‘You want me to coerce you?’ I asked incredulously, for he knew well that coercing someone awake who had no coercive Talent would be like greeting him with a slap across the face. He only smiled and said with a lopsided grin that if I hurt him, then I must be prepared to salve the hurt with a kiss. He kissed me then lingeringly, longingly, before he went to bank up the fire. Unwatched, I watched him move about in the flickering play of light between lantern and fire with a helpless blaze of love that seemed to exactly balance the weight of sorrow and remorse I felt at what I had done to the twins. But then fatigue pressed down on me again and it was hard to keep my eyes open until he went.

I was certain that it was the use of the black power that had drained me. It had always been so. Rushton’s spirit-form had told me it was a part of me and, remembering with sudden clarity how the black sword had become part of my spirit-form after I used it to sever the link between the twins, I knew he was right. The sword could not have become part of my spirit-form unless it was truly part of me. I had never known it because I had always shunned and feared that dark power, regarding it as a secret aberration, a dark force that inhabited me. But it had been no more than a source of potent spirit strength, which I could make use of in my waking life by drawing on it when I used my Talents. I had begun to understand when I chained my secret inside Rushton, but it was only when I formed the black sword with the intention of using it to sever the link between Miky and Angina that I had truly accepted it. Indeed, perhaps it was that acceptance as much as what I had done with the sword that had fused it to my spirit-form.

‘It’s Angina, isn’t it?’ I said softly.

Rushton went very still for a moment before he set aside the poker and turned. ‘He died several hours ago,’ he said. ‘I did not mean to tell you until later.’

‘Miky?’ I whispered.

‘She lives yet though she is dangerously weak. Darius was watching over them when it happened and he came out and told Roland. He asked for Rasial and for Hannay. He says he will need them to save Miky.’

‘Rasial?’ I echoed, startled out of my guilty sorrow.