Chapter 49
FORTY-NINE
ARYELLA
“Commander!” I abandoned formalities and dropped to my knees before him. His eyes had glazed over. “Rise!” I gripped the hilt of his sword and shoved it into his chest.
Panicked shouts erupted from behind him. I glanced over his shoulder to see another swarm of Insidions emerging in the distance. At least a hundred of them.
“Elias, look at me!” When that still wasn’t enough to alert him, I shook his shoulders. “There are more of them! You have to get up!” His eyes, astonished but clearer now, darted from my eyes to my mouth to my arms to my hair. “Stand up and keep your shit together!”
“I…” His mouth fell open as he lifted his free hand to my face. “Oh, gods, you’re alive. I,” he stammered again, “I?—”
“I know I am.” I grasped his strong wrist. “But we have to?—”
“No!” he roared at something behind me before yanking me into his chest. An Insidion hovering over us, choking and bleeding, impaled on the sword that Elias had just lifted in defense. The knife the Insidion had been about to drive into my back fell out of his limp hand.
Elias tossed the sword and body to the side with a grunt and stood, keeping me pressed tightly against him.
“Let me go.” I gently pushed away. He reached for me, even as I retreated, still pale with shock. “We?—”
“I’m sorry, Fe—Ary,” he corrected, face transforming from shock to regret. I assumed all that happened between us over the last six weeks was flashing through his mind. “I’m so sorry.”
“Later. There’s no time.” I shook my head, grabbed his shoulders, and urged him forward. The Insidions were closing in on the tree line.
“At the ready!” roared Elias when he saw the enemy approaching. Ezra had disappeared and was nowhere to be found. If something happened to him, and I never had the chance to explain, I’d never forgive myself.
Before I could think more of it, someone nearly bowled me over with the force of their hug. A taller woman who smelled like sweet grass, sweat, and the next closest thing to home. She released me, drew back, grabbed and squeezed my hands.
Wild black hair uncovered my face, revealing amber eyes I’d missed so dearly.
Gemma.
Finn had gotten her out. I gasped and threw my arms around her neck. She held me back in a tight embrace.
“Your Highness, you need to run!” Elias’s voice was strained with panic. He gripped my shoulder, spun me around, and looked me dead in the eyes. “You can’t be at the front!”
Sure enough, the Insidions were close. Our army was in formation, ready to defend against the onslaught of swords, spears, arrows, and blades the enemy carried. We had more bodies, but they were coming too fast.
“Ary?”
I looked at Gemma, whose back was facing the approaching army.
“What?”
“Ary,” she said again, my name a weeping plea on her tongue. A tear slid down her cheek.
“What?” I pressed. “Gemma, what…”
“Ary.”
My smile fell, my chest collapsed when I saw color drain from her face. Blood was splattered over her hands and dripped onto the ground between our feet.
No.
Gemma let out a horrified cry when she looked down and saw a thick, long spear protruding from the center of her stomach.
And I… cracked .
I don’t remember reaching for Helios’s spoke in the wheel, only that I screamed, and fury in the form of flames surged out, not from fear or hatred, but from raw pain. From being lied to and starved, from losing Oliver and Phillip, from being manipulated and treated like a weapon with no agency.
Most of all, from losing him.
This was overdue. Gemma was my breaking point. There would be no coming back from this. No more hiding until I was ready . I’d been holding on to the freedom anonymity allowed, but that freedom was lost to me now.
Now, it was time to burn.
The fire rose up in me so quickly and violently that all I managed to do was shift in front of Gemma and shout to Eli, “Take her and fall back!”
I didn’t know what I looked like, but I felt heat simmer across my skin. Whatever he saw was enough to make him immediately obey.
“Fall back!” Elias echoed in a roar, his eyes wide in terror as he grabbed the collars of a soldier running past and dragged him backward, away from me. “Fall back, now!”
I managed to hold on for a few more seconds, just long enough for my own people to start running and for Elias to lift Gemma’s impaled body and move her backward safely, away from me.
The power threw my head back as I tried not to get ripped apart. I screamed so loud I thought heaven or hell might take me. As long as I was taken to wherever he was. The power paralyzed my body as it grew inside me, rising like lava inside a volcano.
