Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2), Aaron Schneider [accelerated reader books .txt] 📗

“We could have the time,” she said quietly, then he felt her will, faint and silken against him. If you wanted it. If you wanted me.

Milo stared at her, his mouth working for a second or two without making a sound.

“I mean, I didn’t, not that I wasn’t hoping,” he babbled, then stopped himself and drew a steadying breath. “I mean, you’re immortal, beautiful, wise, and pretty much everything I’m not.”

Rihyani’s laughed gently, and that familiar ache in his chest throbbed.

“Are you trying to talk me out of it?” she asked, giving him another quick glance out the corner of her eye.

“I guess I’m trying to say…” Milo began, then had to take an embarrassing few seconds to decide what exactly he was trying to say. “Well, I guess it, um, I mean, you just seem too amazing. It’s like I’d be a fool to dare to hope for something so out of my reach.”

With a smooth sideways step, Rihyani slid up next to him.

“Do I seem out of your reach now?” she asked, eyes fixed on the dancers below.

Almost without knowing what was happening, Milo’s arms wrapped around her. Once the embrace began, it seemed to have a life, a gravity, a force all its own. She contoured to him and he to her. She raised her eyes from the hall beneath them, their foreheads resting gently against each other’s.

It’s not foolish to hope, Rihyani whispered to his soul. Only the hopeful can know real triumph, and even when they fall, they do so daring greatly. I’ll strive for you and you for me, and together we’ll be valiant enough for whatever comes.

Milo felt something new and potent burning inside him, and for once, it was not a matter of eldritch knowledge. It was a far simpler, far more potent power, and it shone inside him such that he thought he might begin to glow like the beautiful creature in his arms. For a single instant, he felt as though the long shadows and cold depths inside him were gone, banished before the light, and he couldn’t decide if he wanted to laugh, sing, or cry.

He looked into Rihyani’s eyes and decided he wanted something else altogether.

“Here’s to hope,” he said, then kissed her deeply.

Epilogue: Adversus Solum

Petrograd was not what it once was, and it was whispered on some nights that the fires of the Red Revolution still burned in a city that was now little more than a ruin, inhabited by bandits, scavengers, and more of the same with grandiose ambitions.

“Yet those souls still need saving,” Father Bunin would say. “And as long as the Lord grants me strength and the saints grant wisdom, I will be here.”

The fact that those souls had sacked his little chapel on the road into Petrograd and had more than once cruelly mistreated the priest did little to discourage him.

“Everything is dark apart from the light of Christ,” he would remind himself as he set about putting right what could be and clearing out what was broken beyond repair. “If our Lord could forgive the worst of these, how much more should I?”

From there, it was a matter of finding out what needed replacing, though the Orthodox church had abandoned the area nearly a decade ago. As such, the furnishings, decorations, and even the icons were of his own crude making. Unlike the teacher to whom he devoted his life, Bunin was no carpenter, but he did the best he could. The wood he hewed from the forest down the road, while nails and fastenings he collected from the crumbling outskirts of the city.

It was on one such scavenging expedition that Bunin discovered an odd sight.

A small, lumpy form huddled inside a burnt-out home.

This in and of itself did not seem strange since Bunin was regularly finding old, moldering corpses on such excursions. In fact, two-thirds of the bodies laid to rest beside his chapel were those he’d found in such a state. Father Bunin was no stranger to the sights and smells of death, living so near a cursed place like Petrograd.

What was strange were not only the proportions of the figure but also the fact that it seemed to still be alive despite what seemed to be a horribly disfiguring disease. Ragged breaths wheezed out through the ragged holes where a nose had been, and the whole body seemed swollen, most particularly the head. The poor wretch’s beard was streaked with sour, crusted bile.

Despite its truly horrific state, Father Bunin squatted next to the creature and laid a gentle, callused hand on the clammy brow.

“Oh, my child,” Bunin said in a tender whisper. “What afflicts you so?”

Bunin started when one eyelid peeled back from a glittering black eye.

“A witch,” the wretch hissed between jagged teeth. “A fey witch.”

Bunin nodded slowly, understanding that such superstitions existed among the folk of Russia. Father Bunin believed from the Scriptures that there were those who might consort with spirits and demons, like the woman from Endor or Simon the Sorcerer, but the simple folk found it easier to blame the harshness of their life on such creatures in place of simpler, harder answers. He didn’t begrudge them this in their confessions, and he certainly would not begrudge a dying man such thoughts.

That he was dying was certain, the poor wretch. That he was still alive even now was a miracle of either divine or infernal making. With a silent prayer, Bunin hoped for the former as he unlimbered the waterskin slung across his back.

“Are you thirsty?” the priest asked, holding up the skin.

The diseased man’s other eye, as black and hard as its twin, opened, and he glared at the offering with open suspicion. Then a cough wracked his body, and his parched lips split in several places. The fluid that leaked from them must have been choked with disease because it looked and smelled quite unlike blood.

“Yes,” he croaked, and without hesitation, the priest raised