But Sadie couldn’t move.
Morgan slammed into her, throwing them both back against a large piece of the fallen granite wall. He used his body to cover hers as chunks of debris rained down around them with such relentless violence that she could no longer hear her own screams. The air detonated with the percussion of a sonic boom, and the cane in Morgan’s hand whispered a mournful sigh before it simply dissolved into ash.
And the chaos suddenly stopped.
Silence replaced it. The air was still. The earth no longer rumbled, and the sound of the waterfall had ceased.
Sadie blinked in the dim light of dawn breaking over the summit of Fraser Mountain and looked past Morgan’s shoulder. Destruction lay everywhere like a volcanic eruption. A gaping hole had opened several hundred yards deep into the mountain, and the sharp cliffs that had formed the grotto now lay crumbled into talus. The waterfall had been sealed off, the gold and most of the pool now deeply buried beneath boulders.
The giant trees, most of them uprooted, some of them still standing but with their tops snapped off, littered the ground like discarded toothpicks.
The destruction was complete.
“Morgan!” she screamed, grabbing his shoulders and wiggling out from under his limp body. “Morgan!” she repeated, shaking him. “Answer me!”
There was a cut on his head, but his side was bubbling red with blood from one tiny hole from Eric’s bullet. More blood spread at the ground beneath him, soaking his shirt all the way down to his pants. His eyes were closed. His breathing was shallow. His face was pale as death.
Sadie dug at the boulders pinning his legs, whimpering with frustration when she couldn’t budge them.
Father Daar stumbled over and knelt beside them.
“Do something!” Sadie shouted at him. “Use your magic!”
“I have none!” Daar snapped back, adding his own weight to hers. “It was used up in the destruction.”
Sadie spotted Morgan’s sword lying beside him. She grabbed it and started prying at the boulders.
The sword suddenly broke, sending both Sadie and Father Daar stumbling backward.
Sadie lifted the hilt that she was still holding, staring in horror at what she had done.
“Oh my God. I broke his sword.”
She scrambled back and knelt down to cup Morgan’s face. “Hold on, my love,” she whispered, touching her lips to his ear. “You hold on,” she ordered when he didn’t respond.
Sadie was suddenly grabbed by the shoulders and pushed away so violently that she swallowed her gasp. A tall, dark-haired giant with eyes the exact same color as Morgan’s replaced her at Morgan’s head, running a large hand over her husband’s face.
“We’ll have you out in a minute,” the stranger said, putting his shoulder into the larger of the two boulders.
Callum suddenly appeared and set his own shoulder to the rock, both men grunting and straining and cursing. Sadie sat on the ground and placed her feet just below their hands to add her own strength. Even Father Daar used smaller rocks to hold up the boulder each time it moved.
The stranger stopped, catching his breath, and looked at the situation. He walked to the back of the rock and started working, throwing debris out of the way. Callum found a stout branch and set it to pry against the boulder, only to stop suddenly and lift out the broken tip of Morgan’s sword.
“I hope ya can run fast,” Callum said. “Because just as soon as Morgan is well enough to stand, he’ll come after you.”
“Oh, please hurry,” Sadie whispered. “He’s bleeding to death.” She turned to the priest.
“Isn’t there something you can do?”
Both Callum and the stranger—Sadie realized he was Morgan’s brother, Greylen MacKeage—looked at the priest with Sadie. Father Daar slowly shook his head. “My staff was destroyed, and so was the waterfall. There’s nothing left.”
Faol suddenly appeared, limping over and washing Morgan’s face, whining and pawing at the boulder.
“Get that beast away from him,” Greylen said harshly, moving to kick the wolf.
“Nay,” Father Daar said. “He’s only worried about his son.”
“His son?” Greylen whispered, his face paling as he snapped his eyes back to the priest.
Daar turned red in the face. “I’m guessing, MacKeage. But I have a notion Duncan’s been visiting us this summer,” he said, waving at the wolf.
All four of them turned to stare at Faol, who was now looking at them with unblinking green eyes. He whined again and pushed at the boulder with his nose.
Greylen and Callum went back to work. They were suddenly joined by another pair of large, strong-looking hands, and Sadie looked up to see an older man, with red hair and graying beard, putting his weight into the boulder.
“Ian,” Greylen said. “Be ready to pull him out the moment there’s room. Woman,” he snapped, looking at her. “Help him.”
Sadie quickly moved more debris out of Ian’s way, making room for Morgan to be pulled free. With a lot of grunting and another fair amount of cursing, Callum and Greylen put their backs into the task. The boulder moved mere inches, and Ian roughly pulled Morgan free of his prison, continuing to drag him until his feet were clear of the boulder.
Sadie immediately crawled to Morgan and ripped open his shirt. Blood gushed into her hands.
Greylen grabbed her by the shoulders again and roughly set her to the side. “You’ve done enough to him. Get her out of here, Daar.”
There was such anger emanating from Morgan’s older brother that Sadie backed away on her own. She wiped her husband’s blood on her pants and turned to Father Daar.
“There has to be something we can do. What about the magical water? Th-that puddle’s still shimmering.”
The priest slowly made his way to the puddle, bent down, and stuck his finger in the water. He looked up to where he’d been standing when she and Eric had arrived. Sadie followed his gaze. The cherry tree he’d been trying to break was splintered into a thousand pieces. He looked back at her.
“You can get there better than me, girl,” he whispered. “Go look for a cherry burl in that mess. The tree’s been growing in blessed water for more than two years now. Maybe some of the magic is hiding there.”
Sadie crawled over the rocks to the far edge of what had once been the pool.
“Find a big burl!” the priest shouted. “From the root if ya can.”
It took all of her strength, but Sadie was able to dig a knot free from the roots of the cherry tree. She hurried back to Father Daar and handed him the small piece of wood.
“This is all I could find,” she whispered, anxiously glancing toward Morgan.
Greylen had taken off his shirt and wrapped it around Morgan’s wound. He was now checking Morgan’s legs for broken bones. Sadie looked back at the priest.
He was frowning. “I don’t think it’s enough,” he said, sadly shaking his head. “It’s wanting the strength of the water and my old staff. Already I can feel it losing its vitality.”
Sadie reached out and touched his arm. “Please. We have to do something. We’ll never get Morgan to town in time.”
The moment she touched him, Daar’s eyes widened in surprise. He covered her hand with his own, his mouth suddenly lifting into a smile.
“It’s in you, girl,” he said in a voice filled with awe. He turned to face her and touched her with both hands, holding the knot of cherrywood against her skin. “There’s magic left. It’s here,” he said, turning her right hand palm up. “In you.”
“What do you mean?”
“When ya were healed,” he told her, rubbing her unscarred palm with his finger. “The burl dissolved because its energy went into you.”
“And—and I can give it back?”
“Aye,” he said, looking into her eyes. “Ya can.”
“And I can heal Morgan?”