Heat of the Everflame (The Kindred’s Curse Saga #3)

Chapter 5

Chapter

Five

I almost laughed—I might have, had Vance’s grimy hand not been jammed against my mouth.

This wasn’t just any gryvern.

Our bond swelled and strengthened with every wingbeat. Thump— her fear for my safety. Thump— her rage at my pain. Thump —her ravenous hunger to destroy those who had brought me harm.

My gryvern, my beautiful Sorae, had come for me.

Cordellia’s calm voice cut through the melee. “Everyone, get to your posts. Remember your training. We’ve prepared for this.”

My joyful relief faltered at the steadiness of Cordellia’s confidence. This was a gryvern , a legendary immortal beast that was part dragon, part eagle, and part lion. They were unbeatable by almost any weapon and nearly impossible to kill.

Cordellia should be panicking. They all should be panicking.

So why weren’t they?

“Finally,” Vance muttered, shoving the cork in his vial and tucking it away with the jars he snatched from the other men. But instead of rising, he held his position on top of me, his gaze fixed on the sky.

Sorae’s piercing snarl ripped through the air. She was close—even with the flameroot’s lingering effects, I could feel her presence so strongly across our bond.

Thank the gods I’d saved my weakened magic instead of wasting it on Vance’s paltry threats. I would need every ounce of it to fight off the Guardians long enough to mount Sorae and ride away with her to safety.

Any minute now she would find me, rescue me, take me home. If I could just get free of these men and get to her...

Fight , the voice demanded.

Soon , I promised.

Vance released his hand from my mouth to fumble for his larger weapons, allowing me to crane my head for a better look.

At first, all I saw was a mighty winged shadow silhouetted against the blinding sun. She tilted downward in a ferocious trajectory for the clearing, the sunlight illuminating her back.

And my joy became bliss .

Nestled between her wings, his dark hair unbound and whipping against his olive skin, a jeweled sword clenched in one hand and a shield of Fortosian steel in the other, was Prince Luther Corbois.

My Luther.

Even with a mile between us, his eyes found me in an instant. He took me in—pinned to the ground, my dress soiled with dirt, wet blood coating my body, Vance’s knee lodged into my ribs.

The rage on his face could have leveled the continent.

Happy tears sprang to my eyes, and an ecstatic laugh bubbled out. Luther was alive—and he had come for me.

I had little faith in gods or men, but I believed in the fearsome dedication of Luther Corbois with every fiber of my being. He had proven that he would give anything, even his own life, to protect me. He would stop at nothing to take me home, help me rescue my mother, and stand by me to stop this war. Together, we could do this.

Everything was going to be okay.

“Prepare the ballista,” Cordellia shouted. “Wait until the beast is close. The aim has to be perfect.”

I turned my head toward her voice. At the edge of the treeline, a group of mortals stood around a tall structure that resembled a massive crossbow. Loaded into its grooved arm was a bolt as large as a person, its sharpened tip dotted with hunks of glittering black stone.

“By the Flames,” I whispered. “No... no! ”

Cordellia marched toward it. “Remember, the godstone has to pierce the beast’s heart to kill it. We only have two bolts, so don’t fire unless you’re certain.” She glanced at me, then scowled at Vance. “I told you to get her chained up. We need her under tree cover so the gryvern is forced to land.”

Vance and his men finally climbed off me and yanked me to my knees, dragging me along the dirt toward the tree in the clearing’s center.

I screamed again, thrashing against their hold. “Cordellia, don’t do this—she’s loyal to me. I won’t let her hurt the mortals, I swear it!”

“She’s loyal to the Descended Crown,” Cordellia shouted back. “If you die, she’ll turn on the mortals and kill us all. We can’t take that risk.”

Sorae roared a deafening war cry as she passed over our heads, flying so low that the downdraft from her wings sent a breeze fluttering through my hair. A stream of sapphire dragonfyre poured from her mouth and seared a line of scorched earth across the meadow.

The horde of mortals fled in terror. A few moved too slowly, and their flame-engulfed corpses staggered, then fell, lifeless and still.

Fight , the voice purred, galvanized by the slaughter.

No . This was not what I wanted. Death and bloodshed, Descended against mortal. It didn’t matter that these rebels would slit my throat, given the chance—I was meant to be a better Queen with a higher purpose.

If carnage was the price of my freedom, the cost was too high.

I clutched desperately at Vance’s tunic. “I can call her off. Let me go, and I’ll stop the attack. No one else has to die.”

He grabbed my arm and yanked me closer. “Why do you think we put you out here in the first place?” he snarled in my face.

Blood rushed from my head, my vision spinning as quickly as my thoughts.

Bait .

They hadn’t placed me in the wide-open clearing to keep me out of trouble or to spy on me from a distance. They’d done it to show me off—to lure my protectors here and take them out, one by one.

Starting with Sorae.

Vance shoved me to the ground at the foot of the tree. “One of these days, you will finally accept that unlike you coward Descended, the Guardians are not afraid to die for our cause.”

He gestured to his men to chain me up, and I scrambled to get away. My fingers clawed at the hard soil in a futile effort to clutch onto something, anything, to drag myself out of their grasp.

