Page 63 of The Royal Curse

Andreas’s hand still burned in mine. I turned my attention to him, his body and soul filling my senses. They seemed to pulse at the same frequency as my magic, in perfect harmony. Or like a lock and a key, made to fit only one another.

Harmonious completion. No matter what I’d experienced recently, I’d truly believed that it had to be nonsense, mealy-mouthed spiritualism without any basis in reality. The kind of useless mumblings that took time and attention away from real research into twilight mages’ curses.

But now…the total destruction of my potion. As if the natural resonance of Andreas’s soul and my love for him had truly amplified my magic until it took on a strength I’d never imagined, hypnotizing, mesmerizing, tempting me to simply lose myself in it.

But there was something else there with us, and when I saw it I went cold all over.

A gaping black void swirled in the middle of him, the raging infection in his torso like a rabid animal’s hungry maw devouring him from the inside, his glorious vibrant life dimming and being sucked away.

For a moment I lost my bearings. The pull of the darkness spun me sideways, dizzying and disorienting. But then I seized my magic like a drowning man reaching for a rope, tugged myself upright, drew my strength inward, andfocused. There it was, the source of the foulness: the infection itself, tiny busy motes that swirled and oozed in mesmerizing patterns and multiplied too quickly for even my magical senses to comprehend. The complexity hit me in a tremendous wave of sensory information, like hearing the colors of a texture at an ear-splitting level, a roar of energy surrounding me, the cacophonous music of the world that no mundane ears could ever detect.

But beneath that I could feel that harmony Andreas made with me, the way the rhythm of his body and his mind moved in complementary counterpoint to my own. His pattern.

And I clung to that, keeping hold of it in the overwhelming chaos of motion around me as I sank deeper into that space beneath what we could touch and see without magic, far outside of what humans were meant to know.

In that moment, I understood why Ennolu hadn’t wanted us to have this power: I teetered on the edge of madness, and ithurt, gods, it hurt down to the core of me, like a galvanic shock through the marrow of my bones.

But I could see it now. Andreas’s life, and his imminent death, and what had to be done to preserve the one and prevent the other.

I could see it all.

Of course, that didn’t mean I had the skill or the strength to do a damn thing about it. I’d never gone this deeply into the world below the world, the gods’ domain of magic. I didn’t belong here. No human did.

And yet it was mine to use, if I could find a way. I’d paid the price for it all my life.

I sucked in a deep breath, not even sure if it was into my lungs or just my mind’s interpretation of them, and let my power flow in and fill me to the brim. Calm. I had to stay calm and focused, because there were two tasks to accomplish, both fiendishly difficult, and all the while, my blood sizzled and burned, and I knew my physical body’s voice was screaming…

First the infection, and there had to be more subtle ways to remove it, but I was running out of time, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t find the shape of it, and I was panicking, because I was losing Andreas moment by moment—and so I gathered everything I had, pictured the way the magic had spontaneously incinerated the potion in my blood, and threw everything I had at the edges of the void where the infection proliferated in a seething mass. My magic struck, a burst of pure energy. The flash of brilliant light and heat and screeching noise nearly swept me away, my vision blurring and the ever-present throb of pain flaring into agony for a moment before it died down again, leaving me panting and wobbly.

It took a long few moments to clear my magical vision of the crimson-cloud haze that’d descended over it.

When I blinked it away at last, the infection was shriveled and dead, detritus around the edges of his wound.

But Andreas was still dying, his life still fading.

Gods, I didn’t understand, I’d fixed—and then I realized: it wasn’t the infection itself that had been killing him. It was the poison it’d pumped into his blood.

I chased the poison frantically, trying to burn it out the same way. But there was too much of it. It’d infiltrated his entire body, and as I reached out tendrils of magic, tracing down his veins, I was spread thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker, my magical strength running out even more quickly than Andreas’s life. Matter, the substance of the world, could be transmuted to another substance, and energy to energy. I could make more of his life with my magic, but it would only work if I destroyed the poison, and if my magic ran out…

But that wasn’t all I had, was it?

I had my own life.

My own reservoir of glowing, beautiful life, the wellspring of my thoughts and the motion of my body—and my love.

It meant nothing at all if Andreas died.

Without thinking, without hesitating, I opened myself to my magic and let my life flow out of me unstintingly. It rushed through Andreas and lit him up from the inside, carrying away all the taint in his blood with irresistible force.

I grew weaker, weaker, my vision starting to gray out, but I clung to consciousness with every bit of my remaining strength. Andreas was almost cured, if not healed. His wound would still be open when I’d finished, but it’d be clean, a small cut that would only need a few days of bandaging to fade to a harmless scar, one of many on his soldier’s body.

Almost. If I could hold on for one more moment, he’d live…as everything went dim and distant around me, I felt the glow of his life flaring anew, his fever abating, his body surging with strength.

I love you.

Everything went dark.

“…never said he’s the most skilled mage you’d find—”

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