Page 33 of Silver & Smoke
‘Semantics, dear Dessa. Did you truly think my heart would not be bruised by our separation?’
‘The only thing that’s bruised is your head from walking into that pole at the Mortar and Pestle,’ Dessa replied with a snort.
‘That’swhat that’s from?’ Kipp exclaimed before he looped her arms around his neck. ‘Better hang on.’ That was all the warning he gave before he leapt from the window, his belt hooked over the rope, Dessa plastered to his side as they flew through the air.
‘Poor girl,’ Thea mused quietly. ‘Wren, you’re up.’
Wren looked at her own belt of potions. ‘I can’t use this—’
Before she could finish her sentence, she was swept up into a pair of warm, strong arms.
‘You’re with me, Embers.’ Torj’s voice vibrated through her, low and intimate despite the mayhem around them. His arms tightened, a silent promise in their strength, and she curled into himinstinctively, one hand splaying across his chest, his lightning scars seeming to sing beneath her touch. Their eyes met briefly – a thousand words passing between them in that glance – before he lifted them both to the windowsill. In that moment, with death pressing close from all sides, the fierce tenderness in his gaze nearly undid her.
Wren’s gasp died on her lips as they launched into nothingness. Her stomach lurched violently, left somewhere behind as gravity seized them. The cold whipped her face and bit her skin through her clothes. The scent of chemicals tangling with smoke stung her nostrils, along with the smell of burning rope coming from Torj’s belt. But something else caught her attention.
A flaming arrow carving through the dark of night. Setting ablaze the gardens where she’d brought so many wildflowers to life with her storm magic. In seconds, fire consumed all that she had achieved there.
After everything they had fought for in the shadow war, after the battle they’d won on her graduation day, it had come to this...?
The ground rushed towards them at terrifying speed, the world tilting as Torj’s boots hit the grass below, but he held her steady as he found his footing, placing her carefully on solid earth.
‘Cal’s got the crops and conservatory. He’s got the Pendelton archers under his command – those who are left, anyway,’ Kipp said. ‘Any ideas on how to trigger the kind of devastation you’ll need to obliterate any remaining shadow magic?’
‘One,’ Wren replied, allowing lightning to surge at her fingers, but movement at the forefront of the building caught her eye.
Through the writhing smoke, a masked figure emerged.
Their movements werewrong– too fluid, too fast. Behind them, the stone of the building itself blackened and cracked, the very air rippling around them like heat above a forge. But instead of warmth, a preternatural cold radiated outwards, and Wren’s breath frosted before her face despite the nearby flames. The ground where thefigure trod withered, grass becoming ash without passing through fire.
‘That’s Silas...’ Zavier rasped, landing behind them. ‘He’s here.’
Without thinking, Wren gathered her power, feeling the familiar crackle of storm magic dance across her skin and culminate at her fingertips. She hurled it at Silas, expecting to see him dive for cover.
Instead, he simply... stood there. The lightning that should have struck him dead dissipated like morning mist.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Wren told the others, watching her lightning vanish harmlessly around Silas. ‘He’s not just blocking it, he’s...’
She recognized the telltale signs of shadow alchemy at work – the faint residue in the air, the way her royal magic seemed to dissolve like salt in water. It was alchemy twisted into something unnatural, something that made her stomach turn.
Torj was at her side, peering over her shoulder.
‘Look at his skin,’ she told the Bear Slayer, horror dawning as she understood. Where her magic touched Silas, there was a reaction she’d never seen before – not like this. His flesh rippled like disturbed water, revealing a network of veins that should have been blue but instead writhed black beneath the surface. They pulsed obscenely, swelling as they drank in her power, mapping his body with strange, elaborate patterns.
The air between them vibrated with wrongness, the natural order perverted as her storm – a force meant to destroy him – instead fed the very enemy it targeted.
Wren tasted blood on her tongue, felt it drip from her nose as she struggled to fill her lungs with air. ‘He’s not just stopping my magic,’ she said hoarsely. ‘He’s consuming it.’
CHAPTER 17
Torj
‘Warswords were originally trained to fight alone, but as the shadow war erupted across the midrealms and the world became rife with monsters, working in teams was deemed the more effective tactic’
– A History of Thezmarr
‘WREN!’TORJ LEAPTin front of her, dragging her away from Silas’s line of fire. Every report they’d received had told them the Kingsbane was in Delmira, and yet here he was, that strange power rippling off him.
Wren moved to strike again, but Torj gripped her wrists.
