CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR #3
From across the room, Galahad watched us. The blood had dried on his cheek, but the frost still caught in the fibers of his robe, the cut from the ice shard running a slow dark line toward his jaw. He looked at me and then at Tristan and then at me again.
His expression had changed.
It was no longer the serene cruelty he usually wore. Now it was something different, something harder that had moved in behind his eyes. Something that had finished calculating and had reached a conclusion.
-ARTHUR-
The dragon hit me harder than it ever had.
One instant I was walking along the hallway to my solar, and then I could feel my spine bending backward.
The pain was so intense, I had to stabilize myself against the stone wall.
The beast within me was now fully awake, and its violent flailing caused my teeth to clench and blindness to creep into my vision.
She is in pain, and she needs us.
I knew the truth before the shouting reached me, before the first guard came sprinting around the corner with his face the color of a white sheet.
Something had happened to her, and she was in danger.
I could feel the truth eating me from the inside out, so I followed the cold that came down the corridor like a gale wind.
The drop in temperature was so sudden that my breath fogged in front of me, and the torch nearest me guttered and then died.
Ice was creeping along the floor in jagged fingers, climbing the baseboards of the walls, and crackling through the mortar between the stones with a sound like breaking teeth.
Two guards stood at the far end of the passage, both completely motionless.
They were frozen in the way that prey animals freeze: the instinct that says, if you don’t move, it can’t see you.
The corridor parted for me just as it always did.
Lance was standing at the front, and when I arrived, he turned to look at me.
His face was just as blanched as the guard’s.
He didn’t say anything but just turned to look at what was happening inside Galahad’s chamber.
I followed his gaze and then stopped in the doorframe as I took it all in.
The room was unrecognizable. Water moved through it like something alive: not pouring, not spraying, but circling.
It lifted the debris from the floor and held it suspended midair: a wooden stool in the middle of the cyclone was rotating.
Next to it was a tin cup, spinning lazily at eye level.
Frost coated the ceiling in a spreading white bloom, and the glass window had blown out entirely. The frame was packed with ice.
Galahad was pressed against the far wall, and his robes were disarranged. There was blood on his face in the shape of three wounds that had been cleaved into his cheek. They looked like claw marks. He was shouting, but the words were hard to distinguish over the sound of the maelstrom.
“—corruption’s breath, the mark of the defiled... the demon takes many forms, a purging rite must be... she called it forth herself, it answered her sin...”
And at the center of all of it.
Her.
She stood in the middle of the room with her arms slightly raised and her head back, and her eyes...
her eyes were wrong. The violet had gone almost entirely.
What was left was white and rimmed with ice-blue.
She was breathing, but barely. Instead, her chest moved in shallow, rapid increments as her hair whipped around her face, and she didn’t blink.
The dragon slammed against my ribs so hard, I lost a breath.
Ours.
We must go to her.
I gripped the doorframe with both hands until the wood creaked under my fingers, and I felt the grain of it splintering. I held on because letting go meant stepping into that room, and stepping into that room meant closing the distance, and closing the distance meant...
GO TO HER!
But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Because I knew that if I did, I’d lose control, and the dragon would usurp me entirely. And that was something I couldn’t afford to do with so many witnesses.
Galahad was still shouting. His voice cracked on the word demon for the third time, and I looked at him, looked at the blood on his face, the displaced robes, the way he was pressed to the wall with something that wasn’t entirely fear in his expression.
The obvious conclusion arranged itself without my permission.
She’d attacked him. He’d been performing his duty, and she’d attacked him.
The evidence was written across his face in three bleeding wounds and across the room in every shattered and frozen thing.
Galahad was many things, but he was first and foremost a knight of the realm, and she was a prisoner whose magic should have been locked down to nothing.
The ice cracked louder. A fissure split the far wall, hairline thin, running from floor to ceiling in under a second.
The guards in the corridor behind me didn’t move, but I couldn’t blame them. None of us moved.
Inside the room, she was losing it. Whatever thread she had on the power, it was unraveling. The water pressure was building: I could hear it in the way the stones groaned, the way the air tasted metallic and cold. If she didn’t stop...
Help her, the dragon said, and for once it wasn’t claiming; it was urgent. She is drowning.
I knew that much was true. But I also knew that if I crossed that threshold, the dragon would stop asking and start taking... And I was very aware of what it wanted to do to every living thing in this room that wasn’t her...
Go. Quickly.
She isn’t in danger. We are in danger from her, I told the beast, but it only responded with a growl that shook me from the feet up.
Footsteps sounded from behind me. I turned to watch as Tristan stopped at my shoulder.
He took in the room the way he took in everything: completely, quietly, without the small flinch most people wouldn’t have been able to suppress.
His dark eyes moved from the spinning debris to the cracked wall to Galahad, who was still pressed against it, to the girl at the center of the storm.
He didn’t ask permission. He simply walked past me and into the room.
I let him, though I didn’t know why I let him. Perhaps I figured her magic was no match for his death magic, or perhaps I didn’t even think about it but just knew someone had to try to dismantle her. To stop the havoc she was wreaking.
Tristan walked into the maelstrom like it was simply weather he’d decided not to mind.
The water pushed at him: I watched his coat press flat against his chest, watched his hair whip sideways, but he kept moving.
Toward her. He was speaking. I couldn’t hear what he was saying over the sound of the room tearing itself apart, but his mouth was moving in something low and steady, and his hands came up slowly, palms out, the way you’d approach something wild.
His power rose. I felt it the way you feel a drop in pressure: a subtle wrongness in the air, a heaviness that settled over the skin. Death magic. Where her power was storm, chaos, and the violent release of pressure, his was absence. Stillness. The held breath before the last one.
The two magics touched.
The maelstrom didn’t collapse. It quieted slowly. The suspended objects began to descend: the cup first, then the stool. Soon, the water retreated from the ceiling and fell in ordinary rivulets down the wall. The ice stopped spreading.
Her eyes came back to violet. It happened gradually: the white receding, the violet returning, the focus arriving like someone surfacing from deep water.
She was shaking. Even from the doorway, I could see it.
Both hands at her sides, she was trembling badly, and she was looking at Tristan and not at anyone else.
He said something else, and she took his outstretched hand, closing her eyes.
The last of the water settled.
It was then that Mordred arrived at my left shoulder. He was breathing slightly harder than usual, which for Mordred meant he’d come quickly. His mismatched eyes moved through the room with the systematic thoroughness of a man reading a report.
“I don’t understand,” he said quietly. Not to anyone in particular.
“The wards.” I didn’t look at him.
“Yes.” A pause. “The binding I placed on her: the strength of it was considerable, my lord. I used three anchor points and a suppression lattice tied specifically to her elemental channels. For her to break through that—” He stopped. Started again. “I don’t know how she did it.”
The ice crackled as it melted. Galahad was still breathing too fast against the far wall, a hand pressed to the cuts on his face.
“Her power was obviously stronger,” I said simply, because it was the truth.
Mordred said nothing. His crystal pendant caught the dim torchlight and held it.
In the room, Tristan had put his hand on her shoulder. She was still shaking, but less. She looked like something wrung out and left in the cold to dry.
Remove him!
I unclenched my hands from the doorframe and noticed that the wood had split under my grip. I looked at the raw, splintered marks my fingers had left, then I looked away.
“Get Galahad a physician,” I said, and I didn’t know how it was possible, but my voice came out even.
“And the girl?” Mordred asked.
The dragon coiled hot and slow behind my ribs as we watched Tristan speaking quietly to her, calming her in a way no one else had attempted. I watched her.
“Leave her,” I said.