96. Seb
SEB
He was going to lose.
He hadn’t realized until the Pax the extent to which Danielson knew what was happening. Seb was sixteen points behind, exhausted, sinking into noxious mud. The pain in his ribs was starting to flare, and he had no magic.
He had no magic.
The thought ricocheted around his skull, bringing him back to last summer, bringing him back to Lapland, threatening to drown him in the acid of his own anxiety.
“I have no magic.”
“But you do have magic,” a smugly superior voice—Biret’s—reminded him.
His Words.
Frantically, he cast about for them, worried that they had gone too, but they were there, steady as a heartbeat.
Spontaneous magic wasn’t illegal in Cantrèa; it was just never used, on account of its difficulty and the fact that you couldn’t score points with it.
Spontaneous magic seemed useless when you had an Orb loaded with spells.
Except that Seb didn’t have an Orb loaded with spells.
“Magic is a river,” Biret reminded him.
Seb stepped into the current.