He looked up at Luc, at his hand swallowed by Luc’s much larger one. The Arcana was beginning to fade in the man’s weary eyes. The traces of it running under his skin had already gone mostly dark.
“Do not…,” Luc sighed. “Do not… blame yourself…”
“Evaine said you’d say that,” Rolan half laughed, half sobbed.
“Not… your fault, boy… my boy… my son…”
Rolan frowned. Did Luc think he was talking to Mylas? He thought of the boots he’d flung to the ground, and he felt like the world’s most ungrateful, shameful idiot.
“Tell me what to do,” he begged. “Tell me how to help you!”
Luc only gave a thin, fluttering breath, his hand slipping back to the bedcovers. His eyes shut, the final glow of magic dimming from them, and Rolan watched the faint rise and fall of his chest in disbelief.
This couldn’t be the end.
It justcouldn’t.
Luc was a mountain. He was the sky and the forest. He was vast and eternal and untouchable. He couldn’t be brought down by something as pathetic as Cabbot with a rusty knife!
“Luc,” Rolan whispered. “Luc!”
The Arcanist didn’t open his eyes. Rolan watched his chest, willing it to rise. Willing him tobreathe.
“Luc!”
“Rolan,” Evaine said quietly.
“Do something, Evaine!” He grabbed her satchel and tore it open, rifling through the pots, bottles, and sachets within. “There has to be something here! Therehasto—”
“Rolan!” She shook him by the shoulders. “Rolan, stop!”
Pulling him to her, she wrapped her arms around him and held him as he wept. His sobs welled up and out of him, rattling his ribs, curling up his spine, unmaking him bone by bone. He clung to Evaine’s sleeves and cried himself hoarse, all the while wondering at his own reaction. HehatedLuc, didn’t he? The man had lied to him. Used him. Rejected him.
But he’d also taught him. Guided him. Opened his eyes and his heart and his imagination, seeing him as no one had ever seen him before. It couldn’tallhave been a lie, could it?
“Rolan.” Evaine’s soft voice drifted down like a bird calling from a high wind. “Rolan, look.”
At what? Luc’s body? At the consequences of Rolan’s own stupid cowardice?
“Look,”she urged again.
So he pulled his face away from her shoulder and blinked through a sheen of tears.
A gentle light caught his eye, wafting about in the air. He sucked in a breath and scrubbed his muddy sleeve over his face.
“What is it?” Evaine breathed.
His heart stuttering, Rolan took a step toward the light and held out his hand. The light was coming from a white moth that fluttered to and fro, as gentle as a feather on a breeze. It was no bigger than his palm, its wings delicately transparent.
“It’s a Cryptic,” he said.
The moth fluttered down to Rolan’s open hand and alighted upon his skin, so softly he couldn’t even feel it. Its feathered antennae grazed the pad of his thumb, as if in blessing. It glowed with a silvery-white aura, just like the unicorn he and Luc had spied in the forest not so long ago.
Some precious few Cryptics are born not of shameful secrets,Luc’s voice rumbled in his memory,but noble ones.
Rolan’s heart trembled. His vision blurred with tears. He felt he should pray to the goddess, but didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to give in to hope again, only to have it thrown back in his face. But it bloomed in him all the same, as fragile as summer’s first rose, beautiful and thorny at the same time.
Evaine frowned at the moth, her eyes still wide. “I’ve never seen one look that way before.”
