The Broken Ones (The Malediction Trilogy 0.6)(50)
I hammered my fist against the magic, then lashed out at it with my own, screaming that he hadn’t done anything to me. That he’d done more to keep my life safe than anyone, including her. But Marc’s shield muted my voice, allowing only theirs to pass through.
“I asked you to protect her.” Ana?s’s hands balled into fists, and the ground shook again, tiny bits of rock and gravel raining down from above. “Instead you killed her!”
“Ana?s, she’s not dead. Pénélope’s f–”
“Murderer!” she shrieked, and the rocks above us groaned and shifted, the columns of the tree glowing faintly as the magic attempted to compensate. I had to stop this, or she was going to kill us all. Or be killed, I amended, as the King stepped out of the gates of the manor, followed by Marc’s parents.
I had to get through.
Holding up the sluag spear clutched in my hands, I backed up a few paces, then gripped the steel with my magic, ignoring the way it recoiled from the toxic metal. Then I threw every ounce of power in my possession behind thrusting it through the magic barricading me away from this disaster. The effort knocked me onto my bottom, but even as it bent and warped, the steel punctured through Marc’s magic and the wall fractured, then shattered.
“Ana?s, stop,” I screamed, scrambling to my feet and running into the fray.
Everyone turned toward me, even the King, who was on one knee next to a column of the tree, flooding it with power. Tristan was sprinting up the street, shirt tails loose as though he’d been torn from sleep. “Ana?s!” he shouted, even as paving stones tore up from the ground, hovered briefly in the air, then rippled away from her and toward Marc in a tide of wrath, my sister’s fury making her deaf and blind toward everything but vengeance.
“No!” I flung myself in the path of her magic, expecting to be incinerated or pummeled to death by rock, but everything froze. Falling to my knees, I looked up to see stone and magic swirling in a barely contained vortex, and behind it all, Ana?s staring at me with wide eyes. “Penny, I could’ve killed you,” she whispered, brushing away Tristan as he reached her.
“Don’t do this,” I said, feeling Marc’s hands on my arms, pulling me to my feet. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“He’s killed you.”
“No, he hasn’t.” I wanted to go to her, but there was no way through the mass of unspent power in front of me until she relaxed and relinquished it. “I’m fine. Surely you can see that?”
“But you won’t be. Father told me that you’re… you’re…” Tears flooded down her cheeks, evaporating almost immediately from the heat of magic.
“Tristan, control that girl or I’ll kill her myself,” the King snarled. “She’s putting the entire city at risk with her outburst.”
Stepping between Ana?s and the King, Tristan eyed the storm of magic, but wisely refrained from clamping down on it. “Ana?s, what is going on?”
“Pénélope’s pregnant. She’s going to die.”
Silence.
Everyone was staring at me. Tristan and Ana?s. Marc’s parents. Even the King’s attention had been torn from the threat above, his gaze, which was normally so terrifying, full of pity. All those who’d risked coming out to see the commotion – their expressions were solemn, as though I were nothing but the paramount of tragedies. As though the life inside me were not the greatest of gifts, but a sickness. I hated them for it. Hated that my fate was deemed certain. That I was to be given no credit for having power over my own destiny.
Marc’s hands tightened on mine, the only person who understood. The only person who felt the same way as me.
Tristan broke the silence. “Marc’s no more at fault than she is, Ana?s. And killing him won’t change her fate.”
“It is more his fault.” Ana?s was shaking, anger rising once again. “I trusted him with my sister. I trusted you, Marc.” Her gaze bored past me, and I could feel Marc’s guilt, building in his mind and mine, toxic as iron. Ana?s, by both character and necessity, put her faith in almost no one, but she had put it in Marc. And she believed he’d violated it, and for that she was unforgiving.
My hair lifted and swirled on the twisted surge of magic, and I knew this was a battle that my sister wouldn’t survive. Not with the King present. But it was a battle that I could stop before it started.
Stepping out of Marc’s grip, I pulled off my glove and held up my hand, the silver bonding marks glittering in the light. “He has saved me, Ana?s. More than you can ever know.”
Chapter Twenty
Marc
The maelstrom of power extinguished so swiftly that my ears popped, paving stones landing with a crash on the street, shards of white spinning off in every direction.
“What have you done?”
The words came not from Ana?s, but from Tristan. He strode past Pénélope as though she didn’t exist and grabbed my arm, tearing at my glove. I tried to pull from his grip, but magic took hold of me like a vice, implacable and painfully tight, and it occurred to me that never in all our years had he used his power to force me to do something.
The leather of my glove tore down the back, revealing the gleaming silver bonding marks that magic had painted across my knuckles, and Tristan went still, his eyes glassy and unblinking. “Why?”