Sewn & Scarred (The Fated Creations Trilogy #3)

Chapter ThirtyEvaline

Chapter Thirty

Evaline

O nce night fell and I knew the Vasi wouldn’t bother me, I tried to reach out to my mother.

There was a lump in my throat. After the tour, after seeing how many people Vasier had in his army, I knew the responsibility to stop this war was going to fall to me.

If Kovarrin waged war, they’d lose. Even if Vasier didn’t use me as a weapon.

If Vasier waged war, he’d win.

I couldn’t communicate with Rominia, even though I was still trying to think of ways I could get a message to Wyott, so I would have to do what I could .

I had to speak to my mother, to find out if she knew how to get out of this ward, how I could get my magic back.

So I sat in my makeshift bed, and I tried.

I pictured her, I prayed to her, I thought of the clearing I always met her in.

Fresh, desperate tears fell as I did, frustration burned my throat over not being able to figure this out.

The Gods wanted me to stop Vasier, but I didn’t know how to do that with no weapons and hardly any magic. They wanted me to make the impossible happen, and this time, I questioned whether this possibility existed.

Finding my mother, speaking to her, was my last chance. It was all I could do, to protect the people of Rominia. I took a breath and let myself sit in my anguish, ruminating on that feeling of hanging on to my one last hope as I tried to go to her when it happened.

One moment, I was staring up at the golden ceiling, and in the next I felt myself fall through the chair, eyes shutting in the process. When they opened, the night sky peeked out from between tree canopies overhead.

I sat up, a breath of disbelief loosing from my lips, and looked around the clearing.

“Oh, Gods, Evaline,” my mother cried out as she rushed toward me. She fell to her knees where I sat and enveloped me in her arms. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated over and over into the air around us but I wrapped my hands around her shoulders and pushed her back so I could meet her eyes.

I shook my head. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Her blue eyes shifted with tears. “It’s not, I can see that you’re with him. It took me a while to find you, but once I did, I just, I can’t believe—”

“Did you see what happened today?” I asked, pulling her to stand. We didn’t have much time together, or at least we hadn’t in the past, and I needed to know everything before I was ripped back to Mortithev. We were lucky my limited magic allowed me this far.

She shook her head, and I told her everything, my words tumbling out of me as quickly as they could.

She’d winced when I told her that Vasier had told me about their relationship, but she didn’t interrupt as I continued, and told her of the war force Vasier had.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Vasier, I—”

I shook my head, cutting her off.

“That is none of my business,” I said, waving a hand between us.

She dragged her hands through her hair. “But clearly it did so much harm,” she cried out. “One stupid mistake, I should’ve just been with him. Or never been with him,” she shook her head. “But all the people who’ve died in these wars, all those who will if they fight in this next one, it’s all because of me.”

I put my hands around her shoulders again and pulled her to face me.

“No,” I said, my voice stern. “You’re not going to do this. You’re not going to blame yourself. Men all over the world have commitment-less relationships, or cheat, and you don’t see women waging war over it.” Her eyes flicked between mine as I spoke. “His actions are not on you. He made his own decisions, his own mistakes.”

Her chin quivered but she forced a breath down her throat and nodded.

“We likely don’t have much time. My magic is weakened and I don’t know how long this will last. You need to tell me how to break this ward, or how to get my magic out of it.”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell you how to break it, because I don’t know how Lauden made it.” She smoothed the hair away from her face. “Most Sorcerers don’t even know any of this. I only know what I have researched throughout my life, both before I created them and after. But it doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “Some wards can be taken down, but not by the person whose blood was used to make it. Not by the person the ward traps.”

My eyes clenched shut, but I tried not to let the information deter me.

I met her eyes.

“What about my magic? Do you know how to get it back?”

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “No, I’ve never heard of a ward that can trap magic as it can the physical body.”

I pulled away from her and started to pace, trying to keep my breathing even and stave off any panic.

Before I could worry too much over my lack of options, my mother walked toward me.

“I will work here, I will stay here and try to find an answer. I will hunt down every Sorcerer in the Night if I have to. I will see if there are any loopholes or if I can find the spell used to lock magic away, see if there is anything to be done.”

My desperation squeezed my throat and I felt the shadows shift around me as her image went hazy—my time here was running short.

“I have to figure it out before he kills everyone,” I whispered to her and she lifted a hand to cup my cheek, but I couldn’t even feel it.

“I’m so sorry, Evaline. For all of it, the entire mess. For how I created this monster, in more ways than one.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but she disappeared, and I rushed forward until I was sitting up, nearly falling out of my chair.

I hated Vasier, and not for the first time today, the threshold for my hatred toward him raised higher.

To know that he was succeeding in his revenge on her. That she was suffering on the other side, as she watched me suffer here.

And to know that she blamed herself for all of it, when it was only his conscious that should bear it.

That he made decisions, let things that happened to him twist him until he wasn’t even capable of love or reason.

He’d let the past warp him until he couldn’t see a future that did not involve retribution.