“You’re sure you’re fine?” Danai asked, flipping my hand over again.
“How many damn times are you going to ask her, Danai?” Dorian’s voice barked from the corner. “Of course, the girl is fine. I mean, look at that boy with her!”
Tymon crossed his legs and smirked. “What about the boy, Dorian? He glows? From a good, healthy sexual encounter.” Lifting his hand, Tymon studied it a moment. “Huh. Looks like I’m glowing a bit too.”
Danai leveled an angry look at him. “She can still be not all right and have had magnificent sex, Dorian. Stop whining or go get laid.”
I could hear his growl of disgust as he turned away.
Tymon was glowing, though, and I glanced over to Elex. He was also glowing.
Elex smirked at me. “It’s a side effect for the men when they are with their true or soul mate. Never seen it?”
I shook my head and said, “No.”
He grabbed my hand. “Druid males glow for about twelve hours. Not much.” He flashed his other hand, teasing the air with his glow. “But enough. It’s an ego boost for us.”
“You hardly need an ego boost, Elex.” I tried to admonish him, but it didn’t work because I was delighted he was glowing because of me.
“So, we’re all safe and unharmed?” Lunella asked.
Every one assented, and she sat at the table with us and the vast spread for breakfast.
“Is anyone going to explain what happened last night?” I asked, looking around the room. “We all split and went different ways after, but that was more for self-preservation than anything else. I still want to know what happened.”
“You were kidnapped, you daft—”
“Dorian!” Lunella snapped at him across the room. “She knows she was kidnapped. But with the way you act toward her, she’s clearly confused as to why you would risk your ass to save her out of a moving carriage since you’re always treating her like shit.”
“I do not.”
Tymon raised an eyebrow. “Yes, actually, you do, Dorian. You’re mostly an asshole to her. To a lot of people. So why would you risk your life to save someone you don’t like?”
“No one deserves to be taken against their will.”
“Yes,” Lunella agreed, “but Elex was already on his way. He was capable.”
Dorian huffed. “Sending a child after a child.”
“You see? You’re always being an asshole,” Tymon said.
He launched out of the chair and came at Elex and me. “Because those people are dangerous! They are deluded. They think—” His words cut off, and he snarled at me.
“I was swung off the dance floor and pulled out the door and stuffed into a carriage to be carted off into the night. I didn’t know what was going on. I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to get back to the temple.”
I stood to face him. Dorian was taller than I was, by a lot, and his skin was a pale cream that reflected the morning light streaming through the windows. His hair was a white-blond halo above him. He tried to be intimidating, but he wasn’t. And I knew this after he rescued me.
“I don’t understand why you came after me. Of course, they’re dangerous. And they’re deluded. But Elex would have gotten me back.”
Realizing he couldn’t get far with his intimidation techniques, Dorian stepped back. His lip curled, and I watched him as he snatched a strip of bacon off the plate on the table. “Well, I guess, since you’ve all decided this needs to happen, I need to explain this.”
Glancing at Tymon, Dorian walked away, munching on his stolen strip of breakfast meat. His chewing was thoughtful, and it was clearly a stalling tactic, but he then continued. “The people who kidnapped you last night were a faction of dissenters. They don’t agree with the temple and how we do things here. We have protected the gate for years. We have held the mountain. We’ve nurtured and cared for the people of S’Kir.
“But there is a part of our population who do not believe that the temple is the best group of people for this job. They don’t trust us. The Lost God left us in charge, and they don’t believe we should have been entrusted.
“They, like you, are infants and don’t understand how old these plans are. How much time and planning went into setting up our society, to preserving peace and protecting the magic that flows through everything.
“To them, this is nearly a game. It doesn’t fit in the narrow world they know here. They grew here, within the protective plans of our world, and now they think they know better than me.”
I wrinkled my brow. “Than…you?”
Dorian waved me off. “Us. The temple.” He snatched another piece of bacon. “We have always kept them quiet and placated.”
“Last night was unprecedented,” Lunella continued. “We have never had these usurpers be quite so bold. We never dreamed they would try to kidnap you.”
“And they can’t have you.” Dorian’s voice was possessive and angry.
“Well, no.” A wave of confusion washed over me. “Of course, they can’t. I am an acolyte here, and Elex is part of the Education Guilds. We belong here.”
“They want you despite your alliances,” Tymon said. “It doesn’t matter. They are convinced that controlling you will control the Breaking.”
“I don’t control the Breaking.” I tossed a look between the masters in the room. “I can control a class of students, and that’s about it.”
Danai forked a few pancakes on to her plate. “No one here is sure what the Breaking will bring. We have only prepared as much as we can. We don’t know what will come. None of us. But we are ancient, and we are far more acquainted with the people and our island.”
