His eyes flashed dangerously. “I am what you made me.”
“No!” Maeve cried. “You—you were kind. Once,” she said the last word in a whisper.
Rodan spoke, his voice calm like water over her heated flesh. “The question remains, Maeve Almeida. Will you accept the companion role in my trials? Will you help me rectify these wrongs, and set the Realms to right again?”
Shaking, she swung her gaze between the two men. Both tall. Both handsome. Both wanting something quite different from her. Could she do it? Could she turn her back on everything that she wrote about and believed in? If Rodan fell along the way, the challenge would migrate to her shoulders, and she would be the one locked in battle with her childhood friend.
While she deliberated, the silence descended on them once more.
The roaring quiet, more than anything, demanded her response.
Maeve lifted her chin, looked between them once more, and said, “I accept.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Rodan
RODAN RELEASED THE BREATH HE’D HELD without realizing it, and a smile curved his lips. He turned his gaze toward his old enemy, “I have my companion, Sebastian Sekou. I will begin the trials.”
Sebastian looked ready to explode, his expression thunderous. He and Maeve stared at each other, she with her jaw set and her fists on her hips, him with a muscle jumping in his cheek. Sebastian reached up and straightened the crown—Rodan’s crown—on the top of his head and glared between the two of them.
“You decided then,” the interloper said, his voice a hissing snarl. “You’re just as much my enemy now as he is. I won’t hold anything back.”
Maeve’s chin lifted, and something in Rodan softened at her challenge. Recruiting her for the trials would work in his favor. Her eyes narrowed. “I look forward to it.”
Sebastian choked out a quick, mocking laugh, and then turned away from them both, disappearing before his boots hit the ground. Rodan blinked at that, and a cold chill wrapped around his bones. The throne is imparting power upon him, he thought. This will make things even harder.
Maeve let out a breath and deflated where she stood, and soon the glitter of tears shone at the corners of her amber eyes. He took a few steps forward, the wind picking up and throwing bits of pine needles against his calves as he did so. “Maeve,” he said, softening his voice. “Are you alright?”
She jerked away from him, and he tried to pretend that the motion didn’t hurt.
Of all the women who threw themselves at me over the years, this is the one I offered everything to.
Maeve crossed her arms over her stomach and looked at the spot where Sebastian disappeared. “What just happened?” Her tone was a little high, and he saw the panic in the widening of her eyes. “Did I really just do that?”
“Yes,” Rodan said. “You did. Thank you, Maeve. The Realms need you.”
She looked at him, her eyes like cut citrine, her long tawny hair flipping over her shoulder, and bit out, “That’s what I did it for. The Realms. Not for you.”
He nodded. “Of course.”
What else did he expect from her at this point?
“Something’s wrong with him,” she murmured. “Sebastian. He smelled wrong.”
Rodan sensed it too. A miasma, a greasy sheen about the air when Sebastian appeared, as though he infected the very oxygen around him with whatever sickness burbled up inside.
“Is he ill?” she asked. “Could that be it? Could something have happened to him?”
Rodan shook his head. “I honestly do not know. But it was not the only curious thing about this encounter.”
“What else?”
“His disappearance. When did you ever see Sebastian wield magic with any kind of finesse? That was more your style. He was good with the flash-bangs, but never anything of any significance.” Rodan thought again on how Sebastian slipped out of sight. His own keen senses told him that Sebastian managed to traverse space, removing himself from where they stood and transporting himself somewhere else. Rodan possessed the ability himself, though it would be barred from him for the duration of the trials.
Maeve frowned at him. “I wasn’t that great at magic. Sebastian said—”
“I think we’ve established that Sebastian lies. He does it as easy as he breathes. Your magic is tremendous. A boon to his trials and, hopefully, to mine.”
Her lips pressed into a straight line, and she turned her head away, her hair falling forward to hide part of her face. “I think he’s sick. That was not the same man that I knew when I was younger. And if he’s sick, that means that there must be a cure.”
“Oh?” His mouth twisted in an unpleasant smile. “Why do you think there was always a sense of imminent danger when you came through the veil? He was the cause of much of the chaos you witnessed over the years, only he pinned the blame on me. He is a master manipulator. He may have painted me as your villain, but it was he who abused your trust, not I.”
She shook her head. “I would have known.”
“You were a child.”
“I was not!” She spun on him. “I was young, yes, but I wasn’t a child.”
He tilted his head a little to one side to study her, his gaze flickering down the length of her body and back up. Maeve, on the athletic side of curvaceous, stood taller than the average woman but still a good six inches shorter than himself. Her hair, a lovely, tousled mess that begged for hands to dive into it, fell to her shoulder blades.
A red flush rose in her cheeks as he looked at her, and he smiled. “I suppose,” he said with a drawl, “from the perspective of an immortal, most humans would seem like children. Even so, you were young enough then—and dare I say, wounded enough—to believe anything pressed upon you with such sincerity. Sebastian gave you a world of good and evil. Black and white. It must have been refreshing.”
Her lower lip trembled, and he wondered if he overstepped. The books that she wrote in her world offered an insight into Maeve’s past, and that insight taught him that her upbringing had been unpleasant. Even now, it appeared as though she carried wounds from those days.
“It doesn’t matter, Maeve,” he said as gently as possible. “All that matters now is that you work to right the wrong. You’ve taken the first, most important step in accepting the companionship role in my trials. If I fall, I know that you’ll do the right thing.”
She shook her head, still staring at him, as though captivated. “I don’t want to be a queen.”
He tilted his head. “Then abolish the crown if you ascend. Create a democracy. Find advisors and representatives. Change things. I know that whatever you choose, it will be leagues better than what the people are facing under Sekou.”
Maeve’s brow furrowed. “How long has it been here, since Sebastian’s coronation?”
“Thirty years.”
Her eyes widened. “Thirty? It can’t be. He doesn’t look a day over thirty himself. He would be pushing sixty.”
Rodan closed his eyes for a brief moment, then opened them. If there is to be any trust in this endeavor, I must be as forthright as possible. It went against his nature, against his training, but the fact remained that his companion needed every possible advantage if they were to win. “The throne is more than a fancy chair.”