Page 91 of The Blade in the Ashes
Nessira’s face was flushed, hair falling out of her usual neat bun. Dimitri slumped against the door, breathing heavily even as his muscles remained locked and alert.
“I don’t think anyone saw us,” he told me.
I barely heard him though; my attention was completely focused on the bundle of fabric wrapped in Nessira’s arms. Simple rags that she held onto as if her life depended on them. As ifallof our lives depended on them.
“Hyrax is practically mad with rage,” she panted, arms holding that bundle close to her chest. “We just barely escaped his suite when he and Caldrius arrived back. He’s destroying anything in sight.”
“And anyone,” Dimitri grumbled, straightening as he caught his breath.
I felt a heavy lump form in my throat. “He’s killed?”
A shadow fell upon his features, and he bowed his head. “A kitchen maid got in his way. He was so blind with fury, I don’t even think he noticed when he caught her in his magic.”
It seemed impossible to be so overwhelmed with emotion that you had no idea what your powers were doing. It wasn’t as if the magic was sentient and acted of its own free will. That was the crux of Godhood, though, a danger I knew intimately. We had so much power, that it was all too easy to lose track of it.
That made us unpredictable.
And dangerous.
I turned back to the bundle in Nessira’s arms. “Did you find it?”
Her pale lips were so dry that they cracked as she grinned, and my heart lurched with hope as she pulled away the fabric to reveal the worn leather-bound book in her hands.
There it was.
Eagerly I reached for it, with an excited trill. It was impossible to maintain the weight of it in my single uninjured hand, so I lowered myself to the ground, setting it on the floor in front of me so I could examine it.
“My lady!” Dimitri’s voice was stern. “What happened?”
He was at my side in an instant, taking my left wrist in his hand while I flipped through the pages of theBook of the Godsin my right. I bit down on the hiss of pain that threatened to escape when he began unwrapping the makeshift splint.
So many spells.
Spells that could wreak havoc.
A spell to possess the mind of one of Ciclopia’s beasts.
A spell to kill an entire Descendant line.
A spell to claim another’s power as your own.
A spell to create the Veil.
A spell to remove it.
Such danger written out in tiny script on ink-lined pages.
“You need to see a healer,” Dimitri told me, turning my wrist over in his fingers.
I hunted through the pages of the book, searching for one spell in particular.
“There’s no time,” I absentmindedly protested.
Nessira lowered herself next to Dimitri, staring wide-eyed at the skin that had already turned startling shades of violet and black.
It wasn’t here. No spell to initiate a Forging.
How could that be?
