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If she could just get away, somewhere Denham couldn’t hurt her… Somewhere he wouldn’t look for her…. That beautiful arch of waterfalls nestled in the mountains outside Awora would have been a sight to see again. It was so peaceful, and isolated. If she could just focus on that memory, perhaps the pain of Denham’s bone-shattering spell would hurt a little less.
The thought was barely through her mind when everything seemed to explode.
Her body. The chair beneath her. The room around her.
She thought she heard Cecilia again, this time shouting, but no words were clear. Something overrode them.
The pressure of Denham’s magic disappeared. The weight of his palm pushing into her jugular vanished. Precious oxygen rushed into Rochelle’s lungs and she sucked it in with a ragged gasp. Her vision was still spotty at first, her senses skewed, her comprehension muddled. What she understood was pain … and that, somehow, she remained alive.
After a few seconds, however, she blinked her vision clear enough to realize why exactly she still couldn’t hear anything.
Rather, her sense of sound was entirely overridden with the thunderous crash of cascading water. Because across from her was a breathtakingly beautiful stone archway of seven nearly uniform waterfalls, pouring from within the heart of the mountainous rock. It was late enough in the day that the rainbow she remembered from her previous trip was smaller, and lower, but nevertheless there was a sparkling rainbow effect hovering above the gathered body of water at the collective base.
Rochelle gaped at the sight, unable to move. She knew where she was, of course. But that knowledge did not bring understanding.How… how am I … here?
This was the place she had gone to in her mind several times in the past two months when she felt desperate for an escape. When her emotions were too high, when she was near a crippling edge and wanted nothing more than to let her sadness or her hunger or even her anger break her, this was where she came. She’d always returned here, to this serene and seemingly private place, to gather her strength again. So when real death had seemed inevitable, unavoidable, she’d allowed herself one more glimpse of this remembered place.
Realization dawned and she nearly fainted. There was only one answer. She had teleported. Not via the strange portal system Denham had left behind in that cave, but the way Aric had shown her.Sort of.
Rochelle swallowed hard and dragged her focus away from the mesmerizing view. No matter how nice it was to look at, it didn’t really fix the rest of her problems—like her pain. Sitting upright under her own power was proving much more agonizing than it had any right to, actually. She would have to take stock of herself and heal the worst the things first. Healing had never been her specialty, but there was no way she could move on her own in her current state. Another question flooded her mind immediately on the heels of that thought. Even if she could move freely, or once she could, where would she go?
She wasn’t even sure which way, exactly, Awora was from the mountain. She did know that Caram was not a walkable distance away.
One thing at a time.
Heal at least a little, then rest, then maybe heal some more. Somewhere after that, she could think about things like next destinations and how to permanently escape the deranged Elder Prince.
****
The portal dumped them on the backside of a mountain, out in open forest. With a quick scan of their surroundings, Aric deduced they were on the opposite side of Caram from Emyr, near a lake. But he’d barely made even that deduction before his scan was interrupted by a magical explosion none of them could miss.
Somewhere in the forest up ahead, obscured by healthy, towering trees, a surge of magic erupted, pushing outward and upward, rolling over everything in its path. Birds screeched their displeasure as they hurried to escape the blast. The clouds overhead even rippled from the wave.
“Merciful ancestors,” Mitzi said.
Viveca turned to Aric. “Please tell me you did that.”
“No.” Aric frowned. The pulse of magic had thinned by the time it washed over them, becoming no more than a rough, passing wind, but the taste of it was familiar. Intimately familiar. “This way.” He hadn’t been so tempted to blindly teleport in over a decade, but they didn’t know what was ahead, or even how far they needed to go. So he didn’t teleport himself or the group of them. Instead, they ran.
Darnel’s boots clinked a once reassuring refrain in the background.
Every few seconds a swish of swaying red danced in Aric’s peripheral vision as Viveca kept pace.
He knew each of their footfalls. Recognized their presence at his back. This team he’d traveled with and relied on for most of his life.
None of it mattered. Up ahead, in the half-blown-out building already coming into sight, something was happening to Rochelle. Or had happened. Something so terrible she’d once again lost control of her magic, even despite all the effort and rigorous training Aric had put her through to prevent any such occurrence from repeating. His stomach twisted and hot anger licked at his blood as worry for her overrode his stubborn focus on the mission.
And then Cecilia stumbled out of the building, Denham’s arm slung around her shoulder. Both of them were limping and bleeding. Both of them visibly startled at seeing Aric and the others rushing up.
“Ce—” Viveca started.
Aric continued forward and shoved them both into the portion of wall that remained, molding the stone to his will before their simultaneous grunts even reached his ears. The wall latched onto their limbs, curving around bloody arms and legs, locking them in place.
“H-howdareyo—” Denham said, voice strained.
“Don’t start,” Aric snapped, keeping firm pressure over Denham’s shoulder. “Just by being here you’re proving your deception to King Jensen. For which I would thank you, but I’m more concerned about what the pair of you were doing to Rochelle that caused her magic to explode moments ago.” He cut a glare to the woman who had once been his friend and confidant. “What did you do, Cecilia?”
Cecilia glared back, though the expression only served to emphasize her unnaturally pale complexion. She had likely not gotten a barrier up in time to properly protect them from that explosion and was suffering some wounds his rough treatment was exacerbating, but he lacked sympathy. “She’s dead.”
