I held power. Carys’s power. I had no idea how to wield it.
In the battle of the Kingdom of the Plains, she’d draw the dagger across the palms of each of her archers. She’d given them power. And she’d drawn the dagger across her own palm, too.
Dorian’s fist was braced against the cave floor, an unconscious leverage as his body died. I seized his wrist.
“Give me your hand.” The dagger clattered aside as I pulled with both hands, but it was like trying to dislodge a stone from the wall. “Dorian!”
He didn’t hear. Or if he did, he didn’t show it.
I went on pulling, pressing my boots into his side. When that did nothing, I let go and crouched over him, taking his face between my hands.
“Dorian, look at me.”
His face shifted left and right, lips pulled into a grimace. He moved like a possessed animal.
Softness would not save him.
I swung a leg over and straddled him. Drove my fingers into his hair, tugged at his scalp, dragging his face up to mine. Close enough to feel his breath. Close enough to taste death in the air. From deep in my throat: “Veyre, give me your hand.”
His eyes flicked to me. For a moment, he saw me.
Slow and shaking, his fisted hand came up betweenus. The knuckles blanched white, the veins tar-black, and five lines of blood issued down his palm into the wrist of his guard uniform.
I turned his palm up and one by one wrenched the fingers open. He kicked under me, twisted his head, but my whole world was those five fingers. I couldn’t be stopped.
The fate line lay there. Blackened, but visible.
I swiped the dagger from the floor. In a single stroke, I sliced the tip across his palm.
I’d expected blood. I got it.
The skin split. Black blood rose in defiance of gravity, floating, reaching—then rushing toward the blade like iron to a lodestone. It struck the metal and sizzled. Smoke curled. The corruption burned to nothing, and what remained was pure: feralis, distilled and waiting.
The dagger drank. Took corrupted magic and cleansed it. Held it. It vibrated under my grip, ready to release, to obey.
But that had only been a sip. A shallow cut. I couldn’t cut him everywhere; he didn’t have the time, or the blood.
Back in the Eldermaze, Thalassa had told me that women had far greater wells of magic than men. Our power resided in our potential.
My next choice was obvious.
Cruel bone kissed my palm. The blade opened me in a clean line and before pain could crest, I pressed my bleeding hand against Dorian’s.
Skin to skin.
Palm to palm.
I wrapped my fingers around his and held on. I leaned down, pressing us chest to chest, the dagger still clenched in my other hand.
If nothing else, I could take pain.
At first,nothing.
Then, it hurt. Vaelen’s bleeding sky, ithurt.
The corrupted magic entered me like a spiked bramble forced beneath skin. It branched into two, then four, growing into my bloodstream where our palms joined. Sprouting, spreading, piercing my forearm, my bicep, my shoulder, my chest.
I almost let go of his hand. I couldn’t.