by Cora Carmack
Taven’s deep booming voice shouted above all the rest. “Zephyr, please! Have I ever done anything to make you mistrust me?”
Aurora could not see the woman’s response; she could see nothing except a very small tunnel in the center of her vision that showed Taven kneeling over her.
Zephyr answered, “You pledged your life to our cause—if you are lying, I’ll not hesitate to take it as penance.”
“I pledged my life to her protection long before your cause. She is who I say she is.”
The woman did not reply, but almost immediately Aurora felt the rush of something cool on her skin. It wrapped around her like silk and then sank beneath her skin. She could feel it spreading inside her—like ice melting the burning pain. Her vision began to clear and her chest stopped aching and slowly she felt herself come alive again, as if she’d hung over the abyss of death by only her fingertips. She was able to swallow, her throat burning at first, but easing as the strange power worked through her.
By the time she sat up and looked at the woman called Zephyr, she felt as if she’d been born all over again. Her words were raspy when she asked, “Who are you?”
Zephyr stepped out of the shadows, emerging into the sunlight.
“I am the one who has been fighting for your people in your absence.” She held up her arms and waved at the shelter around them. “Welcome to the rebellion.”
Aurora looked to Taven, and then down at the blue uniform he wore. Now she understood. She wanted to demand he tell her everything, but there was something else she had to know first.
“What are you?” she asked Zephyr.
Jinx, whom Aurora had forgotten in the chaos, dropped down then from her place at the top of the ladder. Dust rose at her landing, swirling around her feet in a way too perfect to be natural. Her eyes were on Zephyr as she said, “Water witch.”
Zephyr crossed her arms over her chest in response, cocking her hip casually. “Earth witch.”
They studied each other for a few moments—Jinx with narrowed eyes and Zephyr with a purse of her full lips. Then one after the other, they turned to face Aurora.
It was Jinx who said, “And a princess too. Who knew?”
Jinx’s tone was even, but it was missing the warmth and effervescence with which she always spoke.
“I can explain,” Aurora croaked, her throat still parched from what she was only now realizing had been a dangerous case of rapid dehydration, courtesy of Zephyr’s magic.
But when she opened her mouth to continue, the words dried in her throat. A tingle of foreboding skipped up her spine, and she tilted her head back to look up through the open shelter door at clear sky. She took one breath, then two, then another soul’s consciousness slammed into hers.
Malice curled around her like the tentacles of some monster from the deep. She pushed at the soul’s presence, but the day’s events had weakened her, and by the time she’d shored up her defenses against one intrusion, another was already coming. She gritted her teeth as fury—hot and thick as tar—clogged in her veins. A thirst for vengeance stole across her tongue, and she only had time to say, “Someone close that door!” before the sky ruptured and bled out fire.
There were no sirens, nor Stormling barriers. Beneath her clothes, her crystal necklace burned in warning, but the first flaming embers were already scorching through the sky. At least a dozen slipped through the opening overhead, which no one had been quick enough to close.
All of Aurora’s focus was on enforcing the boundaries around her mind, and she only avoided getting burned because Taven took hold of her elbows and dragged her back into a corner.
Aurora heard screaming, and was horrified to realize that it was not coming from anyone inside the shelter, but from the city above. The screams built and grew into an agonized chorus, and the scent of char rapidly tainted the air. Zephyr used her magic to douse a pile of burning debris, and Jinx resurrected one of her vines to make the perilous journey up to the surface where it wound around the handle to the shelter door. Jinx pulled with all the strength of her small form, and the door crashed down, immersing them in darkness.
The only sounds were the sizzle of dying flames. The pale blue glow of the skyfire lantern cast them all in ghostly shadows. Aurora shoved her fist against her mouth to keep from sobbing. She could still feel the storm—though her barriers were strong enough to keep her thoughts her own. But now it was the other souls that fed her agony. She could feel them dying—by the dozens.
A siren sounded. Too late. Far, far too late.
Desperate to do something, anything, to stop the horror and pain that bombarded her with the arrival of each newly departed soul, Aurora jerked up the leather necklace that held her tiny bottle of firestorm powder.
Locke had told her to use it in the event of a firestorm. It would not protect her completely, but it would temporarily make her impervious to flame.
She yanked out the cork with her teeth.
“Don’t!” Jinx yelled, throwing out a hand to stop her.
“Why not?”
“That powder is rare. Firestorm hearts aren’t exactly easy to capture. Don’t waste it when you’re already safe.”
Aurora cringed. “Waste it? Do you know what is happening out there?”
Jinx held her ground. “I do. And I also know that you cannot do anything out there that you could not do in here.”
She meant for Aurora to soothe the storm. While much of her newly realized power was still a mystery, she had spent their journey back to Pavan quietly soothing unsettled souls and preventing them from becoming storms. But those souls were relatively normal—lost and wandering from their inability to disconnect from their former lives. The soul that seethed above them now had been twisted and marred into something foul and unrecognizable. There was no soothing that kind of rage, not without a Stormheart to bring the storm to heel.
