AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Go on,” she says, waving her hand into the room as if she’s welcoming us to the royal ball. “What are you waiting for?”
The prince smiles at her, and Princess Elanerill clasps her on the shoulder as she walks past. I try to smile, but the burned magic in the air twists around my throat, making me feel like I’m choking. She was wrapped in magical energy, this woman. Now the magic she carried through the streets of the Crystal City is all but depleted, and we haven’t even started opening the portal.
The woman meets my eye as I enter the room, then sticks out her hand. I freeze as some part of my brain urges me to jump backward.
“Glad you’re here,” the woman says, grabbing my hand and pumping it up and down in hers. “I’m Lythienne. You’re Ithronel’s sister.”
“Yes,” I say, although she hadn’t made it sound like a question.
“Good, good,” she mutters as we walk into the room.
She turns to stare at the wall behind the door, where a complicated, delicate piece of machinery appears to be growing out of the rough-hewn stones. A web of thin silver wires connects the machine to a series of metal rods jutting out of the far wall at seemingly random intervals.
“So,” Lythienne says, turning back to me. “How do you think this thing works?”
Some desperate, crazed part of me wants to laugh, but Lythienne is staring at me with hard, sharp eyes, and I don’t think she’s joking. So I pull a deep breath, raise my hands, and approach the machine carefully, as if it were an unfamiliar horse snorting with its ears pinned back.
And, ultimately, the thing isn’t that complicated. We already know what it’s supposed to do, and it isn’t too difficult to parse out which elements connect to the silver wires threading their way across the far wall, although I can’t for the life of me make out the purpose behind the massive bell that hangs heavily above the wires. Lythienne adjusts the dials until the machine hums with a low, irritated sort of magic that I feel in the back of my teeth.
“I think that’s it,” Lythienne declares.
I frown at the strange contraption. The silver wires begin to glow with a soft, white light as the machine amplifies the ambient magic in the room and then directs it to the far wall. It’s impressive to pull that much magic from thin air, but it’s not nearly enough to rip a hole in reality. A sort of helpless rage twists inside my chest; we can’t have come this far for nothing.
“Where’s the magic going to come from?” I ask. “It’s going to take more than this to open a portal.”
Lythienne smiles at me in a way that I don’t entirely like, and the low throb of magic in the room intensifies. It feels like strange, wild magic, something that makes me think of the Kingdom of the Summer and the glass-topped tower where Princess Elanerill lay in her magical coma for so many turns of the seasons. The magic grows stronger, until it’s so thick I can taste it. It’s hot and soft and dangerous, like a sword wrapped in velvet, and some part of me is almost afraid to turn around and see where it’s coming from. But I turn anyway, because honestly, I already know what I’m going to see.
Princess Elanerill and her groom stand next to the machine, their arms entwined, their eyes fixed on one another. Magic swirls around them like haze rising from a fire. The machine’s horrible, low buzzing grows louder.
Heart magic. My throat is so tight I can barely breathe. I was taught that heart magic was the most dangerous type of magic, the least predictable, and the most likely to spin out of control. Hells, I’m afraid of it. All those trips to Princess Elanerill’s tower, our attempts to cut off the unfinished heart magic spell draining her life energy, the frantic screaming as the healers told us we were losing her, they had all convinced me that I’d never mess with heart magic.
Yet here I am, in a room that’s slowly filling with the stuff. Tears prick the back of my eyelids until I feel like I’m about to choke. I’m horribly aware of Phaedron, standing with his back to me and his eyes fixed on the far wall, wrapped in the fortress of his illusions, and I’m not going to look at him. Not for all the gems in all the Lands Below.
Lythienne gasps, dragging my attention back to the silver wires. They’re glowing a dark, ominous red now, and the metal rods embedded in the far wall shine in a way that makes me think of oil spreading over water. Sweat trickles down the back of my neck to trace a line between my shoulder blades as the air in the room swims and thickens. Heart magic screams through the machine, hot, urgent, and angry, twisting as it pulses through the wires, forcing the metal rods to burn against the stone wall.
Instantly, everything feels wrong. The metal is so hot it smells like a blacksmith’s forge, and heart magic pulls against the web of wires like an animal in a trap. The angry red glow of the wires becomes a violent orange, and I’m suddenly very certain this machine was not designed for this type of magic. Acrid smoke rises from the metal rods to wreath the strange bell. I open my mouth to say it’s too much, the machine isn’t going to hold together.
And a portal snaps into existence against the far wall. My ears pop as a sudden gust of air fills the room, sucking the mess of smoke and heart magic into another world. The air along the edges of this portal looks like it’s boiling. A sickly gleam spreads across the portal’s surface.
“Phaedron,” Lythienne calls. “Go! You and Arryn, now!”
Phaedron steps toward the angry churn of magic against the wall. Arryn is there with him, her lips pressed into a thin line, one hand on the dagger in her belt.
“No,” Phaedron says, turning toward me. “Alindra.”
“What?” Arryn cries. “No, I’m the one—”
“I’m sorry,” Phaedron says. His voice sounds like slamming a door. “Alindra first. You can follow.”
Arryn’s mouth drops open, Phaedron’s ice-blue eyes meet mine for the first time since last night’s disastrous attempt at seduction, and my heart sinks. Of course, I have to go first. I’m pregnant, and the Lands Below are not kind to pregnancy.
And Phaedron wants to get rid of me. Because whatever I thought was happening between us, whether it was friendship or something else, it’s clearly over now.
“We don’t have time to argue about this!” Lythienne snaps. “Whoever is going, go. Now!”
I step forward without thinking, my body moving of its own volition. The portal is so hot it feels like I’m stepping into a furnace. Phaedron’s hand closes around my wrist, and I turn away, staring at the rock wall above us instead. The silver wires are incandescent with magical fury; as I watch, one of them snaps and drifts in pieces to my feet, still smoldering. Arryn is saying something behind us, but I can’t make out her words over the roar of magical energy and the dull thud of my own heartbeat. Phaedron moves forward, and I follow, entering the fire.
Heat steals the breath from my lips and peels the skin from my bones. The world is white-hot, screaming with pain, pressing in all around me. My lungs burn with breath they can’t expel, I’m pressing forward even as magic sends daggers through my flesh, and this is worse than the other portal, so much worse—
