Page 74 of Minor Works of Meda

My teeth chattered. Heat streamed out of me. I felt sick. The urge to vomit rose, then vanished. I was cold all over. I couldn’t answer Kalcedon. I barely heard him. Everything I had was going into that spell.

“Stop. God, just… stop.”

I drew another sigil with shaking, uncooperative fingers. Pins pricked through my hands, deeper needles of cold lancing through me. A void roared just in front of my eyes and my life tumbled towards it. I couldn’t cast by feeling now; my body was unresponsive, my fingers slow and dragging behind the commands of my mind. Stars sparkled in the darkness of my vision.

With a curse Kalcedon threw himself down beside me. Heat rammed into me, and then he pushed me over. The sight of the blue sky was blinding. I toppled, gasping, as power coursed painfully through my bones. Kalcedon’s long fingers twisted. They fluttered through the air as he cast a healing spell of his own. Oraik jerked up at one point as the spell rammed through him, then fell back. I could see the magic work on him.

Kalcedon turned on me.

“That was a cheap trick,” he hissed. “Going cold just to make me help? You could have died, you idiot.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Why in horns should I care if he goes?” His face looked pale and drawn. “People die all the time.”

I didn’t care. I slapped him. Kalcedon flinched but didn’t raise a hand to block me. Hitting him hadn’t felt like touch normally did. There had been no burst of pleasure, no heat roiling through me. Only skin touching skin.

“Because he’s my friend, and if you gave him half a chance, he’d probably have been yours, too! You are heartless.”

Kalcedon didn’t answer. His shoulders caved forward. I clenched my hands into fists and glared at him, waiting for him to call me every name he could think of. But he was silent. And I didn’t feel a speck of heat from him.

He was so low I realized, for the first time, that Kalcedon was capable of going cold. He’d emptied his endless well for me.

“Well?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Aren’t you going to yell back?”

He shook his head and sank to his knees.

He was as weak as me.

Kalcedon.

For a man like him, that was terribly dangerous. I pushed a thread of my own trembling power into him. It was just a drop in the deep well that was normally Kalcedon, as insignificant as one spark against a bonfire. I couldn’t feel any change in him, though now I shivered too. He didn't respond to the spark, except to slump down all the way onto the deck, eyes shut. The bit of heat in him held steady without going out. He was alive. Barely.

And Oraik… he was alive too. I could see the rise and fall of his chest from where he lay on his back on the deck. But there was blood. Too much of it.

Suddenly I felt alone, and terrified, like either of them might slip away. And even as mad as I was at Kalcedon, I could not begin to wrap my mind around losing him.

I felt something, in the distance. A pulse of heat. Coming from the way we’d been. I turned my head. The Colynes warship was only half underwater, its bow lifted proudly up into the air. The Cachian Temple ship remained beside it. The heat I’d felt flickered out, but I felt certain something had been there. I drew a shaky breath and looked to Kalcedon, still unconscious on the floor of the ship.

The best thing I could do, for all of us, was get us far away.

Sail-rope in one hand and tiller in the other, I pointed us south and rode the wind towards safety.

Chapter 33

Whether the raven-faeries and the sinking Colynes ship saw our escape, I didn’t know. But to all appearances, we were not pursued by wolf-boats or the Temple sailors. I thought I felt heat in the water twice more, but all I could do was get us further away.

I sailed, and kept sailing, until evening fell; until it had been some hours since the last sense of anything in the water. I felt numb, worried about both men and unable to forget the things I’d seen. Oraik woke up and complained of the pain; he went back asleep when I said there was nothing I could do. By the time the sky darkened we’d reached Degnac. At least, I thought it must have been, since that isle seemed to match the distance and direction we’d traveled. It wasn’t as though there was a sign proclaiming the shore’s identity.

Wherever we were, whatever place we’d landed in, it was quiet. We didn’t pass a single village as we approached the forested shore. I was glad of that fact, since a man drenched in dried blood and another who was storm-gray and flecked with gore were bound to attract attention.

It hurt to think about what had happened. All the lives ended, Oraik’s almost among them. I navigated the wolf-boat into a sheltered stretch and reminded myself the warriors Kalcedon had killed were likely killers themselves and working to destroy the Ward. And although I had been ready to hate Kalcedon passionately for not healing Oraik, knowing it had almost cost Kalcedon’s life to do so made that anger reluctant and uncertain.

The cove we’d reached was small but protected. Jutting rocks and a forested spit of land shielded it from the ocean’s view and wind. Hidden as far as we could be from the ocean view, I dropped the wolf's anchor over the side and went to check on Kalcedon.

He lay on his back beside Oraik. His power was still horribly thin, though it had slowly begun to build again over the course of the afternoon. I placed a hand on his warm chest, in the small concave just below his ribs, and sent another thin, trembling vine of my own power into him, as I'd done throughout the afternoon, as often as I could spare it.

“Don’t,” Kalcedon said. He cracked one eye open. “You can’t spare it, weakling.”

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