Page 100 of Skyshade
Then, she portaled to her island.
Grim knew she was using skyres...but he didn’t need to see the pain it took to create them.
The tooth glimmered in the moonlight.
She spread out the pages before her—four full skyres she had managed to get from the book, and the half of the tracking skyre. They were supposed to fit together somehow.
Her tests would be run on another object—a piece of bark she had peeled from a nearby tree.
Her eyes closed. She breathed deeply. Then, she dipped the feather’s tip into her vein, until it gathered her blood like ink. She winced against the slight burn, but that wasn’t the hard part, no.
The moment she began to create the shape upon the bark, the edges of the skyre forming, her veins began to heat.
Please be right, she thought, remembering what the blacksmith had said about making markings incorrectly. There was a price.
As her shape closed, she paid it.
Her body seized. She began thrashing on the ground, she barely missed biting her tongue. Instead of feeling fire through her veins, shefelt as if each one was being plucked out of her body, torn through her skin. Her scream scraped roughly against her throat; it seemed to swallow the world.
The pain—it was too much.
Her powers rose up to the surface, that beast within her lashing out.
Plumes of black smoke barreled through the woods and down the beach, ending in flames that hissed into ice when they met the sea. The forest floor lifted like a carpet and became a field of thorns.
She screamed and screamed, the pain and power it called blinding her, eating all her senses, until it all became too much, and the world fell into darkness.
The noon sun peeked right through the treetops. She squinted against it, then rose, only to find herself covered in dirt.
Pain surged through her, a reminder of last night.
She had messed up the skyre, and it had nearly killed her. The peel of bark sat buried beneath a layer of soot, glimmering with her blood.
She didn’t know if she could do this again, until she got it right. She didn’t know if she would survive it.
Her body was sore. Her power was spent, scraped clean. She nearly fell over as she made to stand. Her head throbbed. She had dreamed of the village again—the screaming, the darkness, the chaos.
How long had she been asleep?
Isla portaled back to her room and found it empty. She cursed. It was already past noon. Grim would be well into his day already and wondering where she had disappeared to. He would be getting worried. As she changed out of her clothes, she noticed the commotion outside. Soldier boots. Orders. Panic.
Grim portaled in a moment later, his hardened expression shifting to relief when he saw her.
Then, his gaze dropped to her bare feet, which were covered in dirt. “Where were you?”
“The Wildling newland,” she said, the lie escaping her with surprising ease. Isla wanted to tell him about the island. But there was something about it belonging to her father—something about him having kept it a secret—that made her hold back. She turned toward the bathroom. “I was experimenting with the skyres. What’s the panic?”
“There’s been an attack. Many people are dead.”
Isla stopped in her tracks. She whipped around. “Another storm?”
He shook his head. “No. An attack.”
“What? Where?”
“A town to the northwest,” he said, studying her. “It’s one of our military bases. But civilians died too.”
That didn’t make any sense. Who would attack now? Oro certainly wouldn’t. He didn’t want war and wouldn’t kill Nightshade innocents. The rest of the realms didn’t have the motive or resources.
