Chapter Forty
Adeline
Nothing could have prepared her for the sheer force of the flood.
It was ravenous and demanding, a thing made not for bodies of soft tissue and delicate nerves but for the earth itself.
It ripped through her like one natural force moves through another, a river through a rockbed, and she simply was not made for it.
She bowed to it through no will of her own, knees hitting a bed of moss she hadn’t meant to call forth.
“Adeline,” Mareda cried.
Through the deafening groan and rustle of her forest storm, Adeline could feel Imogen pulling back, fighting to spool her influence in.
“No,” Adeline gritted.
She could see it through, and it would finally be over, smoother and more victorious than they had even believed possible—because Kai had called it off. Even in the midst of her panic and fear, some giddy instinct bloomed within her, its warmth soothing the sting of her struggle.
She could do this.
It would be worth it.
Adeline blinked the haze from her eyes, teeth splintering with the effort of clearing her own vision.
The blur of motion all around her did not help, gards yelling and guests screaming, bodies running in every direction.
Between the tangle of darting legs, Kai stood just feet away, Avette hanging like a glittering bauble in his hand.
She had seconds before one of the Queen’s Gard slipped past Ger and Marry, mere moments before they reached Kai.
She fumbled in the thundering mess of magic crashing around her insides, grappled with great writhing threads of it.
Please, she told it, please, please come to me, let me.
Her thoughts were as wild as the thrashing magic, but perhaps that frenzy was a language it understood; her fists were all at once filled, magic blooming beneath her palms with such force it sent her skidding backwards, then tumbling down the dais stairs.
Her back hit the frozen marble, and the air burst from her lungs, calming the storm in her blood for one vivid moment.
The room came into focus. Amid the screams and cacophony ringing off the walls, someone yelled a curse, and she glanced up to see a Queen’s Gard tripping up the stairs, tangled in her thicket.
Relief replaced the breath in her lungs for only a moment before another man stumbled over the first. He righted himself on his fellow’s back and kicked his way through the brambles.
Her heart catapulted into her ribs, recognition slicing through the thrum of magic; Benan was tearing through the vines, lurching for Kai with his teeth bared.
Adeline cried a wordless warning, but before she could leash her magic again, something else leashed her, a physical grasp on her loose hair.
Red-hot pain tore through her scalp as she was hauled upright and reefed backward, colliding with a chest of cold, carved armour.
“Hullo, Princess,” said a weedy voice in her ear. “What an interesting new talent.”
She had barely time to register the cool kiss of metal over her throat before it fell away, and she lurched to the ground once more, magic skittering up her insides like a frightened beast clawing for escape.
Adeline craned her head up from the floor; Avette had managed to escape Kai’s grasp, but they remained locked in a storm of glittering winds and waters. Benan slipped around on their outskirts with his sword drawn, defending his queen against a cluster of palace gards who’d seized their moment.
Her heart contracted at the sight.
They weren’t alone.
“Ade!”
She rolled and hauled herself to her knees, Ger staring down at her with his face drained of blood but his armour splattered with it.
At his feet, a young gard lay prone and staring; she recognised him from her return to the castle.
The boy who’d thought to earn Avette’s favour with his own brand of loyalty.
His reward was Gerard’s sword protruding obscenely from his throat.
Adeline swallowed a surge of bile, even as her magic slipped around her organs and squeezed.
But Ger—oh bollocks, that look on his face.
She scrambled upright and lurched for him, tugging him into her arms.
“You’re alright,” she told him.
They did not have time, not for him to fall apart or for Adeline to hold him together.
She knew they didn’t, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go of the beloved boy trembling in her grasp.
Over his shoulder, screaming guests and courtiers scrambled over the pews and half-trampled each other in their path to the double doors.
Of the palace gards not attacking Benan, most were fighting one another, others joining the stampede for the exit.
A handful still beat back the crowd from the doorway, and from the other side, corralling the terrified herd toward their awaiting blades, was a lone Queen’s Gard.
Adeline held Ger until her arms ached, eyes on Doran’s bloodstained cloak as it whipped and rippled through the crowd. Her insides tightened.
“I am,” Ger said hoarsely. “I’m alright.”
