A Soul Like Glass (Kingdom of Betrayal #4)

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

G allium’s hand on my shoulder anchors me, and I let out my held breath, but I have to speak my fears. “Thaden, we could draw the blight to your village.”

Thaden’s jaw clenches. His focus is on my hand, where my fingertips hover above his arm.

I’ve never touched him.

Oh, he’s touched me. A hand on my shoulder, a brush of his non-scaled arm against mine. But I’ve never reached out to him before. And never when I was accessing my power.

The pull is strong.

Blacksmith magic attracts itself.

“We shouldn’t go to your village,” I say, plowing on. “I shouldn’t go there. Gallium shouldn’t go there. And now that you’re changed, neither should you. We all carry Blacksmith magic that could endanger your people.”

His jaw clenches again. “It’s a risk I have to take.”

“Why, Thaden?” I ask quietly, needing an answer even as my hand continues to hover above his scaled arm, and he doesn’t try to move away. “Because you promised Asha? Surely, there are alternative places you could take us?”

Now, he steps back from me, his focus rising once more to my face, but his jaw is no less tight. “There are other reasons. You will see.”

He turns away from me, as if it’s settled.

“But, the risk?—”

“You will see!” he snaps back at me, a deep growl in his voice.

For an instant, the cloak he wears over his emotions disappears. It’s fleeting. But I see it, the face he hides.

The face he has masked with bronzed hair, scales that glitter, and a presence that radiates with the strength of a dragon.

There’s a look in his eyes.

It’s the same wild, intensely angry look Malak Ironmeld gave me when he strapped me to his anvil?—

I refuse to revisit those memories, that trauma. I shut it away as I have so many times before, but I can’t stop my shudder.

Thaden doesn’t see me shiver. He has already turned away and is now surging ahead along the burned-out path, determination in his every quick step.

For the first time, I wonder…

If getting back to Asha isn’t the only reason he’s so anxious to reach his village, then what else is he hiding?

Gallium’s hand tightens on my shoulder, and when I look at him, he gives me a determined look.

No matter what lies ahead of us, we will protect each other.

By the time we stop to rest and eat, breathing has become difficult.

The heavy scent in the air is overpowering, a combination of burned ash and fresh blood. The sky has remained dark, so it’s impossible to know if it’s daytime or the middle of the night.

All I know is that I’m exhausted.

Even Thaden seems to be struggling with his breathing, using gestures instead of words to indicate where we should lay our furs.

“Safe here,” he rasps, minimizing his speech while he indicates the bare stretch of blackened rock, not a hint of a dead leaf or branch in sight. “Should reach village tomorrow.”

I want to ask him if he anticipates we’ll get there in the morning or later, but my mouth is too dry to speak. Sipping water does nothing to help, and worse, our water supplies are running low.

My power is keeping me going.

But it’s also a danger.

Within the breeze is the same pull I experienced when I reached out to Thaden.

I drop to my unrolled fur and extend my right hand into the wind. The air changes direction, swirling around my fingers, circling faster like its own little storm?—

I snap my fist closed and lower my arm.

Gallium gives me a grimace. The wind plucks at his hand where he grips his hammer and at his arm where the medallions are nestled. He folds his arms firmly across his chest when he sits down, but he’s forced to unfold them when I hand him food to eat.

He stares at it before he nibbles the edge of the apple-like fruit, barely touching it.

I understand his reluctance to eat. Our bodies are working hard, running on power alone. The thought of swallowing food… I’m sure I’ll only bring it up again.

We’re caught now in a dilemma with no good outcomes.

Without our power, our bodies would be stretched beyond their limits, and we’d face collapse. With our power, we’re becoming targets for the environment.

I leave my medallions where they are nestled around my arm and take careful bites of the apple that Gallium hands back to me. I can’t eat much more than he did.

After that, I offer to take the first watch—a suggestion that basically consists of me tapping my chest and saying, “First.”

I’m surprised when Thaden doesn’t argue. His shoulders are hunched, and the rings under his eyes are darker. He finishes the apple-like fruit he was eating, core and all, gives me a nod, and then lies down on his fur with his back to me.

Gallium is slower to agree, but it doesn’t take him long to reach for his fur, pull it over himself, and close his eyes, facing me, his eyelids slowly closing.

It’s only once they’re both asleep that I realize we didn’t agree on who would take the second watch, but it’s the least of my concerns.

When the wind dies down, I can hear more clearly the sounds from the distant plain.

A mournful call.

A soft cry.

A high-pitched shriek cut short, and then another eerie call.

And within all of the sounds, a rhythmic clanging that takes me back to the day my people died. Students were hammering their medallions out in the wasteland. My mother’s commands cut through the air, carrying the force of her power.

“Forge!” she screamed. “You will forge until your hands bleed and your muscles break!”

I pull my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them.

