Elena felt for his heat, the distinctive prana of his heart, and tore.
Flames ripped up from beneath his skin. He crashed, aflame. Screams cleaved through the air, from Risha, from Farin, from the guards who finally began to understand the horror before their eyes.
“Witch!”
“Sorceress!”
“Bitch!” they called her, and Elena could only laugh, her voice high and brittle.
“Better to be a bitch than a bechari.”
She raised Farin’s arm and threw the blade. It sank neatly into Risha’s chest. The Tsuani queen let out a loud, wet gurgle, her eyes catching Elena’s with a look of such confusion, she almost felt pity.
The queen toppled to the floor. Her guards cried for a medic, for help. Their voices rose in a chorus, panicked and hysterical like birds trapped in a smoking tree. It slammed into her. And for a moment, Elena swayed.
She remembered the burning mountain. She remembered her burning city. She had felt this fear—this immutable, irrevocable premonition of death.
This had been her, once.
But over the chorus of their screams, Elena heard the song of her power. The delicious, devastating thrum of her Agni, deep and resonant, like dawn breaking over a burning sea. Like beauty over horror. A goddess over men.
So she drowned that feeling.
She drowned her fear.
Elena wrenched her Agni forward and burned.
The guard closest to her shrieked as flames licked down his leg. He hopped back, kicking. Another tried to pin her to the ground, but Elena yanked the flames, and he howled at their vicious bite. She began to rise—but pain razed down her wounded leg. She gasped, crashing back to the floor.
The pain swelled—white-hot, unwieldly. It traveled up her leg, her chest, to the upper reaches of her throat. Elena bit back a scream as her control wavered. Farin jerked free, shouting for the guards to pin her down, goddamn it! They rushed forward, meaty, cruel hands clenching around her arms, digging into her skin. She fought them. Hard. With all her strength—but that too was fading fast.
Elena cried out as she was shoved onto her stomach, her chin clacking against the floor. Blood filled her mouth. Faintly, she smelled the ash of her dying fires. Someone tugged her up, and she caught Farin’s spiteful, frayed face.
“Bury her,” he spat, spittle flying from his lips. “I want her fucking entombed in the mountain.”
But she could smell his fear, taste it even now, and Elena laughed and laughed as they dragged her back to her cell.
CHAPTER 69
SAMSON
“Come home,” his mother says. “Come home, for my eyesight grows weak.” But the son of sea marches on to his deadly purpose.
—fromA Lament of Seshar: A People’s History
Samson drooped, his bones heavy, his mind fogged from the drugs they had pumped into him. Cold, biting air slid across his hands, his wrists. There was something familiar about it, something familiar about the smell of pine and earth and…
He woke to the icy shock of water. Samson sputtered, coughing, but then the guard threw another bucket. The water slapped his face, hard like cement. Samson crashed back against the wall.
“All right, he’s clean now,” the guard shouted.
An officer marched in, but as he drew closer, his nose wrinkled.
“Mountains, he still smells like shit.”
“Don’t get too close, he’ll bite,” the guard laughed.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” The officer studied Samson. A smile cut across his face. “Look at him.”
