Jeweled by Anya Bast Page A

dreams running so out of control. Anatol just hoped the great man could find a way to stem this tide, bring the people back to their senses and get some real work done. But that wouldn’t happen tomorrow.
    Tomorrow would be day one of the nightmare. This illness would need to run its course, work itself out. Until then they would just have to find a way to survive.
    He pulled Evangeline closer to him.
     
     
    Gregorio Vikhin stood looking out the window of his town house at the bonfire made of expensive furniture in the street below. The houses and storefronts on either side glowed with the reflected red light while the drunken, celebrating citizens of Milzyr danced around it like devils. They were so drunk on alcohol and their newfound power that they even burned the fine things they’d wrested from the dead or soon-to-be-dead nobles, things they could have kept or sold for food.
    He let the curtain fall back and stepped away from the window. They wouldn’t come into his town house. They wouldn’t steal his furniture, or drag him off to the steps of Belai to be executed. No, they gave him respect. Respect he didn’t deserve.
    This was his fault.
    He pressed the heel of his hand to his eye socket and sank into a nearby wingback chair. His ideas. His words. His fervor that he’d whipped from one end of Rylisk to the other. But not like this. He’d never meant for it to happen like this.
    He wondered what Kozma Nizli would make of this.
    But maybe this was the only way. Clearly, the royals and their cronies hadn’t been listening to anything they had to say before now. Perhaps bloodshed and chaos were the only way to get change in Rylisk.
    After all, it wasn’t like the royals were ever going to give the people a say in their governance without violence. Blessed Joshui, the royals had been deaf and blind! Lost in a fantasy of their own making, heedless to the danger they created for themselves with every tax hike.
    Most would say they were getting what they deserved.
    Yet, there would be innocents who would be hurt in this mess. The J’Edaeii, for example. Most of them were already victims, having been forcibly taken from their families at a young age. Brainwashed into thinking they weren’t prisoners. Used as a breeding pool to infuse the royal bloodline with the magick their pride had lost through inbreeding. Though they came from common peasant stock, they would be swept up in the bloodshed along with the guilty.
    Magick would leave their world because of him. His words. His ideas.
    Yet he couldn’t help but feel proud as well. After all, now the people would have a say in their lives. There could be a new order. Fairness for all. Democracy in governance. They would set up a new system of government, hold elections, have debate. The people would no longer starve as they had in the past. They would no longer be used as mules, whipped by their “betters” until they were bloody.
    He had done that. His words. His ideas. But, yes, there would be a price to pay. Innocents would pay it. He would feel every one of their deaths to the center of him. Their shed blood would weigh him down forever.
    That would be the price he paid.
     
     
    “This cannot be.” Evangeline’s fingers gripped the iron bars in front of Belai and watched the pool of blood at the top of the steps grow larger. Beside her Anatol seemed bereft of words, even of breath.
    Emotions pierced and prodded and tangled her gut. And they weren’t the removed, watered-down emotions of the crowd she felt, these were her emotions. If she allowed herself to taste the feelings of the people around her it wouldn’t be horror, revulsion, fear, and disbelief she would sense. It would be jubilance, victory, and pride. Their emotions would match the expressions and actions of those around her—the smiling faces and pumping fists. No, these were her emotions coursing through her in a flood right now, so hot and so hard that no wall she could build could stop