“I can’t,” Aurora whispered. “It’s beyond my skill.”
“What do you mean, beyond your skill? I thought you were the most powerful Stormling to grace the Pavan line in generations?” This question came from Zephyr.
Aurora grimaced and shook her head. “I’m not.”
“You’re not the most powerful?”
She was not a Stormling. At least, that’s what she had always believed. Now, she was not sure what she was.
“It’s … complicated.”
Brax, the overgrown guard who set this all in motion when he caught Jinx, plopped down onto the ground and said, “I have time.”
“Well, I don’t,” Aurora replied. “I cannot sit in here while people are dying out there.”
She pushed Jinx’s hand away and raised the bottle to her lips. Then a familiar haze emerged between Aurora and the storm’s consciousness. This time she knew for certain that the power she felt in the air belonged to Cassius. It had the same cold, menacing potency as his presence the first time she met him. It filled the air like his deep voice filled a room. And while she loathed the Locke prince, the presence of his magic over the city eased the pressure she felt against her own barriers.
She returned the cork to the bottle and the necklace to its home against her sternum. “Never mind. It’s no longer necessary.”
She didn’t bother explaining further before she crossed to the ladder and scaled to the top. She shoved back the door, and the sound of screams came back with a vengeance. High above, a near-translucent barrier quaked from the impact of falling embers. Flames licked at the magic, and it looked to Aurora as if the sun had fallen from the sky and stopped mere moments away from crashing into the city.
Smoke filled up the space beneath the barrier, and even though the embers were no longer razing the city, that did not stop the current fires from spreading out of control.
She turned, intending to call for Jinx, and was surprised to find all the inhabitants of the shelter standing just behind her, gazing out at a blackened, burning city.
Zephyr was the first to jump into motion. “I’ll do
what I can, but I cannot create water from nothing. There’s only so much I can pull from the air.”
“I can help with that,” Jinx replied, peeling back one side of her jacket to retrieve a jar of storm magic from a holster near her ribs. She held out the jar, the inside of which was swirling with torrential rain.
“A hunter?” Zephyr shared a knowing look with a tall, dark-skinned man whom Aurora could not recall speaking a single word since his appearance.
“Two hunters,” Jinx replied, glancing at Aurora.
A rush of gratitude filled Aurora’s chest. Jinx had every right to be furious with Aurora’s lies, but she still included her as one of them. For now.
Zephyr’s smile was filled with satisfaction as she jumped into action. She turned to the dark-skinned man first. “Raquim, you and Brax focus on search and rescue as I work on dousing what I can.” She cocked her arm and threw the glass jar of storm magic against the building in front of them. Wind and rain surged in every direction, whipping at their clothes and hair. Zephyr gave a shout of triumph. But before she focused on her magic, her gaze trailed to Taven. “I suppose you will be reporting for duty.”
He nodded, his eyes straying first to the tempest still fighting overhead, then to Aurora. He hesitated.
Zephyr did not, setting out at a run toward the city center, where the blaze loomed the largest.
Selfishly, Aurora wanted to keep Taven here to tell her everything she needed to know. But she knew he was needed elsewhere.
“Go,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
His eyes were torn. She knew his sense of duty was telling him to stay with her.
“Will you meet me here tomorrow at first light?” he asked.
She nodded. “I will. I promise.”
He waited another beat, staring at her as if she still might be a dream, then he turned sharply and began to run.
“Wait!” she called, sprinting after him.
He slowed, but did not stop. “I’ve already been missing too long. My unit is likely searching for me. If any of them survived. But if you want me to stay, you only need to ask, Your Highness.”
“Please don’t call me that.” He slowed to a walk, and she avoided his serious gaze by looking at the palace instead. It was hard to see between the smoke and the rain, but she could see the shape of the large golden dome. “I’ll let you go, but first, please, what of my mother?”
Taven stiffened, and his long strides stopped abruptly. Horror knifed through Aurora’s middle. “Is she—did they…”
He gave a sharp shake of his head. “She’s very ill. But she lives. Though she does not believe the same is true of you.”
It is thought that the first magic users were given gifts not unlike the gods themselves. They had the magic from which all the world had been created and with which all the world could be destroyed.
—An Examination of the Original Magics
6
Thirteen Years Earlier
Cruze tried to keep track of the time, but during a tempest, the whole world slowed down and sped up all at once. The downpour soaked past the skin, until the cold felt like it would never let you go. First, you wanted to move constantly in an attempt to create heat. But after a while, you realized that creating heat means losing it, and then you didn’t want to move at all. You wanted to sleep. But it was too cold for that too. The unexpected changes of the wind kept you on high alert, always wondering if there was something worse than wet and wind coming next. If you were the other children, you cried and cried and cried.
Cruze did not cry, not even when the voice in his head came back—the voice that whispered of destruction and death. He waited for something more to come of the voice, for madness to take him fully, or the voice’s owner to present itself. But the whispers remained whispers, just skimming the surface of his thoughts; sometimes he even had to strain to hear them over the sobbing of the other children. They cried for mothers and fathers he knew would never come.