Ger eased Adeline back and took hold of his hilt; though his hands fumbled and shook, he managed to wrench the sword free from the fallen gard’s corpse.
“Good,” said Adeline. She dragged her gaze from the chaos. “So am I. Get back to Imogen.”
“I won’t leave you undefended—”
She took his hand and yanked him around the gard’s body, shoving him toward the dais.
“I promised you nothing would happen to me, but if anything happens to Imogen, we’re all dead. So, y’know—don’t make a liar of me.”
Ger hissed through his teeth as she shoved at him, but he dodged her hands only to press a swift kiss to her forehead.
“Don’t die.”
“A promise is a promise.”
With a grim smile, he turned and dashed up the dais steps toward the podium, where Eleni had hurried over to usher the screaming Priestess away to safety, leaving Imogen sprawled on the ground in their wake.
Her eyes were closed, but she was conscious.
Even if Adeline hadn’t felt the magic still hammering its way through her pores, Marry certainly knew it.
The determination with which she darted around the dais said it all.
She fought for Imogen and Imogen alone, men fallen at her feet, her pained limp swallowed by adrenaline and one hand still closed around her dagger while the other slashed a stolen sword through the air.
Adeline rounded on the body behind her, diving for his sheath. Earthly energy vibrated through her bones, but she held fast to the dead man’s sword, ran halfway up the dais steps—and paused.
Beyond the fray of insurgent gards and Benan’s flashing blade, it was difficult to fix on Kai’s struggle.
Near impossible, beneath the windstorm of their warring power, to pick apart his silhouette from Avette’s.
Adeline’s own magic howled within her, demanding to meet the chaos and be unbound from her mortal frame.
Her pores ached for relief, skin screaming.
But the screams behind her were louder and more visceral by far.
Her lungs ballooned with caught breath, and the decision was made before she’d even exhaled. Adeline whirled on the spot, dashing back down the steps. Avette was outnumbered; Kai could hold on a moment longer, she knew he could.
He would have to.
Because in all their planning, they had assumed that Doran would defend his queen. They had forgotten, as so many did, that his one enduring loyalty was to violence.
The Captain had carved his way deeper into the chaos and stood unnervingly still amid the swarm of courtiers and civilians, blade crossed over his chest and his expression serene.
Without looking around, Doran reached out, as casual as one swatting at flies—and caught a man mid-sprint by the throat.
Adeline could hear the breath throttled from him even above the din.
As if in sympathy, a hollow ache hit her squarely in the chest. She hurried toward them, and in her mind, Aera’s roar became the ghostly roar of the tourney crowd, watching her step into an arena to face Doran’s cruelty.
It was the roar of a tavern brawl, Doran’s cloak rippling in the storm of his own rage.
It was the roar between her own ears when she’d seen Kai for the first time, pinned to the ice as Doran towered over him.
Adeline’s floundering pulse snatched at her voice, but she pressed past it, the yell ripping clumsily past her tongue.
“Captain!”
Doran moved nothing but his eyes, a flash of steel that longed to slice right through her.
His grasp on the spluttering man visibly tightened for just a moment.
With considerable effort, Adeline kept her sword arm relaxed against the overwhelming thrum beneath her skin.
Magic hammered at her insides, but she fought to keep her body still, as she’d often seen the stablehands do around the more temperamental stallions.
She could not risk spooking Doran with his hand still locked around that poor man’s throat; couldn’t risk sending her clumsy tangle of vines his way either, at least not yet.
“Let him go,” she said.
Her feet ached in their silken slippers, curled for grip against the icy marble as though the Captain might charge her at any moment.
As it was, he simply gazed back at her, the cruel slash of his lips slowly curving.
The man in Doran’s grip floundered, his feet slipping uselessly on the ice and dragging his weight against the hand that collared him.
His splutters grew raspier, more frantic.
“Let him go now.”
“And why would I do that?”
“What lawful reason have you to stop him from leaving?”
“Lawful.” Doran gave an awful chuckle and rolled his eyes skyward, staring up at the winking icicles as he rolled his sword vaguely through the air. “Mutiny, treason, I’ll think of something.”