Page 75 of Guardian of Exile

He didn’t give any indication he’d heard her. She wiped sweating palms on her jeans, grasped both of Tristen’s hands in hers, and spiraled down into A-Queltr. He trembled a little as she made the descent. When she leapt onto death’s ledge, he jerked so badly he would have fallen over if she hadn’t been holding him upright. She said his name again, hoping that now, it would be enough. He blinked. His eyes focused on her for a second, then slid away.

It wasn’t enough.

She needed to do more, but she couldn’t actually attack him with death magic. Or rather, she could, but she wasn’t willing to risk it. If he didn’t react in time, she could actually kill him. She just needed to make her own magic feel potent enough that the Tristen who was buried in there somewhere couldn’t fail to recognize it and respond.

She was best at coaxing the magic of A-Queltr out of her center when she was angry or frightened. In those times, it flooded her with enhanced strength in an instant, without any need for her to consciously guide it. But she wasn’t scared or angry now, so she had to coax it out, which took time and concentration.

As death magic slowly crept through her body, she kept both of Tristen’s hands tight in hers. He tried to jerk away, but he was no match for death-fueled strength. He also still wasn’t himself. His movements had the jerky panic of a wild animal caught in a trap.

If he didn’t wake up, he was going to hurt himself. Desperate, she thought of the phantom snakes made of death magic that Jevryn had once summoned when he’d been impersonating Kiev. Nyx had done something similar—on instinct again—when she’d confronted her mother on Endalna. Concentrating, she thought of the magic as a whip she could pluck from the unending pool inside herself.

She grasped a tendril of pure death magic and it spiraled out from her. Confident she could recall it in an instant, she sent it at Tristen with all the killing intent she could muster.

Magic detonated from him, a potent jolt pouring straight from him into her. A-Queltr absorbed the deadly influx, and she let the whip of death magic fade.

“Tristen?”

He blinked. His magic still surged against A-Queltr, but this time when he finally focused on her, she saw recognition in his eyes. He looked down at their hands, at the black veining her skin. At the place where his magic was flowing out of him and into her.

His magic slowed.

“Keep going,” she said. “If you need to.”

Understanding and relief lit his eyes. The flow of his magic, which had eased to a trickle, came roaring back like a fire hydrant opened wide. It poured harmlessly into the wide chasm of A-Queltr, and not for the first time, she wondered what this place inside her truly was.

It was all good and well to say a pathway to death lay inside her, but what did that truly mean? Some cosmic link to a physical land of death that was common to all beings? Or some facet of Lethe-Alihana evolved into their children, a magic that linked Salyrians and nothing more?

Even if she had a free hand to reach for Alihana, they wouldn’t tell her the answer. She’d asked before and they’d ignored her, and she still didn’t know if it was only because they’d wanted to annoy her, or because they truly didn’t wish her to know the answer. So she stood in the wake of magic that should have killed her and wondered if she should worry about how calming the experience was. How centering.

For all her father’s lectures on the nature of death, and how death was peace, she’d always thought he’d referred only to reaching the ledge of A-Queltr. She hadn’t considered that standing in an onslaught that should have killed her, but instead merely flowed through her, could be peaceful as well. There was a feeling of invulnerability in it, as if nothing in the world could ever touch her, and if this was a feeling her father had lived with for nine centuries, it was no great mystery as to how he’d become as arrogant as he was.

Tristen’s magic finally tapered off, drawing her back from internal thoughts to the present. She dropped his hands, but she remained in A-Queltr. It was comfortable there, and she didn’t want to leave it quite yet. But she pulled death’s power back to her center, the black limning her veins fading into nothing.

The onslaught of magic coming from Tristen finally relented in intensity, then slowed, then finally died. He shuddered, looking both like he wanted to hug her and also be as far away from her as possible.

He compromised by staying where he was but dropping her hands. “Thank you.”

That made her feel worse. “Don’t thank me. I should have thought of this sooner.” All of that excess magic could have gone straight into A-Queltr. There wouldn’t have been any risk of discovery, and he wouldn’t have nearly lost himself.

Tristen shook his head. “It wouldn’t have worked. It won’t work, if it gets that bad again. It isn’t just the excess magic buildup. It’s the compulsion to use it for what it was intended for. I could go on a mass killing spree and that compulsion to fix things would still be there.”

Nyx understood that compulsion to fix things well. At least Tristen had the excuse of a magical drive. In her, it was just a character flaw.

Tristen let out a hollow laugh. “You wanted to assign me all these noble attributes in New York, but the truth is, I have to heal people. Whether I want to or not.”

She gave in to her own compulsion to fix. “You had to heal,” she agreed. “But you didn’t have to heal the people who needed it the most.”

“I picked people with issues largely untreatable by modern medicine because they provided the best outlet for my magic with the least amount of exposure. It wasn’t altruistic.”

“There’s no shortage of rich desperate sick people. And if you deemed those too high a risk, you could have asked anything of the people you did help. They would have done whatever you wanted. I saw the way Valerie and the other two looked at you. And that? That’s power. You could have used it. Plenty of people would have.”

“I did use it. Valerie ran my clinic and found my clients, didn’t she?”

“That’s called having a job. One I’m certain she was well-compensated for.” The irritation on his face, the one that she was missing the point, confirmed it. Going to the most common abuse of power, she asked, “Did you fuck her?”

He reared back. “No.”

“Did you fuck anyone you healed?”