Crown of Cinders (Imdalind #7)(53)

“Ryland,” I tried to force the words out as my magic swelled in my head, erupting underneath my skin in the worst kind of goose bumps, ice against fire. “I can’t stop it. You have to protect me.”

I didn’t know if I had been able to get the words out. I didn’t know if he had heard me. I couldn’t even hear the battle anymore, yet I could see Ryland screaming at me, his curls bouncing, the magical attacks exploding over his head in pastel fireworks. I heard nothing, just the buzzing as my sight pulled at me.

Ryland faded into the black of sight, the vision swallowing me like the drain in a tub, sucking me into oblivion.

The power took control as my eyes darted to black, leaving me staring at the dark, the occasional quake of what I assumed were explosions rumbling around me.

They shook my bones, everything tense with fear. I almost expected the sight to end, to drag me back to the war. However, with one sharp inhale, a flood of color wrapped around me, a million images coming one right after another before they stopped in an alley I recognized as being in Prague. Except, the sun was too yellow, the street too clean.

The children, however, I knew at once. They were younger, but I knew their smiles and their button noses. I had never seen Jaromir without the mark on his cheek, yet I knew him without question.

“I don’t like fighting,” Jaromir groaned as he sunk down against the wall, folding himself into a tiny pretzel.

The world around him rattled with another blast, glass banging in frames, rocks shivering on the ground. He didn’t seem to notice. He simply lay still, his back shaking with tears as Míra came up beside him, wrapping herself around him like a cage, her cheek pressed against his back.

“I don’t like it, and it’s getting worse.” Míra’s voice was a distant whisper as it moved within the sight of the past.

The sound of Jaromir’s cries was haunting as they rattled with another blast.

“Promise me you’ll never hurt me like Papa hurts Momma,” Jaromir begged, sitting up so fast that Míra had to scuttle to avoid impact. “Promise me you’ll always love me?”

“Silly, Jay-Jay. I’m your best sister. Of course I’ll never do that.”

The kids smiled and laughed, the sound of their promise following me as they moved away, like oil through water, colors swirling and dancing until a cave took their place.

I expected the same cave I had seen so many times before, the one that taunted me with Ilyan’s death, the one I had seen Míra standing in days before. This one was different—a large, open cavern flooded with muddy water. I was convinced I had seen it before, but I couldn’t place it.

My heart clenched as the memory embedded itself. The story Dramin had told me so many times smacked me in the face. I knew what this was.

Imdalind.

“Are you watching?” The deathly hollow of my own voice filled my ears as my sight flickered alongside another explosion, the water shimmering as the rocks shifted. Except, when the echo of battle ended, my own image was now standing before the pool. Standing, staring with a bloodied length of ribbon in my hands.

I stood still before another explosion waved amid the sight, wiping me from view and shifting the sight back to the kids, back to Míra who sat, crying in a tent, back to Jaromir who was throwing rocks against a barrier. Each image flashed for a split second before they changed again, replaced by a forest I knew too well, one I had been hunted in for nights on end. Taunted by Cail and his games.

“Are you watching?” the deep voices of a hundred Drak inside me asked again, louder. The death in my voice twisted in my stomach, writhing down to my legs as I fought the need to run. Run past the trees, away from the steps I could already hear coming after me.

With the snap of lightning, with the rumble of thunder, the forest flickered and left, the same trees pulled into a perfect circle, a fire blazing in the center. Wyn, Ryland, and I sat around the pit, sharing the same pie we had so long ago. The sound of our laughter bounced off the trees, bounced in my ears, before it was replaced by the blast of battle, Ryland’s scream traveling alongside it.

I cringed at the sound, at the panic, and tried once again to pull myself out of the sight. It stayed, the clearing emptying of people and pie and filling with hundreds of Sk?íteks, each dressed in clothes more fitted to that of the Elizabethan era. And in the middle of them, a woman stood with hair as blonde as Ilyan’s, dressed in white, a handkerchief over her face. Sain stood beside others I didn’t recognize with a bright blue Vil? I was convinced I had seen before and a Trpaslík on either side of him. The others were crying while Sain stood still, attempting to hide a smug little smile on his face.

I stared, confused at the scene, before everything rattled again, pulling me into the middle of an ornate hall, large oak doors and marble floors surrounding me.

I knew this hall.

I had grown up in this hall.

But it was not the hall of my childhood. It was the hall of my nightmares.

It was the hall that was full of rot and rats where everything smelled of death and was dripping with water so rusty it looked like blood.

Maybe it was.

My mind said it was.

My mind took me right back to those haunted halls, the explosion that shook the space making everything real.

“Are you watching?” my own voice asked again as the lights in the hall flickered with an explosion.