Page 21 of Heat of the Everflame

I could imagine why—my pallid skin, my sunken, dark-rimmed eyes, my fresh bruises and still-bleeding wounds.

“How many times do I have to tell you—eyes up here, Corbois,” I yelled out to him, forcing a teasing lilt into my hoarse voice. “We really have to stop meeting like this.”

His gaze rose to mine, and we might as well have been the only two people left in the world.

Though I yearned to see that brilliant smile he reserved only for me, he was too far gone in his rage for my banter. Instead, in the crystal pools of his eyes, I saw the profound depth of his devotion. The intensity of it nearly brought me to my knees.

He had sworn that no force this side of death would keep him from my side, and Luther Corbois was a man of his word.

A warning tickled at the back of my mind. Over our months together, I had become so used to the heavy, enrobing aura of Luther’s power I’d almost stopped noticing it.

But now it was the absence of that feeling that snagged my focus. Though he couldn’t have been more than thirty yards away, there was a cold, empty nothingness in the air between us that, in Luther’s presence, felt unmistakably wrong.

“Archers, take him down,” Cordellia ordered.

A blur of black shot across the clearing and stopped me in my tracks. Luther raised his shield to his chest with no time to spare before an arrow collided into it and bounced away with a clang, leaving behind a tiny hole in the metal.

Another arrow followed, then another, and another. Luther crouched low beneath the shield’s protection as a volley rained down on him and forced him to sink back against Sorae’s side. Deflected arrows piled at his feet, and though most were tipped with the dull grey of Fortosian steel, a few bore that awful, telltale glittering black. Each godstone arrow left its mark in his shield, the slower ones making only dents, while others nearly pierced straight through.

If just one of them landed, if it even got close enough to cut a scratch on his skin...

Luther’s frustrated glare peered out from behind his shield. Every time he made a move to advance, another volley pinned him back.

Why wasn’t he using his magic? One flick of his wrist could flood this entire clearing and bring the mortals to their knees—yet he did nothing of the sort. Was he worried I would be angry because I’d asked him to spare the Guardians the night of the Ascension Ball?

Was he willing to go that far—sacrificing himself not just to protect me, but to avoid spilling mortal blood just to honor my wishes?

I was too scared to ask myself if that was a trade I was willing to make.

Sorae seemed to sense my growing worry. She flared her wings out protectively over Luther and arched her long, scaled neck, unleashing another stream of dragonfyre along the treetops. Leafy branches lit up in blue flame, and screams and groans became sickening thumps as charred bodies dropped out of the branches.

“No, Sorae,” I shouted. “Don’t hurt th—”

“Launch the ballista!”

For a moment, everything went silent. Then—the creak of a lever. The twang of an overwound rope. The whistle of a flying bolt.

I had no time to think. No luxury of debating the moral highs and lows of mortal bloodshed. No chance to weigh the cost of using the small spark of my magic that had emerged from the flameroot’s suffocating fog.

As I watched the godstone-studded spear rip through the air on a certain course for my gryvern’s beating heart, I had no time to do anything at all. Except...

Fight.

Just as I had that night in the forest with the direwolf, and again at the Challenging against Rhon Ghislaine, I managed only a whisper of a thought—an instinctual, ephemeral plea for salvation—and with a flare of silvery light, the bolt was gone. In its place, a cloud of ash floated away on the winter breeze.

I collapsed to my knees as my vision tunneled to near-blackness. Consciousness had become a fleeting concept. Whatever I had done, it had cost me dearly, both in magic and in energy.

I heard Luther shouting my name, then his boots striking the soil as he ran toward me.

Then the pluck of bowstrings and the patter of falling arrows, and his soft swears as he was pushed back once more.

It struck me then why I hadn’t felt the aura of his deep well of power. He was a Lumnos Descended—and we were in Arboros. Outside of the borders of histerremère, without a Crown on his head to free him from the Forging spell’s limits, Luther had no magic. He was nearly as defenseless as an ordinary mortal.

And he had come for me anyway.

“Load the second bolt,” Cordellia commanded. “Quickly!”

“No,” I whimpered. I tried to push to my feet and found myself collapsing onto my side instead. My heartbeat stuttered in a quick, uneven rhythm—a worrying sign.

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