Page 113 of The Deadliest Candidate

No.

She scrambled out from under Lautric, who slumped in pain with a groan. The clothes had been scorched clean off his back, which was raw and crimson with burn marks. Her heart ached, but Fern forced herself to stand up, to raise both arms. Srivastav was blasting the full force of his fire upon Edmund, whose shield was fracturing now, turning purple.

Fern could not fight the general, nor did she want to, but she remembered the first part of the fire channelling incantation—the part which absorbed and redirected fire.

She closed her eyes, her fear giving way to a great, icy calm. Her thoughts and emotions were muted.

For what she was about to do, emotion was not a luxury she could afford.

Wild Magic loved emotion; it fed off fear and passion and desire. She must be barren of them all if she wished to use it without harming herself. Fern was well read; she knew all too well the stories of those who had died using Wild Magic, those whose sanity or bodies had been consumed by the feral source of power.

But she had no other recourse, and she would not allow anybody else to die.

Like last time, the source was easy to find. Fern pulled on a trickle of it, and it immediately coursed through her, already quicker than she intended. She closed her eyes, stilling herself, striving to control the power she drew in.

Her incantation was on the tip of her tongue, branded into her mouth. She began to recite the incantation, and the trickle of Wild Magic she had drawn became a pouring cascade. She had opened a tap she could not quite close, and the magic filled her fit to burst, making her insides burn and her skin itch.

Fern opened her mouth, and now she bellowed the incantation.

First, the seeking incantation, for finding the fire, which was all around her. Then the summoning words, for pulling the fire into her. The Wild Magic, hungry and greedy, tore the fire from the air, Srivastav’s flames coiling and curling away from him and into Fern, searing her.

Her body blared alarms, screaming fire and agony. But Edmund had stumbled back, and his shield shimmered as he fortified it. Fern forced herself to carry on. The flames filled her, and the Wild Magic stoked and whipped the flames. The pain was excruciating, and the Wild Magic answered the pain in a sort of explosion of delight.

Tears streamed down Fern’s cheeks, and she saw Srivastav’s face only in a blur as he turned to look at her.

“Sullivan, stop!” he cried, his voice hoarse with fear.

Fernwantedto stop; she wanted nothing more. But the Wild Magic felt free and fast, and it fed on the fire like a hungry child, and Fern was being consumed. She threw her arms out towards the sewer pit, desperate to let go of the flames eating her alive.

Flames burst out from her hands, her arms. They streamed into the pit in great leaping ribbons of flame. Fern smelled the fire, the heat of it and the burningof her hair as the flames singed the tips of it, and she smelled the burning of her flesh as the flames devoured her fingers, her hands, her arms.

As long as Srivastav kept trying to kill Edmund, Fern would not be able to let go; this truth was undeniable now. The Wild Magic she’d called forth both fed the fire and fed from it. The fire would consume her if she did not stop.

She looked down; her arms shimmered, turning bright violet, cracking like dry earth. Fern pulled herself from the source of Wild Magic, but it fought her, clinging on. She realised, almost with elation, that she could no longer stop the flow of fire. Her death, after all, would not be the suffocation void of water, but the scorching blare of fire.

Was it worth it, she wondered, quite distantly. To die here, in Carthane? To die so close to her parents? Would they be waiting for her?

If there was a place for waiting, then, yes, her parents would be waiting for her. It would not be so bad, she thought, if only she didn’t have so many regrets. If only she hadn’t made so many mistakes.

The fire stopped.

The flames swirled, rose, dissipated in a cloud of sparks and dancing embers. Srivastav’s incantation no longer rang through the air.

Fern stood, shaking violently. Her hands were red-raw and blotched, as though she had just plunged her arms up to the elbows in scalding water. The pain was instant and searing, replacing the space inside her the Wild Magic had filled moments ago. She looked up through sweat-drenched strands of hair.

Lautric stood behind Ravi Srivastav. He had not used magic, but he held a dagger in his fist, and the blade was pushed against Srivastav’s throat.

Further away, Edmund had crumpled to the ground. There was no shield left: either Srivastav had destroyed it, or Edmund’s spell had ended. He lay motionless. Fern longed to let herself fall, to let her agonised consciousness slip away, if but for a moment of respite.

“Why should it be you, Lautric?” Srivastav said dully. “You and I are in the same position—neither of us were sent here to fail. Your life is worth no more than my wife’s or my daughter’s. You’ve the blackest heart of us all, so why should it beyouwho dispenses justice?”

“I’m not dispensing justice,” Lautric replied hoarsely. “And I don’t want to hurt you. But I can’t let you kill her. You must know that.”

Fern was aware, only distantly, that he was talking about her.

The pain of the fire was a scream that drowned out everything. She fell forward onto her knees and blinked through a veil of tears.

Josefa was dead. Emmeline was dead. Edmund was probably dead, she had probably failed to save him, too. And Vittoria—where was Vittoria in all this? And now Lautric would kill Srivastav, and Srivastav’s wife and daughter, somewhere in the world, hostages to Srivastav’s Emperor, might die, too, and all for what?

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