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“You can command him to save you. He will be bound to obey.”

“And then what will happen to him?”

“Hard to say exactly. The Aeons will decide what he needs to do, I think. What I am proposing is rough old magic. Its effects cannot be predicted.”

“Could it kill him? If I do this?”

Vane pauses a moment, thinking. “Perhaps. If he resists. But I doubt he would.”

Kerik looks at Perl in the ice cell. The memory of being chained in such a place is sharp. He cannot bear the thought of Perl suffering that. “It will get him out of there?”

“Of course. He cannot save you from a cell in Vylenor.”

“But the wards on Vylenor. The power it takes to move through them.

Vane waves a hand in the air. “I imagine that type of simple magic would easily be overridden by your obvious latent power combined with the connection you have to Perl.”

“So, what do I do?”

Vane makes a sudden sound, a cry of pain. He doubles over, breathing hard. And then he’s fading. The gold chains around his body glow brighter and Kerik can almost see the magical ties that bind him to Ulla, forcing him back. For a moment all that s left of Vane is those chains, glowing in the air. And then they are gone too.

Kerik still holds the silvered glass. He looks at Perl. And with no other idea of how to do this, he whispers, “Perlash-zeren-ai, I command you to save me.”

He feels a familiar warm pleasure in his body. And the silvered glass goes black.

27

PERL

Perl is suddenly not in the ice cell. He is sure he heard Kerik’s voice a moment ago. He looks around for him. But there is no Kerik here. He still has the iron cuff on his wrist. He has no magic.

How did he do this?

He is standing on a deserted street. It’s late at night. The air is cool. It’s winter. He recognises the style of the buildings around him. This is Attar. He is back in the Jewel of the Empire.

And before him, Sanglora Manor.

28

DAMON

SANGLORA MANOR, ATTAR

Damon sits at the small table in the room beneath the eaves of Sanglora. Candles and fires are lit in the middle of the night.

Lyr sits on Damon’s lap. He has come around from his swoon, but he is still shaky with fear. Damon can feel it. Lyr’s flesh under his hands through the thin fabric of the chiton. Usually, to feel Lyr’s body is sweet. But not now.

What precisely Lyr fears, Damon knows not. But over the past moons Lyr has become more and more controlled by his growing dreads. He has bad dreams, Damon knows, far more bad dreams than he tells Damon about, leaving him hollow-eyed when waking. And even when Lyr wakes shaking in the night and Damon rouses beside him to pull Lyr into his arms and whisper sweetly against his raven-wing hair, Lyr often refuses to speak of the nature of his night terrors.

Damon does not know how he can soothe him. He is attacked in his dreams by the ghosts of things that happened to him before he ever met Damon. Damon cannot change Lyr’s past.

And Lyr cannot look at Perl. For his part, Perl does not seem to want to look at Lyr. Although neither of them has said why. When Damon asked Perl if he had met Lyr before he said, “Not exactly.”

“And what do you want with me?” Damon says.

Perl gives Lyr the tiniest of glances. “Jareleezi has Kerik.”

Damon feels Lyr stiffen on his lap. He wraps his arms tighter around him. “Jareleezi. The witch who tormented Lyr?” The last Hevelikar.