Page 163 of Master of Storms
She’d hadn’t even noticed him fall.
“What happened?”
Haakon’s face twisted grimly. “We don’t know. He just collapsed. Go. Go to him.”
Solveig started sprinting.
29
Solveig slid to her knees beside Marduk, her heart hammering in her chest. Rurik lay beside him, but he was awake and gasping, clutching at Sirius’s hand as the warlord knelt with his king’s head in his lap.
Rurik looked fine, but Marduk….
“What’s wrong with him?” Solveig demanded.
Froth burst from Marduk’s lips, his spine arching and his heels drumming on the ground. He didn’t see her. He didn’t see anything. He was trapped in some silent scream of pain.
There was no answer on Árdís’s face.
Panic burst like a bubble in Solveig’s chest. “Tell me what happened! Did he get hit from behind? Was it poison? Or magic? Or—”
“We don’t know!” Árdís tried to restrain him.
If they didn’t know, then how could she fix him?
Solveig’s throat thickened as she cupped the base of his skull in her hand. Of all the outcomes she’d expected today, this wasn’t one of them. Marduk managed to escape every trap, and he was incredibly wily when he was backed into a corner. She didn’t even know when she’d begun to worry about him, but to see him like this…. It was the loss of something she hadn’t even known was growing inside her.
“Marduk?” she whispered.
There was something very small and quiet within her; a little squeeze in her chest that felt like it could swallow her whole if she let it.
She felt the way she had when she’d begged her mother to keep breathing—if she let it in, then she was going to drown on this emotion.
No, no, no, please.
“It’s not Chaos magic,” Andromeda said, laying a hand on Solveig’s shoulder. “Indeed, there’s such an absence of Chaos within him, that he might as well have had any spark of the gift extinguished.”
But it wasn’t Marduk’s gift.
Solveig froze as she stared into the other queen’s dark eyes. “It was never his in the first place.”
“He escaped the Abyss,” Andromeda corrected. “He had to have—”
“He used Ishtar’s link to the magic.” Solveig crouched over him as her heart began to race in time with her thoughts. “He could access it. Sometimes. And when he used it in the Abyss, it nearly tore his mind apart. It was never meant for him, but it was meant forher. It’s Ishtar. She’s gone.”
His sister was gone, and the bond they’d shared was obliterated.
“What do you mean she’s gone?” Árdís demanded.
“Tyndyr kidnapped the queen and forced your sister to open a portal to Álfheimr,” Andromeda said. “They’re both gone.”
“That’s impossible. Freyja was right here two seconds ago,” Árdís argued.
“It was an illusion,” Solveig replied.
Árdís’s face drained of color. “Rurik,” she whispered.
Solveig shot the king a glance. “She’s gone. He’ll have felt the bond between them break.”
