Chapter 14
My hands never even reached the front of his coat.
White-hot flames erupted from his palms as I was still leaping towards him, brighter than the midday sun – a blinding shield that seared my eyes and sent me stumbling backwards over the mossy ground, a wall of heat slamming into my face and arms. My fingers moved reflexively, isa, then algiz – ice, protection – and the burn receded in a whoosh of cool air.
Black spots swam across my vision. It took me a moment of furious blinking to clear my sight.
Too rash. Too reckless.
He could have fried me ten times over in those vulnerable seconds. But when I finally regained my vision, Durlain hadn’t moved at all – his flames retreated, but light shimmered beneath the pale skin of his hands.
The purple gleam of his hair had brightened in an unsettling way.
The shadows of his features had sharpened.
Tall and horned, sparks dancing on his fingers, he was more the lethal fireborn prince than any mask he’d shown me before – those unbearably sensuous lips curling into a smile that was coldly annoyed at best, a hair’s breadth away from mockery at worst.
‘Not your best idea.’ His tone turned it into a scalding insult. ‘You don’t get to hold a knife to my throat twice, Thraga.’
Balls.
A sensible woman would retreat. A sensible woman wouldn’t have attacked in the first place.
But then …
Surely he didn’t do much to earn it in the first place?
‘Take it back,’ I said hoarsely, backing away, fingers tight around Isa’s hilt. ‘About Lark. All of it.’
The crook of his dark eyebrow was a provocation in itself. ‘I don’t recall making any assertions I could take back? All I did was ask you a handful of questions.’
‘They were bloody suggestive questions!’ My back thudded against the trunk of a dead oak, as if even the forest itself was trying to stop me. Skeletal branches tangled on the edges of my sight. ‘You know damn well that’s not the same as—’
‘And if you’re susceptible to the suggestions,’ he murmured, gentle like the caress of a blade on skin, ‘then I’m to blame for it?’
My fingers twitched.
Fire flared a warning in the palm of his hand.
The air rippled around his slender shape, heat shimmers distorting the grey and sallow brown of petrified wood behind him.
Yet he stood motionless, a silhouette of shadow and flame in his long black coat and his smooth black boots – untouchable, unassailable, more powerful even presumed dead than I would ever be in life.
Anger was stupid.
Anger was a predator’s privilege.
If you fight back—
And then my hands were moving anyway.
They swung up faster than conscious thought, an explosion of movement that seemed to break free from the deepest, darkest pits of me – fuelled by nothing but spite, nothing but raw defiance, the runes shaping themselves on my fingers.
Algiz first, then thorn; I whirled around the tree trunk just as Durlain’s whip of fire lashed at me, just in time to dodge the flurry of sparks that erupted where his magic shattered my protective spell.
The crackle of that impact didn’t cover up the audible oomph of thorn hitting him solidly in the midriff.
‘I would actually argue everything is your fault!’ I yelled around the tree, signing another quick algiz sign at it when a sizzle of fire ran across its other side.
The fossilised wood groaned but held. ‘Yours and your hell-cursed family’s.
If none of you had ever shown up in Seidrinn, if none of you had burned my mother alive—’
On either side of me, the grass was catching fire.
I interrupted myself with a muffled curse, signing gebo and laguz without thinking – adding, water, and the flames sputtered into smoke.
Wouldn’t hold for long. Moving meant giving up on my cover, though, and while I doubted Durlain would burn me alive, he might just be in the mood to scorch off my hair at this point.
Eyes on the next row of trees, I slipped my hands behind my back and signed hagalaz.
Destruction.
The stony wood blew apart behind me.
Gold and orange blazed across the clearing, but I was already moving – leaping behind the next broad oak before the flames could catch up with me.
The tree had snapped centuries ago, the trunk’s ragged edges still reaching for the sky …
but it was high enough to hide behind, and hide I did, breath heaving, mind spinning, a frenzied laugh frothing from my throat.
There was no plan here. No strategy, no chance of winning.
But I was furious, and out of nowhere, I felt so fucking alive.
‘Thraga.’ There was a tightness to Durlain’s voice, and I madly, stupidly revelled in it. ‘Is there any particular sense to this game? If you insist on defending darling Lark’s honour …’
That stifled the laugh on my lips.
Shit. I’d almost … forgotten about Lark?
But this was not the moment for doubts. Durlain was probably hoping I’d be seized by guilt and give in – so I sucked in a deep breath, rested the back of my head against the broken oak, and yelled, ‘I’m getting a knife against your throat a second time!’
