I slowly lower my gaze back to the king. My heart pounds, and I hate how breathless and impressed I sound when I ask, “How do you summon them, and their magic, so easily?”
“It isn’teasy. Of course, nothing worth having comes easily, does it?” He blinks, his posture relaxing slightly, but his eyes are still darker than normal. “All magic requires sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice…”
“Yes.” He flexes his hand, studying it for a moment before clenching it into a tight fist. “More than you seem to understand.”
“I’m not exactly a stranger to sacrifice.”
“Maybe not. But this is a different game than the ones you’re used to playing.”
The dragon overhead roars. I grit my teeth, resisting the urge to touch my eye, to show any kind of weakness or regret in front of this man.
“Maybe you aren’t capable of letting go, of sacrificing what you have to in order to make space for what you desire?”
My gaze flies to his. “I’m more than capable.”
“And yet, nothing is catching fire,” he says, lazily sweeping a hand toward the untouched targets.
“Maybe I could try settingyouon fire?”
“I’d be worried by that threat if I thought you could actually manage it.”
I try to take a deep breath. Part of me knows he’s only baiting me. That I shouldn’t give in, because there’s only one way it will end if I do—in violence, and then an even higher wall rising between the two of us.
But warmth is kindling in my heart again, and the king’s words are like tinder tossed upon it, crackling and threatening to ignite.
A different game, he said.
Nothing about the life I’ve lived—the things I’ve survived—has felt like a game. Maybe that’s all this is to him; he’s the one that holds most of the pieces, after all.
“I’m a busy man, Ashwalker. Are you going to make this worth my time or not?”
The heat in my chest expands, filling my body. I’m not purposely reaching for Blight, but I’m imagining fireon every surface, searing every inch of air, consuming everything in its path. I’m so desperate to burn it all down that there’s no way she could ignore my desire, and suddenly her power is flooding through me with an intensity I've never felt before.
Reave's eyes widen slightly. “Wait?—”
But I'm not listening.
I'm done with hisgames, his condescension, his smug certainty that he knows everything about power and sacrifice and?—
The target doesn't just light.
Iterupts.
Fire explodes outward, columns of flame that strike several more targets with enough force to knock them over. They catch fire as well, all of them building into an inferno that makes everything shimmer and warp.
Blight's power surges through my veins like molten lava carving new paths down a mountainside, too powerful and too hot to contain.
I can't stop it.
The fire around us keeps growing, keeps spreading, and now there are flames licking up the walls, racing across the sand, catching in ways thatnormalfire shouldn’t. Dragon-fire has different properties, apparently, and soon I can feel Blight roaring in my head, telling me to stop dragging this power out of her, but I can't—I can't?—
“Enough!” Reave's voice cuts through the chaos. His magic follows, a quick frost that clings and suffocates.
When our two forces collide, I’m rocked off-balanceenough that I feel the taut hold I had on Blight’s power start to fray.
The flames sputter and shift. Some of them fall away to smoke, but others continue to burn, bright and angry and defiant.
