Chapter 43
Talisa
Cresta’s Air spell hit us with a wall of solid wind before I completed a warding-charm to deflect her attack.
It hit my chest, flattening my academic gown against my ribs, and drove the air from my lungs as if she’d punched me in the stomach.
My back bent. My shoes skidded backward across the slick step, and I teetered on the brink of toppling. At the same moment, Elio’s grip tore loose from my hand as the spell hurled him backward.
I flinched as I heard the heavy thud of his body tumbling down the stairs. As I dropped to my knees, I whipped my head around to look for him, but it was all I could do to resist the spell’s relentless push and not plummet after him.
I slammed both hands against the step beneath me, channeling a counterspell to shield me from Cresta’s blast.
The stone groaned beneath my palms and knees. The sound traveled up through my thighs and arms until it vibrated through my teeth.
A network of cracks radiated outward from my hands, widening as they raced across the step I was kneeling on. Then the cracks branched up onto the riser of the next stair up. In the blink of an eye, the entire staircase was webbed with hundreds, maybe thousands, of hairline fractures.
High above me, Bernardo’s Earth spell poured into the stone, not to reinforce it but to shatter it from the inside out.
The Ascendant Platform shuddered beneath me.
The steps beneath me quivered. A chunk of stone the size of a cow broke free and plunged toward the arena floor. Then another fell. Then three more in quick succession.
How much longer before the entire thing collapses? I wondered, panic squeezing my chest.
I looked up at my opponents and the glowing Aurelian Ring spinning slowly above Cresta’s head, close enough for her to reach.
Both of them beaming in triumph, she and Bernardo reached up to grasp it. Their victory seemed only an instant away.
Then the unthinkable happened.
Before Cresta’s fingers could close around her prize, it shot upward as if yanked by an invisible rope. It flew up ten feet, then twenty, until it hung over the arena like a second sun, its runes blazing.
Cresta’s expression crumpled into something raw and ugly. “What?” she shrieked. “No!”
She spread her fingers and furiously invoked another levitation spell to circumvent this new obstacle.
Air gathered around her, billowing and ruffling her robes, then lifted her with smooth grace.
“Bernardo!” she ordered as she flew up in pursuit of her prize. “Crush those mice!”
His face contorted with effort. Muscles stood out along his forearms as the wind blew back the wide sleeves of his academic gown.
The entire platform trembled violently, and the fractures beneath my hands and knees widened further. The steps I was clinging to crumbled at their edges, more chunks breaking free and falling away.
I spread a desperate Earth magic spell over the stone stairs, trying to knit the fractures closed. The platform answered me with a sullen shudder that ran up my arms and settled in my chest like a lump of granite.
It felt… exhausted, like it had taken too much damage.
“Talisa! The whole thing’s coming apart!”
I glanced down and saw that Elio had caught himself on a lower step. He looked up at me, his face blotched red with bruises beneath his smooth brown skin, his amber eyes wide with panic.
I could feel it, too, the deep, groaning vibration of the Ascendant Platform fighting to hold itself together against the hammer blows of Bernardo’s destruction spell.
All around us, every fracture was widening.
Meanwhile, Cresta continued to rise on her column of air, her gown billowing and her loosened braids floating around her head like a dark halo. She reached for the Aurelian Ring once more.
Her fingertips were almost touching the smooth metal when the golden circle vanished, as if someone had blown out a candle.
Cresta’s hand closed on empty air.
The amphitheater fell silent. The roar of the wind from the Gale Tunnel died away. Three thousand pairs of eyes stared eagerly at us, waiting to see what happened next.
The herald’s amplified voice boomed, “Course reset for Lady Cresta and Lord Bernardo, on account of bypassing obstacles.”
What? I thought shocked beyond belief. They’re actually being penalized for cheating?
Far below me, Elio whooped with unabashed joy.
Then the Ascendant Platform groaned again. The stone beneath my knees shifted as if the entire structure had taken a breath and was letting it out.
A flare of golden light erupted from the summit and engulfed Cresta and Bernardo in a single, blinding pulse.
For an instant, they were silhouettes, Cresta floating in mid-air, her hand still outstretched toward the vanished Ring, and Bernardo crouched beneath her, both hands braced against the stone beneath him.
Then the light wrapped around them like a net and hurled them across the arena, trailing fiery streamers like twin comets.
I watched, stunned, as they flew over the wreckage of the Living Rampart, over the shattered remains of the Gale Corridor, and landed on what was left of the starting platform.
