Finn’s excited demeanor dimmed. “Uh. He kind of . . . split, too. Rode out the other day. I don’t know where to.”
“What do you mean by split?” My glyphs began to glow.
“Hold it, blondie, Matto’s a grown dude, and there was no stopping him.”
I shoved my hair from my face, my gaze darting. “He’s got a huge head start.” He’d already been on the road when he’d visited me in that vision! Had he been telling me good-bye, for good? “I have no idea how to find him.”
“Don’t,” Aric said quietly.
“Excuse me?”
“The Fool knows this game and this world better than anyone. He can take care of himself.”
“But he can’t see his own future! And he was so sick.” I glanced at Jack and Selena. Both looked torn.
“Matto was doing tons better than before,” Finn assured me.
“Sieva, he’ll travel with another person, reading his companion’s future to safeguard his own. You know his weaknesses, but you ignore his strengths.”
“What does that mean?”
His blond brows drew together. “Again, Empress, let him rest.”
Could I? I ached to make sure he was okay. But I didn’t want to be part of the problem. “Wh-when will he come back? Will I ever see him again?”
Aric’s eyes were grave. “He’ll find you when you least expect it. . . .”
In Finn and Selena’s tent, I dropped onto a spare cot, still numb over Matthew’s disappearance.
Jack and Aric followed me inside. They both stood so tall and built, seeming to soak up all the oxygen in the area.
“Coo-yôn will be okay,” Jack said. “He sometimes went off by himself.”
Even if I accepted that Matthew wasn’t in danger, I couldn’t accept that he’d gone out on the road alone. Months ago, I’d left Finn’s by myself, and I had never known such loneliness. For the first time in my life, I’d had no friends or family to talk to, no one expecting me.
Kind of like Aric Dominija’s life for the last two millennia.
My couple of days versus his eons.
Too much to process. “Can we please talk in the morning?” I fell back on my old argument: no one could make me choose before I was ready. “Is there an extra tent where Aric can stay?”
“Ouais.” Jack rubbed his hand over his black stubble. “But, Evie, before you make a decision, you need to consider something.”
“What?”
He turned to Aric with an almost guilty expression on his face. “You saved my life, Dominija. You’ve done me right. But I can’t lose my girl again.”
Aric clenched his fists—as if he knew what Jack was going to say.
Jack faced me. “What if you can’t stop the game? It spools on as long as more than one player lives, all the Arcana aging. Which means the Reaper’s got to have a patsy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s goan to kill every Arcana that’s a threat. If you’re the last two left, one of you will die first, leaving the ‘winner’ to walk the earth as an immortal. What if you get to be eighty by the time he dies? It doan matter if you’re Arcana—at that age, you’ll hurt, you might be sick—and you’ll stay like that for centuries. How’re you goan to fight in the next game?”
I swallowed. I’d been horrified by the idea of living so long—more so if I was forever cursed to be sick, to be in pain.
I gazed at Aric; he stared back at me as if his world was crumbling around him—and he could do nothing but let it.
Even in the face of my anger and confusion, Aric pulled at my heart. “It means a lot for you to say this.”
“But does it mean enough?”
This man was a part of me, had been for epochs. I felt our soul-deep bond, could almost hear that endless wave along the shore. Still I had to whisper, “I don’t know.”
43
I’d been dozing on my borrowed cot when the Magician returned with Cyclops.