Page 107 of Bloodgrove

Will lowered the cleaver and sighed. At least irritation had replaced despair. He spat the napkin onto the floor.

“Please. Enlighten me.”

Eric smiled. “I can see you trembling. You are afraid. This is what—your third time? Fourth?” He stopped in front of Will, took hold of his chin, and forced him to look up.

Mockingly, he bent closer. “As I said. A pup.”

“There are not exactly many magical architects to learn from.”

“But that is not the problem. You know what you have to do.” Eric took the cleaver from him and lifted the blade to Will’s cheek.

“You simply do not understand why yet. But everything in life has a price. Especially power. Even love.”

Will drew his lower lip between his teeth. “But he already has my life.”

“Then renegotiate.” Eric’s voice softened. “You do not understand the gods yet, any more than you understand magic. When you are back in the Capitol, take your life back. And now ask me.” A gentle smile touched his lips.

Uncertainly, Will leaned his cheek into Eric’s hand and against the cool steel of the cleaver. “Why are you telling me this secret?”

“Because you don’t understand yet that you were a mage long before the god ever offered you a bargain.”

“How do you know?”

“Because this is how it was for me. You know this part of the story—my family lived in the mountains you traveled through by train. We were simple farmers, and we were in danger of not surviving the next winter. My grandmother had died the summer before, but I remembered the fairy tales she used to tell me. About gods who wandered through the mountains, about monsters that were both curse and blessing, and about the mages who hunted them.”

Eric stepped away from Will, leaving him seated on the floor, and looked out across the vast ballroom, the cleaver still in his hand.

“So one night, I slipped out of the house and went hunting for a god. I didn’t even question if I had magic, or if I was strong enough; I just knew I had to save my family. I set a trap, the way they did in the stories. After three days, I caught the god of the Hungry Pack and the Eternal Hunt, and he was amused by the child who had outwitted him, so he listened to my bargain: his power for his freedom.”

Will’s eyes widened. “Then why are you still yourself?”

“Because he did not want more than that. He did not want to be bound to the fragile human body of a half-starved nine-year-old. He only made me more like him by giving me a splinter of himself. But he never made me a mage.

“But with his added magic, I could buy my family passage into Bloodgrove. It nearly killed me—that was the truly difficult part—and you know the rest. Old Duke Ormonde took us in. He recognized my potential and gave me to the King as a gift.” For a moment, Eric’s shadow lengthened, and his fingers twitched as though claws might grow from them at any second.

He glanced back at Will. “Gods are as varied as humans are. And they can fall just as we do.” He held the cleaver out to Will. “But your god never made you who you are; he is just using you to survive. So enjoy the power and remind your god that he is bound to a very fragile, but stubborn vessel.”

Will laughed uncertainly and took the knife back from him. If Eric had managed to save his family, surely Will could make one lousy ballroom for Elodie.

“Should I hold your hair?” Eric asked, entirely his sarcastic self again.

He received no answer. Will already wedged the napkin between his teeth once more and raised the cleaver over his uninjured foot.

Chapter 53

“Where is Eric?” Will asked, looking down at the wedding guests flooding the ballroom in the last light of sunset. He stood with Elodie upon the balcony from which the shadow mage Robert Lake had once fallen to his death and gazed into the ballroom below.

It was perfect.

“He declined weeks ago,” Elodie said with a shrug. “He cannot bear to watch me win.”

Will frowned but did not dare respond. He had considered telling Elodie about yesterday, but in the end had decided against it. In less than twenty-four hours, he would be sitting aboard the train back to the Capitol. Eric’s passion would become a distant memory, Elodie’s curiosity an echo he would miss forever. But those two still had a chance, and he did not want to risk it with his revelation.

Even so, he was saddened that Eric wasn’t here to say goodbye. He had withdrawn with the first rays of sunlight while Will was still completing the final details.

Now the ballroom was too dimly lit for the guests to make out the two figures watching from high above. They turned in circles, marveling, whispering, and pointing, tearing apart every detail of what Will had accomplished. He could still feel the dull pain in his left foot, joining the chorus of wounds across his entire body. His dark red suit hid them all.

“Elodie, do you have my train ticket?” he asked, adjusting the cravat that concealed the bandage beneath it.