An abandoned boy, a grieving prince, and a reclusive sorcerer find themselves caught in a web of peril and mystery...
Domi, a young thief abandoned on the street at birth, just wants to save his dying foster mother. But first, he must survive the m...
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It was like Domi blinked. He just blinked, and everything changed. A different place surrounded him than where he had been drinking tea an instant earlier.
He gasped and jerked so hard he almost fell off the chaise where he found himself sitting.
Except that wasn't right. He had not been sitting on a chaise but in his bed in the greenhouse cottage. Domi lifted his hands—his empty hands—and stared. A moment ago they'd held a mug. He had just taken a sip of the pain-deadening tea Sidus gave him in the pre-Brightening crimson light.
Now there was no tea. No tea, no Sidus, no cottage, no crimson early-morn light.
Instead, Domi sat on a velvet chaise in a spacious salutatio room. An ornate gray rug covered half of the black marble floor, and a promenia chandelier glowed silver overhead. Three ebony marble walls and one gray accent wall, all crusted with rich silver detailing, hummed with promenia that made him cringe back the instant he glanced their way. A window with opal-studded black tapestries, tied open with a gray satin ribbon to admit violet Trellis-light, likewise sang with promenia that made him lean away.
"W-what?" he gasped, his head darting to and fro. The ornate room was pleasant, a breaker's daydream, but a very, very bad feeling rose within him like blood from a wound.
A latch clicked, and Domi bolted to his feet, already halfway to the door before it opened. Thundering bells reverberated through his head, and he gasped, skidding on his heels. He didn't want to go any further. He wanted nothing to do with the door, or the window, or promenia, or escape. No way.
A beautiful middle-aged woman stepped into the room. A jade clasp held her wavy black hair back to put her emerald laurel on display. Gold-banded, the tracings shimmered against bronze skin and reflected in her almond-shaped eyes.
She closed the door behind her and then sat across from him in a velvet chair. She gestured to the chaise behind him. "You might as well sit."
He crossed his arms as tightly as his injured shoulder allowed. "Who are you? Where am I?"
She folded her hands in her lap. "My name is Cercitis. I wish we were meeting under better circumstances, Laetus."
"Laetus? Cerci—Prome, that's not my name." He crept toward the door and winced as promenia howled at him. "When are you going to let me out of here? Or give me a barrister? I'm a Lightbearer, I have a right to legal representation, don't I?"
"Laetus is your birth name," the Empowered lifeholder said as though she had not heard the rest. "Your mother named you after her elder brother, Laetus Adurere."
"Adurere. That's..." He knew that name. Everyone knew that name.
Was this a weird dream? Maybe his wound was infected, and he lay abed in a fever, lost in delirium. Except it all seemed very real. So perhaps his mind was not the one gone but this woman's. The thought sent terror through him in a cold, acidic rush.
