The Shadow Queen (Ravenspire, #1)(35)
She refused to let him go.
The risk of her touch triggering a latent spell and revealing Lorelai to Irina was a risk she was willing to take.
“Nakhgor.” Her voice shook, and her fingertips began to itch. “Find the sickness in his blood.”
Gabril’s breath rattled in his throat, and he choked weakly.
“No!” She pressed her hands harder against his chest and felt the sting of magic surge down her veins to pool like lightning in her palms. “I forbid you to die. I forbid it!”
Gabril’s chest rose once more and then slowly deflated until there was nothing but a faint, irregular heartbeat slowly fading away.
“Gabril!” Her tears dried. Her hands stopped shaking. There was nothing but the burn of magic and a fierce resolve to save him. “Nakhgor. Find the sickness in his blood. Kaz`prin. Bring it through me and into the ground instead.”
For a moment, her magic seemed to hover against Gabril’s skin, holding fast to the heart of him but refusing to obey Lorelai’s command and enter his body.
Unbidden, she saw a memory of Irina crouching beside Lorelai so she could look the child princess in the eye as she said, “You have to mean it. The heart knows if you are worthy to command it. Allow no doubt. No room for dissent. Speak what you want and mean it with your whole heart, and every other heart will obey yours.”
Lorelai glared down at Gabril’s chest and focused. She was a warrior. A survivor. She was everything Gabril had taught her to be.
She was his queen, and his heart would obey hers.
“Nakhgor. Kaz`prin.” Her voice rose, filled with grief and power and fury. “Nakhgor. Kaz`prin.”
His chest shuddered. His heart thumped once against her palm.
She threw back her head as the magic flooded her, as its heat pressed against her skin from the inside out until she thought she might explode from the pain and the freedom of it, and yelled, “Nakhgor! Kaz`prin!”
Power burst from her palms, pierced Gabril’s chest, and surged into his body, a tide of white light that hurt Lorelai’s eyes when she stared at it in wonder.
The light rushed through Gabril’s veins, and then Lorelai could see his thoughts the way she could see Sasha’s. With Sasha, Lorelai heard a few words and saw a simple image here and there. With Gabril, it was a flood of memories threaded through with words, sentences like ribbons weaving in and out of a moving canvas. She glimpsed the castle, her mother holding her father’s hand, a pretty woman with dark skin and two young boys on her hips, the cruel slant of Irina’s mouth as she screamed at Lorelai while standing in a pool of the king’s blood, and an old mountain woman whispering that if Lorelai wore her gloves, she would be safe from the queen. The images spun on in rapid succession, but the light had finished scouring Gabril’s blood and was returning to Lorelai bearing every bit of Gabril’s fever and sickness.
As the light surged back into Lorelai, she screamed in agony. Pain was a creature with teeth and talons that raked at her from within. It was heat and swelling and unbearable anguish. Her bones felt like they would dissolve. Like she would split wide open at the seams and come apart.
Gabril’s chest rose and fell in even measures. The arrow wound knit back together, the skin smooth and healthy. His eyes flew open as his princess sobbed in agony, her bare hands still pressed to his chest.
“Lorelai!” He grabbed her arms and sat up, but she couldn’t see him. Couldn’t hear him.
Nothing existed but the unending pain.
She’d told the magic to take the sickness from Gabril, bring it into her, and then send it into the ground.
Why wasn’t it going into the ground?
She gnashed her teeth and then bent double as her stomach clenched.
“No!” Gabril wrapped his arms around her and held her against him. “Don’t touch the ground with your gloves off, Lorelai.”
Touch the ground.
Her fevered mind latched on to the words as the pain scraped her raw.
The magic was trapped inside her until she released it the same way she’d called it. By touching her palm to the heart of the thing she wanted.
Gabril was rocking her, whispering things she couldn’t hear. She struggled frantically, and he gentled his hold as if to help her get comfortable.
The moment he loosened his grip, Lorelai lunged forward, her breath a ragged sob in her chest, and slammed her open palm down onto the forest floor.
The light exploded out of her hand and plunged deep into the ground beneath the Falkrain Mountains. The pain receded, draining out of her and into the dirt as her magic ebbed. Exhaustion swamped her—a profound weariness that instantly sucked her down into the darkness of sleep as Gabril snatched her away from the ground and desperately tried to shove her gloves back on her hands.
He was too late.
Beneath the surface of the mountain, tendrils of Irina’s magic sent to spy on the outer reaches of her kingdom, wove a web under the land. The threads of Lorelai’s magic struck the web, and in a heartbeat, the princess’s location was on its way to the queen.
FOURTEEN
THE DREAM ALWAYS began in the same place—on a snow-capped hill overlooking the road that cut through the Falkrain Mountains to join Ravenspire with Morcant. Irina’s legs were knee-deep in snow that crested the fur-topped edge of her boots as she stared at the Ravenspire carriage slowly making its way across the Morcant border, bringing her younger sister, Tatiyana, to their father’s funeral.