by Mary Weber
Eogan tries to steady me, but I shake my head and place my other hand on the ground. I close my eyes and let the ice creep out from my fingertips until, shoving it harder, I spread it onto every surface of stone and wall and brick and cold flesh. Immediately, I hear both the Faelen and Bron men begin slipping.
From somewhere, Adora utters an oath.
I open my eyes and swerve around to stare straight at her. She’s crouched against the wall with that knife in her hand again.
I smile.
Her eyes widen.
Eogan already has his sword out, but it’s the cold energy snaking from my shivering fingers that knocks her blade away. I whip the ice current farther as she launches herself at us, hissing obscenities—about my mother, about my status as a slave, a favor girl, a murderer—and wrap it around her like a thread.
She drops to the ground and bursts into hysterical laughter mixed with screams.
I wait for Eogan to bind her hands before I release her. Leaving her alive. Barely injured.
Cursing.
Let the Faelen people deal with her.
The rain is turning the slick ground into slush. King Sedric and his men, bruised and bloodied, are tramping through it, making their way toward us. One of the knights steps ahead to seize Adora from Eogan. “We’re taking His Majesty and Princess Rasha. Rolf will stay be—”
His words are cut off by a loud whistle followed by another blazing detonation, this one closer. The whole fortress sways with the sensation that half the mountain is slipping away.
The group whips around.
“Nym!” the princess beckons urgently. “Come on!”
I look at Eogan and that perfect emerald gaze posing a silent question amid the growing vibrations and sounds of cracking rock.
My body’s shaking too hard to answer him with anything more than a nod. Let’s finish this.
I try to wave Rasha off. “We’ll be right behind you,” I yell above the noise.
She hesitates only a second, assessing me with those reddish irises as the rain pours off her brow. Then she tips her soaked head with a look of understanding and hurries after King Sedric and the few guards left, toward the back side of the Keep. To the cliff. While Rolf stays, sword in hand, to assist us.
I wait until they’ve disappeared, then, blinking back the ache of tears, I drag my leg across the courtyard, which is beginning to wobble as chunks from the mountain start falling.
I step up onto the low wall and into the water puddles.
And brace for the storm that is taking over from inside me.
CHAPTER 36
THE ENTIRE WORLD IS ON FIRE. THE CLOUDS, the night air, the raindrops that are
falling
falling
falling
in perfect little drips through jagged lightning streaks that are spreading, like yellow fingers, to tear open the sky overhead. Just like the jagged melody that is tearing up everything inside me.
I stand on the low wall overlooking the courtyard, unable to move or breathe as the entire Keep shakes from the corroding mountain and bombing ships.
“Nym.” Eogan’s voice has a funny edge to it.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I say, even as I force myself to turn to him.
His gaze is burning up the thin space between us. Alive. Strained. His jaw tightens and I catch the flex of his shoulders stiffening.
What the—?
The avalanche. He’s barely holding it back as his block expands. The fiery rocks and snow brought down by the bomb are hitting midair and collecting on the invisible barrier, dipping lower as if weighing it down. Weighing him down. “Well, clearly you’re going to have to,” he murmurs.
I stretch out my fingertips. They burn. I scream. Hulls, what if I can’t do this?
But in one spasm, I’ve coiled the ocean’s breath and yanked it through the pass. The air currents howl as I throw them against the boulders, whipping the rocks away from the fortress, the cliff, and the king’s ascending group of ragged men until the ice and stones are gone and the mountain’s no longer breaking.
And I’m shivering at the ease with which I did it.
Eogan’s sigh is audible as his hand connects with the pulse in my wrist, but it’s too late for soothing. Something’s broken loose in me, and that song from the Valley of Origin is pushing up its magic-soaked atmosphere to burn through my lungs.
Here it comes . . .
