“Please help me.”
“YOU ARE ASKING ME FOR HELP? WHY SHOULD I HELP YOU, SHARRIM?”
My father was proudest of me when I managed to beat him. Weakness and begging wouldn’t work. I had to be smart about this.
“Do you remember the ashes of Tyre?”
He looked behind me. His gaze swept over the grave of Kings Row and halted on Rowena inside the pillar. A muscle in his face jerked. Something sparked within his gaze. He buried it before I could pin it down. What I said next would determine if Rowena lived or died.
“He says you killed his brother,” I said. “This is a demonstration of his power. He doesn’t think our family can match it.”
The flames went out. The bus lay before me, suddenly cold. My arm hurt.
It hadn’t worked. He’d abandoned me. I’d banked on his pride and lost. I turned away.
A draft touched my cheek. Next to me Roland lowered the hood of his plain brown robe and looked at the pillar. The undead scattered. Ghastek stood alone by the pillar, his chin raised, his eyes defiant. The rest of the People huddled in a clump to my right, putting me between themselves and my father.
“Have you thought of a solution?” he asked, as if he’d just given me a complex mathematical problem and was curious if I could solve it.
“I can take control of the pillar, but that will require breaching it, and any breach will break the protective envelope around her. If I attempt to claim the protective envelope around her as my own, it may disintegrate and she’ll die.”
He nodded, his handsome profile slightly curious. “Continue.”
“My best option is to freeze her into stasis with the spell of Kair, while I claim the land. The spell of Kair would hold her separate from our reality.”
I wouldn’t be able to hold it for longer than an instant either. I didn’t have enough practice.
“Claiming would allow me to instantly disintegrate the pillar before it burns her, but claiming is a two-step process: the initial pulse that disperses from me to the boundary and the return pulse that travels from the boundary back to me. In the space between the two pulses, I’m powerless. The spell of Kair requires a constant flow of magic from the mage. It will collapse. The first pulse of claiming will disrupt the magic net that’s keeping her alive right now. If she’s out of stasis between the two pulses, she’ll burn to death.”
And I had just told him that Erra was teaching me. I would worry about it later.
My father crouched and picked up a handful of ash. “When their kind scorch the land, they wound it. Are you prepared for what will follow if you claim it?”
I had no idea what would follow. “Yes.”
My father nodded. “Three seconds. That is all you have.”
Three seconds was an eternity longer than I would’ve lasted. It had to be enough.
I had only generated a powerful claiming pulse once, and I’d required a tower to do it. Erra had been having me practice claiming small chunks of land, a couple of feet here and there, and then letting them go, and it required a lot of preparation.
All I needed was a twenty-yard circle around the pillar. That would contain any veins of magic stretching from the pillar. I could do this. I just needed an anchor. Claiming required an anchor, whether it was a tower or a nail thrust into the ground. I needed a conduit for my power.
I didn’t have anything.
Wait. I had my sword. I grasped Sarrat with my left hand and knelt, holding it straight up.
Slowly, deliberately putting one foot in front of the other, Ghastek walked away from the pillar to the group of People waiting on the side.
My father raised his hands. Light stabbed from them. Words, ancient and beautiful, poured out of his mouth, moving the magic itself. It was beautiful. It was poetry and music wrapped into a song of pure power.
I stabbed Sarrat into the ground and fed every drop of me into it.
A pulse tore out of me, a crimson wave of light rolling through the land. There was a pause, a single heartbeat that lasted for an eternity. Silence met me, and then, in the distance, I heard a noise, like a tornado coming from far away. It grew, deafening, overpowering, and slammed into me, jerking me off my feet. I hovered three feet above Kings Row. My skin turned to ash. Flames burst inside me, incinerating me. My body burned.
Neig had drained the land of its magic to make the pillar. It needed magic to survive and it was taking mine. It was pulling the magic out of my veins.
The agony drowned me. It hurt. It hurt so much. The land would consume me.
Rowena.
Through the bloody haze covering my eyes, I reached toward the smudge of magic burning in my mind and struck the pillar.
My vision cleared for an agonizing moment, suddenly razor-sharp, and I saw Curran lock his huge fangs on the back of Moccus’s neck and bite through it. The great boar gasped and went limp, finally at peace.
The pillar shattered, the molten liquid spilling, each drop turning into a perfect globe of glass, suffused with stolen magic.
Don’t panic, Erra’s cool voice reminded me from my memory.
The glass was mine. I crunched the droplets with my power. They broke as one, then again, and again, raining down in a glittering waterfall, and I crunched them again and again, feeding their magic back into the land while a crystal rain fell onto the soil, slipping into the earth.
The wailing lessened, then grew quiet, then turned to a whimper, a whisper, and finally vanished. I fell on the ground, landing badly on my side, and blinked. My hands weren’t charred. Not even my left, which I’d stuck into the fire.
I sat up. A perfect circle spread around the pillar, green with fresh grass. A familiar aroma filled the area. It smelled like spice and honey. Delicate flowers had sprouted all around me, small white stars with black centers. I had made them once before, when I’d cried during a flare, because a man who served Morrighan had died. I cared for him, and I had tried to keep him alive, but in the end, I’d had to let him go.
Rowena lay on the ground next to me, naked but unburned.
She opened her eyes, raised her hand, and struggled to say something.
Alive. She’d survived. We’d done it.
I felt oddly numb.
My father sat on the ground next to me and gently touched one of the flowers. Ghastek knelt by Rowena, took her into his arms with infinite care, and carried her away.
The boar’s corpse sprawled on the ash, all of its flesh stripped, the great bones rolling gently, as the lion dug into its stomach. The awful chewing sounds of a huge predator eating echoed through Kings Row. A part of me knew this was Curran and he was eating a god, and I should be freaked out by it, but most of me refused to deal with it. I was spent.
“Has the creature spoken to you?” my father asked.
“Yes. He wants to conquer.”
“So did his brother. What else did he say?”
“He offered for me to be his queen. He wants me to betray you. He hasn’t gotten around to saying it, but he will.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I reminded him that my father and my aunt killed his brother and destroyed his army, so he was a losing bet. He told me he wasn’t his brother and promised to prove it. This is his proof.” I turned to him. “He has the yeddimur.”
A muscle jerked in my father’s face. “They are an abomination.”
So the great and powerful Nimrod had a weakness after all.
“Is he really a dragon? Was his brother a dragon?”