“I am.”
Silence hung cold and telling. A sardonic smile twisted his lips at the quiet weight of their stares.
“Then, you’re the only one of us who deserves to be in here,” the gray-haired man finally said. Several bitter voices expressed their accord in epithets. Sarai might do the same.
He smiled humorlessly. “I’m here to release you.”
A woman squinted. “Why’s that? You want us to owe you?”
“My Petitor wants you free. I happen to agree.” He turned to Florus. “Do you have a copy of the Corpus?”
“Every volume.” Nervousness seemingly gone now, the Praetor looked curious. “What laws will you be using?”
“Most of them.” Weighing the sentences the dead could have received for their quasi-criminal behavior against the time their killers had already served, would shave their sentences down to years of house arrest. “Bring the volumes on sentencing to their trial.” Kadra tilted his head toward the imprisoned group.
Florus’s eyes cleared. “You’ll tout them to anyone who disagrees.”
“And you’ll keep my past to yourself.” He seized their gazes and held them until most of the group flinched back. “That life is gone.”
“It’ll find you when it’s ready,” a man spoke in an odd tone, irises widening to cover his sclera. “You should have been ready too.”
Ten fucking hells.Kadra surveyed the series of eerie ear-to-ear smiles and dark sclera that slowly bloomed on the inmates’ faces. It was no wonder that Sarai hadn’t wanted to be here. Behind him, the chorus of fervent pleas to the Elsar told him that Florus’s vigiles didn’t either.
Only the Praetor seemed to be in awe. “Divine revelation.” He reverently made a note of it in the prison’s record book.
A howl of laughter cut through Kadra’s turbulent mind that sounded suspiciously like Wrath’s. The gods, he decided, were a menace.
“Blindfold and gag them when you bring them before the town,” he ordered to Florus’s squawk of outrage. “Not everyone takes well to revelation. Your heretic priestess should be proof enough.”
A second laugh sounded in his head as he left the prison for the town square. It was only much later, midway through eleven dozen cases in front of an irate crowd, that he realized that the laugh had been female. And distinctly bitter.
Long hours later, he stripped off his robes and tunic and slid into bed beside Sarai’s sleeping form. She unconsciously curled into him, a habit borne of months in his arms. He wondered whether he would soon live off these memories once she knew the truth.
Her brow creased in sleep, distress twisting her features. Loathe to wake her, he smoothed those troubled lines and painted a row of kisses over her cheeks until relaxation overtook her face. A surge of affection choked him to breathlessness. The gods could offer him every seat in their Bright Realms, yet this was the only one he craved.
“Kadra,” she murmured half asleep. “I keep seeing someone else’s dreams. These poor boys.”
Her last such dream had been eerily similar to his past. He wondered if Petitors could pluck memories out of another’s head unconsciously.
He cradled her against his chest. “They’ll survive.”
His use of the word seemed to rouse her fully. “But isn’t that the problem? How many survive without living?” She prodded his chest. “You don’t either.”
I owe you too great a debt for that.He took her mouth in a languorous kiss, tasting the soft skin of her neck and feeling her toes curl against his feet. “This,” he lovingly nudged her nose with his, “is living, is it not?”
Gold eyes glowed. “Perhaps,” her lips grinned against his. “But so is this.”
He reluctantly allowed her to pull him from bed and onto the balcony. Holding her from behind, he wrapped the sheets around their bare bodies.
“Look!” She angled her chin up.
Thousands of stars spilled over night’s ink ribbon sky. Even larger masses of rose-streaked gas formed oblong clusters behind them, around them, between them. Nebulae of a thousand striations in hues of sunrise, each larger than the world on which they stood.
Something tightened in his chest. He hadn’t seen this in years. Edessa’s thousands of oil lamps dimmed the sight.
“That constellation,” she pointed at an oblong circlet of stars tilted haphazardly in the east, “is what we in the north call “the Slingshot.” See that bright star just outside its reach? That’s the—”
Pebble.
