I lifted his shirt to reveal a scorpion, but carved into his skin, different from the other scars that crisscrossed his body. This wasn’t a scar, it was a fresh, bleeding wound.
Anger burned in my blood, alongside the sick feeling in my stomach. “What can I do to help?”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing to do. Unless you can heal?” I shook my head sadly and he let out a groan of pain.
I bit my lip. But could I use my magic to heal?
I’d never used my magic on bodies before the fight with the rebels, but now I was beginning to wonder if I could use it in more circumstances than I had thought. But more than that, my mind fluttered back to the bangles on my wrist and what I’d felt when Kiyan had pulled me out of the burning beast.
They’d come alive on my wrist. Had they protected me from the fire? I stared down at the bangles still on my arm.
Or had they healed me as I’d been burning?
The memory of the cooling sensation skittering across my skin amidst the burning flames came back to me. Of my skin being smooth and unblemished when I’d woken up.
Kiyan’s eyes fluttered closed.
“Kiyan?” I said softly, nudging his shoulder, but he didn’t move. He’d passed out on the bed.
I lifted his shirt again and a gasp shot out of me. The knife wound now had greenish tendrils spreading from it, the poison in the mark starting to take over.
He would die here if I didn’t do something.
I placed my palms over his wound, the bangles falling gently against my wrist. I had no idea how to use them, but I concentrated my power there.
My magic sparked to life, golden threads pouring from my fingers and spooling out across the room.
But they didn’t have anywhere to go, and for the first time I faltered. What was I searching for? Usually, I would ask it to help me find what I needed, to give me what was lost, what I was searching for. But this was much more abstract.
A way to heal.
Just as I thought it, the threads gathered and began rushing back to me, weaving themselves around the bangles on my wrist.
Confirmation.
I exhaled and tried to remember what I had done in the death beast when I had felt the bangles. Taking one of them off, I examined it in the candlelight, cognizant of the web of green poison slowly seeping through Kiyan’s skin like ripples in a pond. Something small snagged my attention as the gold caught the light.
An inscription.
One I’d never noticed before. How was that possible? I’d looked over every inch of these bangles a thousand times growing up. Unless it had appeared afterward somehow? After I’d swum across the River?
I squinted my eyes, bringing the bangle close to my face and trying to read the words aloud. It was in ancient peri and I had to read it several times to understand the words.
To make whole begins with the self.
I frowned, turning the phrase over and over in my mind. Did I translate it properly? My fingers traced the small curls of the inscription stamped in the gold.
To make whole begins with the self.
I thought back to my research, the tomes I’d read in ancient texts in the human world, coupled with the compendium Kiyan bought me at the bazaar.
This was a magical object, and it couldn’t create magic by itself, it could only be channeled.
And it had to be channeled through me first.
I put the bangle back over my wrist and instead of trying to push magicoutwardI concentrated on pulling itinward. Bringing the magic from the object to meld with my own. My eyes fluttered closed and I focused on the sensation of my magic wrapping around the bangles and pulling.
A cool, light sensation flooded my veins, spreading down my wrist and tingling over my skin. A small breath escaped me, and it felt as though I were bobbing in a pleasant stream, a cool relief on a hot day, a gentle breeze in stagnant summer. The magic of the bangles wrapped around mine and fused to the core of my own.