I gasp. My flesh, my arms. Blazing. I begin clawing at them—at the Elemental energy lighting my skin up and leaving me alive and terrified because this power forcing out of me is bigger and more dangerous than who I am or anything I’ve known. As if the Hidden Lands’ creator himself is singing the enchanted refrain inside me, and I am a conduit for his voice. A harmony to blend earth and sky and water.
And suddenly I have no idea how to control it.
“You can do this.” Eogan’s whisper is startlingly close, tangling in my hair. I wonder if he can see how badly I’m quivering—how the water’s flying off me in sprays.
No, I try to tell him. I can’t. But my words won’t move. Because this song that’s in my lungs and in my breath and forcing my mouth open is binding the elements to me. I can feel each raindrop, each thunder bellow beating in my veins as the melody abruptly escapes free as a bird.
Only to discover that the music has the power to destroy an entire kingdom with one wrong note.
Oh litches, what have I done?
The song flows from my mouth and enters my shaky hands. They spark.
I squeeze them into fists but more sparks leak out anyway. Like the airship bombs dropping around us—one, two, three, ten. The ships aren’t just racing out to demolish Faelen. They’re now taking out the pass as well.
Eogan points to the airship that caused the avalanche, and the twenty more behind it heading for us.
I shake my head. “Eogan, this thing in me. I won’t be able to control it.”
His voice is gentle—almost proud. “Just focus. You know how to do this.”
“I think you mean ‘Please don’t kill us,’ ” I mutter. And hear his responding chuckle just before I release the clouds to roar and howl down toward us. At the last second, I propel them against the ballooned contraptions, pressing them backward, upward.
The airships bob and swirl through the rain, moving faster and farther, curling around each other before sailing out to land in the ocean where the Bron warboats are moving through the breach.
I exhale.
A gale picks up out at sea, and now I can feel its friction in my blood. My neck tingles, and the next moment the melody surrounding me is reaching for the cerulean water, pulling it up in thick waves until it’s churning and coiling, creating miniature cyclones that lift higher and higher.
They pause.
I flick my wrist and twist, and the waters plunge. Giant waves roll up like the famed Elisedd dragons. Curling. Sending the Bron ships dancing back toward the open ocean, like paper boats in a puddle, with only two of them capsizing.
I send in another gust that spins and thrusts them even farther. Just like that.
I’m violently shuddering. And yet, somehow, even with the power coursing through me, erupting beyond me, I’m controlled.
Abruptly, Eogan’s hand is on my neck, and I can feel the calm flow through him, just as I swear I can feel a sudden tension surge up from Faelen. Through her valleys and snow peaks. Through the fields and black earth. Through her people’s blood and sweat and voices, as if carrying up on the wind.
“They’re about to launch,” Eogan says, and at first I’m confused until I realize he’s not talking about the boats. He’s eyeing the hundreds of airships that are now tiny specks hovering over Faelen. Some already creating explosions, while the rest are lining up, taking position.
“They’re going to take it out all at once,” he says quietly.
Suddenly his hand drops to my waist, holding me steady as the courtyard rumbles with an ungodly growl fro
m somewhere behind us. It’s followed by a shout. Eogan’s other hand reaches for his sword as we both spin around to discover Draewulf crouched fifteen yards away. His teeth are curled around Rolf’s shoulder while black wisps zip and flit around the beast’s feet.
He’s watching me.
His eyes are saying he’s returned to finish what we started.
The next instant, he flings the captain aside and is on all fours, foaming and snarling, then bolts in our direction.
The weather ripples, and immediately the rainbow mist from the valley slides along my skin, coalescing into place. The crystalline armor. It is diamond and light and a string of thread on a knife’s edge as I stretch out my hand.
“Make him fear who you’ll become.”
I flex it and slam two ice picks through his arm.
Draewulf yelps but keeps coming until, at the last second, he veers off and launches sideways. For Eogan’s throat.
Only to be met by Eogan’s sword.
The wolf swipes at him with his huge foot while attacking with his teeth. Eogan ducks, flips around, and is shoved against the wall. He nearly goes over it except for my next ice pick ripping through the monster’s shoulder. It throws him back.
