Chapter 7
BLOOD AND FIRE
There was a turf war in the warrens, once, when I was young.
Looking up at the faces that surrounded us, that’s what I thought as they dragged us in and restrained us: that we’d been pulled into some kind of conflict between the guilds of the undercity, that this was a trap meant for someone other than us.
But then one of them- the one that had hit Khal, the one with the scar through his lip- said, “Yeah, that’s the orc,” and I knew this was for us.
There was blood on Khal’s mouth, and my mind was frozen. One of them took a knee in front of us. His companions held Khal’s arms.
“See, people have this idea that we’re the enemies of the people out here, but that’s not the truth, is it? There’s no one as invested in the fate of law and order as the folks making their money off of it. No one is as ready to stop threats to this city as we are.”
Khal’s mouth was still bleeding. His eyebrow was split.
“So tell us, orc. How many of you are there? How many are coming? Give me clear answers, and I’ll return you to your ancestors in one stupid, green piece.”
One of the others laughed. This was wrong. I should move, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t move my limbs.
“There are no more coming,” Khal rasped, winced. “I came…to buy. That’s all.”
“Oh, get a load of this one, he just came to buy.” A fist drove again into Khal’s gut, and the cry I heard was mine. “Better answers. I have all night. Beatta will bring food for me, won’t you, Beatta?”
She looked away.
“Please,” I got out. “Please, he’s telling the truth. We just came for medicine.”
“Medicine?” This man in the lead was slim, like his elbows were bigger than his arms. He grinned, and his teeth were stained with chewing root. “Don’t your lot eat your wounded?”
They weren’t going to believe us. They were going to hurt him. And this was my fault; I was the one who thought we could trust the door in the wall. I was the one who thought my people were safer than the soldiers. He could die, and while he died here, Tyralk would die too.
Khal’s eyes had no hope in them, like he already saw the ending. “The girl is my prisoner,” he said, another line of blood dripping from his mouth. “She has nothing to do with this.”
“What are you saying??” I cried. “Please, he’s not your enemy, he works for the baron, you can find witnesses—"
"Shut the bird up."
A hand closed over my mouth. My hands were heating, my vision shifting to that kaleidoscope of color, and no, I was too close to Khal- I couldn't erupt or I'd burn him. Fire in a tower with wooden floors? Fire four stories up? I would kill him, and I couldn’t kill him, I couldn’t-
The leader unsheathed a knife. There were rust flecks on the blade. They were going to kill him and I was going to kill him and they’d kill him and I couldn’t-
I screamed. I was screaming. There was a hand over my mouth, but I was screaming, could hear it, feel the power rushing out of me. Khal couldn’t burn I couldn’t burn him he’d burn-
The man holding me was screaming. I felt the hand over my mouth fly away, watched the flesh on the man who held me’s face curl and blacken. It was an inferno. I was an inferno. No. I couldn’t burn Khal. I had to keep it controlled, and I-
Khal was looking up at me, on his knees.
His eyes were wide in horror. They’d dropped his arms, were stumbling back, dancing, their clothes on fire.
Beatta was on the edge of my vision, cowering against the wall.
And now he could see what I was, could see that I was the monster who burned everything I touched.
I opened my mouth to scream, tried, only flames coming out. I was breathing too much, couldn’t breathe. He was looking at me, frozen, afraid, and he was going to burn.
I covered my mouth with my hands, trying to smother it, to stop myself. I needed to tell him to run, to leave me, to get away before the floor gave way. I pointed at the window. The power was coming, still, wave after wave, panic after panic, and I needed him safe, and he needed to go, and-
He stepped towards me. The man with the knife was on the ground next to him, had stopped rolling.
“No!” I tried to scream. “No, get away!”
He looked at the ground, blackening and cracking around our feet, and stepped into the flame, and the flame sculpted around him, receding in front of him, swallowing the space he left.
He almost reached me, hesitated, his hand held out into the heat.
The roar of the flames and the roar in my head swallowed his words, but I could see his lips mouth, “Rowena. Rowena, stop…”
The floor was breaking under me. I threw up my arms over my face, before the fall, the waves of power still wracking me, shaking all of me.
I was ending as a torch. The floor under my left foot gave, and arms snatched me up.
I was in his chest. I looked up. He was yelling, and I couldn’t hear any of it.
He was lit by me, glowing like a thousand candles.
He was so beautiful. It was so unfair. I could protect him from my magic, but not from the destruction I brought to everything I touched.
He dragged me across the room to the window.
I saw him grab the rope ladder- please, if I could see the rope as a part of him, if I could spare the rope, because this power would destroy me, my vision was going, but the world needed him in it, needed this boy with gentle eyes and soft smiles, and I couldn’t rob him of everything any more- he was pulling me onto the ladder, and everything was on fire, he was pulling flames and destruction with him in his arms, and the last flood of magic pulled out of my core, and I screamed.
I was going to die. The pain, the sucking depletion, like all the oxygen was gone from the world.
I flickered, like a dying ember, and it went out, and the blackness took me.
As I sunk into oblivion, I wished I could know that without me he would live.