Chapter 34
Had the knife been Ehwaz, Belloc would have been dead.
But Ehwaz had been forged for speed, for surprises.
Jay’s blade was simple unspelled steel, no different from the hundreds of others one could find in the Estien armouries, and it cut through the air just a fraction more slowly – a difference of maybe half a heartbeat, but it was enough for its target to whirl aside with an ease that belied his bulk and brawn.
Steel clattered uselessly against obsidian.
Belloc’s howl shook the stone beneath my feet.
In the blink of an eye, the world dissolved into chaos.
The volcano rumbled above us. Rook was shouting a name I didn’t recognise; horses whinnied on the other side of the jagged black plain.
I heard the racket, distantly, and was faintly aware I ought to be terrified …
but I watched Belloc’s hand come up as if it was nothing but a distant dream, as if his calloused fingers taking aim at me were nothing but dull routine, and there was not a sliver of fear in me.
Just fury. Just that memory I shouldn’t be clinging to—
You fight so well.
Flames roared from his fingertips, and my hands were moving.
Algiz, kaunan, and the barrage of fire sizzled out against the invisible shield of my magic.
I flung a half-hearted eihwaz after it, knowing it was no use; Belloc stood too far away for the death rune to have any effect.
He hurried two steps back all the same, breaking his attack, and there was no denying my ill-advised, gleeful spark of triumph as I followed him across the smooth black stone – the royal heir of Estien, stumbling over his feet to move out of my way.
On the edge of my sight, Jay was getting the hell away from us.
Belloc didn’t seem to notice, fire engulfing his broad shape now, burning so red-hot I felt it even from twenty feet away. ‘You little bitch—’
‘The name’s Thraga!’ I yelled back and dodged the lashing whip of sparks he sent my way. My head felt strangely light. Recklessness or hunger, I wasn’t sure. ‘Do try to remember. Your brother never could.’
‘The king need not concern himself with names of cattle.’ Fire roiled around me again; I blocked it unthinkingly.
Belloc’s face was as red as his hair in the blazing inferno, lightning flashing in his eyes as he snarled, ‘So are you conniving with the wife-murderer after all, Nightingale? Gone from fucking cabbage farmers to fucking princes?’
In another life, I might have cared about that accusation.
In this one, I lunged away from the blast of heat he shoved at me, distantly smelled the acrid stench of my own charred hair, and shouted, ‘Only a select number of princes, sorry to disappoint you!’
‘I wasn’t fucking propositioning—’
‘Oh, good!’ My next shield slid into place just in time to intercept the forked attack crackling towards me from two sides at once. ‘Because I’d bet my left hand your balls smell like rancid butter!’
I was being foolish.
I knew it, and yet there was no stopping it, the way I’d suspected after my first half-bottle of gin that I should probably not be singing any more midsummer ballads and had been unable to stop wailing all the same.
He looked so very much like Aranc. He looked like sulphuric air and hands around my throat, and I knew, with blinding, staggering clarity, that I’d rather die hacking at that leash than let it drag me down ever again.
Holding back would mean erasing myself before he could do it.
He could break me. He would not bend me.
Flames growled around me, and I reacted in a blur of instincts and panicked brilliance – raido, kaunan, thorn.
Change, fire, attack, and with a deafening whoosh the fire curled away from me and pounced on Belloc like a flock of ravens descending on a corpse.
His curse was audible even over the bellowing flames.
Retaliation came fast and vicious, a wall of fire so high it eclipsed the smoke-stained sky; I didn’t even try to defend myself with runes, threw myself aside just in time instead.
The obsidian was warm beneath my knees, vibrating with the volcano’s growing fury.
Hell. Was he going to detonate the damn thing?
No use thinking about that. I staggered back to my feet, managing to squeeze a swift sequence of isa and algiz onto my clothes and face – a shield of ice to temper the violence of his firestorm just a fraction.
Then he was on me again, a relentless barrage of magic that left little room to breathe or think; I whirled left, feinted right, signing my protection runes with a speed that was all nerves and reflexes.
Another wave of flame surged towards me.
This one split into three serpentine tendrils moments before it collided with my defences.
‘Almost like the stench of your balls is a sore spot!’ I shouted over the roar of the fire.
