Page 56
“And the Dark?”
“The space between. The distance beyond. Every threshold where one thing ends and another has yet to begin.” His midnight nails trail across the petals of a night bloom. “The distance your light must cross before it reaches anything at all.”
A chill moves through me.
Nyctarian pauses, half-turning toward me. “Tell me, Brother-King. How fast will the Courts mobilize to come to the aid of a realm they have always considered lesser than their own?”
“Not fast enough.”
“No.” Bitterness creeps in. “And I will not wait to be consumed at the leisure of those not yet in danger.”
Unease prickles up my spine. “Consumed?”
“Surely your wandering offered some insight.”
“Into what?”
“Must I provide all the answers, Silver Flame?” He continues down the path of night blooms without waiting for me. “If one were to study those who have vanished, a pattern might emerge. Certain qualities shared among them. One might even begin to see a preference.”
His steps never falter. “And then your brother came along and ruined a perfectly elegant theory.”
My feet freeze on the path. “How so?”
“Keep walking,” Nyctarian commands without pause. “We are almost there.”
I step up alongside him. “How did Elionn change what you believed?”
“As you observed, my healers are absent. Only the one I summoned home from your sithe remains, and only because I locked him in the dungeon.”
Nyctarian’s mouth twists into a smile laced with too much bitterness to pass as amusement. “Once I recognized the pattern, I warned the others. Restricted their movements. Put every safeguard I could devise between them and whatever had taken those who came before. But one by one, they vanished.”
“And you believed their healing magic was the reason.”
“It was the most obvious commonality.”
“Until Elionn.”
“Until Prince Elionn,” he agrees. “Your youngest brother carries Nyt’Fall blood through his mother, but none of its celebrated gifts. No healing magic. No particular affinity for the craft. Yet still, he vanished.”
“Which should have disproved your theory.”
“Should have.” His lips curve. “Unless the fault lies not with the theory, but with our assumptions about your brother.”
My brow furrows. “Elionn is not a healer.”
“So everyone tells me.”
“You think he has dormant abilities?”
“I think he is the son of a Nyt’Fall princess who died bringing him and his brother into this world.” Nyctarian continues along the path. “It would be rather arrogant of me to declare what gifts her blood did or did not pass to them when the Silver has never coaxed those gifts into bloom.”
“If such a theory holds merit, then the commonality remains that healers are going missing.”
“So I thought.” His lips purse. “But then there is the matter of your wildling.”
The way he says the last word raises the hair along my arms, as if he has somehow caught on to the trick we played with our glamour. But no one can see beneath the magic I wove.
Not even Nyctarian.
