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“Inota isn’t a mage, strictly speaking.”
Conrad frowned. “A dragon, then?”
“Definitely not. She hates dragons. No offense,” Cato added, glancing up and down the table apologetically. “But she’s not a mage the way I am. No innate gift with artifacts, no power beyond—well, beyond the obvious.”
“That’s not true,” Callan said, shaking his head. “She guided us through the Fog. And there’s all the jewelry Conrad confiscated—”
“None of this has any power,” Cato said, gesturing impatiently to the pile of rings. “She wears them for show. As for navigating the Fog, that’s just a focus trick. Anyone can do that. My question is, how come none of you realized she wasn’t a dragon? You knew I wasn’t a dragon the minute you met me.”
“I wondered that myself,” Lana broke in, brow furrowed. “She—she feels like a dragon.”
Callan could feel himself growing impatient. “Maybe these are all questions someone could askher,” he pointed out.
“And risk having her escape? Leaving us to a war with the Mage’s Guild?”
“She could have done that in the forest,” Callan snapped, aware he was being unforgivably rude to the Prince and not caring. “The portal was right there, but she chose to stay. She chose to reveal herself, to let us take her prisoner. That has to mean something. Please.” He took a deep breath. “Please, let me talk to her. She’s my soulmate.”
There was a long silence then. Prince Conrad was looking at him hard, his expression betraying his reluctance… but Callan also knew that the Prince was thinking of his own soulmate, of what he’d gone through to have her at his side.
“Go,” Queen Lana said finally, breaking the silence with one decisive word. He looked up at her in disbelief. “Go and talk to her. If there’s anyone who might still be able to find a way out of all this, Callan, I believe it’s you.”
Conrad looked very much like he’d like to argue with her, but as always, he deferred to the Queen’s authority with a slight inclination of his head. Callan rose to his feet, thanking the Queen breathlessly, already impatient to see Inota again. Saying it in front of the Queen and her council had only reinforced what he already knew to be true. Shapeshifter or not, the many-faced woman in that cell was his soulmate, no matter what she looked like.
The trouble was, as had been made abundantly clear, she was also his sworn enemy.
Chapter 26 - Inota
Yet another prison cell, Inota thought, curling into a ball on the low bed in the sparsely decorated room she found herself in. Oddly enough, this one felt more comfortable than any of the others. Maybe it was the fact that for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t thinking about how she was going to escape. That particular ship had sailed the minute that portal in the forest disappeared. She’d made her choice, for better or for worse.
Worse, of course. She’d revealed who she really was to the very dragons she’d hurt the most. Honestly, it was a wonder that Conrad hadn’t seen fit to break both her arms while he was escorting her to the prison cell—it would have been the least she deserved. It felt oddly peaceful, lying here in the cell. She’d imagined that she’d feel terrified, knowing that the Mage’s Guild was coming and she’d given up her one chance of escaping them. But all she felt was calm. The worst had already happened. In a weird way, she was free.
It surprised her when Callan came to see her. She’d been resigned to never seeing him again after that final betrayal, but the smile on his face when she rose to meet him, though tired, was real.
“I made this up,” she said softly, gesturing to the face she was wearing, the one he knew best. “This isn’t a copy, this is…”
“I know.” He stayed on the other side of the bars. Understandable, she supposed, though a desperate, greedy part of her wished he’d come into the cell and hold her in his arms again. She was lucky he was even talking to her, she scolded herself.
“I wanted to tell you.” It felt a lot easier to talk to him now that she’d given up all hope of escape. A strange lightness to her voice that hadn’t been there before. “I wanted to tell you everything, not just pieces of it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t risk letting you know that I was with Haspar, I knew you’d never forgive me. I tried to tell you as much of the truth as I could, really, I—”
“Why are the Mage’s Guild after you? You’re not a dragon.”
“No,” she said, feeling her chest ache. “No, I’m not. I’m—I’m something else.”
“A human.”
“Not for a long time.” She closed her eyes for a minute. This wasn’t a story she was in the habit of telling. Part of her had always wondered if she even could. But when she looked at Callan, she knew she had to try. “When I was small, my village was attacked by dragons. Some dispute over territory or something—we never found out what it was about, only that they used our village as a battleground. Dozens of them came in one day, disguised as traveling humans. Then they shifted and fought.” It was a curiously distant memory, like it had happened to someone else. In a way, it had. “It lasted all night. We all hid inside. Half the buildings in town were damaged or destroyed, and our house was the worst of them. A dragon fell out of the sky and crushed it. I was inside when it happened. They didn’t care. They resolved whatever dispute they had, and then they left. There’s not even a record of the battle in any of their records. I checked.”
She took a deep breath, pressing on. “It was a wonder I survived, they told me—it was only my brother running inside to drag me out that saved me. Eventually, I wished he hadn’t. Our village healer did his best, but my legs never healed right. I could barely walk without agonizing pain. Couldn’t carry anything. Couldn’t work. And I was another mouth to feed, a burden they couldn’t afford.
“A few years after the attack, a traveling mage came through town, and my brother begged him to heal me. But there was nothing he could do. He’d been my family’s last hope, and I could see how it crushed them that he couldn’t fix me. So I hid myself in his wagon and stowed away. He didn’t find me until we were in Hammerfall, at the Mage’s Guild.”
“Was that Devere?”
“No,” she said, smiling faintly. “No, I met him when this mage was shouting at me for what I’d done, telling me there was no place for me at the Guild. I said I didn’t care, that he could heal me or kill me, his choice. Devere made me an offer after that. Said that if I didn’t mind dying, he could offer me something. Money for my family if I’d participate in an experiment.” She pulled the pendant out from beneath her robes, running her thumb over the familiar gemstone set in its face. “Devere was an Artificer. This was his masterwork. He said he’d made it from an ancient dragon relic he’d stolen. Mages are forbidden from working with shifter magic, of course, which is why he couldn’t experiment with the approval of the Guild. So he gave it to me.”
“And it healed you?”
“It obliterated me.” She could feel her body trembling, feel the curious disassociation that looking at the pendant always brought about in her. “The moment he put it around my neck, my whole body burned away. But I was still awake, somehow. Eventually I remembered…” She stretched out a hand, watching the skin warp and shift before her eyes. “I remembered how to be. I used the magic of the artifact to form myself. Devere was… I’ve never seen someone so full of joy in my life. It was beautiful.”
