32. Thirty-two
Chapter 32
The passageway was empty, dark without the porthole’s light. The narrow walls and low ceiling felt ominous. Almost claustrophobic. The ship rocked, a sickening motion with no windows or view of the sea to orient by. I kept my fingers hooked into the shield.
I was tired from holding the earlier shield. It wasn’t just my fingers; it was my head, too. Keeping a spell going required a will and a mental fortitude that I’d never struggled with, because I’d never had enough power to hold something for so long.
Which wasn’t to say I couldn’t do it. But I felt my concentration fraying already. My head throbbed. My fingers ached to uncurl.
Kalcedon paced silently up the stairs, with me behind him and Oraik right on my heels. The world above appeared as a blinding light, one Kalcedon strode into without hesitation.
I squinted, just as a wall of purple fire roared straight at us. I flinched and braced for impact. The fire slammed into the shield and washed up over it, seeking a way in. I twisted my hands, stretching the shield to block the attack from coming over our heads.
Kalcedon didn’t seem to even notice. His hands turned, fingers flying. Three Colynes soldiers raced towards us, swords drawn. A bolt of power leapt from Kalcedon’s fingers and ripped into one of them.
I’d never seen a man go to pieces like that.
My shield faltered. Kalcedon threw another bolt of power, obliterating the right-hand soldier in a spray of blood. A flurry of arrows clattered uselessly against my shield as Kalcedon rained death on the deck. His hands kept moving, ripping each soldier to pieces individually.
“Keep him alive,” I heard Ozeri bellow. She must have spotted Oraik behind me.
The ground beneath me buckled. We sank, the wooden boards shifting like sand beneath us. My shield didn’t cover the bottoms of our feet; a spell had slipped in like smoke beneath a door. I tried to take a step and fell to my knees. Instinctively, dumbly, my hand flew out to stop my fall. I regretted the motion almost as soon as I’d started it, but it was too late. The shield fell. Kalcedon, seemingly unbothered by the shifting floorboards, hurled a wave of power towards the female fae who'd cast it.
She got a shield up just in time to block him. The male took off, turning back into a bird and hurling himself off the deck. Behind him I could see the Cachian Temple ship, sails billowing wide as it raced towards the chaos unfolding on the Colynes warship’s deck.
Another wave of arrows came our way. Kalcedon threw another bolt of power towards the Colynes archers. Still kneeling on the soft deck, I barely got a shield back up. It was smaller, not as clean as before, wavering as my fingers trembled.
Oraik grabbed me by the waist and pulled me back to my feet; somehow I didn’t drop the shield. Together the two of us stumbled towards stable ground.
I don’t think Kalcedon knew any other attack spells. He wasn’t a warrior, though anger had made him one. He just kept hurling heavy bolts of power, shredding, splintering, splicing. One connected with the nearest mast. With a mighty, cracking groan, the mast slowly tipped over, then snapped and crashed down. Screams pierced the air as the ship dragged to the side. Kalcedon leapt, bringing him closer to Oraik and I and onto solid ground.
The deck was covered in carnage, carnage he’d wrought. A hundred bodies lay in unnatural poses, surrounded by blood and pieces of flesh. It was a horrible sight, painful to look at but impossible to turn away from. A jerk of Kalcedon’s hand and another set of Colynes soldiers burst. The female faerie threw another spell and the deck beneath us blistered open, the old wooden boards throwing out branches in remembrance of life. A spell to restore a tree dead from inside to out, I thought involuntarily.
They must have really wanted Oraik alive, if this was the worst magic the fae would throw our way.
Kalcedon turned his focus away from slaughter for a moment to shear power straight down at his own feet, commanding the branches to snip and prune themselves with finesse born from decades of gardening.
The Colynes witches were cooking up something, two of them working together in a spell that was steadily building as their sigils wove nets in the air.
“The boats,” Oraik yelled. He grabbed my shirt and towed me towards the wolf-boats hanging over the side of the warship.
“Kalcedon!” I yelled. He glanced over his shoulder and saw we were moving. With a quick leap away from the battered and twisted ground we’d stood on, Kalcedon began to back up in the same direction, still throwing power. Not every shot hit someone. Some simply blasted holes in the deck. Large ones. The ship was beginning to tilt downward away from us, the whole deck at an angle as it took on water.
