Page 34 of The Dryad Storm

Chapter Eight

Chromatic Power

Gwynnifer Croft Sykes

Agolith Desert

Eleven days after Xishlon

Gwynn hurtles out of the portal’s golden depths and lands front-first against the stone floor of a green-torchlit cavern, its crimson walls marked with glowing emerald Varg and blue Noi runes.

Her palms smack down on cold rock, and then Mavrik’s hard body slams against her back as he’s thrown from the portal behind her. The collision of their bodies forces the breath from Gwynn’s throat, Mavrik’s palms slapping down on either side of hers, the edge of his wand hand brushing her own.

Invisible sparks race up Gwynn’s arm from that point of skin-to-skin contact, and they both shudder, her light magic once more unleashed and flowing into Mavrik’s lines in a spangled, prismatic rush.

Her eyes flick toward her wand hand, and she’s shocked to find it alight with pulsing color until Mavrik hauls his body off hers, breaking all contact. Gwynn’s light magery snaps painfully back to its trapped state, her linesstrainingto relink to his.

Heart skidding, Gwynn pushes herself to her knees, looks at Mavrik, and freezes, transfixed by the wavering lines of glowing color pulsing over his hand, as well. The cavern and Subland soldiers surrounding them fade to a blur, the forbidden Fae color hypnotic. Like sunrays diffracting through a bottle of oil...

Breathing hard, Mavrik lifts his wand hand and views the color rippling over it with wide eyes, his brow lined with sweat.

“What just happened to us?” Gwynn rasps, holding up her own, color-infused wand hand.

He shakes his head, swallowing. “I don’t know. Wynter’s Wand... it linked our lines somehow. When we touch.” He looks at her, awe blazing in his green eyes. “Gwynnifer, your light magic just protected us both from a direct lightning strike.”

Gwynn blinks at him, his words triggering a recollection from one of the Valgard armory’s countless books on magery—it outlined that Level Five Light Mages can’t be killed by light power, including a direct lightning strike.

“I’ve never been able to access even a spark of my power,” she says, confused.

“ButIcan,” he counters, seeming dazed. “When you grabbed hold of me, you flooded my lines with your magic and turned me into a Light Mage. Gwynn, you just saved my life as well as your own.”

Gwynn gapes at him, speechless. She crinkles her eyes to try to clear away the sparks of color flashing through them. “This thrall between us,” she finally manages, “it’s difficult to think past.”

“I know,” he admits, giving her an intense look.

The image of the Verdyllion is suddenly flashing in Gwynn’s mind, the desperate need to locate it surging. Forcing herself to focus, Gwynn scans the wan, battered-looking Smaragdalfar soldiers scattered throughout the torchlit cavern and zeroes in on Wynter’s pale winged form. Relief and alarm ignite—relief over the sight of the Verdyllion grasped in Wynter’s hand, and alarm over the way Wynter is slumped on the ground.

“Are you hurt, Wyn’terlyn?” the slender Elf, Rhys, asks her in Alfsigr, Gwynn parsing the translation from the Alfsigr language dictionary imprinted in her mind.

“I am unhurt, Rhysindor,” Wynter assures him, her black wings fluttering weakly. “My magic is simply depleted from creating so many runes.” Rhys and the Amaz warrior Valasca help Wynter to her feet, Valasca’s Urisk companion beside them.

And then, as if drawn by the force of Gwynn’s gaze on her, Wynter’s silver eyes meet Gwynnifer’s.

The second their eyes meet, the Verdyllion’s spiraling length pulses with prismatic light, and a sizzling sting washes over Gwynn’s wand hand, kindling light power through her lines in raying, prismatic flashes. Gwynn gulps as Wynter’s eyes flutter then roll back as she falls sideways. Rhys and Valasca catch her in a flurry of concern. The taller, fierce-eyed Alfsigr archer who resembles Wynter, the lavender Urisk woman, and a knot of Subland soldiers close in around them and, together, they lead Wynter away through one of the cavern’s rune-lit corridors.

Drawing in a ragged breath, Gwynn glances down at her color-pulsing wand hand once more, swept up in the feeling that what’s happening between herself, Mavrik, Wynter, and the Verdyllion is like a maelstrom of light power brewing on the horizon. She turns to the disappearing triad of portals, only traces of their runic arches still wavering in the air.

An upswell of urgency tightens Gwynn’s chest as she meets the belligerent silver gaze of the domineering, female Smaragdalfar soldier with the half-shaved head who seems to be the Subland army’s commander. Lines of dark green metallic hoops pierce the woman’s pointed ears, glowing Varg tattoos blaze on half her emerald-patterned face. The cylindrical hilts of several collapsed Varg swords are sheathed at her sides, and a necklace with pendants depicting the emerald-hued Subland Goddess Oo’na and her white messenger birds hangs around her neck. She’s bracketed by two young Smaragdalfar Elf soldiers also wearing religious Oo’na necklaces, one of the soldiers a broad-shouldered, muscular young man with a furious expression; the other a refined-looking, lean man possessing a blade-sharp calm that feels dangerous.

“The children I came here with,” Gwynn calls to the woman in a frayed voice, “where in the East were they portaled to?”

The Smaragdalfar woman’s eyes flash with a look of outrage. “Somewhere surrounded byarmed Smaragdalfar guards,” she bites out. “Away from Mages who crop the ears ofchildren.”

Gwynn recoils from the woman’s brutal tone, as if it were Gwynn herself who sliced the tips from the children’s ears.

Disorientation and remorse spinning through her, Gwynn absently grasps her tingling wand hand, hyperaware of the reverberating effect of Mavrik’s touch. “Where are we?” she implores, turning to him.

“The Sublands under the Agolith Desert,” he answers as he rises to his feet, voice strained.

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