“Give her to me,” a quavering female voice demands.
Hope punches me in the gut. Maharani Belwar, the best pink forte in all of Wickery. She can bring Adraa back. She can saveher.
“What can I do, Ira?” Maharaja Belwar rolls up his sleeves.
Maharani Belwar doesn’t even glance at us.“Laeh!”she cries out, thrusting her hands onto Adraa’s chest. Adraa jolts upward, but nothing else happens. Her head lolls to the side in a deathlike swivel.
Gods, no. No!
“Stay with me, baby.Laeh.” She shoots again. The pink magic dissolves into Adraa, raises her body in a jerk, and…And nothing happens.
Maharani Belwar turns to Maharaja Belwar and sputters, “Vivaan, she’s not responding. In the clinic, in the clinic there—”
In one fluid motion, Maharaja Belwar scoops Adraa up in his arms. And in a flash of orange he’s gone, with Maharani Belwar right after.
I stumble to pick myself up. My father and what’s left of the other ceremony viewers sit on the steps, stunned. Adraa’s sister is frozen. Riya, however, is already dashing toward the clinic.
“Tvarenni!”I shout, and shoot after her.
When Riya halts before a doorway I lurch to a stop and gape at the scene before me. Adraa is on the medical table, where a week ago we stood together helping patients. Everything has changed. The floor, covered with blood and broken bottles, makes me want to vomit. I’m thrust back to a time in which I stood at the threshold of my mother’s room, watching horrified as screams shot from her ragged throat. Now it’s just the yell of spells and a blaze of orange and pink smoke wafting over the body of the girl I love. Blood drips to the floor in a maddeningly consistent patter.
There was no wound. Adraa wasn’t bleeding for the few seconds I held her.
“It’s not hers,” a voice murmurs.
What’s happened? There was no wound before!
“Jatin!” Riya shakes me. “It’snothers.”
Peering at the floor again, I get it. Bottles, potions, blood, it was all pushed off the table for Adraa.
As I step forward to do something, anything, Maharaja Belwar twists around and slams the door closed with a flick of yellow magic. I think I hear a soft apology, but the slam masks any other noise. I’m cut off from her. I’m useless.
Riya slumps against the opposite wall, tears shimmering on her cheeks. “She still thought I was mad at her. That’s the last thing she’ll ever—”
“No!” I shout. “No!”
“Will you wait with me?” she whispers through sobs.
“I’m never leaving her.”
Within minutes, Prisha, Kalyan, my father, and several servants find their way to our hallway of torture, where time eats at us until it devours something vital. A servant girl falls into Riya’s arms, which renews Riya’s tears. Hiren, that guard from the rooftop who wanted to arrest me, holds Prisha close. Kalyan sits next to me, silent and strong. My father paces, wanting into the room as much as I do, I’m sure.
My brain cycles through all my memories of Adraa and tries to hold on to every detail. Of course, I fail. I fail over and over again until even in my memories I can feel her slipping away.
When the door finally unlatches, it’s Maharaja Belwar.
“She has a pulse. Ira is still at it, but even if she were to wake up…There’s not much hope,” he says, with tears sliding down his face.
I turn and pound my fist against the nearest wall.
This is my fault. Adraa recognized the danger when no one else did. What royal has ever died during their ceremony? It’s been a century, maybe even centuries, plural. But she knew and I pushed her here, to perform for the gods and they beat her. No, theykilledher.
“Son?”
I whack my father’s hands off me and run. I make it to the training yard before I collapse to the ground. Frostlight blossoms flutter at my crash and then lie still. I crush a few in my hands. Curse the color white. To blood with it all!
“Damn you! Damn all of you. I loved her, you bloody bastards. I loved her!” I scream into the air. I don’t know I even said the spell, but a freezing blast of ice shoots up into the sky and my arms go numb from the cold that bursts from my body. My whole body is numb, besides my chest, which grates like I’m being shredded by a hot iron. A surge of pure white magic keeps shooting out of my hands. It feels like hours of me exploding, hurling my magic into the sky and hoping the gods die along with me. Then I slump to the ground and sob.
