Page 63 of Royal Hunt
“Ellis please!” I tried to reach out to him, but his body exploded in flames, racing up and down his body.
I screamed and backed away. Ellis cried out in sorrow and distress. “You should have let me die! You should havelet me die! I’ve been dreaming about you since I was little and dreaming about all of this destruction, this death, this chaos. You’re the reason all of this happened!”
I backed up as the table and the bodies caught on fire. The swell of heat suffocated me, but I refused to leave. My clothes singed and burned, and the smell of burning hair twisted my stomach—my burning hair. I shoved his accusations deep down inside of myself where they couldn’t hurt me. I’d deal with them later.
“Ellis please! I—”
Golden eyes rimmed with red glanced up sharply with me as the holocaust raged around us. As if a string had been cut, Ellis snapped back. The flames smothered and disappeared in a single puff, not even leaving lingering heat behind. With shaking fingertips I touched my burned hair and clothes to convince myself it hadn’t all been a hallucination. The bodies on the table were burned down to ashes.
Ellis was wedged in the back corner on the ground, his arms over the back of his neck and his head to his knees. He rocked slowly back and forth with shaking shoulders.
“Leave me. I need … I need to let it out. I need to grieve for them, to let it rage … or it will consume me.” His voice was only a whisper, tight with control.
“Ellis—”
“Leave now or I’ll end up killing you. Please.”
It was the please that did it. I stumbled backward, struggling to get to my feet. Heat flared behind me with every step I took, until that heat forced me out of the room and into Nessian.
“Eve? What’s wrong—”
“His magick! He conjured fire, but it’s out of control. I don’t think it’s hurting him, but we have to go!”
That was why I liked Nessian; he was a man of action. Without stopping to question me, he scooped me into his arms and whistled for his sisters. We raced down toward the end of the hall as the flames came back, larger and hotter than before.
Nessian shoved at the window, but it was too far down to the ground below. If we fell, we’d break something. I turned back toward the fire, hurtling toward us as a raging ball of flames. Lily and Lyra screamed and reached for the window anyway. Nessian tugged them to him at the last moment and pulled me with him. He shoved the three of us down to the ground and covered us with his body just as the fireball hit.
An agonized scream was all I heard before my world exploded in white. I expected my skin to burn and my hair to fall off. I was prepared for heat so intolerable I’d wish I was dead.
I didn’t expect to feel nothing.
The girls clutched me tightly, and Nessian continued to scream. I couldn’t see anything beyond the burning white that made me keep my eyes screwed shut.
Then as soon as it had started, it was over.
I pushed at Nessian’s chest and he fell over, breathing hard. I gasped at the scene of destruction around us; the blackened, charred stone of the castle and the ashes of anything that wasn’t. All around us was a pristine, untouched circle that extended only an inch from where our bodies were, a shimmer dome of white that had protected us.
Nessian was still frozen in his position, even though I’d knocked him onto the floor. Terror twisted his face, with both arms extended out in front of him. He blinked and the shield popped like a large bubble.
I stood shakily, wiping the tears from my face.
“I-I guess Ellis isn’t the only one with some out-of-control magick.”
Lyra hiccuped and two leathery wings burst from her back.
“Oh fuck,” I whispered. It was the only thing that seemed appropriate to say.
Twenty
The castle was trashed, and now the main entrance hall had been blown to smithereens thanks to Ellis’s fire. After combing the castle there were fifty or so servants left, too terrified to abandon everything. Ellis ordered them to immediately salvage what they could of the east wing, and offered to double the wages of anyone who brought another servant back or found someone else to fill the role.
By evening, the household staff swelled to over one hundred.
Viana decided against taking Cassus and Ferar to her kingdom immediately, and instead chained them both in Ellis’s dungeons not long after we came to the castle. Honestly, I didn’t think she wanted to leave without knowing how Ellis was going to deal with everything.
Most of the nobles fled to their own estates, wanting nothing more to do with royalty or any of this Royal Hunt business. If they thought Ellis and I forgot the crimes that got them drafted into the games to begin with, then they were quite mistaken.
Now was simply not the time for such things.
