Page 43 of Of Nine So Bold

You need to listen to him,the broken one urged.

“Please,” Byron continued, almost as if answering the broken one’s pleading. “If there’s any way to bring her back from wherever her spirit has gone, it will mean unraveling what just happened here. That may take time, and it will be substantially harder if your power overshadows hers. You need to put her down so I can try.”

A wary noise left the vampire. “Are you planning to delve into the power that threatened this place? My friend, that could kill you.”

The scholar didn’t even blink. “It’s killingher. I’ll die before I let it do that.”

Rage snarled through me. I would not allow that either.

Except… there was nothing here to attack. Nothing to kill now that the forest was gone.

Fuck, I didn’t know what to do.

Grim resolve came from the broken one. Confidence too. If anyone besides us could save her from this horrible magic, it would be Byron. And while the broken one did not want this man to lose his life, he understood the willingness to sacrifice for her. He would do the same.

As would I.

“Very well.” I lowered my beloved, laying her carefully on the ground. “Do it.”

11

MELISANDRE

Veins of magic flowed up through the nexus and into the royal tree, feeding pure unadulteratedpowerinto me. Though I stood where I’d been, my hand on its trunk at the heart of the castle courtyard, my mind was not so limited by mere physicality.

I could feel everything. See everything. Throughout Aneira, smaller nexuses fell to my will one after the other while my trees, my apples, tracked the ley lines coursing through the ground, twisting and warping the landscape, the people, theworld.

In Aneira…

In Cioloren…

In Gentresqua…

National borders meant nothing. Neither did their silly magical defenses. None could stand against me.

Except one.

My teeth ground as the shimmering force of Erenelle’s border wall resisted my onslaught. Even now, that infuriating country wouldn’t break. Every spell I’d turned against it all these years said that no one was even stillalivewithin its borders, the entire nation reduced to a wasteland populated only by ghosts.

Their wall shelterednothing. Yet still it wouldn’t fall.

Seething, I pressed my hand harder to the trunk of the apple tree and turned my attention away from that dead nation. When the entire world bent to my will, I would deal with Erenelle. Or perhaps I would leave it as a graveyard, a testimony to the fact the only outcome of resisting me would be subjugation or death.

And until that day…

I smiled as, one by one, humans anywhere near the ley lines succumbed to my spell, becoming my pawns. Mysubjectsin the truest sense. For years, they’d bent their knee to me or others in fealty. In respect, feigned or real. But whether that honor had once been truth or lie no longer mattered.

Now their entirebeingswould bend, and I would be the only one they served. All because they took one little bite of an?—

I paused as a tiny speck of light glinted in the dark night of my power.

Gwyneira was here.

Amusement rippled through my expansive awareness. Like a snow-white gnat flying at the edge of my vision, her presence flitted about, as lost and helpless as a feather in a storm.

The child could no more control magic than she could learn to breathe underwater. So some fragment of the magic in Lumilia’s ley lines must have drawn her here, pulling her hapless awareness away from her body and out into the maelstrom of my power.

It would be her destruction.

---