Page 21 of Blade of the Nightking

Had I looked like that?

Had Aedric carried me in that state? Had he lain beneath murky skies flecked with falling ash, my ruined body tucked against his side while he held me through what we’d both believed were my final, agonizing moments?

The people of Solmire…

This.

This was how they’d died.

How I should have died.

Sairus snapped his fingers at me. “Heal him.”

My eyes burned as the stench of his charred flesh reached me, the smell horribly familiar. I’d smelled it before. On my own blistered body.

I pushed myself to my feet, numb. I had no idea what I was doing.

“Just like we practiced,” Aedric breathed, rising to stand beside me. To steady me. To brace me.

“We didn’t practice healing,” I whispered.

“We practiced touching your magic. Bending it to your will.”

My eyes found his, and I knew I must have looked wild. Afraid.

“Shape it,” he said softly, cutting off the protest before it could leave my mouth. “Tame it.”

His gaze held mine.

I can’t.

“You can.”

I closed my eyes.

Inside me, my magic stirred—coiled tight, like a serpent sleeping in a deep, black pit. When I reached for it, it reared, slithering back into the darkness.

Please, I thought.

I remembered how easily it had come that night in Solmire, after the ball, after Sevrien’s attack. How it had spilled through me, knitting wounds closed as though they had never been. I lifted a trembling hand and hovered it over the dying faerie. I reached for my magic. Tried to coax it forward. Guide it into him the way I’d watched the healer do with Aedric, willing it to rise, to answer me.

Nothing happened.

“Try again,” Aedric urged.

I nodded, swallowing hard, and reached deeper. I remembered the rush of Rìan’s power when I’d grabbed onto it, how it had filled me completely, how it had touched every part of me at once. I tried to pull that feeling back.

It didn’t come.

“I can’t,” I whispered to Aedric, turning to him, panic clawing at my chest.

The disappointment in his eyes cut me deep, though he cupped the side of my face gently. “We’ll practise. You’ll learn,” he said quietly, brushing his thumb across my cheekbone. “You’ve done it once already for yourself.”

I fought the sob threatening to erupt from me.

Even if I learned, it would be too late for this male.

“How did you do it, then?” Calantha propped her elbows on the table, staring at me past the twitching body as though his suffering were beneath her notice. “How did you heal?”