The Sorcery Code by Dima Zales, Anna Zaires Page B

you spying on him?” she asked, unable to keep the accusatory note out of her voice. She hated the way the old man seemed to have his tentacles in everything these days.
    “I’m not spying on the boy,” the Council Leader denied, his white eyebrows coming together. “I just want to make sure he’s healthy and well. You know he doesn’t talk to me either, right?”
    Augusta nodded. She knew that. As much as she disliked Ganir, she could see that he was hurting, too. He had been close to Dasbraw’s sons, and Blaise’s coldness had to be as upsetting to him as it was to Augusta herself. “All right,” she said in a more conciliatory tone, “so your source is telling you that Blaise acquired a lot of Life Captures?”
    “A lot is an understatement. What he got is worth a fortune on the black market.”
    Ganir was right; this didn’t sound good. Why would Blaise need so much of that stuff if he was not addicted? Augusta had always considered Life Captures to be dangerous, and she was extremely cautious in how she used the droplets herself. She had even spoken up about the risks of Ganir’s invention in the beginning—a fact that she suspected had something to do with the old sorcerer’s dislike of her.
    “What makes you so sure he got them for himself?” she wondered out loud.
    “It’s not definitive, of course,” Ganir admitted. “However, no one has seen him for months. He hasn’t even shown up in his village.”
    Augusta did not think this was that unusual, but combined with the large quantity of droplets, it did not paint a pretty picture. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked, even though she was beginning to get an inkling of the Council Leader’s intentions.
    “I want you to talk to Blaise,” Ganir said. “He will hear you out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he still loves you. Maybe that’s why he’s suffering so much—”
    “Blaise left me , not the other way around,” Augusta said sharply. How dare Ganir imply that their parting was to blame for Blaise’s current state? Everyone knew it was the loss of his brother that drove Blaise out of the Council—a tragedy for which they all bore varying degrees of responsibility.
    Why hadn’t she voted differently? Augusta wondered bitterly for a thousandth time. Why hadn’t at least one other member of the Council? Every time she thought of that disastrous event, she felt consumed with regret. If she had known that her vote wouldn’t matter—that the entire Council, with the exception of Blaise, would vote to punish Louie—she would’ve gone against her convictions and voted to spare Blaise’s brother. But she hadn’t. What Louie had done—giving a magical object to the commoners—was one of the worst crimes Augusta could imagine, and she’d voted according to her conscience.
    It was that vote that had cost her the man she loved. Somehow, Blaise had found out about the breakdown of the votes and learned that Augusta had been one of the Councilors who’d sentenced Louie to death. There had been only one vote against the punishment: that of Blaise himself.
    Or so Blaise had told her when he’d yelled at her to get out of his house and never return. She would never forget that day for as long as she lived—the pain and rage had transformed him into someone she couldn’t even recognize. Her normally mild-tempered lover had been truly frightening, and she’d known then that it was over between them, that eight years together had not meant nearly as much to Blaise as they had to her.
    Not for the first time, Augusta tried to figure out how Blaise had learned the exact vote count. The voting process was designed to be completely fair and anonymous. Each Councilor possessed a voting stone that he or she would teleport into one of the voting boxes—red box for Yes , blue box for No . The boxes stood on the Scales of Justice in the middle of the Council Chamber. Nobody was supposed to know how many stones were in each box; the scales