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A rasp creeps into my voice. “I don’t want to be what I am. I don’t want this power. I don’tuseit—I haven’t been using it—I tried everything and there was nothing else, and he was going to destroy the city. I managed not to hurt anyone but him.”
Which would be a first.
The other participant in our standoff, the ghost who’s an uninvited guest inside my head, pipes up a little shakily.Ivy, you’re… you’re riven?
I hadn’t wanted to say the word myself. I don’t see the need to answer Julita. Even to a minor noblewoman who’s barely been outside her own county and the capital city’s royal college, the source of my godless magic must be obvious.
Stavros’s sword hasn’t wavered. He makes a scoffing sound. “And you expect us to believe you? Of course you’d claim all that now that you’re caught.”
It’s a battle already lost. The riven are reviled throughout the continent, and Stavros hates magic like mine more than just about anyone.
Still, I can’t stop myself from arguing. “Other than just now and keeping myself fromdyingyesterday, I haven’t let my magic out in seven wretched years. I’d snuff the power right out of me if I knew how.”
But the problem is how I’m torn already. The cracks in my soul that let endless magic seep through me, taking and sacrificing without limit if I give it free rein.
Alek finally speaks, his voice thin. “Riven sorcerers go mad with their power. It consumes them. That’s what always happens.”
I swallow thickly. “Well, apparently it’s possible to at least delay that outcome for a while, if you’re stubborn enough. Why do you think I’ve been refusing it? The magic would like me to bring it out every blasted moment I could. You can be sure it never shuts up about how disappointed it is.”
Casimir eases up a step, his deep blue gaze gone pensive. “Is it because of your magic that Julita… Isthathow her soul ended up inside you?”
Julita’s presence shudders in the back of my skull.Gods above, maybe it is.
I answer both her and the courtesan at the same time. “I don’t know. I didn’t use any magic when I tried to save her. If I had, she’d be alive and we wouldn’t be here right now, and somehow I don’t think you’d be upset about it then.”
Stavros’s lips draw back from his teeth in a silent snarl. “You wielded the power meant as divine punishment in the greatest temple in Silana—in the All-Giver’s own fucking tower. Don’t try to take the moral high ground.”
My jaw sets on edge. “If the gods had a problem with it, I don’t think one of them would have been egging me on.”
“What?” Alek blurts out, swiping his messy black waves back from where they’d shaded his eyes.
“He told me to use it after I was stabbed. Practically ordered me to. I would have let myself die otherwise—I didn’t even exactlyagree—and he spoke to me again just now—”
Stavros cuts me off with a sputter of a laugh. “Youareinsane. If the gods even noticed you were here, they—”
Then his voice dies too, with a widening of his eyes and another subtle twitch to refocus his sight. At the same moment, Alek and Casimir freeze all over again.
Alek’s lips part in apparent shock. Casimir’s eyebrows jolt upward.
A tingling sensation like a waft of magic brings my own gaze down, to the spot on my chest they’re staring at. My pulse lurches.
The skin between the torn flaps of my bodice was bare a moment ago. Now a godlen sigil shimmers there, an unearthly glow against the thickening darkness of the night.
Two lines arch from a central apex, with two smaller points poking from their peaks like little horns.
Kosmel’s sigil.
Well, I figured he was the most likely of any of the nine lesser gods to support my riven magic. The godlen of luck and rebellion is known to appreciate a little chaos.
But I keep staring at the glowing mark just as the men are, my jaw gone slack. That’s divine magic shining against my body.
Like I’ve been claimed, without any say in it.
Kosmel must be trying to help my case here. If he didn’t want me dead from a knife wound, he won’t want me ending up with a noose around my neck either. He’s confirming my story.
Part of me recoils all the same. I didn’t ask for this—I purposefully skipped my dedication ceremony. I’ve avoided the attention of our deities in every way I know how.
My soul’s been ravaged by godly retribution enough without anyone else sticking their divine fingers in.
