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“You would never be the cause of bloodshed,” he says softly. “That would be their own foolishness in thinking they could try to take you from me.”
“That is the same thing!”
He chuckles before leaning down to peck my lips.
“Only in your eyes,” he says, finally letting go. I turn back to the work at hand, feeling every gaze on us like they were all listening, which makes my skin prickle.
Once the last man retreats from the field with his shovel thrown over one shoulder, I walk to the nearest furrow and kneel at the edge. The soil feels different under my hands already, rougher, and the seaweed has started to absorb some of the muck.
I press my palms flat and let my magic travel through my palms and into the soil, but the soil pushes back.
The taste of it overwhelms me, flooding across my tongue and coating the roof of my mouth until I gag against it. The earth doesn’t want this. The curse has been feeding on this land for so long that the soil has forgotten what it feels like to be healthy.
I push harder. Just enough to hold it steady against the resistance, and I feel the moment the soil starts listening. The dirt beneath my palms shifts. The rusty color leaches backward, retreating from the spot where my hands press, and in its place, the dirt darkens to something closer to brown.
The seaweed and ash soften the putrid smell of decay, but beneath it all, there’s something I haven’t smelled since before the freeze on Purgatory.
Real soil.
It’s alive and warm under my hands in a way that makes tears sting the backs of my eyes. I can feel the relief of the island as if it were my own.
Kylian crouches at the end of the long furrow, watching me fill the line with different things, watching me whisper to the ground, urging it to accept what I’m offering. The seconds drag past, and the earth sits there, utterly, and devastatingly still until I bury my fingers and give it my power.
The ground trembles. At first, it’s a single deep shudder that runs beneath my hands, traveling outward in a wave I can feel through my knees.
A thin green shoot breaks the surface, pale but impossibly alive. It unfurls from the dirt with unnatural speed, rising an inch, two, then climbing higher.
Another shoot appears beside it, then a third. The stalks thicken, turning a vibrant shade of green as they stretch toward the night sky.
My vision blurs at the edges, and my arms shake, then the warmth in my palms sputters and threatens to go out. Kylian’s hands close around my upper arms from behind, firm and immediate, pulling me upward so quickly I didn’t even see him move.
I shrug him off.
“Don’t,” I say, and the laugh that comes out of me is bitter and too loud for the quiet that has settled over the field. “These people are afraid of my magic. Afraid of what I am. I spent years hiding it, burying it so deep I forgot how to breathe, and now the people I’m trying to feed are looking at me with the same fear I held for years. They will stop fearing me.”
Kylian’s voice comes from behind me. “You’ve done enough. The soil is responding. We can continue tomorrow.”
His hand reaches for my arm again, and I don’t think. My body decides before my brain catches up, the way it decided at the docks. My magic erupts from my chest in a pulse, gold and blinding, and it hits Kylian square in the torso and sends him backward.
His boots leave the ground, and his body travels six feet through the air before he lands hard on the packed earth, skidding another two feet before he stops. Guards surge forward as if I am a threat to their king, but I trust Eagan enough to know he won’t let them hurt me.
Humans scatter from the fence line in all directions, and I drop to my knees just as Kylian sits up and raises one hand from the ground. The guards stop. Every one of them, mid-step, frozen by that single gesture. He pushes to his feet, brushing the dirt from his clothes, and I see the mark on his chest where the blast struck and singed his clothes. His expression tells me I am running out of time.
“Little mage, I swear to the fates if you . . .” My hands plunge into the soil, not resting on the surface this time but digging deep as I unleash my magic.
CHAPTER 42
• King Kylian •
THE GOLD LIGHT hits my chest with a force that empties my lungs and sends the world spinning sideways.
My boots leave the ground before the pain registers. For a fraction of a second, I am weightless, suspended in air that tastes of ozone and the unmistakable heat of raw magic. The ground meets my back and drives what little air remains in my chest out through my teeth.
My shirt is singed. The fabric blackened in a rough circle the size of her palm, beneath it, my skin is red and already fading to pink as my body repairs what hers tore open.
She hit me. My brat of a bond. My little mage, who cannot control the power that pours from her hands, knocked me on my ass deliberately. The part of me that should be furious is instead staring at the burn mark on my chest with something closer to awe because only she would be daring enough.
Guards are already moving, their boots on the packed earth drawing nearer, and when I lift my head, I see them converging on the field with their attention locked on my bond as if she’s a threat. Two of them have stepped past the fence line onto the soil, their bodies angled forward, ready to attack.
