Crush the King (Crown of Shards #3)(100)

All I see is darkness. It’s almost like a . . . wave rising up, getting ready to drown us all, her voice whispered in my mind. A wave that could swallow us, and everyone else here, and all of Bellona.

She’d given me that warning before the Regalia. I just hadn’t realized how literal her words would turn out to be.

A faint bit of magic flared in Serilda’s eyes, making them burn an even darker blue than usual, as if she were peering into the future and observing our fate. I wanted to yell and ask her what she was seeing, but there was no time. An instant later, the magic in her eyes vanished, and she gave me a single sharp nod. She was telling me that I could do this—that I had to do this, or we were all dead, along with scores of innocent people.

I strode over to the opposite side of the bridge, lifted my head, and stared up into the center of the wave. Purple lightning was still crackling through the water, so I opened my mouth and let the gusting air roll in over my tongue, tasting all the scents in it. There was only one—the hot, caustic stench of magic.

Every single member of the Bastard Brigade that I’d encountered over the past year had been strong in their magic, and now that the weather magiers had combined their power, they had gone from merely dangerous to seemingly unstoppable. I didn’t know if my immunity was strong enough to overcome their collective power, but I had to try. So I kept tasting all the magic in the air, trying to figure out how to destroy the tidal wave that was still growing.

But the problem with so many magiers feeding their power into the wave was that the magic wasn’t focused in just one spot. It was more or less evenly spread out through the whole length of the water, just like the power was more or less evenly spread out among the magiers. I might have been able to snuff out the magic in one part of the wave, and make that section collapse, but I wasn’t strong enough to dissolve all the magic at once, and the rest of the water would still hit us with its deadly, crushing force.

So how could I possibly save my friends?

I looked over at the magiers, whose hands were still moving back and forth in those sharp knitting motions. Even if I’d had lightning, fire, or some other offensive magic, the magiers were too far away for me to attack. Even Sullivan, with all his powerful blue lightning, wouldn’t have been able to reach the ship from here, and especially not now with the gale-force winds gusting around us and the water sweeping over the bridge railing and slapping against our bodies.

Desperation filled me. I didn’t want to die, and I certainly didn’t want my friends or all the other innocent people on and around the bridge to die. But right now I didn’t see a way to save them, much less myself.

My gaze flicked from one thing to the next. The purple lightning streaking through the water. The magiers moving their hands. Their eyes glowing like amethyst stars as they fed more and more of their power into their horrible storm. And of course the tidal wave that just kept growing higher and larger with every passing second—

And I suddenly realized that this wasn’t the first time I’d had to battle two enemies at once. During the assassination attempt on Serilda outside the Mint yesterday, I had faced down a fire magier and an ogre morph. I hadn’t been strong enough to kill the morph on my own, so I’d used my immunity to trick the magier into doing it for me with her fire. Maybe I could do the same thing right now. Maybe I didn’t have to destroy the wave and all the magic churning through it.

Maybe I just had to redirect it.

“Evie! Evie!”

Behind me, my friends screamed my name, although if they said anything else, I didn’t hear it. I tuned out their frantic cries, along with the booming thunder and the wind howling in my ears.

Instead, I focused on the wave, timing my movements to it. As it grew higher and higher, I reached for my own magic, for my own immunity, pulling the power up and up and up, until the invisible strength of it was crackling around my hands like the purple lightning was streaking through the water. Then, when I had an iron grip on my power, I lifted my hands and planted my boots on the wet flagstones, bracing myself as best I could.

The magiers must have finally exhausted their collective power, because they all snapped their hands down at once, forcing the wave to start its inevitable deadly downward roll. A final crack of thunder roared through the air, and the concussive boom rattled everything, including the bridge. I bent my knees, bracing myself a little more, and held my ground.

I had often thought of my immunity as a gladiator’s weapon, as a dagger to slice through someone else’s power, or a sword to kill their magic completely. Now I thought of it as a shield, the largest and most important shield I had ever held. I pictured my immunity streaking out of my fingertips like gray and blue stars, and then those stars fusing together and arcing out into this enormous, invisible shield that stood between me, my friends, and the tidal wave rushing toward us.

“Come on!” I screamed, urging myself on. “Come on, come on, come on!”

I reached for even more of my magic. And more magic, and more magic still. Even though I couldn’t actually see it, I still pictured the invisible force of my power going up, up, up, until it formed this strong, solid shield that completely covered me and my friends. And then I lifted that shield up into a defensive position, just like I would in a gladiator fight in the arena.

I had never tried to use so much magic before, had never tried to dig it out of myself like a miner chipping tearstone out of a cavern wall, but I reached and clawed and scraped up every last drop of power I had, every little shard of magic buried deep down inside me.