I turned toward the oncoming enemy with both palms facing outward, and the flames erupted, tearing through the air and then struck, incinerating everything in their path. Every incoming Insidion, every tree, bush, and blade of grass was scorched. An entire army razed.
It lasted only seconds, but a few seconds were enough.
A few staggered about screaming, still engulfed in flames, before finally succumbing to death.
The trees they’d come through had been torched to mere stumps.
Bushes were now piles of ash. Our side of the forest was still green and vibrant with life. The other… void of life entirely.
I killed them. I killed them all.
I couldn’t look at what I’d done. At all the death, or if I’d missed and hit any of my own people. Maybe the mourning was chiseling away at my humanity, but the threat was now eradicated. No one had survived my blast. Survived me .
I turned around to see a few hundred of my own people standing and staring at me, slack-jawed. There would be plenty of explaining to do, but right now, all I cared about was getting back to Gemma. I lunged forward and slid to my knees at her side.
“Gemma!” I reached straight for Viridian’s power. Elias had her lying with her head propped on his thigh. “Gemma, you’re going to be okay.”
“Oh, gods!” she wailed. “Oh, gods, Ary, it fucking hurts.”
“I’m going to help…” I trailed off.
When I’d healed that little boy in Tovick outside the fallen temple of the gods, I’d felt a tendril of life reaching out for me, begging to be saved.
But here with Gemma, where I expected to feel only one tendril, now there were two.
“Gemma?” I croaked.
“Finn doesn’t know yet,” she cried weakly. “I haven’t told him.”
Two lives? I couldn’t… Could I?
As if she read my mind, she begged, “Can you save it? Please save it. Don’t worry about me.”
But there wasn’t even the slightest swell in her belly. It was early. Far too early.
“I’ll save you both,” I promised. She would survive it, and when she recovered, I would reprimand her for even thinking of going on assignment when pregnant. People thought I was reckless.
“The fire is spreading, Commander,” I heard someone say. “We have to retreat.”
Barely looking up, I lifted my free hand and doused the approaching flames with a torrent of Rainar’s water.
I spread it from left to right, creating a thick barrier of soaked earth that the fire would struggle to pass, then pulled the water from the air into a fine mist. With one push of Sussurro’s wind, most of the fire was doused.
“Holy shit!” someone shouted, followed by a wave of gasps and cheers.
“Ary,” Gemma pleaded, her breaths labored. “The letters from Damond mentioned how the healing… how much it takes from you. If you can’t?—”
“I can. I will .” Because I rejected the possibility of failing Gemma. I looked to Elias. “When I tell you to remove the rest of the spear, do it.” I grabbed his hand and wrapped it tightly around the bloody wood protruding from her stomach. “Understood?”
“Yes.” He didn’t hesitate.
“Listen… to me,” Gemma gasped out. Her color drained. She was fading fast. “If it doesn’t work, please tell Finn… about the baby.”
“It’s going to work.” My voice and my face were calm for her sake, but I was not.
I didn’t know what I was going to do if it didn’t work. Gemma and Finn couldn’t lose what they were trying to build together. Agony escaped from somewhere deep inside me that I kept hidden. It was such a terrible thing to lose.
“Promise me, please!” Gemma wept. The bright, swirling amber of her eyes began to lose its vigor. “He deserves to know.”
“If I have to, I will.” I cupped her cheek with my bloody hand. “But I won’t have to. You are going to tell him.”
I cursed under my breath when her eyelids fluttered closed in relief at my promise.
“Will this hurt you?” demanded Elias.
“Yes.” Our stares locked. “But it won’t kill me.” Probably. “I swear to all twelve gods that I’ll kill you if you try to stop me.”
His eyes widened as he nodded. “Okay.”
“Remove it, Commander.”
He obeyed. Gemma, now barely conscious, released a bloodcurdling scream as the wood scraped through her muscles. Blood pooled beneath her, and the hot crimson began gushing over my hands as they rested on either side of the fatal wound.
Just as I had the day I discovered the wheel, I grasped Viridian’s green and began to pour the power into her. Every last bit of it, until my vision began to blur, then blacken. If this did take everything from me, then Gemma and her baby were worth it.
And I would see him again soon.