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“Mental imagery, Ilara, similar to when you learned your Outlets. Urge it forward, picture it leaving your body and entering the queen.”
Heart pounding, I sucked in a breath and beckoned the light and dark to my fingertips. I pictured my affinity flowing from my hands and sinking into the queen. In my mind, Norivun’s mother grew covered with healing light.
Someone gasped.
I opened my eyes and swallowed a yelp of surprise. Golden light glowed around Queen Lissandra, and my hands had lit up like stars. Biting my lip, I concentrated harder and pushed with everything I had.
My light and dark affinity shot into the queen in rivers of power. Everywhere it touched, my affinity encountered bleeding blood vessels, broken bones, and pain...so much pain.
“I can feel her injuries!” I nearly shouted in excitement.
“What are you doing to sense it?”
More light and dark barreled out of me, flowing as though they knew what needed to be done, and I wondered if this was, in fact, like when I’d healed my wing, that this affinity intrinsically knew what to do, and it didn’t take much guidance from me. “It seems to be flowing on its own.”
My tutor nodded. “This affinity may work independently of you. It’s a rare trait in affinities, but I’ve seen it before. Are you commanding it at all?”
“Other than my initial push, not really.”
“Then it would indeed seem as though it works on its own.” Matron Olsander’s magic tugged slightly onmine, like a gentle hand prying my fingertips off my power.
I released my iron grip on the sensation between my shoulder blades.
She gave me an encouraging smile. “That’s it. Allow it to heal. Let the magic do what it’s innately trying to accomplish.”
I loosened my mouth, letting my lips fall slack. Mind and body opening, I allowed the light and dark spilling from my fingertips to chase through the queen, healing every cut that it passed, knitting every blood vessel that had burst, soothing all of her aches and pains, and mending every single broken bone.
Unleashed, the light barreled through her, healing in heat. The dark chased it, dousing the fiery pain away in cold.
When my affinity reached the queen’s lungs, it siphoned the blood and liquid away, clearing her lungs of that horrible rattling sound.
And as my power worked, I fell into a state of deep relaxation, my mind and magic nearly disconnected from my body.
“That’s it, Ilara. Allow it to do what feels natural.”
My tutor’s voice sounded far away, as though from another land. I sank deeper into my affinity, letting it take over, yet I still sensed what was happening. And when the queen felt mended and nearly whole, I began to rouse and was about to attempt to pull my magic back inside of me, returning it to that chasm between my shoulder blades, when I encountered something dark.Something sinister. It was buried so deeply within the queen that I almost missed it.
Ugly webbing spread out deep inside her. Hidden so completely within Lissandra’s structure that I’d almost missed it.
Frowning, I prodded my angel affinity along it. It felt...malevolent. Evil. Just a whisper of it caused me to shudder because it feltwrong.
Shivering, I wanted to retreat, but whatever that sensation was, I had a feeling it shouldn’t be there. I dove my affinity deeper inside the queen.
The brush of a memory, of what I’d felt insidemenot too long ago, feathered along my mind.
And then it hit me.
What I was feeling in the queen was the same magic that had caged my power after the warlock’s veil of death had attacked me in the Isalee field.
It was the same evil spell that the warlock had used to suppress theorem. And given what I was feeling and what Norivun had told me about the king creating a chamber to tether the queen’s abilities...
A crash of understanding barreled through me, and it all began to make sense.
The king had been working with the warlock forfull seasons. King Novakin had possibly called upon the warlock to assist him whenever he wanted nefarious magic applied, and somehow, the warlock had used that same dark spell to cage the queen’s power in whatever chamber he and the king had created.
Mother Below.I’d stumbled upon the dark spell theking had cast upon the queen all of those winters ago, the spell that had suppressed her affinities within her, locking them down until she was unable to access them.
And I now knew how he’d done it.
