Sacrifice (The Snow Queen #2)(76)
Her ice magic surged through her with the power of a hundred avalanches. Her ears rang as she turned to Tenebris, the remnants of her tears freezing to her cheeks. “You have made a mistake,” she said.
“What would that be?”
“You laid your hands on someone I love.” Her magic howled with such strength, she could almost feel snowflakes spinning in her blood.
Tenebris smiled. “You don’t frighten me, Princess. If you had more guts you would be a threat—then you would be like me. But you are spineless. So I’ll kill you with ease.” He reached for her—his hand glowing black with his powers—and laughed.
Rakel—her skin cold—caught his hand with her own and clenched it. His curse clawed its way up her arm, making her muscles twist with pain. Bile rose in her throat, and she was in so much agony she saw stars. But she clenched her jaw shut, swallowed her screams of pain, and tapped her magic. The wind picked up with an eerie howl and snow swirled.
“No.” Her conviction built in spite of the pain.
She was nothing like Tenebris. She didn’t need to prove it…but her sacrifice was still necessary. For Verglas, for Steinar, for Halvor, Oskar, and Phile, and especially for Farrin, the man she loved above all else—she would face Tenebris’s darkness.
“You can’t stop me, Princess. You have the magic, but not the hatred.” Tenebris’s eyes glowed as he leered over her.
“It seems you didn’t understand me,” Rakel said, adjusting her grip on his hand. She had to spit the words out around the pain that tore through her. “When I say that love is pure, I mean it stands unrivaled in its power.” This time, instead of pulling chunks of magic, she plunged all the way into it, bringing her body some relief from the curse.
Tenebris raised an eyebrow, unimpressed with her action, but he shifted when Rakel—still holding his hand tight—gazed north as her powers pooled around her.
Her magic was so overwhelming, she found it hard to breathe. She was aware of every fleck of ice and bit of snow on the field, and her powers reached out for more as she drew more and more of her magic into her grasp. Soon, she could feel the tug of the various ice structures: the ice wall she had built at Begna to keep mercenaries from returning to Verglas, the ice gardens she had forged in Ostfold, the wall she had made to keep the Chosen troops from following Verglas soldiers when they retreated from a march to Glowma, and finally, singing out in pure crystalline tones, she felt her ice-castle.
For a moment, her heart ached. She had put so much time and love into her castle, and she had so many books and maps there that she treasured doubly now that she knew they were from Steinar and Oskar.
I won’t have any need of them after this.
“What are you doing?” Tenebris’s voice was tight as he tried to pull his hand from her grasp, but she had used ice to fuse their palms together.
Rakel reached deeper into her ocean of magic and felt the throb her ice structures created deep in her bones. She stretched out her fingers and wriggled them in a “come-here” gesture.
She gasped when she felt her ice structures topple. Her ice-castle was the most violent. It shattered, creating a ripple of power and shaking the mountain. Ensom Peak roared. Its snow cap collapsed into an avalanche that poured down the mountainside and threw snow into the air. Rakel’s released magic streaked through the air, coloring the sky with iridescent lights.
Rather than letting it come to her, Rakel funneled her powers directly into the ground. She dove deeper and deeper into her magic—her lips turning blue with cold—and the loosened magic from her buildings started to coat the ground. Frost bloomed, traveling out across the field at a rate faster than the eye could take in. The ground shuddered under Rakel’s feet as mountains moved, hills flattened, and the plains buckled under the force of her magic.
“No, no,” Tenebris repeated. He tried to punch Rakel, but her magic caught it, and he cracked his fist, hitting jagged ice.
Giant spikes of ice taller than the biggest trees forced their way out of the ground, marking the Verglas border. Rakel could feel it in every part of the country, and everyone present could see it as ice jutted out of the ground, looming over the border like ancient sentinels.
Tenebris started screaming as the purity of Rakel’s magic settled into the very ground. The temperature of the air dropped, and snow fell from a cloudless sky.
Some of the Chosen magic users joined in Tenebris’s screams, their skin frosted by her magic. They disengaged from the fight and scrambled for a great gap in the icy border.
Tenebris shouted and tried to beat on Rakel with his magic, but without success. She had expelled so much power and still hadn’t reached the bottom of what she had—though she could now feel it coming.
“You’re going to lose, Tenebris.” Rakel’s lips were numb, and her voice shook under the force of the magic she was channeling. Every pore in her body was flooded with her icy magic, and it was almost more than she could bear.
“How?” Tenebris howled. “How can you fight for them? These people hated you!”
Rakel smiled. “Because I love them. No matter what their personal feelings are for me, I love them, and I want to see them happy.”
For the first time since the war, she felt free. The truth of her words resonated in her bones. No longer was her goal to prove she wasn’t a monster like Tenebris, or to try and win people over so they liked her. Her worries and fears were gone. All she had left was love as powerful as her magic.