Lady Smoke (Ash Princess Trilogy #2)(115)

Blaise must know this, too. He turns away from the wrecked ships and focuses the brunt of his attention on the one fleeing. His shoulders shake as he takes a deep, trembling breath and lifts up his hands once more. He lets out an animalistic cry so loud it could break open the sky itself. The power that floods from his hands is not a beam of light shooting from us to them. Instead, it is a tornado, whipping through the air without a target—as aimless as it is brutal.

The fleeing Kalovaxian ship takes the worst of it, dissolving to nothing but splinters as quickly as I can blink, but our own ship is not spared. The crowd behind me screams and drops to the ground, covering their heads as pieces of the ship begin to break.

“Blaise!” I scream, but my voice is lost in the madness. A piece of the mast above my head snaps off and plummets toward me. I am frozen in place, unable to move until an arm snakes around my waist and yanks me out of the way.

“Get everyone to the aft of the ship, to the rowboats,” S?ren tells me, drawing his sword from its sheath.

I grab his sword arm. “No,” I say, the word wrenching itself from my gut. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, you can’t—”

“Theo, look around. He’s going to kill us all,” S?ren says, gesturing around the ship with his free hand. “He asked this of me and I’m going to honor that.”

I swallow, tears biting at my eyes. “Let me do it, then,” I say, my voice shaking. “I owe it to him, S?ren.”

S?ren’s eyes flicker to Blaise and back to me. After a second, he nods and passes the sword into my hands. “Remember—strike hard and true, end it fast.”

I nod. It’s only when he turns away from me and begins escorting the frightened passengers to the aft of the ship that I realize it’s the same thing, more or less, that he said to me when I held a dagger to his back.

Steeling myself, I step toward Blaise’s figure, still leaning against the ship’s railing as tremors rack through his body, making his muscles spasm and twitch. Heron and Artemisia stand on either side of him, too exhausted from their own efforts to do much more than stare and call out his name, though their voices are lost in the overwhelming din of ruin.

The sword is longer than the ones I’ve practiced wielding with Artemisia, and the tip of it drags along the deck beside me. The ship careens one way and I stumble, leaning on the sword like a cane to stay upright, only to have the ship rock the other way. Each step I take toward Blaise feels like my body is moving through quicksand, but I keep my eyes on him and put one foot in front of the other.

Distantly, I hear Artemisia scream my name, but she feels a thousand miles away. Everything does. It is as if the world consists only of Blaise and me and the sword in my hand.

The air between us crackles with lightning. I reach out and touch his shoulder, hoping against hope that it will be like the last time and my touch will be enough to pull him free from the magic or Glaidi or whatever it is that has a hold on him. But when his head turns toward me and his eyes find mine, there is nothing of Blaise left behind them. They remind me more of Hoa’s, staring glassy and lifeless after the soul left her body. He looks at me, but he does not see me.

“Blaise,” I say, his name a whisper.

The deck begins to crack beneath my feet, shards of wood peeling up like fruit skin.

This is not like what happened in Sta’Crivero. Then, there was enough of him left that I could pull him out again, but now he is more magic than man, unreachable, unsalvageable. I swallow down the tears threatening to spill and lift the sword with shaking hands.

It feels like I am standing over Ampelio all over again, with the tip of a sword pressed against his back. I killed him then to save him from more pain, to save myself, to keep the rebellion alive. How is this so different from that?

My eyes clench closed tightly so that no tears escape. I know what I have to do—drive the blade through his chest, hard and true, just as S?ren said.

I take a steadying breath.

I grip the hilt of the sword harder.

I lunge toward him.

The sword twists out of my grasp, the force knocking me to the ground. It takes me a moment to process what is happening, but when I do it’s like time itself slows down.

Artemisia with S?ren’s sword, gripping the blade instead of the hilt. Her fingers digging into the sharp edge, streaking the wrought iron with rivulets of red. She charges Blaise with a guttural yell that I barely hear and my heart tightens in my chest, but instead of stabbing him, she brings the heavy hilt of the sword overhead in an arc, hitting him over the head with every last ounce of her power.

They both fall to the ground and the ship goes still.



* * *



—

With Blaise unconscious and the threat contained, we assess the damage done to the ship. Luckily, it was largely limited to the areas nearest Blaise—the upper deck, the masts, the railings. There are holes belowdecks spouting water, but they are easy to patch up.

“We can’t go far without sails,” Artemisia tells me when she reports the progress made. I haven’t been to see it myself. When Heron and S?ren brought Blaise’s unconscious body back to his cabin, I came with them and I haven’t left in the three hours since.

“We don’t need to go far,” I remind her without looking away from Blaise’s still face. “We’re only a mile from the shore. We could coast there. And we have the rowboats.”