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Lucia looked down at Magnus’s sling. “Poor brother. That looks painful. Ever since her, your life has been filled with so much pain. This only proves that you still need me.”
“Of course I need you,” he agreed.
“Shh. I need to concentrate.” She placed her hands atop his damaged arm, pressed down gently, and poured healing earth magic into him.
His knees buckled in response to a sudden blaze of pain, so similar to the sensation that overcame him when he was moments from death in the Auranian battle, and he collapsed to the ground, gritting his teeth and trying not to cry out.
When the pain finally faded, he squeezed his hand and bent his elbow, barely believing that the break had been healed and his arm felt just as strong as ever. He looked up at her with awe. “Thank you, Lucia.”
She slid her fingers up into his hair, tucking it behind his ears, as he pushed back up to his feet. “Now, my darling Magnus, look at me.”
He smiled and did as she asked, but then—with no warning, no movement on his part—he was overcome by a sort of dizziness that pulled his mind backward into what felt like a dark and endless abyss. Suddenly, it was as if Magnus couldn’t look away from her familiar bright blue eyes, even if he wanted to.
“Where is the stone wheel?” Lucia asked.
Immediately, the answer rose up painfully in his throat, summoned by the utmost need to tell her the truth, but he managed to swallow the words back down, each one as sharp as a blade.
“Don’t resist,” she said. “Please, Magnus, for your own good, don’t resist this.”
The unrelenting pressure of a thousand vises clamped down on either side of his skull. “What are you doing to me?”
“Tell us where the wheel is,” she said again.
When he resisted, a thick, coppery taste flooded his mouth and he gagged.
“Lucia . . .” he sputtered, and blood spilled over his bottom lip.
“What are you doing to him?” Cleo shrieked as she drew closer again.
Lucia didn’t move her gaze from Magnus. “Quiet.”
“You’re hurting him!”
“And if I do? What would you care? Magnus, please stop resisting my magic and tell me the truth, and this will all be over in an instant. Where is it?”
He couldn’t hold back any longer; the pressure—the pain—was far too strong. The words rushed forward. “The far . . . side . . . of the labyrinth. Near the cliff’s edge.”
She nodded, her eyes bereft of pleasure. “Well done.” She turned to Kyan. “That’s only a hundred paces from here.”
“Lead the way, little sorceress.”
Resisting the overwhelming compulsion to speak had been torture unlike anything Magnus ever before experienced. He dropped to his knees and braced himself against the ground, his chest heaving, as drops of his blood stained the white snow.
“We’ll be back shortly,” Lucia promised him, before she and Kyan began moving toward the wheel.
Cleo took hold of Magnus’s arm. “Get up.”
“I can’t,” Magnus heaved through heavy breaths.
“You must. We need to follow them. If this has something to do with the Kindred, we need to know.”
“Leave him,” Nic said. “We can go by ourselves.”
“What did you know about the wheel before today?” Magnus snarled at Cleo, wincing at how strained and weak his voice sounded.
“Next to nothing,” Cleo said. “But if a sorceress and her strange new friend want to find it badly enough that they’d resort to magical torment to wrench the truth out of you, then it has to be important.” She knelt down and roughly wiped the blood off his chin with the discarded bandages from his arm. “We’re not allies and we never will be, but now Lucia has shown herself to be an enemy to both of us. My ring—the ring that now sits upon your sister’s finger—had a strange reaction to that wheel the last time we were here. I’m afraid of what it might do today. Now get up. If Nic and I approach her without you, I’m sure she’ll kill us.”
“Cleo . . .” Nic protested.
