“Captain Roada,” King Harkett said.
Toran straightened, but his eyes did not leave Nes.
“There cannot be two Witches. Unless you can prove otherwise, I am inclined to believe the one with the flashing arm is the true Witch.”
Toran opened his mouth, but Nes spoke first.
“If you want the true Witch,” she said, “then you know not to ask for proof.”
The King leaned forward. “You speak like you know the burden of magic,” he said.
“I’ll give you proof,” Nes murmured, too low for anyone but Toran to hear. She’d stopped shaking, her hands forming fists at her sides. “But you won’t like it.”
King Harkett sat back, his shoulders filling the width of the chair. “I will not stop you should you choose to condemn yourself.”
Nes nodded once, a firm, resigned movement. With practiced ease, she began stripping her wet clothes from her body. Layer after layer fell to the floor. Fabric peeled away from skin—ocean losing contact with the Witch—until she stood before them all, before the King of Orlonea, in nothing but her underwear.
Despite everything, Toran felt heat rise as flashbacks to the night they’d spent together popped to the front of his mind. But those memories vanished the second Nes closed her eyes. Because when her pupils disappeared behind her eyelids, the ground began to shake.
Toran’s gaze flew to his feet. But he saw nothing. No movement. No tilt or shift of the ground to reflect what his body felt. Around him, Quint and Genna looked just as confused. Damari looked like the young girl she was, terrified of something out of her control. And Suri…
Suri was smiling. Not just smiling—the girl was jubilant at the forthcoming display of Nes’s power. His stomach churned at the sight.
Toran looked over to Loriana, hoping she would somehow have the answers he sought. She still stood on the opposite side of the pool, observing all, but her frame became muddied. Her form, already no more than a wisp in this world, turned blurry, her features blending together like snow melting into mud. Something was wrong.
A wave hit Toran from behind. He fell to his knees, hands bracing his impact. That power hit Loriana, and the ghost of his love vanished.
“No!”
But he was too late. Whatever magic Nes had released seemed to have stripped Loriana of her hold on the living world.
Toran clenched his hand into a fist, fingernails digging into his palm. He pressed his knuckles to the shaking dirt and rose to his feet again.
And then the ground truly cracked, split open like a chasm, and he could see it. See the depth of it, see the dark and the jagged edges yawning apart like the world’s largest set of crooked fangs.
This, he realized, was what all those soldiers must have seen thatday in the Disputed Land twelve years ago. The jaws of death come to swallow them whole.
Try to leash me, and you’ll find I bite.
The shaking stopped. The ground was solid, and when Toran took a step forward, it remained so. But it was not a second before he was thrown from his feet, something large crashing into him.
He blinked, his whole body unsteady, and stared at the thing surging to life over him. He rolled out from under it, pulling himself up into a sitting position.
A tree. A full-grown oak had sprouted from between the ground’s fangs. In front of Nes, its trunk expanded. Its branches stretched and grew with wild abandon. One shot toward him, and he rolled out of the way.
There was a gasp behind him, and he whirled at the sound. Genna was on the ground, blood streaking from a cut on her side, and on the branch next to her, a long slash of dark red. But before he could react, another gasp and a grunt. His heart seized. He knew that pain. Had heard it thousands of times during training.
Through a thicket of branches, he caught sight of Quint on the ground, his friend’s face scrunched with an agony Toran had never seen before. He rushed forward, his sword out, slicing through the growing wood until he was at Quint’s side.
A tree branch stuck through Quint’s right shoulder. It pierced his flesh and pushed through muscle to clear the other side, where it continued to stretch and grow. Beneath his jacket, blood drenched Quint’s shirt, staining it crimson.
Toran didn’t think. He raised Cavallis and brought the sword down on the branch. It took several swings before metal sliced through wood and severed the branch from the tree. He watched in horror as the branch stuck in Quint continued to grow, continued to lengthen.
He rolled Quint onto his side and chopped off the end poking through his back. It did no good. What was left inside his friend kept growing.
“You can’t stop it,” Quint said through clenched teeth. His breaths were getting shorter. Quint reached inside the satchel at his hip and pulled out something long and silver. The siren hair fluttered as if caught on an invisible wind.
Stretching his hands in his leather gloves, Toran took it. He couldn’t stop the magic. But he might be able to stop her.
