Their Affinities hit each other at the same time.
A wave of exhaustion slammed into Ana, her muscles loosening and giving way. Her heart slowed and her lungs grew heavy. Her thoughts turned sluggish. As the other woman’s Affinity squeezed tighter, Ana sank to her knees. Spots burst before her eyes. She couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe.
But she still had her Affinity.
Ana closed her eyes, grasped the girl’s blood, and tore.
The Affinite’s cry cut off sharply. She stumbled back, clutching her side as a trickle of blood wound down her chin. Ana twisted again, and the other Affinite collapsed, her eyes fluttering shut as she lost consciousness.
The hold on Ana’s organs and muscles receded. Drawing in deep breaths, she pushed herself back to her feet.
Kerlan sat on his throne, no longer smiling. His forces closed in around him, several of whom, Ana noticed, had called on their Affinities. One man held orbs of water hovering over his palms, droplets coalescing from the streams that encircled the dais. Another twined a cloud of sand over her shoulders like a glimmering shawl.
They waited for their master’s command.
If that was how they wished to play, Ana would give them the fight they wanted. She swept her Affinity around the hall, navigating through the moving bodies to the open pools of blood cooling around the bodies of the courtiers Kerlan had murdered. The blood began to rise in streams of twisting red ribbons. They coalesced into crimson spheres beneath the light of the chandeliers. And then they began to lengthen, shifting and hardening into blades.
At Ana’s beckoning, the blood daggers turned and pointed at Kerlan and his Affinites. “Surrender, Kerlan,” Ana called. “The War Bells are rung. Bregon’s Navy will set sail at any moment to foil your attack on the Blue Fort.”
Kerlan watched her, his expression cold. The War Bells had fallen silent by now, but echoes of their great, sonorous tones continued to hum in the air.
“The Admiral may be dead,” Ana continued, “but as long as I live, I will never allow your plan to succeed.”
But there was something different in Kerlan’s expression as he straightened to look at her. It wasn’t fury or failure that twisted his face.
It looked like…triumph.
As Ana skimmed her gaze over the group of Affinites encircling him, she realized something.
Sorsha was gone.
Too late, she caught the flash of movement. Too late, her Affinity picked up on the blood signature cutting amid the crowd and movingtowardher instead of running away.
Ana had barely turned when Sorsha slammed her fist into Ana’s neck.
A sharp pain pierced her flesh, and then blood exploded across Ana’s senses. Not in the normal way that it did when her Affinity returned to her, but magnified tenfold, a hundredfold.
She could senseeverything,as though she had cleaved the world apart and saw from the greatest heights of the skies to the deepest parts of the oceans, churning beneath the waves. Every fleck of blood, every drop of crimson.
Everything was red, everything was burning, the blood so bright that it seared. Her mind and body were afire, the pain electric, tearing into her very bones. As though from a distance, she could hear someone screaming—or perhaps it was her own voice, entwined with the sound of maniacal laughter.
Amid the blazing red were coils of darkness, small at first, and then closing in on her. It paralyzed her. She reached and reached, but her Affinity was rapidly spiraling out of her control, shifting and morphing as though it had taken on a life of its own. As though someone else held the reins now.
And then, abruptly, the crimson receded and her world faded to black.
Godhallem had become a scene of massacre.
In the distraction and amid the fleeing courtiers, Ramson had heaved himself away from the dais toward the end of the hall. He could only stare now, his mind frozen in disbelief. The floor was littered with bodies and soaked in an ocean of blood. Puddles formed beneath each corpse, staining the skin red and pooling quietly. A breeze blew in from the open-air end of the hall, stirring the pools of blood.
The few living clustered around the walls on either side of Godhallem. Ramson heard a courtier to his left lean over and retch.
Was this the fate that awaited his kingdom? The world?
A long, drawn-out scream echoed across the hall, and Ramson’s world narrowed into sharp focus. He recognized that scream. It pierced his heart like a blade. Unleashed his worst fears.
He turned just in time to see Ana crumple to the ground, blood smearing her neck.
Beneath the emblem of the Earth Court, Sorsha straightened. She clutched her wrist bearing the siphon. The stone glistened with a dark liquid, but even as Ramson watched, the liquid seemed to be absorbed into the band until there was none left.
