The Grace of Sorcerers by Maria Ying

Author:Maria Ying
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hua Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Seven: Flowers for a Siren

YVES

Dallas Seidel stands at the door of the cabin, waterlogged and miserable. Shivering: she is a creature of the tropics, and for all her gifts she cannot lose her inherent nature, a skin that longs most for shadowed heat, for humid warmth. In this gray place, she does not belong; she is rejected in almost the same way that this reality attempts to reject me.

She’s wearing a different face than the one I have become accustomed to—a Rajput prince, I recall, one of the first she took during our travels together. Not seen in years, either, such grandeur now reduced to a disguise, a face previously unseen to the surveillance of the modern world or the scrying of Sealing and Containment.

But I will always know her by her eyes—and despite our mutual failings, our bitter antagonism and now fresh blood, I swear I see her expression soften, a momentary flash of relief; she has heard nothing of me since before the disaster at the gala.

“You’re my sister’s companion,” Viveca says from behind me, less with recognition—the face is not the one she saw in the Arctic—and more with the confidence that I have not led her wrong. “Come in. It’s warmer inside, if nothing else.”

I have been preempted; after this, I cannot keep Dallas waiting at the threshold. Grudgingly, I step aside and let her through.

For several moments, warlock and weretiger regard each other. Viveca’s attention is like an incision, her second time meeting her elder sibling’s chosen. Whatever face Dallas’ wears, I do not need to hear Viveca’s thoughts to know she is evaluating one of Olesya’s potential consorts. “You are here on my sister's behalf?” she asks politely, a well of complicated emotions just under her pleasant tone.

Dallas’ response is much simpler: it’s outright hostile. “Yes.” Her mouth is the hard line of a battle trench. “Ms. Viveca, your demon’s been running amok.”

“Master Viveca,” comes the correction, precise and clipped. “That’s the warlock title, Ms. Seidel.”

She marches to the blazing fire, yanking off drenched clothes as she does, oblivious to the mess she is creating the way only a cat can. A moment later, and she is that cat—a tiger of lush fur and striking colors, a queen larger and more august than the pretenders of this less enchanted time. She shakes herself next, spray and stench filling this peaceful retreat. With an ill-repressed snarl, I will away the wet Dallas has brought with her, casting it into a sea somewhere far, far away.

“I did not—” I begin, and never quite finish.

She is herself again. That’s unfair of me to say; her truest nature is a beast of claw and fang. But the flash of recognition is instinctive, unavoidable; she stands now in the glow of the fire, naked, returned to the shape I most associate with her—tall, wiry, a mane of untamed hair and a strength that lies coiled under scarred skin and calloused hands.

The original owner of this face had been a

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