Spark

by Anna Holmes

  And still she’s screaming, still dying down there. I try to will my ears to stop letting the sound in, but even shutting them off completely, I can feel her. Hold on, I tell Caelin. I’m coming.

  “No,” she shrieks. “You can’t—”

  I have to, my love. I give the door another tug. The wood is old, but it is solid. It is also well protected against people like me. Not fire, not air, not enhanced brute strength persuades it. I stoop, examine it.

  I must be holding my breath, because my gills open in the midst of my search. I curse the distraction and step back. I’m focusing too much on the wood. There’s metal here—old metal. I can’t batter at it, but I can peel it away, bit by bit. I have a lot more magic at my disposal than I did before, but the hinges are in deep and my focus is—

  Somehow, I can feel her fluttering breaths, her periodic gasps. The pain itself eludes me, but her panic is lodged at the center of me, muddling my thoughts, grasping me as the snow did, but inescapable, horrible. My own lungs try to echo her cries. Focus has never been harder.

  I feel my gills open one more time and hold onto that air, turning my gaze back to the aged iron, starting to curl away like the edges of burnt parchment.

  Oh. Idiot.

  One of the spells on the door is a reflection— whatever I try to throw at the wood would come bouncing straight back at me, which is the only thing keeping me from trying to burn the whole wall down around it. But if I can get the hinges heated, I may just have a chance. I wedge myself between the bookcase I dislodged and the one still on the wall, hold out only my hand, and summon a fireball.

  Well, I wanted it to be a fireball. What I get instead is a four foot column of fire that nearly licks at the rafters above. I grit my teeth and try to whittle it down to something a little more manageable. Once I have a fraction of a campfire instead of an inferno, I squint at the distance between the hinges, start to calculate, switch over to praying, and let my fire loose.

  As anticipated, it comes straight back at me with a quickness I can’t quite match, which is why I used my right hand. The fire sears the top of it, and I bite back a yelp. Cradling it between my left arm and my chest, I step out.

  In the wake of the fire, the iron glows orange. I hold out my unburnt left hand in front of me and curl the fingers in, raking them through the air. With a metallic screech, the last of the hinges peels back, and with a well-placed shove, I’ve broken through.

  I’m definitely in the library proper now, though where, I can’t tell. All I know is that the sounds below are gut-wrenchingly crisp and a black metal catwalk snakes before me around a corner. I take it, still clutching my scorched hand to myself. I cool it down perfunctorily while I go, and the pain fades a bit by the time I round the corner.

  Well, I was right. I am in the library. In fact, I can see the figures of my mother and Jori and Caelin—in between the moving gears of the clock, in whose underbelly I’m currently stuck in very, very high up. “Enough,” I shout. Below, Jori wheels around, looking for the source of my voice, apparently. Mother tilts her head up where she stands over Caelin. “You want me to come down there? You step back. Now.”

  “Don’t,” Caelin cries out again around what might be a sob, from the horrible bubble that rises from my chest and sticks in my throat. “Go, leave—”

  The end of her exhortation gets swallowed in a choking sound, audible from all the way up here. I snarl, “Back, the both of you.”

  Mother is unimpressed. “Perhaps I ought to have taught you negotiations instead of magic, my sweet. I don’t see that you have much to leverage.”

  My good hand grasps the rail, shakier than I’d like. “Neither of you has enough magic to stop me falling. I can tell that from here. I’m no good to you dead. You kill her, you’ve killed us both.”

  “You are being dramatic,” she says. I’m too far up to see her expression, but I can hear the scowl from here. I’ve spent too long looking at it to ever block it out.

  “No,” I say, swinging the bad leg up and over the railing, easing over to perch uneasily on it. “I am using what I have for leverage. You did teach me how to negotiate, after all.”

  The clock fills in the silence, the massive silver moon directly above my head garish rather than serene at this angle. Below me, Caelin thrashes for air, and my pulse quickens. It’s not enough to bargain with my life. She doesn’t have long enough for my bluff to be called. “You back away,” I say, my voice marble even as the rest of me trembles, threatens to fall to pieces. “You let me down there to save her. And then I will go with you. Willingly.”

