Was that the change he sensed in her? He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but Jeren was different. So very different.
“What on all the good earth happened?” he asked.
Indarin appeared unfazed by his surprise, as serene and infuriating as ever. “It made sense. Someone had to teach her.”
“Yes, but what will they teach her?”
“Not so much what they will, but what they already have. Or what Fethan tried to do.”
Shan bristled. “What did he do?”
Indarin shook his head, dismissing him with a single gesture. “I dealt with it. Took it before the Ariah and she is questioning him. She will call us when she has a decision. The Seers take their direction from the Ariah and me now. That’s an end to it.”
He turned his attention back to Jeren and Shan reluctantly followed suit. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to watch her. But it felt like succumbing to an addiction. He wanted it too much.
Jeren moved fluidly, like a weapon herself. Her body glimmered with energy, with magic, he suspected. It filled her so much that she could no longer contain it all. And yet, she channelled it into her body, fuelling herself, making herself stronger faster. And he found himself reluctantly approving.
“She’s a warrior, just as she was always meant to be. What do they know?”
“What she needs to know. It’s not uncommon for the Seers to teach a Scion of Jern as well as a Shaman.”
“But I’ll bet it has never ended well.” That Jeren’s ancestry included tyrants and despots was no secret, though no one really liked to admit it. They talked of those who excelled, likening them to Jern himself, or Felan who won the love of the goddess incarnate Mahailia. They shied away from talking of the others, consumed by magic like Gilliad, dangerous and insane.
Indarin broke Shan’s gaze and looked away, turning his attention back to the lesson unfolding before them and ignoring the statement.
“I find myself in something of a dilemma, brother,” he said at last.
Indarin?
“Really? What’s that?” Shan leaned back against the rocks, stretching out his aching legs.
“It has been brought to my attention that a woman I hold in high regard may... reciprocate feelings I haven’t been able to afford before this time.”
Shan narrowed his eyes. He’d better not mean Jeren. The Fellna poison in his blood writhed and dug its barbs deep inside his body, releasing anger, jealousy, rage. Dear god and goddess, he’d better not—
But he wouldn’t. Not Indarin. A mate was a mate for life and Jeren’s mating with Shan was sacrosanct to all the Feyna and to those who upheld their ways. As Shaman, Indarin led a strictured life. Mates were a distraction. But without magic, he was no longer so bound, was he?
‘Who?’ would be too blunt a question for one Feyna to ask of another and the formal language Indarin had used from the start of this exchange warned Shan to tread carefully. Indarin needed his advice, but he wouldn’t accept pity, or allow too much to be said.
“And the dilemma, brother?”
“Her position makes it awkward.”
Shock made Shan’s eyes widen and he snapped his head around to stare at his brother.
“You can’t mean—” His own mouth snapped off the words before he could name the Ariah, but Indarin’s rage-filled eyes would have done the same.
“A dilemma,” Indarin reminded him in an unruffled voice. “I’ve loved before. And lost.”
Shan felt a chasm open beneath him. Ylandra. Indarin had loved her from afar and her loss to the Fellna had shaken him to the core. Shan hadn’t mentioned his own encounter with her, or with the Enchassa to any of them yet. Now, he didn’t dare.
He tried to breathe but both inhalation and exhalation felt ragged and uneven.
“Shan, if someone needs guidance and support from one with only her best interests at heart, where should she turn?”
“To a mate.” It was a simple and honest answer, the only one he could give. Both of them, Jeren and Lara, deserved and needed such support.
Problem was Shan wasn’t sure he trusted himself to give it. He had already failed Jeren, left her when she needed him most not once but twice. If the Enchassa’s spell took hold, if he lost control to the Fellna... it didn’t bear thinking about.
But the Ariah—Indarin and Lara—
“Do you love her?” Shan asked.
Indarin’s head moved in a barely perceptible nod. No more than that. He didn’t want to risk giving that much away, even to his own brother. He kept his eyes distant, his mouth closed and his jaw very tightly clenched.
“Then you must tell her. And let her know that you will never fail her. And mean it, brother. Mean it with all your heart.”
Indarin gave the same nod again, then pushed off from their perch, striding across the camp towards the Ariah’s white tent.
Shan watched his wife, watched her working with the very people she couldn’t stand to make her magic stronger, so she could win a war she never asked for, and protect her people. She was slipping away from him. And there was nothing he could do to stop it.
And everything he had tried just made it worse.
The Ariah summoned Shan about an hour later. He’d been expecting it, but the tone used didn’t sound good. Even Jeren picked up on it. Despite her earlier anger, despite the coldness she was trying to emanate, she wrapped her fingers around his hand and squeezed.
“You don’t have to come.” He couldn’t make the tone of his voice softer. What if the Ariah saw right into him? What if she realised what the Enchassa had done? He’d still told no one. How could he?
“Yes, I do.” She didn’t say any more than that. She didn’t have to.
The Ariah waited in the centre of the Shistra-Phail sector, Indarin standing at her side. He didn’t make eye contact with either of them. If anything he looked more like a statue than ever he did.
Shan cursed inwardly. Jeren should never have told him her initial impression of his brother. Now he thought of Indarin as a lump of stone every time he took on his stoic, miserable expression.
This wasn’t good. It couldn’t possibly be good. Lara’s eyes burned. She sat on a simple chair but still managed to make it look like a throne. But Lara was no more. The Ariah was the ruler of the Feyna race, not a hothead girl anymore. They all forgot that.
Fethan knelt at her side, his head bowed. Shan let his eyes pass over him noncommittally, but everything about him screamed disgrace.
Yet he had been training Jeren. Her hand tightened on his arm but Shan didn’t react. She wouldn’t want him to.
“I believe we may have made a mistake,” the Ariah said, in measured tones. Her gaze bore into him.
Shan quivered, fighting to control himself. The shadows kindled inside him and he pushed them down ruthlessly. Mistakes. He knew all about mistakes.
“In what way, Lady Ariah?” Jeren asked, her voice just as calm and controlled.
“In ever coming here, perhaps.” She glanced at Fethan. “In our choices since we came. I have to leave, Jeren. We have to leave.”
Jeren’s hand slipped free. She vibrated with anger. “I need the warriors.”
“I understand that, Jeren. But it cannot be. We are changing, just by being here. Our... our darker drives, things we have put away long ago have are coming back to the fore. I cannot sanction this.”