Only one other child seemed to understand that they were on their own out here—the girl with the bruise across her neck. Together, she and Cruze had done their best to build a shelter in the time before the storm hit. They found a set of boulders close together, and piled long sticks over the top, followed by fern leaves. When they had finished, it had looked like a makeshift hut, and Cruze had been proud.
But it had done next to nothing to protect them from the rain when it came. The leaves grew heavy and curled downward, leaving gaps in their would-be roof. The earth beneath them grew into sodden soup that stuck to their feet and legs in muddy smears and clumps. The others huddled closer and closer around him, until Cruze could feel their shaking limbs against his own. And with that whisper still in the back of his mind, he had a sudden urge to shove and shove until he had space, until none of that weakness touched him.
Instead, he hurled himself forward and up, crawling out of their pitiful shelter and submitting to the fury of the storm outside.
“Where are you going?” a voice asked, small and high-pitched.
Cruze did not stop to answer. He kept putting one foot in front of the other, and he did not stop until his clothes were soaked through and his skin was slick with rainwater. Thunder howled overhead, trees quaking at its roar, and he stopped to listen, to feel fear, to perhaps finally cry like the others.
But still … it never came.
Because for the first time possibly ever, Cruze felt free.
He was not locked away in that house where his mother lived with the cloying perfumes and noises at all hours and the people coming and going that never included him. He had never done anything but stay. Stay behind. Stay quiet. Stay unseen.
“What are you doing?”
Cruze whipped around and found the girl. She’d followed him, but somehow she seemed less touched by the elements. She wasn’t dry, to be sure, but it was as if she stood beneath a tree that guarded her from the worst of the rain. But there was no more shelter where she stood than he, and he could hear the steady patter of the rain and felt it fall against the back of his neck.
“Nothing.”
“You’ll fall ill if you stand too long in the rain,” she said.
“So will you.”
She did not reply to that, only tilted her head slightly and looked at him with more focused eyes.
“What happened to your neck?” he asked, tired of wondering, and too far from his mother to care what was and was not polite.
She grabbed the collar of her shirt, pulling it up to hide the mark, but then dropped it, as if she changed her mind.
“I made a choice,” she answered.
“What kind of choice?”
She shrugged and did not blink as she continued, “Not to die.”
He did not know what she meant, but she was the only person out here he felt even the slightest connection toward. “What’s your name?” he asked, aware that he had made no effort to get to know any of the others before, while they had all told story after story of their families and lives back home.
“You can call me Kess.”
* * *
Kiran Thorne burst out of the smoke-filled inn, his heart galloping at a painful speed.
She was not here.
They had evacuated the inn as soon as it was safe to go outside. Firestorms made for a particularly violent dilemma—stay in the building as it burned or run out into the storm that caused the fire? Usually it came down to guesswork, and most often it led to injury or death regardless of where one stayed. Unless, of course, you carried magic like the firestorm powder he had already taken.
When he had not found Roar in her bedroom on the third floor, he assumed she had already made it out. But when he could not find her with the others, he’d charged back into the burning building, determined to find her. Ransom followed close at his heels, for Jinx was missing too. But no matter how much they searched, the girls were nowhere to be found. When the third floor was smothered completely in flames, they’d fina
lly given up and retreated back outside.
Now Kiran paced back and forth, every muscle in his body pulled taut like a bow. The arrow, he felt, might be lodged in his lungs, for no matter how much air he gulped down, it seemed to leak out faster than it should.
She couldn’t be inside. She just couldn’t be.
They’d not traveled safely across the wildlands only to have her die in a Stormling city just like his sister. His skin began to crawl, the way it sometimes did in cities, as if the memories were about to burst through his pores so he could ignore them no longer.
Out of nowhere, a downpour of rain began a few streets over, quickly expanding to reach over the inn. He turned his head up to the sky, and welcomed the wash of cold over his face and down into his clothes. He never felt clean in cities. It was good that hunting kept him in the wilds the majority of the time because he was already restless, and they had barely arrived.
He watched the flames atop rooftops sizzle and steam under the fall of rain, waiting for the inn’s fire to subside completely. Pushing his soaked hair off his forehead, he resumed his pacing. He was not sure how many times he marched back and forth in front of that inn, refusing to think about what he might find inside, before Ransom called out, “Kiran!” His friend gestured down the road where two silhouettes were beginning to take shape through the torrent of rain.
The taller of the two had a hood pulled low to cover her face, her form little more than a moving shape in the distance, but he would know Roar anywhere. He had memorized everything about her—the too-graceful glide of her walk, the way she hunched her shoulders to make herself seem shorter when she wanted to go unnoticed, and how it was utterly impossible for him to ever not notice her.
She was moving gingerly, as if in pain, and before he knew it, he was sprinting toward her. She was dripping wet, but somehow a streak of soot still marred her pale cheek. When he was almost upon them, she turned and shared a long, unreadable look with Jinx.