“You’ve got to get out of here! Now!”
“Why?” I looked around, and realized that we were about to be trampled. Not by Svarestri, but by witches, a great mass of them tearing out of the fiery arena and headed this way. Some were on foot, their shields gone, their bodies blackened by smoke and ash. Some were on brooms, laden with two or three passengers each, some with the ends on fire. Still more had enchanted whatever they could find, like the burnt remains of the stadium benches, to carry their wounded, because they wouldn’t leave them behind.
And I realized that while I’d been lying in the mud feeling sorry for myself, they’d been rescuing their sisters from an inferno.
One Pritkin was heading back into.
“Wait!” I grabbed his arm.
It was hot to the touch—too hot. But not as much as it was about to be. Ares’ arrival had caused the arena to flame up, like gas poured onto a fire. It was almost incandescent from this close, a searing ball of heat and light, like a small sun. Too bright to even look at head-on—and impossible to survive.
Especially with water shields that would evaporate in seconds.
“Let go!” Pritkin was trying to pry my hands off, but it didn’t go as planned.
“Why?” I challenged him. “So you can die for nothing? We failed—”
“We didn’t fail!”
“What are you talking about?” I yelled. “How is that not—” I cut off, choking on a blast of smoke and flying ash. But still hanging on.
“We didn’t fail!” Strong hands gripped my biceps, shaking me. “The shield is down, Aeslinn and his creatures have fled, the witches are clear or getting clear—”
“But the device is still in there!”
“Yes, and unprotected! His men pulled Aeslinn out before he could reengage the shield. The device is vulnerable, if I go now!”
He tried to push me off, but it didn’t work. “So why not take it out before? Why wait to evacuate everyone?”
Nothing.
“Pritkin!”
He tried to pry off my hands, and he wasn’t kidding this time, but I’d let my fingers break before I let go. He stared at me, hair and face almost black, eyes reflecting the flames that burned behind him. And thought about lying.
But he sucked at it; he always had, at least with me. And then I was shaking him, shouting, “Tell me!”
“It’s absorbed too much power,” he admitted. “Destroying it will release all that, all at once. The explosion . . . could level half the city. Now do you understand? You have to get away, to the river or beyond, to be safe.”
I stared at him. Everything was coming too hard and too fast. I couldn’t keep up anymore, couldn’t think. Couldn’t process what he was telling me, except I guessed part of me had. Because my nails sank into his skin, hurting him, but I didn’t care. I was suddenly screaming and thrashing, and actually pulling him backward, this man who had sixty pounds on me and most of it muscle.
Until he did something that ended up with him behind me, too fast for me to counter even if I’d been thinking straight, and got an arm around my throat. I could feel his chest against my back as I fought, could feel his too-rapid breathing, could hear his voice in my ear, telling me things I didn’t care about because I only cared about one thing.
And he wasn’t coming with me.
“Listen to me—”
“No!”
“You must! I have to—”
“No. Please.” It was a mewling cry, raw and humiliating any other time. But not now.
“Listen to me. If I can return to you, I will. I swear it. Nothing else—” He cut off, abruptly, and the arms tightened. “But I have to do this. There’s no time to explain, but there’s no one else who can. I have to go. You have to let me go.”
I just shook my head, my hands gripping his forearms, feeling like the world was shattering around me. I didn’t care. He was going to have to pry me off. He was going to have to—
“Listen.” It was gentler this time, and he somehow turned me around, made me look up at him. I was crying now, great ugly sobs that racked my body and tore at my mind, but I didn’t even try to hide them.
“I can’t,” I said brokenly. “Please don’t . . . I can’t. . . .”
A filthy hand pushed the muddy hair out of my face. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t do.” He finally did something other than fight me, and the kiss tasted of smoke and ash and spent magic. “I think you might be the strongest person I know.”
I shook my head. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t, that he was wrong, that he’d always been wrong about me. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t seem to say anything, even when he pulled away. And I felt something inside break and shatter and splinter. I collapsed, falling to my knees, staring at the ground because I couldn’t watch him walk away.
And then stagger and fall, hitting the ground unconscious a few yards in front of me.
I looked up, shocked and horrified, expecting to see a Svarestri looming over us. But instead—
“Rosier,” I breathed.
“Damn boy.” The demon was holding his hand. “Jaw like a rock.”
And then he shoved something into my hand.
I looked down to see a scrap of parchment. It looked like it had been torn out of a book, with careful, cramped medieval writing in the center, and a manic scrawl along the edges. I stared at it, utterly confused. “What is this?”
“The spell.”
I looked up. “What?”
“The countercurse. I rewrote it in the common tongue. Emrys can put it on himself. When the soul arrives, have him read it.”
He actually started to stride away, before I got my shit together and grabbed his leg. “What? Why? Rosier—”
“I have the same abilities he does,” he told me testily. “I’m the one who passed them on to him! And whatever else they did to me, the demon council can’t block fey magic.”
“That doesn’t explain this.” I held up the paper. “What’s going on?”
Unlike his son, he didn’t try to lie to me. “I don’t have enough strength to come back.”
“What?”
“I came on this journey to benefit me,” he said abruptly as I stared at him. “I told myself it was for the good of my people, but that’s a lie. I wanted to prove everyone wrong, to show them I was my father’s son, after all. Not bothering to think that I was someone’s father, too.
“I never acted like it. I never had a father; I had a taskmaster who was never satisfied with anything I did or was. I hated him, but I’ve treated Emrys . . .” His jaw clenched. “Pritkin. I’ve treated Pritkin just the same. All his life. I can’t change that, but I can do this.”
“Rosier . . .”
“Immortal she named him. Let me be!”
He jerked away, and strode into the fire before I could stop him.
Chapter Fifty-nine
I just stayed there, on my knees, staring into the fire until it seared my retinas, I didn’t know why. And then a passing witch jostled me, and slowly, sluggishly, I came back to life. In the middle of a scene of carnage and chaos, unsure where to go or how to get there.