Chapter Thirty-Three
Ronan
The room is silent and still when I enter it, with only the flicker of a candle in the corner to let me know someone has been in here recently.
And then I see her on the table.
“Sylvie! She’s here!”
I hear Quinn and Taran rush in behind me. “What’s that?” asks Quinn, pointing to something on the floor as I rush to Sylvie. “Cracked door,” says Taran. “Footsteps. Looks like someone left in a hurry—”
I don’t know what they’re talking about, and I don’t care.
Sylvie is here. I touch her—she’s alive; thank the gods, she’s alive—but she’s hurt.
Some light bruises on her hands and wrists, and gods, what’s that?
There’s blood flowing from her arm. Now I see what Quinn meant.
There’s some kind of tube coming out. Quinn picks up a bag from the floor.
I can’t tell what either thing is made of.
I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.
Quinn moves to detach whatever it is from Sylvie’s arm, but I stop her. “She needs that,” I say about the blood in the bag. There’s so much of it. “She’s weak.”
“Can it just…go back in?” she asks, giving the bag a gentle squeeze.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” I say, holding the bag up. “Yes,” I say, feeling Sylvie’s pulse. I squeeze the bag again. “I think that’s working.”
“Where’s the trap, Ronan?” asks Quinn. “There was meant to be a trap.”
“I don’t know, but I’m getting her out of here. Find Taran. The other shadow-born may be here somewhere.”
Quinn takes off down the hall. I lift Sylvie into my arms, carefully holding the bag above her.
Once Quinn’s footsteps are gone, I feel the slice of steel at my left ankle.
What the fuck?
The wound burns and then fades suddenly, strangely. It’s deep. My left leg collapses beneath me, and I nearly lose my grip on Sylvie.
There’s someone under the table where I found her. How? There was no one there when I came into the room.
“Quinn!” I shout, but there’s commotion at the end of the hall.
I fire out light from my hands to see what I’m doing. I can probably heal it myself, though if it’s deep enough, I may need a nature-born to walk again.
Fuck. We’ve got to get out of here. “Taran!” I yell.
He doesn’t respond, but I have another problem. The wound on my heel isn’t closing all the way. The light I’m using to heal myself barely shines. My magic has been weakened again somehow, even though it was working just fine moments ago.
“Problem?” says a voice. The person under the table, the person who cut me, is a woman.
The person under the table is Zara.
For a moment, I think I had it wrong, and that she was kidnapped too. But then I see the blade in her hand.
I shouldn’t be surprised. This is hardly my first betrayal, and yet this one still hurts because not only did I trust Zara, I liked her. She was like me.
Or at least she let me believe she was.
“Poisoned blade?” I ask her. If there’s one thing I’ve never liked about Zara, it’s that she has a tendency to gloat.
Without the full use of my magic, my only option is my sword, and I can’t both reach for my sword to take her out and keep hold of Sylvie.
So what I need to do is buy some time until help arrives.
“Hardly,” she says. She crawls out from under the table and glances down the hall. “They’re busy down there, but I don’t think we have long enough for me to explain.” She sighs, rolling her dagger’s handle in her hand. “I thought you’d come alone. I didn’t want to have to be the one to do this.”
She’s going to try to fight me directly. Gods, she’s arrogant. She has no combat experience that I know of. She thinks she can beat me because I’m down a leg?
“How did you hide yourself? At least tell me that.”
I can see where she concealed herself beneath the table and why I didn’t notice her, but I should have been able to feel her there.
“In Eki, there’s a form of meditation that lets you enter into a state without thoughts or feelings.
It’s like a conscious sleep state. It’s nearly impossible to do while moving, but it’s fairly easily managed sitting still.
The real trick is not reacting when someone shows up.
But I’ve had lots of practice over the past few years. ”
“The candle,” I say as she brings the dagger closer. “It’s the candle, isn’t it?” It’s a wild guess, but there isn’t much else in the room that could be affecting my magic.
“Not bad, Ronan. Not bad at all. Yes, it’s the candle that suppresses your power.
One of my best ideas, I think. It only affects the magic of the light-born, and only when you burn it, but there are so many candles in the palace.
In the arena. It wasn’t hard to replace enough of them to make you vulnerable. ”
I feel Sylvie stirring. Not her body, but her feelings. They’re faint, but I can’t tell if it’s because she’s weak or because I am. Don’t move, I tell her. I have no idea if she can feel me right now, but I beg her not to move nonetheless.
“Doesn’t it affect you?” I ask.
Zara smiles. “Yes, but a bit less than you. Oh, it really is interesting why.”
Now I’ve got her.
“Tell me.”
“I would love to, but…well, it’s complicated.” She leans out into the hall to check on what’s happening down there. To check if she has time to patronize me. “Have you noticed something unusual about Sylvie?”
