Page 7 of Knight's End
"It took you years to learn how to master your powers," Ryan shot back, covering his face with his hand. "Do you all remember how many rolls of parchment Declan went through making his lists of opposites?"
I bit my lip. As a teenager Declan had always been scribbling something on parchment. Always. We hadn’t spoken much back then. I hadn’t known what he’d been doing. But that made sense. He knew which rocks to switch, which crops to rotate, he had it all dialed down to a very precise sort of science.
He rolled his eyes. “Dec, what’s the opposite of coriander?”
“Cilantro,” Declan’s jumping slowed. “But you cannot switch coriander to cilantro, you can only do the other way around.”
“See—what the hell is that? How am I supposed to figure out the opposite of every stinking thing?”
“Ask me,” Declan answered.
Ryan sighed. “Can I reduce this mud and get us some dry dirt?”
“Carefully. Keep your focus,” Declan stated.
But Ryan had already stretched out his palm. Yellow light radiated from it.
Suddenly, my mouth felt dry as a bone. Because Ryan hadn’t just taken the water out of the dirt, he’d taken it out of the very air around us. I was so parched that I started wheezing and coughing. Around me, everyone did the same.
“Shite!” Ryan tried to reverse the spell, which created a giant, suspended ball of water that slowly descended on us, choking us in an entirely different fashion. I sputtered as the water fell past my shoulders toward the ground, cupping my hands as it passed and bringing as much as I could to my lips to drink. My knights and Cerena did the same.
“Sard it all, sorry,” my giant knight apologized. I think he blushed, but it was hard to tell, we were all so flush from the near drowning.
Connor looked at Ryan. “If you have Declan’s powers, and he has mine, then I must have healing.”
The scratch on my arm—the one I’d made to test Ryan’s healing outside the cave—wasn’t deep, but I shoved back my sleeve and held it out toward my best friend.
Connor stared at it pensively, then looked at Ryan.
“How do you—”
“I’d feel safer if you tested it on me,” Ryan said, grabbing a small dagger and slicing his palm. “Think of this kind of shallow wound healing as a delicate process like sewing. It’s about precision. You need the tiniest thread of magic, gather it in your palm and—”
Pink magic blasted out of Connor’s hands, into all of us. My scratch instantly mended, but I was left dizzy and my tongue felt heavy.
“Whass happening?” I asked, my words slurred. I nearly lost my balance and had to grab onto Quinn to stay upright. My stomach churned.
Around me, no one looked much better. Cerena muttered under her breath, but my knights were all holding their heads.
“Too much,” Ryan gritted out. “Too much healing is like an overdose of medicine. It can make you—”
Next to him, Declan doubled over and threw up. That made Ryan start to dry heave. Then Blue.
Quinn and I turned away before we were drawn into the cycle.
The gargoyles sat there still as stones, as unaffected by our puke as they’d been by our blasts of magic.
Cerena’s muttering grew louder and she finished a spell, flicking her fingers as she walked and spitting at each of our feet.
As soon as she passed, I felt better. My head cleared and my stomach stopped roiling.
“Thank you,” I mumbled. She nodded and moved to the next person.
Once she’d restored us all to normal, we walked a bit, leaving the puddle of sick, and going closer to our gargoyles. I leaned up against one’s stiff back as my knights all caught their breath, recovering from Connor’s accidental overdose.
“So, we all have new powers. And we’re all shite at them. Promising,” Connor murmured.
I tried to be encouraging. “It’s better than what we thought an hour ago. That you had no powers at all.”
