Chapter 4 #2
I stumbled two paces before my leash jerked me back.
King Nicosia grabbed me by the shoulder and threw me to the floor, my head knocking hard against the tile, my lungs still gasping for lost air.
He mounted me and seized my wrists, pinning me down.
He was larger than me, heavier. I couldn’t fight him.
Cold, dark panic surged through me, nearly incapacitating me.
Ursa called out, bringing me to my senses. Nicosia restrained my wrists. Skin to skin.
I dowsed.
My consciousness fled the conservatory and warped me before the black wall of his lumis, built erect and tall, textured and straight. It hid his truth, his death lines, his weaknesses.
Pulling on everything I had and everything Ursa had gifted me, I launched at the wall, sucking sharp magic into my ethereal form and shoving it into the black stone.
It flaked under my touch, delicate pieces whipping away like the black were a burnt log and not stone at all.
I formed a drill in my mind, pointed and twisting. Pierced through, enough to see—
His lumis was icy, like Kilg’s, one of the servants at Rove Castle. Three great sculptures of ice, geometric and massive, came to a central point overhead, like a great tent—
The vision tore from me as reality seized me by the throat and threw me back into the conservatory. I rolled across the tile, a new bruise on my cheek.
“Don’t you dare.” He snatched the leather strap off the floor.
Curling into myself, I reached for Ursa, and she sang to me until King Nicosia grew tired in his administrations and left me to clean up his mess.
Later that night, after I’d healed my hurts, after drowning in the thorns of Renn’s guilt and grief, I cried ugly, sobbing cries until not a single tear could be wrenched from my swollen face. Then I lay beneath the Egroran and considered my newest piece of gleaned information.
Adoel Nicosia did not want me in his lumis.
It made sense, of course. Healers could hurt just as they could heal. Nicosia did not know I would see the lines marking how to swiftly kill him, but that didn’t matter. If I touched him, I could hurt him, just as he hurt me.
I’d noticed nothing out of the ordinary in his great ice sculptures.
Hadn’t had a chance to notice or follow his death lines.
Unable to touch the windows, I breathed air onto cold tile and drew the sculptures as I remembered them there, trying to find something odd, like the shadow of death, or pieces from another person, pieces made solely of magic, or perhaps a gold thread linking him to another.
But there was none of that. My lumis had grown to be eccentric. His was not.
“There was something familiar about it,” I breathed, barely a whisper. “Like I’ve been there before.”
“It was like Kilg’s.”
“I felt it before,” I murmured, “on the ship. Before I broke through the wall.”
“He copied your defenses.”
I shook my head, trying to breathe through a distant sense of panic I thought was Renn’s, but perhaps it belonged to me. It certainly suited the situation. “No, it was something else. Like I’d been there before.”
Yet I knew without a doubt I had never healed Adoel Nicosia.
I dowsed into my lumis, slipping past its walls to stare at the crenellated puzzle of myself.
Absently pushed magic into my heart blocks.
Ran my hand over the ones tied up in golden string, stopping on one of the green pieces that had come from Ursa, when she’d healed me after the carriage accident.
I deflated as an achy pain rose in my chest—pain that wasn’t reflected in my lumis, but seeped from Renn. I absently massaged it, staring at those green blocks. It took me a few seconds before a new thought burst into my mind like the first dawn of summer. I shifted back to reality and sat up.
“I know that feeling,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Why it feels familiar. Dowsing on Nicosia is like dowsing on our siblings.” I scooted back and leaned against the Egroran. “There’s a likeness there.” Even though our lumie were wildly different. “That’s what I felt inside him.”
Ursa took a beat to respond. “So the king of Sesta is our brother?”
I snorted, then frowned. “Hardly. There’s no possible way we could share even a drop of blood, I’m sure.” I drummed my fingers on the floor, trying to think of possibilities, but nothing came to mind. “Anything?”
“No.”
I sighed, forming my hands into fists. Considered again the geometric ice sculptures.
I felt like I was still there, in a room of ice, the way the draft of the window cascaded over me.
I couldn’t light the brazier; it had run out of fuel.
No one had brought more, and since Nicosia’s first beating, I’d only been given a single bowl of thin soup.
I opened and closed my hands, then brought them up to my face and repeated the gesture.
“I worry I did something wrong.”
“What?”
I steadied myself with a deep breath. “What if it gets worse, Ursa? What if I showed him too much of my magic? What if he senses something off about me?”
“You had to defend yourself.”
I drew in a shaky breath. “I . . . I don’t think I can do this. I’ve always thought I can survive this. It could be worse. But I . . . I don’t think I can if it gets much worse than this.”
I thought of my dead baby in my arms, and my heart squeezed. Please, gods, don’t let it get worse than that.
“He needs you,” she reassured me. “He won’t kill you, Nym.”
But the question was, How much longer could I endure living?
I started shaking the next day when Nicosia returned.
“Do you have nothing better to do than hurt an innocent woman?” I asked him. I wanted to shout, but it came out like a kitten’s mew. “Do you not have a kingdom to run, a war to win?”
He advanced. Tripped over my pallet and exposed the scriptures lying there. He merely glanced at them, uncaring, and continued forward, a self-proclaimed god.
I backed away. “Does that violet cincture mean nothing to you?!”
A twitch of anger at his left eye. He touched the tree and shortened my leash until I slammed up against it.
“You’re as stubborn as Alarna,” he hissed under his breath. “If you will not tell me, I will take it.”
He grabbed me around the throat and dove into my lumis.
I followed him there, then staggered with nausea as he began beating at my erected wall, just as I had done to his yesterday.
He formed blades and hammers of magic, shucking off layers of braids and knots and basalt.
The wall was not me, but I had built it, and every blow hurt in a way that felt viscerally wrong.
I heard myself screaming far away. Forced myself to agonizing reality before taking the two-way bridge to him again.
I hurt him back.
With Ursa’s strength, I slammed into his wall harder than he could hit mine.
I sacrificed physical strength for magical power and thrashed at the wall until it cracked.
Then, forming magic like water, I poured it into the cracks and let it freeze as ice, hardening and expanding until a huge chunk of the wall collapsed at my feet.
I ran to the far side of his lumis, searching the pillars, memorizing them. Ice, ice, and more ice. The three converged at their highest point, like three priests about to coronate a king. I had to find death lines marking his weakest spots—
Death lines—
Why couldn’t I see the king’s death lines?
Look harder. I squinted. Conjured magic like light around me to illuminate the sculptures. They were there, barely, but wispy, almost like Renn’s had been.
Was the King of Dragons unkillable?
I ran for the closest sculpture. It didn’t matter. I had to fight back. I had to get out of here.
My knees buckled before I could reach it, sending me to the lumis floor. I tasted blood in my mouth. Heaving, I crawled forward and touched the first sculpture, trying to reach its base—
Nicosia broke contact, sending me reeling back into reality. I touched it for only a moment before surging back into my own lumis, repairing the wall he had failed to break through.
“How?” he screamed at me, picking me up by my hair and slamming me into the tree. “How do you break it so quickly? What power is this?!”
I did not answer. I dropped to the floor, knees to my chest, hands protecting my head.
I don’t even know what he beat me with, this time.
I never bothered to look.