It was now just a collection of bobbing, spinning stone fragments no bigger than dinner plates, floating where a solid platform had stood before Bernardo’s spell destroyed it.
Cresta’s primal scream of rage ripped across the arena as her arms windmilled and she fought to balance on a fragment that wobbled beneath her weight.
Her academic gown flapped around her legs.
One of her few remaining diamond hair clips spun downward, catching the light in a defiant spark before it vanished into the sand below.
Bernardo grabbed for her arm, his own footing precarious on a chunk of stone that rotated slowly beneath his boots. His handsome face looked bleached with disbelief.
Cresta screamed, “No! I won’t allow it!” and pointed at us.
As she chanted the start of a spell, I frantically drew on Elio’s power and mine, and raised a glowing ward-wall around the Ascendant Platform.
Let her fling all the blasts of wind she likes, I thought defiantly. I won’t let her hurt us again.
The amphitheater erupted into a pandemonium of shouts, whistles, cheers, and the rhythmic thunder of stamping feet in the commoner sections.
A rising wave of outraged protests rose from the aristocratic tiers.
My hands were still pressed against the step. The stone beneath my palms was warm now, almost alive, throbbing with a deep pulse of sound that matched my heartbeat.
High above me, the Aurelian Ring reappeared, materializing at the summit of what remained of the platform.
It hung lower than before.
Ahead of me, the stairs to the summit were open.
My breath caught. I still couldn’t believe Cresta and Bernardo had been sent back to the course’s starting point. And that Elio and I had been granted a miraculous chance to win.
I looked for him. And saw he was grinning as he got to his feet and began climbing back up toward me.
“What are you waiting for?” he called up to me. “Go!”
Dust powdered his chestnut curls, and a cut above his eyebrow oozed a sluggish line of blood down his temple and over his cheek. It didn’t touch his smile. “Get up there and grab that ring before Cresta and Bernardo return!”
Something broke loose in my chest. I laughed.
“I was waiting for you to catch up,” I shouted back. “Are you all right? That fall—”
“Don’t worry about me,” he replied. “Just move your slow backside and climb those stairs, Miss Fishwife! That ring isn’t going to grab itself.”
Smiling, I turned back to the stairs. The fractures ran through them like lightning frozen in stone, some wide enough to fit my fist through, others hair-thin but deep.
Beneath my palms, the step hummed with a vibration that wasn’t quite sound—more like a voice pitched too low for human ears, a rumble I felt in my teeth and the hollows of my wrists.
I closed my eyes and reached for the connection between Elio and me. Warmth bloomed inside my chest, familiar now, a current that ran from my heart to my fingertips. I drew on it gently, and Earth magic flowed from my palms into the damaged stone.
Let me help, I told the Ascendant Platform, pouring my spell into the cracks. Let me bind what’s broken.
This time, the stone responded.
It was agonizingly slow, each crack knitting together the way a deep cut heals from the inside out.
I felt its resistance; this wasn’t fresh stone eager to be shaped.
This was wounded stone, fatigued stone, stone that had been hammered and shattered and was now being asked to hold together one more time.
The step beneath my hands sealed with a webbing of pale seams like scars. But it held my weight when I wobbled to my feet.
“Elio?” I didn’t look back. “With me. Step where I step.”
“Always,” he said, and I felt him reach the step below mine, his presence warm and solid at my back.
Slowly, cautiously, we climbed what remained of the Ascendant Platform. Each repaired stair groaned beneath our weight but held. The fractures ahead of us waited, and I poured Earth magic into them as we reached them, binding each one just long enough to bear our passage.
I didn’t rush. There was no need to rush anymore. Cresta and Bernardo were stranded on their spinning fragments, isolated by the barrier of wards I’d raised, and too far away to reach us before we attained the summit.
The crowd’s noise had faded to a distant roar, like surf breaking on a faraway shore.
We reached what remained of the summit, a tilted, cracked surface barely larger than a wagon bed.
The Aurelian Ring hung above us, close enough that I could have reached it if I stood on tiptoe.
I didn’t need to.
When I stretched out my hand, the Ring descended as if summoned, until its bottom edge hung level with my outstretched palm. The runes along its circumference blazed gold, then softened to a warm, steady glow.
Elio’s right hand found my left. His fingers were cold and gritty with dust, and I squeezed them with relief and joy at being able to share this moment with him.