“What we aren’t sure of,” Dorian said, “is who these people are. They have managed to stay in the underground, away from our prying eyes. So, in addition to saving your ass last night, I was hoping we would find out more.”
Most of my life, I had joked about how safe S’Kir was and how anything going even slightly off-kilter was utter dissension toward the plan.
I never thought some people spent their lives going against the will of the temple and its masters. It never made any sense. S’Kir was as close to a utopia as we could get, with happiness and health, long life and lifelong learning and friends.
Only accidents marred us. I knew those well.
I pushed some of the breakfast around on my plate while considering what he’d said. Dorian made excellent points. They were the oldest and the closest to the Lost God.
Why would anyone ever go against such a clear-cut plan designed to preserve things as they were? Our society was fun, free, intelligent, and loving. That was the way the Lost God wanted it and how the masters had set it up.
Had the masters known the Lost God?
I pushed the thought away. I still had questions about last night. “So you weren’t helping Elex?”
Dorian eye’s narrowed as he trained them on me. “Everything I do has more than just you or Elex at the heart of it. My reason for saving you, for helping your male, was many-fold. Your life was one. My information was another.”
I hated this man. He couldn’t seem to just have an honest, singular motive. “Did my imperiled life help you gain your information?”
Elex rested his hand on my arm, trying to calm me.
I was not in a mood to be calm—or calmed.
“It did, yes. Thank you.”
Danai’s head whipped up and around to find Dorian’s eyes. “Wow, Dorian. That was perhaps the most dickish thing you have ever said. To anyone.”
A casual flip of his hand dismissed her. “She asked.”
“I asked to prove you are on your own mission and not actually acting nobly to help my male rescue my kidnapped person.” It had been a very long time since I harbored this much anger toward anyone. “And you have clearly provided the evidence.”
“Do you want me to lie?” His anger came close to matching my own.
“I want you to very carefully examine your duplicity in every damn thing you do!”
“Kimber, please.” Elex’s voice was laced with worry.
“I am angry, Elex. He didn’t want to help us—he was once again helping himself. The self-serving Master of the Temple.”
“You’ve known me as nothing more than a distant master for under two months, you insolent child. You have no idea what I am or what I can do. You have no idea what my motives are or why I chose to help your male rescue you.”
“You’re right. I don’t. And I don’t ever want to.”
With an angry move, I shoved the chair back and out from under me. It flipped over, crashing onto the wooden floor, but I didn’t care.
Snapping around, I marched out of the room, through the rotunda, and out the door of the temple.
I had so much anger that I could scarcely believe it. I had to walk almost violently through the massive gardens around the temple.
Where was this coming from? I taught children, I didn’t have a mean bone in my body—at all. I didn’t want to be angry. It took too much energy to be angry.
Dorian had been noble in helping Elex save me from the carriage. What purpose did it serve to diminish that with his own agenda? I was honestly grateful for his efforts until he turned it into a ‘Dorian Festival.’
The man had a past, he had an agenda, but to dismiss my thanks as he would dismiss a servant really chapped my ass. To turn my danger into his gain?
“Kimber, wait.”
Danai was trying to catch up to me on the path. I realized how fast I had been walking and brought my pace down from ‘very pissed off’ to ‘I simply need fresh air.’
She was able to catch up in a moment. “My dear girl, you are just showing me that I need to get back into my fitness routines.” She panted for a moment, and my tension was broken with that comment.
“I am sorry, Danai. He just makes me so angry. He’s unfair and mean, and then does something noble, and squashes it in the next moment.”
Matching pace with me, she sighed heavily. “But, Kimber, that’s him. That’s who he is. He’s a brilliant man, a powerful magic master, and a complete asshole to everyone around him. You’re not an exception to his rule.”
“Why, though?”
“Because he’s thousands of years old, my dear. Thousands. He has machinations that have machinations that have plots with plans peppered with more machinations. He sees…well… We see patterns in everything. I am not young, and I see the wheels and cogs of patterns in our society. I am not yet cynical about it.
“Be warned, my dear. Many of us do have secret agendas we do not share with one another. We have lived and served under the same roof for more than a thousand years and some of us much longer. Our lives would be boring without our own agendas. If we did not keep secrets, we would be horrible people. Horrible. Worse than anything Dorian has shown you.”
I listened to the gravel crunching under our feet as we kept pace with each other. “I don’t wish to be a pawn in these games.”
Danai nodded. “I understand that. It’s noble.”
“I won’t be.”
Her hand landed on my arm. “But, my dear, you already are.”