I step over her and fire into the next set of bodies coming out of the mist.
Another round of mage guards, and another.
This isn’t like how it was with Destien at the grove. I’m being judicious about my power expenditure, but this time I have power to spend.
I am trained for this. You always want to use the minimum possible magic in a mage duel, to prove you didn’t need to use any more to win.
Magic flares where you can’t see, you’re ready.
A form coalesces out of the mist, you hit it.
In the zone like this, I don’t notice time passing. It’s a battle trance, where it almost feels like I’m dancing. And gradually, more and more bodies stay on the ground when I drop them.
Objectively, it only takes maybe a few minutes, tops.
And then, finally, I feel the formation Nariel must have meant. Right on the path out of the mist come more mage guards first—initial water bullets don’t faze them—and then Evram, and then there are more guards—
And then there ismy sister.
I freeze.
And in my unmotion, the remaining mages—half are still down, leaving me with five, not counting the team with my sister—form up in a circle around me and hold positions, wands ready.
I am only dimly aware of this, my attention fixated like a magnet on my sister.
My sister, her eyes wide, mouth sealed with a silencing spell, and a glowing tether around her neck pulled by one of the guards. My effervescent sister, bound tighter than our parents ever managed. Like putting shackles on the wind.
It’s like the air is sucked out of me in one go. I don’t even remember exhaling, just feeling like my lungs are now crushed and I can’tbreathe—
A hand thumps me on the back, and I gasp in air.
Nariel stands next to me,visible, despite the probable cost—to him, to us—if word gets out.
But he’s back even if he shouldn’t be, he’swithme despite the risk, and that thought alone unfreezes my muscles, and he is every inch hauteur.
That, I can’t match.
I am much, much too angry, tooshocked, to summon that kind of detachment.
“How dare you,” I breathe. “Howdareyou, Evram. She’s acivilian.”
“I see we were not wrong in our choice,” the grand magus says smoothly.
“You were wrong,” I say, and my voice comes out hollow.
Next to me, Nariel murmurs, “She’s not been harmed.”
My gaze snaps to him wildly at that.
Evram didn’t know what my sister meant to me, because he’d never known I had a sister. But Nariel did.
Nariel, the one person I had dared extend even an ounce of trust despite the backlash I knew awaited, who pushed me to extend more.
Nariel, who I told where we were going and who arranged everything, who got his people out of the way, who is back for this and whowouldknow if she was to be harmed if he had—
I close my eyes.
Open them.