Draewulf swerves his dust-gray eyes at me and snarls.
The lightning ripples. Sharpens.
I don’t even blink before igniting the ground beneath him in flames.
He lurches aside and shoves a black haze writhing through the air at me.
It fogs my vision as it presses in, choking, blinding me. My hand goes up with a lick of fire to dissolve it.
When it clears, fifty more wisps like it are surrounding Draewulf. Who is leaning over Eogan.
A crack of thunder brings hot liquid fire down on the monster’s back, forcing him backward even as the dark wisps protect him and absorb it.
I hear a moan and my gaze darts to Eogan. His face winces.
“Eogan!” I’ve crossed the distance between us in three steps as his shoulders slump, tremble, then straighten to reveal three claw marks that have torn across the front of his chest. Not fatal, but enough to stun, as the sick realization dawns: Eogan’s block doesn’t fully work against Draewulf.
“The airships,” he murmurs. “Nym, you have to take them now or there’ll be nothing left.”
I nod, but before I can do anything, Draewulf lunges.
I reach out and touch Eogan, pushing my shield to slide over his skin just as the monster’s claws come down on him.
They slip off and then grab for me, but the liquid armor stays in place over both of us.
The beast doesn’t move away. He stands inches from my face and narrows his gray eyes at me. He twitches his finger, drawing up more threads of black around him. Around us. Until they’re nearly covering the atmosphere overhead.
He bends forward and opens his mouth in a hideous, toothy grin.
And waits.
Suddenly, the rain ceases and the sky falls dim.
The winds stop. The lightning stops.
The world goes silent.
Except for that blasted droning and sickening explosions from the airships.
I look at Eogan in horror. My ability—I feel it withdrawing from the elements to protect him. As if unable to fuel two things at once.
Whatever dark magic Draewulf has, it’s powerful enough to interfere with the Elemental energy.
I can’t use it for Faelen while it’s touching Eogan.
Eogan’s fingers slip over my arm just as the beast’s lips snarl up into a smile. “You can’t save them both, girl. It’s Faelen or your trainer. Your choice.”
I swear I can feel the airships picking up speed without wind to block them.
The blackness grows thicker.
My shield wavers.
“Nym.”
I’m just calculating how to release it fast enough to follow with a strike at Draewulf when I catch Eogan’s movement. He’s slipping a blade from his boot.
I look at him. At his brilliant eyes. At the last of the raindrops shimmering off his skin. His breath slides out and mixes with mine as he tips his head toward the ships, then drops his gaze to my lips.
Abruptly his mouth is against them, pressing in, soft and insistent—as if he can draw out every bit of broken in me and repair the pieces with his own calm, his own heart that is beating and blurting out a confession:
That I am his weakness.
I have always been his weakness.
An image flashes of my five-year-old self being dragged through the snow from my burning home. My screams muffled by his unfeeling boy-size hands so his father wouldn’t hear. Those same hands that had minutes before set fire to my house.
Oh hulls. I stare up at him. I have always been his weakness.
He leans back and brushes a hand down my neck and my shoulder. I swallow a sob. I don’t want to be his weakness, I almost tell him. I want to be his strength. But he traces a quick finger over my jaw and raises his eyes to mine. “I think this is the part where you let go, Nym.”
Then he steps away. And before I know it, he’s pulled back from my touch.
The shield releases just as he slashes the knife through the monster’s gut.
Draewulf falls two paces backward. Swipes at the air, at Eogan, at the empty space behind him, but even the ghostly fog drifts aren’t able to hold him as he stumbles toward the cliff’s edge.
I turn and hurl the rainbow-mist shield toward the sky.
Crack! The sound is ear shattering as the atmosphere fractures like broken glass and explodes into a thousand pieces of night. Dissolving the inky wisps in a cyclone of air that rushes over Faelen. Pushing the airships back, shoving, throwing, heaving them past the borders of our island and over the Sea of Elisedd in one enormous wave.
