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Ark scrambled for an escape route, for any way out of these powerful stones without falling on the dark saints' wrath. But maybe it was worth the risk, to get Maia out, to get Azrail out before they could be killed.
"This is dreadful," the grey-haired saint sighed dolefully, leaning against the bloody stone-turned-doorway and crossing his arms over his embroidered jacket. "I'm bored; just kill them already."
Maia bared her teeth on a hiss. Ark edged closer, not daring to look away from the saints to see what was happening with Vawn and Jaro. If they were smart, they'd have fled the circle. If that was even possible.
Ark had to try to get his mate out. There was a three percent chance it would work, but he clung to that pathetic chance. It was better than zero.
"If you're so bored, Samlyn, get lost," the Eversky replied with her teeth bared—wicked sharp and threatening.
Samlyn. The Provider—saint of food and survival. No wonder the farmland had withered. Ark locked down his expression as he realised other signs had been there too—the storm of the Eversky. But what had the saint of knowledge's arrival done to the Saintlands?
Ark wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
He tried to exchange a meaningful glance with Bryon, but the man's glare was fixed straight ahead, his lip curled.
When Maia lurched forward again, her eyes sparking with destructive fury and her breaths broken, Ark grabbed her waist and heaved her off her feet, spinning to the closest gap between towering stone. She clawed and struggled, refusing to go, but Ark ignored the blows that hit his heart and pushed her away from the stones—
Into a barrier.
His eyes met Maia's, but he didn't see a reflection of his dawning horror at being caged. He only saw black, endless rage.
"Tedious," the Provider drawled.
"Oh,fine," the Eversky sighed, and flicked her fingers with an indolent gesture. "Such a spoilsport," she huffed at the grey saint as Ark, Maia, and Bryon crashed to their knees with raw screams. Beside Azrail, Kheir whimpered with the same torment, the sound pleading.
Ark hadnevermade a sound like this before, had never felt pain like this carving through his skin into his blood, letting it well up on his arms and hands, cutting shapes he was in too much agony to understand. Nothing compared to the sound of Maia's scream of rage, to the way it cracked and broke in the middle, to her helpless cry when she hit the ground, grasping at her throat.
Iron. Ark didn't know how he knew, didn't know what fell magic the Eversky had, to fill their bodies with iron with a flick of her fingers, but he knew it as certainly as he knew the saint's identity and that Ark wouldn't taste freedom for a very, very long time.
"This is why fae were a bad choice," the Hunchback Saint commented, but with sick satisfaction, like he loved the screams of pain.
Ark growled, fury tangling in his throat. He didn't have the energy to even reach for Maia, for whatever good it would do when they were caged. His face smacked into the mud and he bared his teeth, panting through the blinding pain. He could have borne down on it, found a way to think around it, if it had been in one place, but the iron filled his blood, his skin, his bones, until he wasdrowningin it.
"This is why they were agoodchoice," the Eversky snapped, her footsteps sloshing through the muck—but not towards them, Ark realised with relief. "Beastkind are more of an issue. But not without their own weaknesses," she added, her voice muffled when Ark howled at a surge of torture in his veins.
He couldn’t do this. Couldn’t bear it.
Just … make it stop,he pleaded with his inner saint.
"Pull the princess out of the mud," the Eversky said casually. "I want her to see this."
"This is gonna be so good," the Hunchback saint breathed with sick satisfaction.
Ark's stomach roiled. What were they doing? What was worse than iron torture? He twisted his fingers in the muck, scrambling for purchase, panting brokenly as another wave of pain struck.
He had his own saint magic. He was a saint reborn, even if he wasn't as impossibly powerful as these three. He wasn't weak,wasn'thelpless. He told himself this as he flattened his palms into the dirt and pushed—and stayed exactly where he was in the muck, his arms useless.
But Maia hissed, throaty and full of panic, and the bond between them seethed with protective rage. Ark remembered too damn slow that healing magic lived in his core. Not saintly, but valuable all the same.
Finally, a barely-there voice whispered inside Ark's mind as he sank inner hands into his well of power and grabbed hold of it.
Cold, static tingling began in his hands, allowing him to push his face out of the mud when Maia's soul drenched with horror and true, undiluted fear. He got to his knees, panting for breath, the iron still making every part of him hurt but not paralysing him as long as he gripped his power.
The Eversky wasn't near Maia, but across the circle, smiling a predator's smile as she held a circlet over Jaromir's head. Ark hadn't seen Jaro kneel, hadn't seen what happened to Vawn, but now the man they'd come to rescue stood against the tall, cracked stone, expressionless but tense with blood on his chin. Afraid—Ark was good at reading people, and that was fear he saw in the man's posture.
Because heknew, because he realised what the circlet was long before Ark did. Maia knew too, hissing and crying through the pain of iron in her body.
Ark only realised what the circlet truly was when the Eversky sneered at Jaromir and snapped it around his throat. It wasn't a crown; it was an indenture.