I had to stay out of those chains. If they managed to lock me up, I would be trapped, with no way to get to Sorae, and she would be a sitting duck for their godstone bolt. The thrum of my magic was stronger now, giving me confidence that I could use it if I had to, but it was still merely embers of its full strength. One miscalculation and I could drain myself dry.

One of the men caught hold of my ankle and jerked it backward. My movements were still too sluggish, and I couldn’t react quickly enough to stop my body from collapsing.

With a nauseating crack , my head slammed onto a knobby, rock-hard root at the base of the tree, and my vision went watery.

Across the bond, Sorae felt my pain, and her fury exploded. She circled back toward me, her nostrils glowing as sapphire flames licked at her sharp-fanged jaws.

“Hurry up,” Vance barked. “Get the chains on her.”

The boy who had carried the vials for Vance latched a chain onto my shackles and rushed to secure it. With his hands still shaking, he struggled to thread the thick iron lock into place.

I tried to push him away, though my protests were pitifully feeble. Between my exhaustion, my dehydration, and my throbbing new head wound, I was barely clinging to consciousness.

A piercing shriek pulled my eyes to the sky, and Sorae’s golden eyes locked with mine. A pulse of emotion washed across the bond as she made her intentions clear.

A promise—to protect me at all costs.

I grabbed the boy’s wrist. “Go,” I warned him. “She’s coming. Run—now!”

His bulging eyes mirrored mine. He looked over his shoulder at the gryvern shooting toward him at lightning speed. “By the Undying Fire,” he whimpered. “Gods protect me.”

He dropped the chains and scrambled to get away. The other men in the group took one look at the fearsome beast spearing our direction, and they abandoned their posts and followed suit.

Only Vance remained. He unleashed a string of swears at his men, demanding in vain that they return.

“Vance, get out of here,” I yelled at him. “She’ll kill you.”

“No,” he spat out. “I’m not a coward.”

“Better a coward than a corpse,” I shot back. “If you’re so determined to die, save it for a more important battle—I am not worth your life.”

On that, at least, we seemed to agree.

Vance dared a glance behind him. Sorae was already surging over the clearing, her dragonfyre plume mere seconds away.

He gave me one final look, the side of his face slowly illuminating from the approaching inferno.

“ Run! ” I screamed.

I turned my face up to my gryvern and shut my eyes as the world went blue.

Even behind my eyelids, I was blinded by the sun-bright azure glow of Sorae’s fire. It engulfed me, swallowed me up like the depths of the sea, but I felt no burns, no wounds, no pain—only a comforting warmth that, for one fleeting moment, left me entirely at peace.

But when I opened my eyes, I saw war .

A blackened line in the earth ran straight between my feet, scattered soft blue flames flickering in the surrounding grass. Behind me, the mammoth tree I’d been chained to was now a pile of ash. Only a few charred pieces of wood remained, along with a red-hot pool of molten metal that had once been my chains and shackles.

I looked around for bodies, relieved to see the mortals had escaped—all except Vance.

One second more and he might have been spared, but his ill-conceived bravery had cost him. He lay in a heap a few feet away, screaming and clutching a bloody, steaming mess of burnt flesh where his arm had once been.

I started toward him, my healer’s instincts to mend and save kicking in, when a tremor rumbled through the earth.

Across the clearing, Sorae had landed in a patch of scorched soil. She threw her head back with an enraged roar that set the forest leaves trembling, then flooded the woods around her in a blazing firestorm, warning the mortals to keep their distance.

This was it—my chance to escape.

Sorae crouched down to her haunches as Luther slid from her back, his boots hitting the soil with a menacing thump. The wall of lingering flames and thick smoke made his form hazy, like the mirage of an oasis in the hot Ignios sands.

I was suddenly desperate to have his arms around me. Even when we had barely known each other, something about his embrace had always felt safe and impenetrable and inexplicably right.

His quiet strength had been my calm amidst the chaos. The faintest brush of his hand could center me when I was lost and catch me when I was falling. Somehow I just knew that if I could get to him, if I could just touch him, we would find a way out.

Exhaustion and relief tugged me staggering forward. My clothes had burned away under Sorae’s flames, but the purifying blaze had also stripped me of the caked-on dirt and blood, leaving my skin cleansed and my soul feeling strangely renewed.

Luther’s gaze traveled over my bare flesh, but there was none of the heated desire in it that normally sent my stomach fluttering. Instead, his features hardened to a sword-sharp edge.

I could imagine why—my pallid skin, my sunken, dark-rimmed eyes, my fresh bruises and still-bleeding wounds.

“How many times do I have to tell you—eyes up here, Corbois,” I yelled out to him, forcing a teasing lilt into my hoarse voice. “We really have to stop meeting like this.”

His gaze rose to mine, and we might as well have been the only two people left in the world.

Though I yearned to see that brilliant smile he reserved only for me, he was too far gone in his rage for my banter. Instead, in the crystal pools of his eyes, I saw the profound depth of his devotion. The intensity of it nearly brought me to my knees.

