“What?”
His eyes flash with annoyance as he sidesteps me. I pivot to see a Reaver not five paces away, his battle-axe lifting for what will surely be a death blow. Or what would have been.
The warrior’s face, contorted in battle fury, shifts to something akin to panic. His weapon clatters to the ground and he grabs at his throat, clawing with increasing zeal, as though his airway is blocked. Red mottles his cheeks. His eyes go bloodshot, then glaze over. He seems to be suffocating. Suffocating on nothing, so far as I can tell. Yet, when he collapses in a heap at my feet, going limp as death claims him, water floods from the corner of his slackened mouth.
“Drowning on dry land…” Soren tsk-tsks from beside me. “A shame he didn’t have gills…”
“You—” I gape at him. “How did you do that?”
But Soren has no answer for me. He is already turning to face another string of attackers. I stand there, paralyzed, watching as he conjures a stream of water from the nearby fountain with no more than the flick of two fingers, then sends tendrils of it toward the trio of incoming Reavers.
He showed me this same trick once, the day we met—a dance of globules around a goblet. I remember thinking it was beautiful.
There is nothing beautiful about this.
The clansmen do not even have a chance to steel themselves as the water invades their mouths, their noses. Fills their throats, surges into their lungs. They drown where they stand, falling lifeless to our feet when their strength gives out.
“Gods,” I whisper.
“Godlike though I may appear, I assure you I am not one.”Soren’s eyes swim with so much maegic, it nearly overflows. Silver flashes in aqueous blue. “And you would not be so impressed by my power if you had learned to wield your own.”
“You…you…you suffocated them.”
“No, I drowned them. But if you desire,youcould suffocate them. You could snatch the air from their lungs in a blink, wind weaver.”
I start to shake my head, but another tattooed behemoth is running from the fray, eyes locked on us with deadly intent. I send an arrow flying through his heart before Soren has time to turn around.
“Thanks,” he says drolly, blasting more tendrils of water at a group of nearby Reavers who have gained the upper hand over a contingent of foot soldiers.
“No problem,” I mutter, firing two more arrows.
We fall into a natural attack rhythm, battling back to back as we make our way toward the lakeshore. He covers my blind side; I shield his. Together, we take down a fair number of the Reavers who are chasing terrified civilians as they flee onto the bridge—me with my bow, Soren with less conventional methods. He does not just favor water as a weapon; he fights like water. There is a fluid strength to his every action, a fathomless power fueling his every move and countermove.
“I’m almost out of arrows,” I call over my shoulder to him. “If you happen to see a quiver—”
“You don’t need arrows.”
He declares this as he hurls a massive ball of lake water at a group of six charging warriors. It sweeps them backward across the sand, into the shallows. They swing their axes and brandish their fists, but there is no fighting this sort of enemy. Their heads vanish beneath the teal surface, never to reappear.
I glance at Soren. He isn’t even winded. “A handy trick, that.”
“Mmm.”
“But I do need arrows,” I say stiffly, reaching into my near-empty quiver. “If I’m going to be of any use.”
He turns to face me. The perfect symmetry of his chiseled features is marred by the quirk of one dark brow. “You have a far better weapon at your disposal. You need only use it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I can’t control my power like you do. It surges out in a blast, all at once, and…sweeps me away.”
“Sweeps you away?”
“I lose control. Loseconsciousness. And I don’t favor my odds of survival if I spend the rest of the night asleep, at the mercy of anyone who stumbles across my body.”
Soren’s mouth is a flat line of disapproval. “Has Pendefyre taught you nothing at all?”