Page 70 of Tusk Love

“About that…” The eisfuura had donned the crown. He sauntered over to them, twirling the scepter in his talons.

Suddenly his free hand lashed out, the claws tangling into Guinevere’s hair. He yanked her toward him, still on her knees. Another wave of murderous rage swept through Oskar, but this time it was maddeningly impotent. He couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t move.

She needed him, but he was dying.

“I’ve decided,” Accanfal snarled, looking into Guinevere’s eyes as she struggled in vain, “that I’m not quite willing to let bygones be bygones. Your father stole what was mine. It’s unfair that you and your two swains have to die for his sins, but what better vengeance than to ensure he never sees his daughter again?”

“I hate to break it to you,” Guinevere spat, brimming with defiance, “but he doesn’t love me that much.” She paused, then added, sounding rather annoyed, “Also, you shouldn’t monologue so much, because it gives people time to plan how to fight back.”

And, with a surprising burst of strength, she lurched forward, her fingers closing around her totem as it dangled from Accanfal’s wrist.

Chapter Forty-One

Guinevere

Some things were gifts, some things were to be learned, and some things were both.

No one’s first arrow hit its mark, but a boy who trained every day with the blades he forged could come to know their heft and arc, and grow up to be a man who might take on a dozen and live.

The ear for melody was a gift, but the voice had to practice so that it could bend with ease. Social graces were learned, so that a girl born to common thieves could hold her own in a ballroom full of the finest pedigrees.

There were some for whom magic was a gift, and the only thing left to do was understand how to control it. And there were some for whom magic was the product of years of careful study to produce a single flame.

Fear was a natural state, neither gift nor curse. But everyone possessed the ability to overcome it. It was just a matter of when and how.

Teinidh,Guinevere begged, there in the darkness, through the haze of the calming spell.Teinidh, wake up.

Her fingertips brushed against the soil of her totem.

And magic stirred in the deep of her soul.

My sister.

A voice like smoke. Eyes like embers, opening. The gift she hadn’t wanted, the curse she had borne all these years—as much a part of her as her too-soft heart and her eagerness to please.

The connection was faint butthere.Guinevere held on to it, forcing it open. The wildfire burned low in her core.

Teinidh shimmered in the dark, bound not by Guinevere’s fear but by the ghostly shackles of Accanfal’s calming spell.But that’s not exactly right, is it?she mused.Perhaps we were sisters of a sort, once.

And now?

Guinevere listened to the voice in the inferno. She listened to the beating of her heart, and to the currents of her magic. She heard what Teinidh was trying to say—what Teinidh had been trying to tell her all along.

To live in this world is to change,said the wildfire spirit.To live in your world is to become you. To hide from me is to hide from yourself.One blazing wrist strained against the manacle that tethered it to the shadows.Give me your fury. Make me the instrument of your vengeance. Give me your fear. We will not die on water. Give me something.

I can’t.Accanfal’s spell was too strong.

Yet Teinidh was resolute, pressing against her mind.Get us out of here. Give mesomething.

And Guinevere knew only what she had learned on the Amber Road—that fire could destroy, but it could also be used to cast light in the dark, to give warmth in the cold, to protect from evil. And she could think only of Oskar, and how Exandria would be a worse place without him in it, and how he had to go to Boroftkrah because he’d promised his mother.

I can’t be angry,she told Teinidh.I can’t be afraid. But I—we—willsave him. We have to save him, because I love him, and if you don’t come now, I willneverforgive you.

Teinidh smirked.Good enough.

It was Guinevere who reached out first. Her hand moved through air and darkness, through soul and being. She pressed her palm to Teinidh’s burning heart.

The white shackles disintegrated, each shard scattering like snow, only to be melted into nothingness by the same heat that poured into Guinevere’s veins. The flames engulfed her, and she welcomed them, because to live in the world was to want to save it.

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