I never forged my own medallions. Was never given my own hammer. Instead, my power was taken.

But it came back. It resurged.

I am not that powerless child anymore.

Pulling my fur up around my shoulders, I resist the urge to raise my hand into the wind again, to let the air play around it.

Blacksmith magic… Creation and darkness…

With that thought, I can’t help but focus on Thaden.

When Asha, Gallium, and I die, our people will be extinct. Or so I always thought.

It isn’t lost on me that Milena Ironmeld is out there somewhere, and now Malak’s own son lies sleeping only a few paces away from me.

It takes both a Blacksmith father and mother for a child to be born with Blacksmith power.

If Thaden were someone else…

In another life…

But our people should never rise to power again. After what that power has done to the fae and even to the humans, it’s for the best that we will be the last of them.

For hours, I sit, my thoughts whirling around in my mind like the dust storms out in the darkness.

Until the air changes.

It happens imperceptibly at first, a small shift in the heaviness, a subtle change in the acidic scent…

And then, suddenly, my chest burns, and I can’t breathe.

A gust of wind billows across the barren range, bringing with it the heaviness of blood and death, snatching the air from my chest.

I grab hold of my fur to keep it from being ripped from my shoulders, my focus flashing to my left—the direction from which the wind is gusting.

Clang!

I jump as the sound of a hammer hitting metal rings in my ears, whirling around and around me, a disorienting hum of noise.

I don’t know where the sound’s coming from. I don’t know what’s making it. It sounds muffled and eerie and… wrong .

Clang!

I jump to my feet just as a dark tornado of wind and debris and crimson ash appears at the edge of the ridge, only fifty paces away.

A dust storm!

My heart thuds, and fear shoots through me.

It will stop. I tell myself it can’t pass the edge. There’s nothing here for it to feed on. Nothing dead. Only the echo of my dead mother’s commands and the beat of long-ago hammers.

Then, to my shock, the dust storm pushes forward another foot, edging toward me, as if it’s found something to feed on, something to let it approach me.

At the same time, it thins and begins rising up and up, an elongating tornado of ash and darkness before its uppermost half begins to curve down, arcing toward me across the distance.

It doesn’t need to move its base if it can reach me this way.

“Thaden!” My screams tear from my throat. “Gallium!”

Gallium leaps up first. He was already facing me, and he’s instantly awake.

I catch the desperation on his face as he launches himself up from his lying position, his muscles pumping as he throws himself toward me.

His strong hands collide with my side, shoving me out of the path of the descending wind tunnel.

I hit a solid surface—Thaden’s chest. He must have lurched to his feet a moment after Gallium. His arms close around me, and he whisks me to the side, propelling me away from my brother, who now stands directly in the path of the storm, and no matter how fast Gallium moves, he won’t evade it.

Fear for my brother fills my heart, and in that moment, there isn’t time to scream.

There’s nothing I can do to stop the dust storm crashing down on him.

Gallium’s form disappears within the dust storm.

My scream is whipped away in the wind that crashes across the clearing, forcing me into a crouch with Thaden’s body curved around mine even as I shout at myself to get back to my brother.

The raging ash has formed visible ropes within the swirling tornado, each one appearing covered in sharp, thorny barbs, all of them writhing and flailing. The mire is so thick that I can’t make out Gallium at all.

Then there’s a bright flash of copper. A streak of metal cuts through the mire, and my breath stops.

“Gallium!” I scream against the wind, my voice snatched away, and my hair whipping sharply across my face.

I make out another slash of copper within the storm and then another. Each one faster than the last.

Gallium.

And then?—

Light explodes between the dark ropes, and I can see my brother’s silhouette backlit in a copper glow. He’s rising up within the darkness, his entire body covered in copper armor that flows around him like liquid skin, protecting him.

My eyes widen as I realize that he must have made that armor from a single medallion.

He grips a dagger in each hand—undoubtedly formed from his other two medallions—and he’s whirling, the blades flying back and forth, cutting through the storm, slicing across the ash ropes, piercing the darkness. Faster than I’ve ever seen him fight.

Just as the ash thickens again, he drops to the ground, crouches, and then leaps directly upward.

Up through the darkness and into the sky above the tornado.

High above it.

In an instant, his daggers transform into swords, both of them pointed downward. His biceps are bunched—every muscle in his body is tense and strong. The sheer concentration on his face, his pure determination, takes my breath away.

And in that moment, I truly believe he has a chance.

He soars downward, gravity taking him back to the storm, but this time, he’s arcing toward its stem—closer to the edge of the ridge.

His blades slash downward.

At the last moment, the tornado splits into two, forming a second, thick rope that swings across the air.

It smacks into his side and the thud it makes is as if the tornado is made of solid wood and not ash.

Gallium shouts, and I can only watch as pain floods his face and his body flies backward.

Out into the dark sky.

And then he’s gone. Over the edge.