Page 132 of Dreams and Dragon Wings
But her warning comes too late.
Before I can draw another breath,somethingstrikes me from behind and pierces me straight through. It knocks all the air from my lungs. It drives me to my knees. Brisa screams. Velda and Glorana rush close, trying to inspect the damage.
I stare down at the arrow now protruding from my heart and blink in disbelief. It shimmers with an oily sheen. Gold rippled with black. Like an arrow forged from Spirit wrapped in a Shade’s stain.
Naei.
It is all I have time to think before Malice’s roar rends the air behind me.
Before I lift my hands and try to call to my command threads of Air to shieldNa’theryafrom the dragonfire that is soon to come and realize that I cannot. Disbelief crashes over me as I stare down at my trembling, useless fingers.
I cannot weave.
Panic soon follows when I realize an even more horrifying truth:
I cannot shift.
Chapter 43
Benevolence
Ilook up and meet Aurelia’s eyes. I hear her voice as if from far away, screaming my name.
Behind her, her people scatter, taking back to the skies. All but her father, who grips her hand and tries to bodily pull her away from me.
My aunties bicker, fighting over how best to help me now. I can sense their panic. Their exhaustion. But their weak weaves do little to dislodge the tainted Spirit bolt from my chest. They need to rest to recover their strength.
They need to leave me now.
“Go,” I whisper to them all.
When they do not listen, I shout more urgently, “Go!”
“Naei!”Aurelia screams back at me over our bond just as bolts of lightning and flame strike the ground beneath me, ripping it open and sending me pitching down into the yawning darkness of the earth.
Brisa, Velda, and Glorana fling out one last weave, trying to stop the inevitable.
But it is no use. The chasm is already too wide. Too deep.
The ground swallows me whole.
My fingers and feet scrabble at the soil rushing past me like sand through an hourglass, fighting for handholds and footholds, trying to keep me from descending too deep. Already, the crust of the earth lingers far overhead, the moon and sky but a distant memory. Malice’s silhouette darkens all.
I grit my teeth and dig my hands into the plant roots I find tangling through the soil, holding on for dear life.
The irony that my uncle seeks to kill me with the one element he cannot even weave—the one element at which I am a master—is not lost on me.
His mocking laughter fills my mind.
“I thought it poetic myself,”he agrees with me, easily reading my thoughts now that I cannot keep my mental blocks in place.“How do you like your grave, Nephew?”
“I would like it better if you were down here with me!” I shout back, earning for myself a mouthful of dirt that coats my tongue and crunches beneath my teeth.
My mind races.
I stare up at the great distance between me and freedom.
Can I climb back out? Can I escape?
