Before She Ignites (Fallen Isles Trilogy #1)(96)

Power sang through me, making light flare through my vision—so bright I had to blink. When my eyes cleared, all I saw was Altan’s face, ruddy and twisted with pain. Sweat gushed down his body as he dropped to the floor.

The noorestone went dark.

Altan was breathing, bleeding heavily, but unconscious.

I stared down at the depleted noorestone. What had happened? How?

A gasp sounded from the doorway, and I looked up, heart pounding.

Tirta stood there, her eyes round with surprise. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know.” Flames rippled up my arm, red and blue and white coils. But they didn’t hurt me. Burn me. Instead, it seemed like they were part of me. One by one, the flames vanished and my limbs were just my limbs again. My heartbeat slowed to a normal speed.

“Well.” She glared hatefully at my nemesis on the floor. “Let’s do something about that. You should kill him.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO




I COULDN’T KILL ALTAN.

No matter how much I despised him, I couldn’t kill him.

“It’s easy,” Tirta said. “Just stab him somewhere vital. His throat or an eye ought to do, if you put enough muscle into it. I don’t recommend the heart; too hard to get between the ribs.”

My mouth dropped open. “Who are you?” Hartans didn’t speak like that. Of course, I knew better than to assign stereotypes to people, what with the company I tended to keep, but tips on where to stab someone? That would be shocking from any of my friends, except maybe Gerel.

Tirta just smiled widely at me. “Are you going to do it? Or should I?”

“Are you an assassin?” I whispered. She’d always looked strong, but I’d never thought of her as particularly strong, and I’d definitely never thought she’d have been willing to kill someone, or teach someone else how to do it. Suddenly the sweet girl I’d known for two months was a stranger. A very scary one.

She’d been sentenced to the Pit for something, though.

She’d never told me what.

Now, it seemed likely she was here for murder.

“I don’t think the question is about what I am,” she said, glancing at my hands. “The real question you should be asking is what are you? I saw what happened with that noorestone.”

I pressed my palms together, smothering the remnants of fire. The noorestone still stuck in Altan’s side was dark—dead—but the others glowed along the walls with their steady blue light. When I touched the nearest crystal, my whole body tense with anticipation, nothing happened.

The energy stayed where it was, trapped in crystal, released only as radiant light.

On shaking legs, I limped around the room (four steps, five, six . . .) and removed the noorestones from the sconces on the wall until all the light was gathered in my sore arm.

“What are you doing?” Tirta was still in the doorway, checking the hall.

“I’m leaving him in the dark, just like he left me.” I placed the nineteen noorestones on the table, white-blue illumination shining at my fingertips. “Why did you come here?”

“To help you escape.” She glanced at Altan. “To save you from him.”

“I saved me from him.” I hiked up my dress, stabbed it with one of the sharper stones, and tore it into a long strip to bundle the crystals together. The stones went into the widest part of the strip of cotton. With some weight in there, it’d make a decent, if shallow, bag.

Tirta checked the hall again, then stepped inside quickly, shutting the door behind her. “Someone’s coming.” Her voice dropped low as she crept toward Altan’s motionless form.

I finished tying a knot at the ends of the cotton strip, easy enough to carry over my shoulder, and watched Tirta pull the baton from Altan’s limp fingers. “Don’t kill him.”

Her expression was hard, deeply shadowed with all the light contained in my bag, as she glared down at my nemesis.

Maybe he was her nemesis, too.

It was hard to think of her as anything but the only person who’d wanted to befriend me here, who’d gossiped and reminded me to keep my humanity. But I couldn’t erase the echoes of her words, or the implications that she’d stabbed men before.

Out in the hall, footfalls thumped on the stone floor, growing in volume and then fading. Whoever’d come by was gone now.

“Don’t kill him,” I said again.

Tirta released a long breath, and the tension that had gathered in her shoulders. She stepped back and tore her gaze from Altan, as though not killing him caused her actual pain. How little I knew about her.

“Are you really Hartan?” Harta hates harm.

“Are you really Daminan?” She wrinkled her nose. “What kind of question is that?”

Offensive, apparently.

“Sorry,” I said. “So you came here to help me?”

“Yes, but as you already pointed out, you helped yourself.” She headed toward the door again, Altan’s baton in hand.

As for my nemesis, he remained on the floor, fingers twitching in his sleep. How much heat had I—or the noorestone—shoved into him? Enough to knock him out. Plus the stab wound. A pool of dark blood shimmered at his side, reddening as I approached with my bag of light.

I knelt to reach for the noorestone stuck in his side, but Tirta’s voice stopped me.