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“Implying that I am?” Doran’s voice oozed menace. “You’re the traitor. Betraying your race to uphold Fey supremacy. Doing their bidding like some groveling errand boy.”
Did he hear himself? Did he hear how insane he sounded? “You’re mad.”
“Am I?” His expression seemed glazed with insane purpose. Alight with the rightness of his zealous obsession. “The true Fey have spent millennia gathering all the power for themselves. We Other left with the dregs and expected to be satisfied. No more. With the goddess blade, I’ll create my own race. A power to rival the Fey.”
His words echoed in her head like a pounding surf. Over and over. Pushing their way past her defenses. Was he right? Was she really only a lackey for the Fey? A cat’s paw doing work too menial for the true Fey to bother about?
He nodded toward Cam. “Should I begin with lover boy here? My first Undying?”
Panic snapped her gaze to Cam. “No!”
The one word crashed through the fog of Doran’s spell.
She shook her head violently. Pounded her forehead with her fist to jar the overpowering persuasion of the leveryas from her skull.
He sought to try his tricks on her. And naive her, she’d almost fallen for it. “Andraste will never allow it. She’ll send her forces over. Drop the walls between worlds to stop you.”
“Let her try.”
“You’d doom us all to death?”
“Join me and there will be no death. No defeat. Only domination.”
“I don’t deal with traitors or murderers.”
Doran’s lips twisted in a smug, cruel smile. “A shame. But have it your way.”
His words barely ended before his spell flung her backward like a puppet on a string, smashing her against the wall, lights bursting in her head for the second time tonight.
If Doran had been formidable before, now freed of the constraints placed upon him by the Amhas-draoi, he’d become unstoppable. The black magic he drew on could only have come to him through the Morkoth, the blade a conduit for their evil sorcery.
Blood dripped from her nose, her mouth. She wanted to scream, her body slowly breaking down under the force of Doran’s power. But she refused to drop into the deep well rushing to meet her. Instead she met and matched Doran’s attack with her own, stunning him with a counter spell, disrupting his hold on her.
It lasted only a moment, but long enough for her to throw herself across the room. Sweep the lamp off into the drapes. Feed the flames with a quick bit of household magic until they roared to life. Climbing the curtains. Spreading over the bed. The crackle growing to a roar.
She crouched by Cam’s side as the flames rose around them, lapping at the rug like an orange-red tide, waiting for her moment. It had to come soon. Or by flame or by Doran, she and Cam were dead.
Her chance came as the fire leapt from the window to the ceiling beams, devouring the old wood in seconds. Smoke and ash floated into Doran’s eyes, caught and smoldered in the wool of his coat. The flames forced him back, and the pain in her body eased, the poison of his magic withdrawn.
It was now or never.
Using both the invisibility of the feth-fiada and the sleight of hand of the sprys-maclioar, she hugged Cam to her while projecting the illusion of them both prone on the floor as if Doran had struck them down.
Screams and running footsteps sounded in the corridor and the rooms to either side, muffled by the snap and snarl of the growing blaze. Black smoke clung to her hair, her face. Singed her lungs with every breath she took. Blisters rose on her arms, her cheeks. Self-preservation hammered at her will as she dragged Cam through the heart of the inferno toward the window.
She’d never attempted anything like this before. Her brain felt split in half, thinned to a veil’s thickness. One miscalculation and the weaving of spells would unravel. Their attempt to escape revealed.
Men pounded on, then forced open the door to the room. Shouting. Cursing. Buckets lo
ng past being useful.
Doran spun around, meeting them head-on. “Quick. There are people trapped in here. I’ve tried getting to them, but the fire’s too hot.”
Alarm and terror, grit and desperation. The emotions swirling through the inn stole between the cracks of her consciousness as the firestorm rose higher. Yet Doran stood, silent after his initial outburst, content to watch the figure he thought was her burn, his pale eyes empty of all but death.
The ceiling buckled as the window behind her shattered, sending shards of glass into her face, slicing her hands and arms. But no one saw that. Or heard her shout of pain. They saw only the bodies she wanted them to see, blackened and withered. They heard only the groan of the floor beneath their feet as trusses weakened and snapped.
At last, Doran lost himself among the crowd just as Morgan shoved Cam over the windowsill. Out the window. His body slid free into the darkness, and she slithered after.