  “No,” Caelin coughs out again. “What are you saying—?”

  It takes everything I have to ignore her. It’s hard, her terror, her disapproval, her dying all vying for my attention. Instead, I keep my gaze fixed on my mother. “Go on. You know how to extract the truth from me. Cast the spell. If she dies, you’ll never get the chance, so cast it now.”

  She stands for a moment, her arms folded. At last, she turns away from Caelin, gesturing roughly for Jori. “Come, girl.” To me, she says, “Keep all your talking out loud. I’ll know if you don’t.”

  The second they’re away from Caelin, I let myself slip from the bar. There’s another platform directly below me. I land with a clang, a jolt spreading up my leg to the center of my hip. I pull myself upright and gauge the distance to the ground. Still awfully long, but the ladder is all the way at the door, and Caelin doesn’t have that kind of time. I swallow the fear roiling my insides and crouch. Maybe they can’t keep me from plummeting, but I think I can. At least, I hope I can. Wondering won’t get me down there any faster, so I slide to sit on the edge of the platform, duck under the railing, and jump.

  The first few moments, I’m convinced I’ve bungled it. In fact, I think I’m falling faster, my heart lodged somewhere up in my skull, thrashing furiously. My stomach has long since abandoned me. And then, as if it had been magic’s plan all along, the gods trying to force me to really appreciate the unnatural advantage I’ve been given, I start to drift, the edges of my tunic floating upward in the air. Like swimming, only more likely to kill me if I do it wrong. With the subtlest of thumps, I land and I run.

  I don’t feel myself slide the last few inches on my knees to her side. She and I have been here before. This time, though, it’s so much worse. There’s no blood, no obvious wound for me to fight. Her skin is dim, overrun by the ice blue lines of the poison that was supposed to be gone. “Oh, love,” I say softly, sliding her from the floor into my arm. “Not again. It’s all right, though. We’ll sort it. I just need your help.”

  The bounds of that most nebulous of hereditary quirks waver, and I can almost reach her mind with mine. The second I glance off of that barrier, though, it solidifies.

  I’m used to this. It happened the very first time I met her, and many times after that. I’d just try again, except….

  I frown. This collision, my will against her innate shield, has much more in common with that first time than all the ones that followed. I might have missed it any other day, but today—today, when I can feel her every strain, her struggle, I know. She means to put it up. “Caelin,” I begin, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. It comes out stilted, clinical. “Love. Don’t do this.”

  Her answer comes through a throat already closing. I’m losing ground to the poison fast. “You can’t let them take you.”

  Shit. I did say the only way I’d go is if she lived. But she can’t— “I won't let you die. Not for me, not today.” I start again. “Elyssia can’t lose its regnant for this.”

  “Elyssia will find a new regnant, as it is meant to. Rosalia….” She blinks hard, searching my face for something. “Rosalia can never be allowed to manufacture another prince.”

  The regret is audible even through the shaking whisper that she’s reduced to. She’s looking for my forgiveness for discussing me the same way everyone else does. Only it’s that fact that makes it different. There isn’t derision t
here—just fear. I swallow hard, and she reaches up for my face. “It’s not only that,” she persists. “I don’t want you to have to live through—they would—”

  “Tear me apart to find what they put in there,” I say slowly.

  And that’s true. And they probably wouldn’t bother putting me back together.

  Except.

  Except in that moment, when I finish estimating aloud the torture Rosalia has in store for me, both Jori and my mother cringe. Not particularly visibly, not dramatically, but hard enough. Mother isn’t one for remorse, or over-concern for my wellbeing. I lift my head for a moment and glance over at her. She turns her head quickly. Does she know what this sensitivity is?

  It doesn’t matter. In that one small gesture, she’s confirmed that my death is the precise opposite of what she has in mind for me. I whip my head back around and take in Caelin once more. The blue lines are advancing anew, and she’s fading again. I’ll need to be quick. “Listen to me,” I tell her, grasping her face, my fingers working into the uneven strands of her newly shorn hair. “That will not happen. Whether they want it to or not. They’ll get nothing from me, and woe to them if they try.” Caelin's eyes, the amber arrested in their gathering blue haze, fix on me. My hand shakes as I push the stubborn bit of hair that fell in them even before the rest was hacked away. “Please, my love,” I say again. “Let me in.”