The coiling flames lashed at me.
I was just a fraction too slow.
Maybe it was the hunger. Maybe the sleepless night.
I stopped the first tongue of fire, and the second, and knew I was too late even before the third collided with my shield of ice – too hot and too fierce for isa to hold, tearing through that thin layer of protection like an axe through a sheet of paper.
Pain bloomed across my left arm like a poisonous flower.
I didn’t scream. I was not going to be his fucking nightingale again, singing for his pleasure.
But the moment it took me to bite back my cry of agony was a moment too long – and Belloc seized it with predatory precision.
The fire around him coiled, compacted, and shot forward like a lance aimed straight for my chest; throwing myself back onto the brittle black stone was all I could do to avoid it.
Fuck. The ground was shaking.
I scurried back, an unthinking instinct.
There was nothing in this dead landscape to burn, and yet the stone caught fire around me as I moved – combusting out of nowhere beneath the palm of my hand, making me yelp in shock as I yanked back my arm.
Algiz. I had to form algiz. Isa, and algiz, and that nifty raido formula again, but my left arm burned and my right palm throbbed and my fingers were too slow, too slow—
The rocks shuddered like they might split apart beneath me.
I made a last attempt to get up, my burned palm scraping against ragged edges as Belloc advanced – his massive form a towering silhouette against the crimson sky.
Ropes of fire weaved over me, across my chest, hovering just close enough to tell me I’d burn if I rose.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘Lying down for me, poppet?’ His voice was laced with heated rage. ‘Shall we see how I compare to your farm boy after all?’
The fire around him was abating, although the burning ropes still coiled around my chest and shoulders.
But behind his bulking form, where the flat peak of the volcano reached into the sky, the smoke was lighting up in grimy shades of rust and bronze; sparks danced like fireflies above the edge of the crater.
Seconds until eruption.
I gasped, ‘What the hell are you—'
The ground gave a violent lurch beneath me, and for the first time, Belloc seemed to notice. He faltered. Thin cracks spiderwebbed across the stone around his feet.
Surprise – I registered the expression on his bullish face dimly, belatedly.
Shock. This wasn’t his own work. Belloc Estien had woken a volcano, controlled the fire at its sweltering heart, yet now someone else was fuelling that same fire to the point of imminent eruption – which meant there was another fireborn mage here. Which meant—
‘Wait,’ Belloc snapped, suddenly choked. The ropes around me thinned, frayed, then sizzled out as he swivelled around. ‘Wait, I never—’
The blast stole the rest of his sentence.
I felt it before I saw or heard it – heat slamming into me, throwing me onto my back as the world turned white, then black, then red around me.
The boom followed a moment later, deafening like a thunderclap; the rumble of the earth was impossibly louder.
If I screamed, I didn’t hear myself. My mouth was full of the taste of ash.
Molten rock was pulsing over the edge of the crater, like milk boiling over.
There was no use in crawling, yet I crawled all the same, my palm and shoulder screaming with every movement.
Belloc was staggering in the opposite direction, fire flaring around his arms again.
It looked like an attempt to regain control, and it looked utterly futile, too – because there, emerging from the clouds of ash and smoke and vibrating air …
A silhouette.
Tall. Slender. Crowlike.
And I forgot to crawl.
Because it was him, it really was him, strolling past the glowing, pulsing flow of lava in a way that was neither hurried nor hesitant, each step drenched in quiet, icy certainty.
His skin glowed and pulsed. Sparks and shadows rippled behind him.
And yet there was a stillness to him that seemed impossible against the churning backdrop of fire and ash, an otherworldly coldness radiating off his lean shoulders – like a black mirror swallowing light. A starless night turned flesh.
Here.
Still here.
I opened my mouth to cry out, and couldn’t make a sound.
Belloc cursed, staggering back. Some of the lava turned suddenly fluid, rushing down the flanks of the volcano like raindrops over glass – cutting off his way to me and leaving the path between Durlain and him wide-open.
Fire flared in Belloc’s palms. Durlain didn’t slow down, didn’t even raise a hand in defence; the river of molten rock hissed and bubbled behind him, following his steps like a loyal watchdog across the plain.
Belloc hurled a torrent of flames at him.