Page 33 of Fortress of Ambrose
Cultivators grow magic in others.
Retentors remove magic.
Is there some way to combine them to get this magic inside me out and into something else? Is reverse-Cultivating a possibility? I bite my lip, my mind racing. I would have to be able to do both kinds of magic first.
“Jordan?” Quell appears between the barn doors like a dream, holding a sandwich wrapped in a napkin. Her forehead wrinkles in the way it does when she’s stressed.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine.” She hands me the food, and I set it aside. The lull of my heart has slowed to a steady beat, but the ache from using magic hasn’t.
Quell holds her own heart, feeling the tracer bond we share, where we feel each other’s deepest emotions. “You’re clearly not.”
“Are they going to get a Healer?” I ask.
“I’m still working on that.” With a tentative hand, she reaches to push my hair out of my face.
I dodge her touch.
“Your lips have no color, and you’re covered in sweat.”
Her words unfurl something hot in my chest that’s not magic, and I almost wish I’d let her touch me just then. To feel something other than pain. “You’re looking at my lips?”
Her chuckle doesn’t melt her annoyance.
I sigh. “I am frustrated with the way things are between us. And how helpless I feel. I’m alright now. What else happened in there?” It is written all over her face.
“Willam mentioned some things that have me thinking.”
“Like?” I follow her, allured by the notes of honey and jasmine in the air but more concerned about how hard she is pulling at the thread of her clothes.
“There are more Darkbearer attacks in other cities, Unmarked neighborhoods.”
I scowl.More death, more destruction by magic, means more fear of magic.This is my duty to fix. I glare at where the Dragunheart pendant used to hang against my chest.
“But…”She stops. So do I, careful to keep a pace between us. She tangles her long brown coils around her fingers. When she finally meets my eyes, hers are all worry.
“What happens with magic and the Order is sort of up to—”
“Me.” I shift on my feet. The Order has always dictated who can use magic and who cannot. It wields access to magical training, like a bargaining chip. Sign over your soul to us, and the world is yours. The Order gives power to some and rips it from others. But the worst part is that it destroys people in the process. Whatever I do with this magic, I won’t let it be weaponized like it was.
“Us,” she says.
“You’ve never cared about the Order before.”
“I’m realizing I need to care.”
Need. Not want.
“Who better to decide how this all should look than someone with your past and my present? You have lived in the ugliest parts of the Order at Hartsboro. I am in the world but not seduced by its glamour anymore. We could work with the peoplehere, who’ve been forced to the margins. Three valuable perspectives.”
The warmth drains from my body, the toushana inside me writhing. “You, me, and…Willam?”
“The safe houses.”
Now I’m pacing. Each step feels heavier than the one before it. My hands are slick with sweat. I want to reassure her, but I can’t. When I absorbed the Sphere’s magic into my body as a last resort, it was because deep down I don’t trust anyone else to handle magic’s future.
“Quell, we can’t pretend that just because you met a few nice people in safe houses, they’re all that way. I’ve seen things that would give you nightmares.”Willam is one of hundreds, maybe thousands.
