Dawn of Ash (Imdalind, #6)(24)

“Was your task completed?”

I knew he was speaking of Sain, and I smiled, the poison in my spine tightening in a heavy exhilaration. There was a reason I had been rushing to return to my father, and it wasn’t because he had called for me.

“Yes.” My voice gave everything away as my heart rate moved into a torrent of thunder.

I expected him to reply, to demand more information, but instead, he drank, smiled, the maniacal greed I had seen in his eyes so many times before taking over. It filled me as it did him, increasing my excitement.

“He gave you something.”

“He did not mean to.” My lips twitched into the smile my father always brought on, my own eagerness to tell him mounting.

“Was it the location of Ilyan’s camp?”

“No. You know as well as I do he cannot give that. Not that we would use it, anyway. We need those brats alive.”

He looked at me with a scowl, his displeasure obvious. My heart constricted at the possibility of failure before steadying again. Even though I might never be able to give him what he truly wanted, I already knew I had something better.

“I saw the sight,” I gasped, pulling his attention, “the one he’s been hiding from us, the one concerning Joclyn.” I leaned toward my father as he did me, the screams and catcalls erupting around us at the start of the next battle. The shock of what I had admitted sat heavily between us. “When I was standing in the field, the water inside of me pulled me into it—his recall.”

Despite the sound of the fight that had begun, despite my chest heaving with the excited breath, all I heard was silence, all I saw was the look of stunned shock on my father’s face.

His eyes darkened to a color I hadn’t seen before, the depth of them almost black, the bottom of an endless pool of death. A look of longing took over his face, making the fear spread into me in an electric way that made me feel alive.

“What did you see?”

“I saw you standing with Joclyn as companions at the banks of the deep wells of Imdalind. I saw Ilyan’s death. I saw the Vil?s, untarnished, sweeping through the city in joyous revelry. I saw you and I and Ilyan sitting with Joclyn on the four-headed thrown, the one that was destroyed in the seventeenth century.”

“But that is not what he has told us. Are you sure it was true?” His words were slow, calculated, the pits and all the bloodshed not so much as pulling his attention anymore.

“What I saw, what the poison within me showed me, was nothing like what I had seen before. Yet, from what he was speaking of, from what the magic told me, it’s true. What I saw is what the sight always was. Even from the beginning. Sain changed it somehow. He changed what he saw before he gave the sight to Ilyan, before he showed it to me. I don’t know why, but what everyone thinks is true … is not.”

I could barely get the words out as the fear knotted through my shoulders with each shade my father’s eyes darkened.

“What are you saying?”

He already knew the answer. He just needed me to say it.

He needed me to unleash the anger.

A cheer broke through the crowd that surrounded us, the sound deafening as it filled the canvas tent we sat in. I didn’t know if someone had won, if someone had died. I didn’t bother to look. I didn’t dare break away from my father and the eagerness in his eyes.

“Sain has been playing us all—all of us—all along. But I have seen what’s coming. We have the upper hand.”

The eagerness in his eyes faded to anger, the flame in them moving to an aggression that rippled over him, tensing his shoulders as he turned away from me, looking back to the two small figures who battled in the pits below. Their frames were so small and fragile I was sure they were children.

“Did you see enough to know what he is planning?” I barely heard his grumble above the roar of the crowd, the sound almost incessant now. Something must have happened; I could smell the blood in the air.

I just didn’t care.

“No. I saw enough to know what the real outcome is … or, rather, what it was supposed to be.”

“Supposed to be?” He jerked toward me, his eyes wide as he questioned. “Do you not think that it will?”

Utter disbelief ran through me, shock at the unexpected question. He had never asked for my opinion.

Never.

And yet, there we sat, surrounded by the dust of battle, the smell of blood and sweat heavy as the question lingered between us.

Nerves and anxiety infected me with the simple question, the emotions growing worse by the minute.

“Sain prides himself on his infallibility. He has always been vocal about that. But even he could not believe in his own ability if he is giving false sights to those who seek his council.”

A small, feminine scream rang out from the pits before the boisterous yell of the crowd drowned us as my father turned to me, a grimace spreading over his face.

“Unless he believes that, by giving out whatever information he chooses and preaching of its truthfulness, it thereby will become.” Edmund had put the outcome together before I could, his words poignant as he turned back to the pits, watching the two children—a boy and a girl—as they clawed and pulled and battered each other in an attempt to draw more blood.

“Ovailia.”

A pleasurable ripple moved up my spine at the sound of my name on his lips. I sat up a little straighter, letting my hair fall down my back as I scooted closer to him, eager to hear what he had to say, eager to be what he needed me to be.