I try to wave Rasha off. “We’ll be right behind you,” I yell above the noise.
She hesitates only a second, assessing me with those reddish irises as the rain pours off her brow. Then she tips her soaked head with a look of understanding and hurries after King Sedric and the few guards left, toward the back side of the Keep. To the cliff. While Rolf stays, sword in hand, to assist us.
I wait until they’ve disappeared, then, blinking back the ache of tears, I drag my leg across the courtyard, which is beginning to wobble as chunks from the mountain start falling.
I step up onto the low wall and into the water puddles.
And brace for the storm that is taking over from inside me.
CHAPTER 36
THE ENTIRE WORLD IS ON FIRE. THE CLOUDS, the night air, the raindrops that are
falling
falling
falling
in perfect little drips through jagged lightning streaks that are spreading, like yellow fingers, to tear open the sky overhead. Just like the jagged melody that is tearing up everything inside me.
I stand on the low wall overlooking the courtyard, unable to move or breathe as the entire Keep shakes from the corroding mountain and bombing ships.
“Nym.” Eogan’s voice has a funny edge to it.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I say, even as I force myself to turn to him.
His gaze is burning up the thin space between us. Alive. Strained. His jaw tightens and I catch the flex of his shoulders stiffening.
What the—?
The avalanche. He’s barely holding it back as his block expands. The fiery rocks and snow brought down by the bomb are hitting midair and collecting on the invisible barrier, dipping lower as if weighing it down. Weighing him down. “Well, clearly you’re going to have to,” he murmurs.
I stretch out my fingertips. They burn. I scream. Hulls, what if I can’t do this?
But in one spasm, I’ve coiled the ocean’s breath and yanked it through the pass. The air currents howl as I throw them against the boulders, whipping the rocks away from the fortress, the cliff, and the king’s ascending group of ragged men until the ice and stones are gone and the mountain’s no longer breaking.
And I’m shivering at the ease with which I did it.
Eogan’s sigh is audible as his hand connects with the pulse in my wrist, but it’s too late for soothing. Something’s broken loose in me, and that song from the Valley of Origin is pushing up its magic-soaked atmosphere to burn through my lungs.
Here it comes . . .
I gasp. My flesh, my arms. Blazing. I begin clawing at them—at the Elemental energy lighting my skin up and leaving me alive and terrified because this power forcing out of me is bigger and more dangerous than who I am or anything I’ve known. As if the Hidden Lands’ creator himself is singing the enchanted refrain inside me, and I am a conduit for his voice. A harmony to blend earth and sky and water.
And suddenly I have no idea how to control it.
“You can do this.” Eogan’s whisper is startlingly close, tangling in my hair. I wonder if he can see how badly I’m quivering—how the water’s flying off me in sprays.
No, I try to tell him. I can’t. But my words won’t move. Because this song that’s in my lungs and in my breath and forcing my mouth open is binding the elements to me. I can feel each raindrop, each thunder bellow beating in my veins as the melody abruptly escapes free as a bird.
Only to discover that the music has the power to destroy an entire kingdom with one wrong note.
Oh litches, what have I done?
The song flows from my mouth and enters my shaky hands. They spark.
I squeeze them into fists but more sparks leak out anyway. Like the airship bombs dropping around us—one, two, three, ten. The ships aren’t just racing out to demolish Faelen. They’re now taking out the pass as well.
Eogan points to the airship that caused the avalanche, and the twenty more behind it heading for us.
I shake my head. “Eogan, this thing in me. I won’t be able to control it.”
His voice is gentle—almost proud. “Just focus. You know how to do this.”
“I think you mean ‘Please don’t kill us,’ ” I mutter. And hear his responding chuckle just before I release the clouds to roar and howl down toward us. At the last second, I propel them against the ballooned contraptions, pressing them backward, upward.
The airships bob and swirl through the rain, moving faster and farther, curling around each other before sailing out to land in the ocean where the Bron warboats are moving through the breach.
I exhale.
A gale picks up out at sea, and now I can feel its friction in my blood. My neck tingles, and the next moment the melody surrounding me is reaching for the cerulean water, pulling it up in thick waves until it’s churning and coiling, creating miniature cyclones that lift higher and higher.
They pause.