Across from us the Cachian ship arrived. Grapnels soared through the air and crunched into the rail, yanking the two ships close. We all fell as the deck bucked. A wave of Cachian Temple magic roiled across the far deck; sleep spells, by the way the Colynes soldiers nearest to them dropped their weapons.
“Get the prince,” I dimly heard someone yell. I stumbled up, desperately forming another shield, this one even weaker and sloppier despite the buckets of power I tore from Kalcedon.
A spell slammed into the shield from the Colynes witches. It was something nasty I couldn’t quite make out, something heavy. It felt like poison. It roiled over the surface and pocked into the shield, pressing into the spaces between the sigils and worming the enchantment apart bite by bite.
“ Meda !” Oraik shrieked. I turned, my aching fingers desperately curled into the spell, in time to see a soldier lunge at me. He’d somehow managed to sneak around to our far side without any of us noticing. He was behind the shield.
A sword sheared into my vision. The soldier yelled a triumphant battle cry. The blade was so close to my head that I had a clear knowledge that it was going to hit me, without any time for my body to react.
Kalcedon had twisted at the sound of Oraik’s shout. And he was fast, faster than I was. He cast something; I didn’t see it; only felt it. The sword jumped away from me.
Into Oraik’s side. Through flesh. A sound, wet and dull, and a cry that shredded my ears. The dagger I’d handed him tumbled from his grip.
Kalcedon’s magic pierced forward again, and the soldier stumbled back. I saw power slice right through the man’s heart, like an invisible blade. There was a horrible sound, like he was trying to speak and couldn’t. Then blood came out of the soldier’s mouth. Kalcedon—as if nothing had happened—grabbed me and pushed me towards the edge of the deck.
“ Run, damn you,” he shouted. His voice was hoarse. “Meda, a shield!”
I’d dropped it without realizing. But I couldn’t anymore. My mind was blank with terror and disgust and the heavy weight of the things I’d seen. I stumbled towards the rail, close to us now, where Colynes wolf-boats hung ready to drop.
I threw up. Despite it being the worst possible time to be incapacitated. My throat burned raw with bile.
With a curse from his lips, Kalcedon twisted out a sloppy shield. I felt its blanketing power even as I spotted the ten different ways an attack could slip through it.
We reached the edge of the ship, and the nearest boat attached to the winch.
“Get on,” Kalcedon commanded.
“But…” someone was going to have to turn the wheel to lower the ship down to the water; a job meant for a full team.
“ On ,” Kalcedon snapped. With a ragged gasp of pain, Oraik clambered into the wolf-boat, bleeding heavily. I managed to follow. It was magic, I supposed, that lowered us down. I threw up over the side again as we landed hard on the water, ocean sloshing into the belly of the wolf as we bobbed and leaned towards the steadily sinking warship. Oraik’s vocalizations were past the point of words.
A seahawk dove towards us and shed its feathers. Kalcedon slammed down so hard I thought he’d kick a hole in the bottom of the wolf.
“Call a wind,” he roared, as he opened the sail and lashed the rope messily into place.
We leapt away from the warship. Once we had a little distance Kalcedon threw a blast of power after the warship, furrowing the water and ripping a great hole in the side. Oraik wailed in pain from the punch of waves around us.
“Help him,” I croaked. I could feel tears on my face but was too far gone to recognize I was crying. I kneed my way towards him, ducking under the sail to reach where Oraik lay. The deck kept bucking beneath us.
The prince didn’t answer or move. He shifted his wet eyes to look at me, then back up at the blue sky. “You’ll be just fine,” I rasped. “Kalcedon?”
There was no response. I turned, one hand on Oraik’s shoulder. Kalcedon stood at the stern of the wolf, staring out towards the sinking ship. His heat was depleted. Nothing for me to grab.
“Kalcedon, help .”
“There’s something out there.” His voice sounded distant. He wasn’t listening to me.
“Kalcedon!” I snapped.
Oraik groaned. I turned back to him. On an exhale blood, bright as wine, slicked his lower lip. This couldn’t be happening. It was like the fire all over again, happening right in front of my eyes. I ripped my overskirt off my waist and bunched it over his wound, where his shirt was wine-dark with blood and each pulse of his heart made more spill.
