Page 81 of Her Cruel Redemption

Chapter Thirty-Eight

My eyes opened reluctantly. My eyelids felt like they were made of lead and coated in sand, but I forced them open all the same, rocked with a heaving, whirling nausea as I did. It sent me rolling to my side to vomit bile all over the ground. When I stopped heaving I groaned, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand.Everythingached. Like I had been beaten or trampled or pushed from a cliff.

‘Easy,’ Daethie’s voice crooned as I pushed myself up to sitting, wincing against a pounding headache. ‘Your body isn’t ready to be awake yet.’

‘What happened?’ I mumbled, pressing a palm to my forehead and squinting at my surroundings. I was in my tent. I had no idea how I’d wound up there. A violent wind was rattling the walls, shaking the poles and testing the restraints holding the entire structure to the ground.

‘You pushed yourself too far,’ Daethie said, and I swivelled my gaze to her, focusing on her face with some difficulty. ‘I warned you to be careful.’

‘I was in the middle of a battle. Anyone would have pushed themselves too far.’

‘Then anyone would have collapsed just like you did,’ she replied mildly. ‘All that magic whooshing around in your body. And above it.’ Her gaze swayed to the roof of the tent, as though she was looking through it. ‘It must have been painful.’

Well, yes, it had been painful. But I thought back to that euphoric haze that had consumed me, thought about how detached I’d felt from the pain. I’d known I was pushing too far. I would have had to be an idiot not to realise that I was doing myself damage. But at the time, the thought of stopping, ending the pain, protecting my body, hadn’t even occurred to me. I’d just kept reaching for more.

‘You’re lucky Maelyn found you when she did,’ Daethie continued, and I refocused on her.

‘Mae found me?’

‘A retreat was called. She was retrieving what wounded she could.’

‘We lost,’ I said bluntly as I swam back through my memories, trying to grasp what had happened. I’d been stalking across the battlefield with lightning pouring out of me, the taste of ozone on the air. And there’d been Draven. Telling me we were losing.

‘If victories were counted in lives, I would say there were no winners.’

‘How many dead?’

Now, something grim shadowed the healer’s face. ‘A lot.’

I dug down to the important part of the memory, the part where Draven had said that he’d known to watch the tunnels beneath the city. That he’d used them to get into Port Howl in the first place.

I know this city better than its king.

I tried to swing my legs out of the bed only to be choked by another wave of nausea. I groaned, doubled over, pinching my brow as my stomach tried to fight its way out of my mouth.

‘I told you not to move,’ Daethie sighed. ‘I suppose you always do as you will, though.’

Taking a few steadying breaths, I slowly settled back into the bed, suddenly uneasy as I remembered the sight of Draven’s fear. Fear that hadn’t been at all tied to the lightning I’d been wielding and seemed to have a lot more to do with the moment the magic had turned on me, its corrosion overwhelming my body.You’re making yourself sick. You could make yourself so sick you’ll never be the same again.

‘Have I done any lasting damage?’ I asked warily, taking stock of my trembling limbs, the slight slur to my speech, my cloudy, slow thoughts. ‘Is that possible?’

‘It’s more than possible. You could kill yourself with magic poisoning,’ Daethie said, her tone light and airy, as though I’d asked for her opinion on a new hairstyle. ‘Your organs haven’t fared too well. I’ve been trying to help them fight off the toxicity, but it’s been slow going. And not only that, but this time it got into your head.’ She tapped a finger lightly against my brow. ‘There’s so much heat up here. You can’t sustain regular damage of that kind. If you keep pushing yourself, permanent damage will be a given.’ She began digging around in a bag beside her, producing a water canister and offering it to me. I sipped at it slowly, still nursing my nausea but relieved to wet my cotton-dry mouth, and for the first time since Baba Yaga had gifted me the magic, I felt wary of what it might do to me. It was one thing to hear warnings that I could be driven mad. Another thing entirely to feel what I’d felt on that battlefield. That longing, that burn for more, that voice in my head whispering that I could show them all, take it all. I could still feel it now, even wracked with after-effects as I was: this vague hum of yearning to bemore.

‘You’re awake.’ Mae’s voice interrupted my brooding. She was standing at the flap of the tent, looking surprisingly clean for someone who’d apparently pulled me from a battlefield only… well, I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Rubbish.’

‘I’m not surprised. I don’t think magic was supposed to be the plan.’

‘I couldn’t just let Draven turn the minds of our entire frontline unchallenged.’

‘I don’t think assaulting the land for a hundred kilometres in every direction with wild storms and lightning strikes was a good solution to that.’

I stared at her blankly, my jaw slackening. ‘Iwhat?’

‘Did some funny things with the weather,’ Daethie chimed in, taking back the water canister in exchange for a roll of blessedly soft bread that made me suddenly ravenous. ‘It seems as though whatever you were doing out there interrupted nature’s systems. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it.’

‘It’s terrifying,’ Mae said, the words blunt. ‘No one should be able to do what you did.’ She shot Daethie a scathing look, but Daethie was either oblivious or pretending to be. ‘You shouldn’t be alive.’

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