Lunella yanked her sword out of the floor and whirled on Master Dorian, pointing the weapon at him. “For your information, it was only when I was disengaged from her that I had any hope of actually getting in a spell to knock her back.”
Mistress Sona pursed her lips and nodded to the slice I had given her on the shoulder. “She’s right. Mistress Kimber is formidable with the sword.”
“It doesn’t mean a thing if the girl can’t wield her magic with it,” Master Dorian snapped as he walked out of the room.
Standing from a corner he, unknown to us, occupied, Vitas strode into the center of the room. “Ignore the damn old buzzard. He’s the oldest and the crankiest of all of us.”
I tried not to crack a smile, but I couldn’t help it.
“Mistress Neves, you know my magic is—”
“This is why we are here,” she snapped. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask Master Argo to challenge you on the sword. Until we have someone who can keep up with you, there’s no hope of you learning how to use your magic with the sword.”
My shoulders drooped. I was not on Master Argo’s good side.
Elex appeared standing over me and offered me a hand. “Kimber, you do realize that it’s a compliment that they have to bring Master Argo here.”
I grabbed the offered hand, and Elex hauled me off my ass.
“Master Argo and I don’t see eye to eye, Elex.”
He kissed my forehead and smiled. “I realize that. He doesn’t approve of us here at all, and I know that. But if he’s the only one who can teach you how to use the magic and the sword at the same time, then—”
“Ugh! Stop making sense,” I grumbled.
There was a bang on the door, and it slammed open.
One of the university fellows stood there, looking worse for wear. Elex took a step toward him before he even opened his mouth.
“Professor Everettson, sir. I was sent to fetch you. There has been a breakthrough at the laboratory.” The messenger was panting. “Please. Come quickly.”
Mistress Ophelia nodded, dismissing him.
Elex touched my cheek and ran for the messenger as they both disappeared down the hall. I looked after him a long moment, watching and enjoying the view of his retreating backside.
Lunella leaned into my view. “You really need to learn to control your libido, my dear. It’s important that we exercise restraint in such things.”
“But, his butt…” I stammered, sounding like an ass.
“Yes, I know. It is nice. I can see why you picked him. But we must appear in control of ourselves at all time.”
With a deep sigh, I turned back to the room—
—as the ground heaved below us.
A startled, permeating silence followed the heave.
When the ground rocked again, this time side to side in a great shaking buckle, it seemed everyone in S’Kir started screaming at the same time. The screams ran through the walls of the dorm and panic rained down on the group of us in the practice room.
The shaking didn’t stop. Glass cracked and tinkled as it broke, the beams of the building screamed, some buckling.
Grabbing one arm each, Mistresses Neves and Ophelia dragged me out from the middle of the room toward the doorways that were at the end.
The screaming grew louder in the doorway. It was all from the floors above.
And still, the shaking did not stop.
“The mountain is trying to fall,” Neves whispered over the din.
I snapped my head around. “It’s not time.”
“I agree. We are not ready. It’s not time for the Spine to break.”
Fear lanced through me. “What do we do?”
Mistress Ophelia cocked her head. “Stop it.”
I gasped. “Stop it?”
Her voice was clear over the sound of the very earth below us shaking. “You’re the Breaker of the Spine. You command the magic in the mountain.”
“How do you know—”
Mistress Neves cut me off. “Feel it, child! You have got to learn your magic. Those walls you built with Vitas are meant to be merely a stopper, not an unbreachable fortress!”
“Stop the tremor, Kimber,” Mistress Ophelia snapped. “You saw the Triium. Now figure out your own magic!”
I dropped to the floor, slapping my hand on the cold tile of the entrance, and dropped all the magical walls I had put up.
The world burst into strings and clouds colored by the magic that was everything.
I could see angry red strings, pulling and twisting the ground. My magic was being drawn to the mountains at the edge of the city, and it was chaos.
It was also the Spine.
The mountain was angry, tense.
Pulsing.
This wasn’t the way the Spine should break.
My own magic, a soft cloud, assured me it should be broken in peace and tranquility.
What it presented now was not that—and if it were to fall, the druid world would not survive.
We would be angry. Hateful. Vengeful.
Lashing my magic to a string that was particularly violent, I let it rip my consciousness back to the mountain in a flash.
The anger here was overwhelming—I could feel my own anger rise. That was bad; I needed to be in control.
Stop!
It felt like I was yelling at the sky, and the words were sucked into nothing between the stars.
I gathered my magic around my consciousness like a thick, roiling fog in the heart of the spine, in the heart of the rock and the magic in the mountain.
Pulling it close to me, tight into me, I took a deep breath—or what I imagined was a deep breath—and screamed out the command again.
STOP!
The fog of magic burst like a firework outward. As fast as it could, it shoved the command into every rock and crevasse that stood in the Spine.
The shaking stopped.
There was no tapering off, no little tremors.
It just stopped.
“Breathe, dammit!”
Someone hit my chest and yelled at me to breathe again. I sucked in as much air as I could and grabbed their hand.
Snapping my eyes open, I found Mistress Neves hovering above me with a look of complete relief on her face. She sank to the ground next to me.
Mistress Ophelia had a hand on her chest. “That was a lot of power.”
Blinking a few times, I realized I was still looking at everyone and everything drenched in magic. I put the walls back up as fast as I could and started hyperventilating in the next instant.
“No, breathe, damn it,” Mistress Neves yelled at me. “Breathe through that. Come on, Kimber. Control!”
I let myself just suck in the air a few times, and then grabbed control of my breathing on the next inhale. It took me nearly two minutes to get myself back in charge, but I did it.
I flopped backward and stared up at the ceiling again.
“Ouch.”
A trickle of a laugh escaped Mistress Ophelia, and I heard Mistress Neves join her a moment later. The two of them were rolling in laughter in just a moment.
It was part relief and part hysterical mania.
“All right, all right,” I said, finally calming my own laughter. “We have to get up and see what happened to everyone else. There are going to be people who need help.”
With a sage nod, Mistress Ophelia stood from where she had been leaning and giggling. “You’re absolutely right. Let’s go. There’s going to be plenty of rescues to be done.”
Mistress Neves laid a hand on my arm. “Well done, child. You need more practice with subtle control, but you’ve got it in you. Sona and I will work with you on the minutiae.”
I bowed my head, grateful.
We headed up the stairs. It was going to be a long day.
*
My apartments were empty when I finally returned home nearly six hours later.
I had hoped Elex would be back. Whatever was happening at the university had to be serious if he’d been gone all that time.
The temple masters—myself included in that, despite how awkward it felt—spent the day helping the civil forces search and rescue people who had been caught in any collapses.
There weren’t many, thankfully. Even though I felt it had taken me entirely too long to stop the mountain…deal with the weirdness of that in a bit. The damage to S’Kir was minimal. A few collapsed warehouses, a few of the more significant buildings had leaned. It was a huge relief to find out there was no loss of life.
Still wracked with guilt, I should have been able to stop the tremors sooner.