“My magic is different around her. Do you know why I feel her so strongly?” I don’t admit the rest to Zara, the way that I’m able to share some of my power with her, the way my light shines even in her darkness.
I can’t risk that Zara can do something with that knowledge if I don’t make it and Sylvie does.
“It’s more than just you. It’s her magic, too.
The two of you together, affecting each other.
You’re shadowbound. The texts on the phenomenon are difficult to come by, most of them destroyed in one of the purges.
But I managed to locate a copy some time ago…
such a pity I don’t have time to show you.
I do think you’d find it fascinating. Now, I really am going to have to just do it.
” She raises the dagger to strike at my throat, giving me no time to consider what she said.
I can’t let her kill me. Not while Sylvie still needs me.
“It’s harder than you thought it would be, isn’t it?
” I ask. Even with my magic weakened, I can feel her hesitation.
She’s been responsible for some terrible things here, but she’s never directly taken a life before.
“You don’t have to do this. You can heal me, and you can let us go. ”
“It’s a touching idea, Ronan, but no. I don’t love killing you, but it’s for the greater good.
You understand that, don’t you? I know everything you’ve tried to do has been for the same reason.
We really do have a lot in common. It’s a pity you could never understand that some ends justify all means. We could have done so much together.”
Sylvie reaches out beneath me. She’s paralyzed, her body paralyzed somehow though her mind has awoken, but her magic is there.
And I can feel what she’s going to do the moment before she does it.
Sylvie reaches out with her shadows, invisible in the darkness until they reach the candle, and she snuffs it out.
The candle’s effects don’t vanish immediately, but they don’t need to. I can’t see what’s happening, but I can feel it as Sylvie turns the shadows with alarming speed. I hear Zara fly back through the open door as she screams.
I lower Sylvie to the ground, fumbling to place the blood bag on the table. Sylvie is trying to hold Zara, but she can’t see her from her position. I draw my sword just as Zara feels an opening in the shadows that bind her. She bursts free, dagger in hand, lunging forward…
But she can’t see what she’s aiming for. She stabs blindly, striking Sylvie as my sword, guided by feel, plunges into Zara’s gut.
I toss Zara back, hobbling to the ground to help Sylvie. I feel the blood rush out of her leg when I touch her skin, but the candle’s effects linger. I can’t heal her. The wound won’t close.
“Quinn!” I shout. “Quinn, get back here!”
“Just a minute,” she calls from down the hall. There are muffled cries coming from behind a door. I can’t sense how many people are there from this distance and with my magic as weak as it is, but it’s a lot.
“NOW!”
“Fuck!” she yells. “Taran!”
And then I hear her footsteps tearing down the hall. I smell the smoke and sweat on her as she steps over Zara and into the room, a flame in her palm.
“Is that the Guild Mistress?”
“Heal Sylvie,” I demand. In the flickering light of Quinn’s flame, I see just how much blood is pouring from her, and it flips my stomach upside down.
“What? Oh, shit.” Quinn kneels down to Sylvie and presses the flame to the wound in the leg.
Sylvie doesn’t cry out. I don’t think she can feel much of the pain, at least.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur to her, rocking her motionless body. “I’ll fix it as soon as I can.”
Quinn’s flame stops the bleeding, thank the gods, but it leaves a terrible mark of burnt flesh on Sylvie’s thigh. She’s so weak, and I have no fucking idea what to do about whatever is keeping her from moving.
It chills me to the bone. It reminds me of losing my mother, how her body went before her mind. It was just after my magic settled, just after I’d begun to feel her and others. I felt her trapped in there for days, unable to move or speak. And then I felt her mind slip away too.
It was horrible. I can’t bear it again.
“I’m going to fix this,” I promise Sylvie. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to.”
“What the fuck happened? Where’s your magic?” asks Quinn.
“Don’t light the candle,” I say as she gets near it. “It’s poison. That’s what has been affecting my magic. Did you find the shadow-born?”
“Yeah, and about twenty alchemists guarding them. More than half of them fled once the fighting really got going. Are you alright here? I should make sure more of them haven’t shown up.”
Quinn’s fire won’t be able to heal my ankle; I’m going to need to wait until I can heal myself to be able to walk, if that even works. Sylvie needs help, but not the kind that fire can provide. “If any of the alchemists are alive, send them here to heal her. A nature-born, if they have one.”
“You got it,” she says. “What about her?” she asks as she nudges Zara’s stilling body with her foot.
Her feelings are fading. Maybe there was a chance for her, but it passed long ago.
If I’m honest with myself, it passed the moment she touched Sylvie.
“It’s too late for her,” I say. “Go.”