“No. No, no.” My breathing was getting quicker. Losing Eudoria had been fast. I loved her more, but this, I felt with certainty, was worse; this slow leeching of blood and life. Kalcedon walked over, then put his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t moving. Wasn’t casting.
If he wouldn’t, I had to. Oraik was going.
I traced a shaky sigil, then another. Phrases came into my mind, building one on the other. I linked them together, unpowered except for the thinnest thread it took to hold their shapes in the air. The wind whipped around us and tore at the thin threads of power.
“Hurry. He’s losing blood.”
“No.”
“What?” I turned to face Kalcedon, eyes wide and hands shaking. He wasn’t looking at me or at Oraik.
“They can’t use him to bring down the Ward if he’s gone.”
I felt my throat working, but there were no words. No breath, no thought, just confusion. Just, this can’t be happening.
Oraik was dying. I could see it, feel it, hear it.
I fed myself into the spell, seaming his wounds together. For each cut I began at the deepest point and worked up towards the surface. I’d barely started, and my heat was half gone.
“Stop,” Kalcedon snapped. He pulled his hands from his pockets. “You don’t have enough.”
My teeth chattered. Heat streamed out of me. I felt sick. The urge to vomit rose, then vanished. I was cold all over. I couldn’t answer Kalcedon. I barely heard him. Everything I had was going into that spell.
“Stop. God, just… stop .”
I drew another sigil with shaking, uncooperative fingers. Pins pricked through my hands, deeper needles of cold lancing through me. A void roared just in front of my eyes and my life tumbled towards it. I couldn’t cast by feeling now; my body was unresponsive, my fingers slow and dragging behind the commands of my mind. Stars sparkled in the darkness of my vision.
With a curse Kalcedon threw himself down beside me. Heat rammed into me, and then he pushed me over. The sight of the blue sky was blinding. I toppled, gasping, as power coursed painfully through my bones. Kalcedon’s long fingers twisted. They fluttered through the air as he cast a healing spell of his own. Oraik jerked up at one point as the spell rammed through him, then fell back. I could see the magic work on him.
Kalcedon turned on me.
“That was a cheap trick,” he hissed. “Going cold just to make me help? You could have died , you idiot.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Why in horns should I care if he goes?” His face looked pale and drawn. “People die all the time.”
I didn’t care. I slapped him. Kalcedon flinched but didn’t raise a hand to block me. Hitting him hadn’t felt like touch normally did. There had been no burst of pleasure, no heat roiling through me. Only skin touching skin.
“Because he’s my friend, and if you gave him half a chance, he’d probably have been yours, too! You are heartless.”
Kalcedon didn’t answer. His shoulders caved forward. I clenched my hands into fists and glared at him, waiting for him to call me every name he could think of. But he was silent. And I didn’t feel a speck of heat from him.
He was so low I realized, for the first time, that Kalcedon was capable of going cold. He’d emptied his endless well for me.
“Well?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Aren’t you going to yell back?”
He shook his head and sank to his knees.
He was as weak as me.
Kalcedon.
For a man like him, that was terribly dangerous. I pushed a thread of my own trembling power into him. It was just a drop in the deep well that was normally Kalcedon, as insignificant as one spark against a bonfire. I couldn’t feel any change in him, though now I shivered too. He didn't respond to the spark, except to slump down all the way onto the deck, eyes shut. The bit of heat in him held steady without going out. He was alive. Barely.
And Oraik… he was alive too. I could see the rise and fall of his chest from where he lay on his back on the deck. But there was blood. Too much of it.
Suddenly I felt alone, and terrified, like either of them might slip away. And even as mad as I was at Kalcedon, I could not begin to wrap my mind around losing him.
I felt something, in the distance. A pulse of heat. Coming from the way we’d been. I turned my head. The Colynes warship was only half underwater, its bow lifted proudly up into the air. The Cachian Temple ship remained beside it. The heat I’d felt flickered out, but I felt certain something had been there. I drew a shaky breath and looked to Kalcedon, still unconscious on the floor of the ship.
The best thing I could do, for all of us, was get us far away.
Sail-rope in one hand and tiller in the other, I pointed us south and rode the wind towards safety.