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She didn’t seek it for herself and he found the stony weight in his heart easing as he considered her.
In the silence of his mind, words he’d tried to forget rose to haunt him.
Mend a shattered soul. Melt a heart of stone.
As those words circled through his mind, he stilled.
The curse.
He hadn’t thought of it in...decades, perhaps even a century.
Mend a shattered soul.
The wind gusted through the trees and Amy shivered, inching closer to him. He doubted she’d noticed. But he did and he considered that, even as his mind turned over those words the vâlva had said to him centuries ago.
Mend a shattered soul.
Had he done that?
Uneasy, he brushed the thoughts aside and gestured to the trap. “You’ve already shown some command over the earth, Amy. And earth magic is simple...almost instinctive. All you’ll have to do is...feel what you want it to do, like Gia told you. And if you freeze up, I’ll just burn away the supports. That will reveal my presence a little earlier in the game, but that won’t ruin everything. It only speeds along the time table.”
“Okay.” Her teeth chattered as she said it.
But she wasn’t looking at the ditch, or at him. Her eyes were on the fog, slowly silvering from the rising sun’s rays. “Dragon...they’re here.”
THEY HAD TO STOP.
Wyn had abruptly frozen in the middle of the path and the terror bleeding off him almost sickened Gia.
They were already nearly a hundred miles from the cabin, as the crow files. Without Amy to slow her down, Gia had taken Wyn on her back and gone straight through the backcountry, letting her Fae nature rise to the fore and guide her. She rarely let that part of herself free reign, aware of the risks in the current world. But Wyn was a wise child and he wasn’t going to go telling anybody that the woman who’d rescued him could run as fast as a car through the woods, so she decided to go with expediency.
But letting that aspect of her nature free also left her more...open and she felt it on a gut deep level when the fear grabbed him.
It didn’t take much for her to pick up on what was wrong, either.
With her shields completely down, she felt the utter wrongness hit the earth only seconds after he did.
Now, as she cradled him in her lap and sat with her back against a towering oak that punched up into the sky, the sun filtering down through the branches stripped bare after the recent storms.
The boy in her arms shivered.
Gia held him close, the thermal blanket from her pack wrapped around him.
It was cool, but the temperature had nothing to do with his trembling.
She closed her eyes, trusting her shade and the earth around her to stand guard as she reached out, following an invisible trail until she locked in on the source of that fouled wrongness that she’d alerted to maybe twenty minutes earlier.
Blood stained the earth.
People had died.
Amy still lived.
Gia didn’t know how she was certain of that, but she was.
And Sorin...yes, he was fine, but he was a dragon. He should be the least of her concerns.
Yet she worried.