  Her fingers find my face. They are cold, colder than my blood, and I know even without reaching out to the edges of her mind that it’s too late. No more time. No more miracles left. My eyes spill over.

  The edge of her thumb chases the moisture away again, and I look up. Her mouth is moving, but I can’t hear her. Her hand slips from my face to my sleeve, winding into the fabric, tugging weakly. I draw close, her lips almost to my ear. “Belt pouch,” she whispers.

  At once, I pull back. Her other hand is fumbling ineffectually with the flap on her own pouch—the same pouch she's worn these past weeks. My heart flies from my chest and lodges squarely in my throat as I fall to trying to pry the closure open, too. Please, please, please, I beg silently.

  It’s there, under a few loose gold, a handkerchief. I seize the vial, our second chance. “Thank you,” I breathe to her, uncorking it and tilting her head back again.

  This time, she takes the antidote in readily. I don’t wait. I take hold of her hand. “Show me,” I exhort her. “Show me where it is.”

  She pulls hard for air and sets my hand to her chest.

  And this time, when I come knocking, she answers. It’s a rush of both relief and pain straight to the front of my brain. I could tell when the pain overcame her before by the writhing, but now I feel every nerve’s cry paired with every breath, every slightest movement on my part or hers. It’s all I can do to keep myself steady, not to further fracture the jagged shards of glass racing through her veins faster than even the rush of her blood. “You have to help me,” I plead, my own words breaking, as if it were my body shutting down and not hers.

  “You,” she puffs out, “are going to have to—cut me some slack. I’m dying and I don’t know the first—first thing about magic.”

  “It’s a story,” I say. “That’s all it is. Tell me the story. The antidote is the character. Who is it?”

  “It’s…cold.”

  Cold. Brilliant. A sensation with which I am largely unfamiliar. I try to reach back into the haze of the last few weeks, when I sank into the lake. Certainly that’s not what she has in mind; she sounds like the cold is a relief.

  Relief from heat. That, I understand. The few moments of shade we were allowed at the slave camp after the hours of breaking rocks in the sun. The open air after the stuffy, stifling ballroom on her birthday. The break of a fever. “Cold,” I repeat. “Like ice?”

  “Like the muck the snow leaves. Runny.”

  I focus hard, try to sift through the pain. Somewhere near my breastbone, I find it, a small, shallow pool of something that doesn’t quite blend with everything else. I set my hand to her chest again. “Here?” I ask.

  She gives the slightest of nods. I try to coax it to shift and find myself stymied again by that block. My ears ring as though I’ve bashed my head against the stone wall, and I flinch. “Sorry,” she chokes. “Sorry. Come back.”

  I lift my hand and find the antidote anew. “You know I will, don’t you?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says with a weak grin. “Because if you don’t, I’ll level the bloody Legion.”

  “I expect nothing less.”

  “It’s tempting anyway,” she mutters.

  I glance over my shoulder. Neither Mother nor Jori seem to have noticed, though one of Mother’s long fingers has begun to tap against her upper arm. She’s losing her patience. “I’ll meet you there,” I tell Caelin under my breath.

  Her face shifts a few times. “Is that what you’re—?”

  Aloud, I say, “Think of what it would feel like if you could move that liquid around.”

  She does, though she’s still frowning at me. This time, instead of trying to push the antidote myself, I think very, very hard about allowing her to guide me. It's clumsy, fumbling, like walking with a toddler. Just as it was with Tressa. Please let this work.

  I wait for her muscles to contract as she acts out what it would take to get it there, feel the liquid budge ever so slightly. The second it does, I take it over, injecting it directly into the deep scar that still lurks not only on the skin, but under. Some of it I divert away immediately and send it to her heart to be distributed in her bloodstream, and the rest I press firmly into her shoulder, as though I’m still staunching that wound those months ago.