He had sworn that no force this side of death would keep him from my side, and Luther Corbois was a man of his word.

A warning tickled at the back of my mind. Over our months together, I had become so used to the heavy, enrobing aura of Luther’s power I’d almost stopped noticing it.

But now it was the absence of that feeling that snagged my focus. Though he couldn’t have been more than thirty yards away, there was a cold, empty nothingness in the air between us that, in Luther’s presence, felt unmistakably wrong.

“Archers, take him down,” Cordellia ordered.

A blur of black shot across the clearing and stopped me in my tracks. Luther raised his shield to his chest with no time to spare before an arrow collided into it and bounced away with a clang, leaving behind a tiny hole in the metal.

Another arrow followed, then another, and another. Luther crouched low beneath the shield’s protection as a volley rained down on him and forced him to sink back against Sorae’s side. Deflected arrows piled at his feet, and though most were tipped with the dull grey of Fortosian steel, a few bore that awful, telltale glittering black. Each godstone arrow left its mark in his shield, the slower ones making only dents, while others nearly pierced straight through.

If just one of them landed, if it even got close enough to cut a scratch on his skin...

Luther’s frustrated glare peered out from behind his shield. Every time he made a move to advance, another volley pinned him back.

Why wasn’t he using his magic? One flick of his wrist could flood this entire clearing and bring the mortals to their knees—yet he did nothing of the sort. Was he worried I would be angry because I’d asked him to spare the Guardians the night of the Ascension Ball?

Was he willing to go that far—sacrificing himself not just to protect me, but to avoid spilling mortal blood just to honor my wishes?

I was too scared to ask myself if that was a trade I was willing to make.

Sorae seemed to sense my growing worry. She flared her wings out protectively over Luther and arched her long, scaled neck, unleashing another stream of dragonfyre along the treetops. Leafy branches lit up in blue flame, and screams and groans became sickening thumps as charred bodies dropped out of the branches.

“No, Sorae,” I shouted. “Don’t hurt th—”

“ Launch the ballista! ”

For a moment, everything went silent. Then—the creak of a lever. The twang of an overwound rope. The whistle of a flying bolt.

I had no time to think. No luxury of debating the moral highs and lows of mortal bloodshed. No chance to weigh the cost of using the small spark of my magic that had emerged from the flameroot’s suffocating fog.

As I watched the godstone-studded spear rip through the air on a certain course for my gryvern’s beating heart, I had no time to do anything at all. Except...

Fight .

Just as I had that night in the forest with the direwolf, and again at the Challenging against Rhon Ghislaine, I managed only a whisper of a thought—an instinctual, ephemeral plea for salvation—and with a flare of silvery light, the bolt was gone. In its place, a cloud of ash floated away on the winter breeze.

I collapsed to my knees as my vision tunneled to near-blackness. Consciousness had become a fleeting concept. Whatever I had done, it had cost me dearly, both in magic and in energy.

I heard Luther shouting my name, then his boots striking the soil as he ran toward me.

Then the pluck of bowstrings and the patter of falling arrows, and his soft swears as he was pushed back once more.

It struck me then why I hadn’t felt the aura of his deep well of power. He was a Lumnos Descended—and we were in Arboros. Outside of the borders of his terremère , without a Crown on his head to free him from the Forging spell’s limits, Luther had no magic. He was nearly as defenseless as an ordinary mortal.

And he had come for me anyway.

“Load the second bolt,” Cordellia commanded. “Quickly!”

“No,” I whimpered. I tried to push to my feet and found myself collapsing onto my side instead. My heartbeat stuttered in a quick, uneven rhythm—a worrying sign.

I was suddenly so tired. So very, very tired.

“ Diem! ” Luther’s voice was strained and desperate. “Diem—hold on, I’m coming!”

The world wobbled and dimmed. To my right, the Guardians slipped another shimmering black bolt into the ballista’s arm. I knew I couldn’t stop it a second time—my magic was too frazzled, too faint.

My head rolled groggily to the left. Luther had abandoned all sanity, braving a lethal hailstorm in a sprint for my side. My heart wrenched as one arrow sank into the flesh of his shoulder, then another lodged in his thigh.

Our eyes met.

“I’m sorry,” I mouthed.

Take him home, and don’t come back.

Sorae snarled a protest at the silent order I sent across our bond, but she was powerless to ignore it. No matter how fierce her desire to protect me, her free will was leashed to my command. She would obey me—even if that obedience cost me my life.

With two thundering steps, she was airborne again, the powerful downdraft of her wings sending the rest of the arrows off course. Luther looked up, then back at me, his eyes darkening near-black with rage.

“Don’t you dare,” he snarled. “Diem—”

His furious words cut short as Sorae’s talons encircled his chest and plucked him into the air.

“Launch the ballista!” Cordellia shouted.

Save them , I pleaded with the voice .

It didn’t answer.

My godhood was spent, and so was I.

My head fell back against the soil as my glassy eyes unfocused. The last thing I saw was the shimmer of sunlight on godstone as the second bolt raced toward a fleeing gryvern and an arrow-struck man.