The entire fortress rocks from it.
Just like the others, the airships dip and bob, looking like a horde of fireflies as they disappear into the night. Along with the remnants of Draewulf’s black haze that fades, as do all traces of the storm.
I glance around for Eogan, but I don’t see him.
I’m just about to call for him when the next moment I’m scared the stars are falling off their fiery hinges, knowing it was me who broke them.
But it’s not the stars. It’s just a few of the broken airships here in the pass, burning up before hitting the ground. And when they clear, I’m certain someone’s taking a paintbrush to the world’s ceiling, swathing it in pure beauty before splattering it with tiny golden dots. They’ve even strung up the giant silver moon low enough to touch.
I reach out and imagine touching it just as my name is spoken. It’s followed by shouts and tumbling bodies coming from the direction of the crumbled fortress gate. Some of Bron’s men have found their way through.
I hear Eogan’s voice demanding to speak with their generals in a tone that reminds me these are his people. His army that he used to command. And I’m simultaneously sighing with relief he’s all right and swerving round to see him standing on the wall, being approached by official-looking men whose clothes are a tad too clean to have done any fighting themselves. Especially next to Eogan, who looks like he’s been in a bloodbath.
My stomach cringes at the amount of bruising and gashes he has on his arms and face and back. He looks exhausted, sallow.
I step toward him.
My name is called again.
I shake my head at whoever it is, only to jerk forward and stagger, and abruptly my teeth are chattering and every one of my own cuts and scratches feels too warm, and my leg wound is scalding as if I’m going into shock.
I reach out and grab the wall. Then the courtyard is spinning, and suddenly there’s a pair of hands on my arms pulling at me. I think they want me to come with them.
“I need to talk to Eogan. I need to see him.”
But they don’t understand. The hands just move to my waist and start to lift me.
I bat them away. “Draewulf . . .”
“Went o
ver the cliff,” the voice attached to the hands assures me, and then he’s hoisting me over a shoulder covered in blood and Faelen colors. Rolf’s face comes into focus for a second. “It’s all right. Eogan asked me to look after you.”
“I don’t want to go.” I want to see Eogan. “Put me down.” But Rolf must not be hearing right because no matter how loud I yell, he just keeps telling me it’ll be all right and complimenting me that I have done my job well.
That I have saved Faelen.
CHAPTER 37
We are flying. Skimming somewhere between sea and sky. I hold out my hand and watch the buttery sunlight trickle through my fingers with the wind. Warming my skin as it spills across my arms and face through the airship window. Like the foamy ocean spray wafting from below.
The ship rises and dips on the air currents just as Eogan steps in front of me, blocking my view of the distant coastline as he runs a hand through his hair.
“What do you think?”
“Of?”
“Of you becoming a delegate and moving here to Bron’s court.” That self-assured look in his eye glints his amusement even as I swear his tone sounds nervous.
“Is that where we are?” I ask, craning to see past him to row upon row of shimmery buildings on the horizon.
“Not yet. That’s Bron’s outer coast on the left. And that over there”—he points to our right—“is the famous fault line.”
“Separating your people from Drust and Draewulf.”
“Silly Storm Girl. Draewulf’s gone.” And before I can argue he leans in close, flashing me that unfair smile. To which I chuckle and present him with a kiss.
He raises a suggestive brow, causing me to laugh, and in that laugh, to inhale a world of beauty. Every smile, every friendship, every bit of goodness I’ve seen. Every bit of goodness I’ve hoped existed within me. And just like the ship I am fluttering, dipping, soaring . . .
“Nym?”
I jolt awake. Rub my eyelids. And open them to find myself in the window seat of my newly designated bedroom up at the Castle, which doesn’t look that different from my room at Adora’s. Except for the fact that Princess Rasha is staring up at me from her stomach on my room floor, in what has, apparently, become her preferred spot in the Castle these past few days.