  In a matter of seconds, the streams of antidote start to disperse, running through her veins like liquid silver, smothering the heat a bit at a time. Even as the breaths come a little easier, the sear of the pain dampening, the wild blue lines retreating into the scar, she curls her fingers into the fabric of my tunic. “Please don’t go,” she whispers.

  “I’ll be all right,” I tell her, reaching up to smooth back her hair from her damp forehead again. “I’ve never not been, have I?”

  She smiles weakly, but can’t sustain it. Her shoulders start to pitch, her eyes squeezed shut. A bit of liquid escapes the corners of her eyes. I wipe it away.

  She pushes out a breath. “There’s—there's nothing I can do, is there.”

  I glance behind me at my mother again. “I’m afraid not,” I tell Caelin. “I can’t break a promise to my own dear mother.”

  “Who grows weary of waiting,” she calls back to me.

  “Well, you’ll simply have to amuse yourself,” I retort. “I’m not finished.”

  I want to dawdle. The faster Caelin improves, the sooner I have to go. But I won’t have her dying so that I’ll stay. “What am I supposed to do with you over there?” she asks me, her voice hollow.

  “Get better,” I say, running my hand along her arm, over her back, her hair again. “Get better, and keep at it.” I bow my head ostensibly to kiss her ear and add, “Come find me when you can.” I cradle her face in my hand. “After all,” I say, tapping the earring softly. “You still owe me a dance.”

  Jori turns her back, her arms crossed, shoulders hunched. Mother leans her head back, apparently bored. Good. Bored means more likely to make a mistake. Caelin’s too feverish to note them at this point, and though the blue has faded from her skin, echoes of the poison’s sting persist and mingle with throbs from her brutalized ribs. I break off my spell now that the antidote’s done. “It’s time,” I tell her.

  It’s good, I try to tell myself. Without me here, she’ll be able to approach Daryon’s little band, decide for herself. But leaving her here on this floor with no one here to help her feels like tearing away a piece of me. She’s not ready for me to be excised, either. Her face twists, and she attempts to sit up. Partway there, she cries out again, and I lower her back down. As the last of the poison fades, the rest of her wounds clamor for attention. My th
roat catches once I realize how compacted in her side is. “I’m so sorry,” I breathe. “I don’t think I have enough in me to fix that. I can help the pain.”

  She grasps for her side and heaves a few breaths, nodding briefly. I set my hand to her forehead one more time. “Think of what it feels like just before you fall asleep. Warm, heavy. Nothing hurts.”

  Her eyelids start to droop. “Alain,” she murmurs, grasping my hand.

  “Yes, my love?”

  “Just—just that,” she says with a little smile. “Alain.”

  Her head falls to the side, and I rush to cushion it from the hard marble. My heart seems to stop for a solid few seconds until I can locate her pulse, confirm her steady breathing. Then and only then can I lower her all the way down. Her face is peaceful, even bloodied and smudged as it is. I let my fingers run over the slashed velvet of her sleeve and her clammy, dim hand, then struggle to my feet. My eyes burn, my muscles slack. After all this time, I finally managed to get Caelin to sleep.

  I turn to face my keepers, as they have been all this time. Jori seems staggered, casting about for something to brace herself. Mother looks…well, like I haven’t finished my dinner. That was once treated as a betrayal tantamount to treason. Now that I’m actually guilty of that, I suppose I can thank her for the practice dealing with the fallout. I raise up my chin. “Well,” I say, turning toward the door. “Let’s get on with it, then.”

  “Sergeant,” Mother says, cocking her head in Jori's direction.

  Jori shakes out of her reverie and approaches me in a way I’ve never seen her behave. Shaken. Hesitant. Slowly, she reaches out and grabs my wrists. The dangling manacle clicks shut and suddenly, this magic of mine is concentrated only within my own body, confined from interacting with the air I breathe out, the things around me. It’s terribly uncomfortable, like suppressing a sneeze. She takes a faltering step back from me, her fingers lingering near my hands for a fleeting moment. She seems to stay stuck there, like she’s waiting for me to take hers in return.