Page 158 of Fortress of Ambrose
“No!” I stand, too. “You willnotdo this. I am removing you as any kind of leader here. I’ve taken the diadem, and no magic will leave your body until I say so.” Toushana bleeds from my hands. “Erla will work with me directly on it now. We will find another way to preserve the Sphere’s toushanaandyour life.”
Confusion knits his brow.
I don’t move, urging my faint magic to swell.
But Jordan doesn’t raise a defensive hand in response. He doesn’t even look angry. More sad than anything else. “I will not fight you.”
“Then you will do what I’ve said.” I ball my fists.
“Quell, preparations are already underway.” He raises his shirt. His wound has returned, larger than before. “We ran a trial on me already and got a little of the toushana out. We will do the full procedure tonight. There’s no turning back now.” He takes my hand and kisses it. “I love you so very much.” He turns to leave.
He will die tonight.
To save magic.
And to save me.
Sixty-Two
Yagrin
He had tomakethe dead understand.
He’d seen the shadows enough to know where they were looming. But he’d never tried to talk to one. When he and Nore returned to the estate, she pulled every book off her shelf and started jotting down all she knew about her brother, this magic, and the Dragunhead.
He needed to get their Pact plan in place. She hadn’t agreed, deeply uncomfortable with it. But she hadn’t outright disagreed either. He had to make a choice. And the only way out of this mess that he could see was to offer up his brother as a sacrifice.
Now he just had to convince the dead.
They were notoriously prickly. If his plan to break the Pact went awry, he didn’t want them to suspect Nore had anything to do with it. He left Nore in her room and found Isla, who agreed to help.
The entryway that led to the ice garden was vacant of shadows. Instead, they were lurking in the garden, watching the forest, waiting for the trees to quake.
“You’re sure about this?” Isla asked.
“Giving them a heart they wantmorethan hers is the only way.” He pushed the doors open, and they strode into the cold air. He waited and waited for them to notice him. But no sudden shape in the darkness moved.
“Use their language,” Isla urged.
He pulled the Latin from the dregs of his memory.
“Loquere mecum.”
He may as well have been a mouse shouting in a crowded ballroom. The shadows didn’t acknowledge he was even there, still focused on the trees in the distance. He pulled his coat tight around himself and stormed to the middle of the ice garden, right in the thick of where they were. The chill of death cut through his bones as the ancestors moved through him.
“Ego potest auxilium!”He balled his fists.
The shadows shifted at the wordhelp. Darkness closed around him. He slammed into a wall of shapeless void, and his body turned to ice. He backed away, trying to unfocus his eyes the way Nore had told him to. He let his vision blur, and the shadows grew crisper, taking the silhouette of human form.
“My native tongue is easier for me. May I speak this way?”
Three letters wrote themselves on a snowy headstone on the ground.
Yes
Yagrin’s heart leapt. “You want Nore Ambrose to grow toushana.”
The shadows didn’t move.