A cranky sigh. ‘No, you aren’t.’
‘I absolutely fucking am.’
‘Thraga …’ His footsteps were inaudible, but his voice moved, slowly circling my tree. ‘You’re a bloody skilled witch, but you’re not going to beat my magic. There’s a reason we won that war.’
Oh, he was going there, was he?
‘The reason you won that war is that you had the numbers on your side,’ I shot back, stealing a glance around the oak and firing a single thorn sign in the direction of his voice. There was no audible impact this time. ‘If the bloody people hadn’t chosen to ally with—’
‘The bloody people allied with us because we protected Seidrinn.’ Smoke curled around me on both sides, thick and pungent. ‘Were they supposed to choose the side that was blowing up volcanoes all over the island?’
‘That’s what you’re doing? Protecting them?
’ I swivelled around, finding myself face-to-face with a churning veil of smoke rather than the forest I expected – as grey as the sky above me, not a trace of Durlain to be seen through the haze.
‘Soaking in your hot baths while so many of them are starving in the fields?’
A flicker of movement on my right.
I snapped around, shaping thorn, naudiz, sowilo. Attack, lack, vision, and the mist thinned between the ghostly trees – revealing only more trees, and not a sign of that hell-cursed horned silhouette I’d expected.
‘Those same fields would be ice without us,’ he sharply said, suddenly behind me.
I jerked around again, scoffing as I squinted against the smoke. ‘And so you believe you have a moral right to that crown and all your little luxuries? Because of your magic? Because your great-great-grandmother fucked a dragon once and you—’
A flare of fire blazed through the mist curtain, and I managed to whirl away just in time, almost tripping over moss and roots. ‘Oh, sore spot?’
‘A little crude, isn’t it?’ he snapped.
‘Humbly begging your forgiveness,’ I told the smoke, rolling my eyes in the hope my voice would convey the sentiment. ‘Because your great-great-grandmother made gentle love to a dragon – is that better?’
None of this was about Lark anymore. I couldn’t even pretend it was about Lark anymore.
I’d spent my life stuck in this ugly world caught between mist and fire, between the deadly cold of Niflheim and the molten heat of Seidrinn’s volcanoes …
and this shit-stained, rat-faced fucker somehow represented both of them, every ruthless power to have broken me. If he wanted to toy with me …
I couldn’t fight ice and lava.
I could damn well fight him.
Around me, the smoke was thickening, crawling into my eyes and lungs. Stifling a coughing fit was all I could do – the slightest sound would give away my location, and then all he’d need to do was send another few fireballs my way. Whereas if he didn’t know where I was—
Wait.
Damn it all. This wasn’t the time for safe choices.
I could barely make out my fingers as I lifted them, but the signs came to me easily, following the frantic path of my thoughts.
Raido, change. Mannaz, othala, ansuz – body having sound.
With more time I could have pinpointed an exact location, could have worked on a more sophisticated distraction that would not even have told him there was a distraction at work … but if I was lucky, this would do.
Five steps backwards, and I loudly said, ‘Durlain?’
My voice didn’t emerge from my own mouth.
Instead, it echoed eerily around me, bouncing back and forth from tree to tree.
Quick, then, before the spell wore off. I signed thorn, naudiz, sowilo again and darted forwards as the mist thinned around me, to where watery rays of sunlight penetrated the haze.
Trees and boulders emerged as I slipped out of that smoke-tinged fireborn mist bank, and there finally was the tall, slender silhouette I’d been looking for, facing a quarter-turn away from me …
‘Here!’ I hissed.
The sound reverberated from the direction of the churning smoke. He snapped around with a jerk … and I was on him.
This time, he didn’t see me coming.
We slammed into the moss together, limbs tangling, bodies pressing together for an instant of heated, violent closeness.
I smelled smoke, roses, sweat. The cold sting of an ice scar brushed across my cheek.
Somewhere in the chaos, my left hand found the wiry outlines of an upper arm, pinning it down against the earth; my knee found his thigh, slamming down on slender muscle.
Just like that, I was straddling him – just like that Uruz lay in my right hand, settling against the underside of his jaw with almost comical ease.
He abruptly went stiff beneath me.
Around us, the last of the smoke curtain evaporated.
‘Twice,’ I gasped, and my voice was entirely my own. ‘What did you say about that war again?’
For a moment, he didn’t even seem to breathe.