“Can’t handle those girls! Not if they get the Tears first, and maybe not if they don’t. The demons probably can’t, either, but I’ll take what help I can get. Tell Adra—”
“All right! I’ll tell him—if you agree to stay here!”
The hand tightened on my bicep, and this time, it didn’t look like it was budging.
I stared down at it for a moment, and then up at him. And saw him flush, whether with embarrassment or anger, I didn’t know. But he didn’t move.
“I’m not going to lose you,” he told me, low and harsh.
And this is it, I thought. This is how we fail. Not because the other side is better, but because we won’t work together. Not even now.
And that was my fault, wasn’t it? The Pythia was the great unifier, or she was supposed to be. The one who got everyone to drop their stupid quarrels and work on a common cause. But I didn’t have the words, any more than I’d had them with Mircea. I didn’t know how to make Jonas let me go, not in a suite full of his mages. I didn’t know how to make him understand that we weren’t running out of time, we were out. I didn’t know how to get through to him.
“Not going to lose her?” Rhea said, from the doorway. “Like you lost the last Pythia entrusted to your care?”
“Stay out of this,” Jonas told her.
But Rhea wasn’t staying out. Rhea was already in and coming up beside us. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” she demanded. “Not Lady Cassandra’s age—there have been younger Pythias. Or her lack of training, which her blood more than compensates for. Or even her reaching out to the covens, which is far overdue. But you. Your grief, your pain, your constant need for—”
“Learn your place, girl!” Jonas snarled, pushing her away when she tried to come between us.
“I know my place!” she said, her voice no kinder than his. “I’ve always known. But you don’t, do you? The Lady didn’t tell you—”
“What are you babbling about?”
“—because she knew how you’d react, what you’d do. This! What you always do, trying to control everything, trying to control her. But not me. She wasn’t going to let you control me—”
“This doesn’t concern you!”
“My mother’s death doesn’t concern me?”
And suddenly, everything froze.
It looked like I’d stopped time. Only I could still hear the sound of the clock, see the dust motes floating in the light from the hall, feel the quiet brush of the air-conditioning.
And the sudden clenching of Jonas’ hand on my arm.
“Your . . . mother?” he asked, the words surprisingly toneless.
“My mother,” Rhea said, grabbing one of the photo albums, the ones we’d taken from Agnes’ safe, the ones I’d never had a chance to look through. And thrust it at him. “It’s all there, my whole life. How she had me in secret, how she sent me away as an infant, how I grew up with one of her old initiates, a coven witch, because she knew you had nothing but contempt for the covens, knew you’d never find me there—”
“I would never?” Jonas was looking at the album she was holding out. It was spilling over with photos to the point that they fell out of the side in great clumps. Many of them featured him, usually with Agnes.
But he still didn’t get it, I thought.
He didn’t get what she was telling him.
“She knew I would test strongly for the power,” Rhea said. “Knew I’d be brought back to court soon enough, to be with her. But as an initiate, no one would question my being there. And coming from a coven family, no one would try to use me as a political pawn, or force me into a position I didn’t want, just so he could profit—”
“No!” Jonas looked up at her, and I guess I’d been wrong. I guess that had been shock. Because it looked like he did get it, after all. “I would never—”
“But she thought you would,” Rhea said, twisting the knife. “And she knew you. She told me once, it was the hardest decision she ever made, and the loneliest. But she knew the number of times you tried to influence her—”
“For the good of the magical community!”
“For the good of the Circle—”
“They’re the same thing!”