“Our family will cast you out if you take him to mate,” Geth counters, ever the one to calmly debate. To take Mother and Father’s side. To take the Zhilon’ile Regency’s side. But not unkindly, and somehow, that makes it even more infuriating. “You know they’ll cast you out,” he reasons. “Just as they cast out our uncle for going off with Fain Quillen. Vothe, Trystan Gardner is a Mage.”

“Trystan saved a number of refugees, Geth,” I snarl, hating the conflict that my brother is whipping up in me. A brother who has been kind to me my whole life. A brother who is trying to be kind to me now. But a brother who truly does not understand. “He saved a Kelt baby from drowning in the Zonor.”

And now I’m drowning, I yearn to rage at him. I’m drowning in wanting to be with Trystan Gardner.

“That’s another thing we need to speak of,” Geth says, holding my gaze. I can imagine the fraught conversation that he had with our parents about me, their newly wayward son. “The Noi Conclave is in talks with ours,” he says. “Vang Troi might be allowing these rescue missions for the moment, but the government is about to tighten the border.” Warning darkens my brother’s lightning gaze. “Vothe, no more volunteering with Minyl.”

Trystan

I watch Vothe stare at the glittering city of Voloi, the tiered expanse lit up by a million purple lights in anticipation of Xishlon. He leans against the Wyvernguard’s sixth-level terrace railing, illuminated by the nighttime glow of its sapphire torchlight.

“I’ve been forbidden from volunteering again with Minyl,” he says. “My brother visited earlier to inform me of this. I suspect that’s coming from my father.”

I look at him in surprise. Vothe never confides in me about his personal life. And he’s talking to me like he’s been doing it all along. It feels disarmingly natural, to let this boundary between us fall. But, why not? We’ve been together almost every waking minute for weeks now. And he’ll no longer be my guard soon.

A pang accompanies the thought, which part of me finds amusing. I remember how incensed I was to have a guard. And such a disconcertingly handsome one. How it threw me so completely off-kilter. How it still does. I lean against the railing alongside him, a single cloud drifting below. The inky river is calm tonight, a thousand stars strewn across the expansive sky.

I turn to face Vothe fully. “What are you going to do?”

He glances at me sidelong, and a spark of palpable lightning flashes between us. Vothe’s gaze flicks over my tattoo. There’s a frisson of want in his gaze, and his smile is subversive when it comes. Desire sparks, along with the urge to kiss him then and there and show him what subversive really means.