Page 219 of The Shadow Wand

The two smaller scorpios are splayed out, their charred heads still smoking and bent back at odd angles where my blades impaled their necks, black ichor staining the surrounding lavender grass. The Vogel scorpio’s head is a mound of gore.

Magefire whips through my tangled lines, hot and furious. But there’s something more. Another line of fire, golden-hot and mounting in strength. A spike of grief hits me as I realize it’s an echo of Yvan’s Wyvernfire.

In a disbelieving daze, I lean to wipe the black mucous coating my blade on the pale lilac grass, then rise and resheathe my weapon as my Wyvernfire ripples through my lines.

I hold up my hands and press the retrieval runes on my palms with my thumbs.

The two other blades embedded in the Vogel scorpio’s neck fly toward me with such force that they almost sever the beast’s head, their hilts slapping into my palms.

I wipe them on the grass as well, straighten, and calmly resheathe them both.

The woman, the teenage girl, and the child are all clinging to each other and eyeing me with looks of pure shock. They’re sick, the woman and the young child, I swiftly realize. Quite sick. With bloodshot eyes and red sores thick around their mouths. There’s a feverish, strung-out look about them, and they’re skeletally thin.

The Red Grippe.

The final stages of it, from the looks of them both.

The Gardnerian girl sets herself staunchly before them, her green-eyed glare fixed on me, her blade still in hand. Her whole self seems tightly strung, like a violin string wound to the near breaking point. I notice that they all have similar heart-shaped faces.

I look closer.

My eyes linger on the ears that are poking through the Gardnerian girl’s long, unwashed black hair. Her ears are jagged—scarred—and I realize, in a horrified flash, that they’ve been cropped. Like Olilly’s were, that horrible night when Gardnerian mobs attacked Urisk all over Verpacia.

Which means they were once pointed.

I set my eyes on the little Urisk girl and note the emerald flecks in her amethyst eyes, the strands of Gardnerian black mingled in with her violet hair.

In a burst of comprehension, I realize that both of these children are part Gardnerian and part Urisk and would not be looked at kindly in the Western Realm by practically anyone.

It all comes together in my mind—the myriad reasons these three are likely fleeing East.

Concerned, I lift a hand toward them, palm out. “Don’t be alarmed,” I say, not sure if I’m talking to them or myself, astonished by what I’ve just done. I turn and blink at the decimated scorpio carcasses, the image surreal.

I took down three scorpios.

Three.

Tears blur my vision as Lukas’s and Chi Nam’s and Valasca’s unwavering belief in me fills my mind.

You were right,I tell them, my heart aching. I can fight back. I can be a warrior.

“Who...who are you?” the Urisk woman asks me waveringly in the Common Tongue, her heavily accented voice stitched tight.

I turn toward her and take in the stark fear in her reddened amethyst eyes.

The Black Witch,I almost say.

“I’m...” I begin then pause, struggling to quickly assemble my thoughts, remembering the false Elfhollen name I’m supposed to use in the Eastern Realm, the Elfhollen identity that Valasca and Lukas and Chi Nam drilled into me.

“My name is Ny’laea Shizoryn,” I tell them as my voice breaks around another painful wave of grief.

Their wide-eyed stares remain fixed on me.

I step toward them but stop when they collectively flinch, the little girl whimpering and coughing up thick phlegm as she clings to who I assume is her mother. The young child’s green-flecked eyes are wide and haunted, as if she’s replaying the scorpio attack over and over in her mind. She’s so thin. Much too thin. Like her mother...

Dread gathers in me like a deep, welling pool as my apothecary mind savagely ticks off the cold facts about their illness. They’ll be dead in a matter of days if they don’t get hold of Norfuretincture. The immediacy of their situation momentarily sweeps away my own pain.

“Where are we?” I ask them as another flash of golden warmth shimmers through my lines.

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