn a corner and find ourselves alone. The torch is cool in my pocket, but the hum of it is slowly increasing.
It wants to be lit. It wants Ronan to find it. It’s impatient.
It has been waiting a long time.
We slow to a walk when we spot Ronan and Hypatia with a group of other alchemists exiting a room that smells strongly of woodsmoke and something herbal.
“There you are,” says Hypatia. “We were just getting ready to send out a search party.”
