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Waiting wasn’t making us safer. Working as neatly as I could and letting nothing go to waste, I started to twist out a shield big enough to cover all three of us, that Kalcedon’s magic could cut through without someone else’s spells getting in. The whole ship shuddered and groaned as I felt more magic above. I took a ragged breath and worked faster. Kalcedon’s power was a steady blaze flowing into me, and with the final addition of a limit I opened the shield, the prettiest one I’d ever seen.

“You’d better stay close,” I told them both, smiling as I studied the knit spellwork in front of me. With a sharp nod to show he’d heard Kalcedon stepped over the broken planks of the room’s threshold. Together, we moved out into the hall.

Chapter 32

The passageway was empty, dark without the porthole’s light. The narrow walls and low ceiling felt ominous. Almost claustrophobic. The ship rocked, a sickening motion with no windows or view of the sea to orient by. I kept my fingers hooked into the shield.

I was tired from holding the earlier shield. It wasn’t just my fingers; it was my head, too. Keeping a spell going required a will and a mental fortitude that I’d never struggled with, because I’d never had enough power to hold something for so long.

Which wasn’t to say I couldn’t do it. But I felt my concentration fraying already. My head throbbed. My fingers ached to uncurl.

Kalcedon paced silently up the stairs, with me behind him and Oraik right on my heels. The world above appeared as a blinding light, one Kalcedon strode into without hesitation.

I squinted, just as a wall of purple fire roared straight at us. I flinched and braced for impact. The fire slammed into the shield and washed up over it, seeking a way in. I twisted my hands, stretching the shield to block the attack from coming over our heads.

Kalcedon didn’t seem to even notice. His hands turned, fingers flying. Three Colynes soldiers raced towards us, swords drawn. A bolt of power leapt from Kalcedon’s fingers and ripped into one of them.

I’d never seen a man go to pieces like that.

My shield faltered. Kalcedon threw another bolt of power, obliterating the right-hand soldier in a spray of blood. A flurry of arrows clattered uselessly against my shield as Kalcedon rained death on the deck. His hands kept moving, ripping each soldier to pieces individually.

“Keep him alive,” I heard Ozeri bellow. She must have spotted Oraik behind me.

The ground beneath me buckled. We sank, the wooden boards shifting like sand beneath us. My shield didn’t cover the bottoms of our feet; a spell had slipped in like smoke beneath a door. I tried to take a step and fell to my knees. Instinctively, dumbly, my hand flew out to stop my fall. I regretted the motion almost as soon as I’d started it, but it was too late. The shield fell. Kalcedon, seemingly unbothered by the shifting floorboards, hurled a wave of power towards the female fae who'd cast it.

She got a shield up just in time to block him. The male took off, turning back into a bird and hurling himself off the deck. Behind him I could see the Cachian Temple ship, sails billowing wide as it raced towards the chaos unfolding on the Colynes warship’s deck.

Another wave of arrows came our way. Kalcedon threw another bolt of power towards the Colynes archers. Still kneeling on the soft deck, I barely got a shield back up. It was smaller, not as clean as before, wavering as my fingers trembled.

Oraik grabbed me by the waist and pulled me back to my feet; somehow I didn’t drop the shield. Together the two of us stumbled towards stable ground.

I don’t think Kalcedon knew any other attack spells. He wasn’t a warrior, though anger had made him one. He just kept hurling heavy bolts of power, shredding, splintering, splicing. One connected with the nearest mast. With a mighty, cracking groan, the mast slowly tipped over, then snapped and crashed down. Screams pierced the air as the ship dragged to the side. Kalcedon leapt, bringing him closer to Oraik and I and onto solid ground.

The deck was covered in carnage, carnage he’d wrought. A hundred bodies lay in unnatural poses, surrounded by blood and pieces of flesh. It was a horrible sight, painful to look at but impossible to turn away from. A jerk of Kalcedon’s hand and another set of Colynes soldiers burst. The female faerie threw another spell and the deck beneath us blistered open, the old wooden boards throwing out branches in remembrance of life. A spell to restore a tree dead from inside to out, I thought involuntarily.

They must have really wanted Oraik alive, if this was the worst magic the fae would throw our way.

Kalcedon turned his focus away from slaughter for a moment to shear power straight down at his own feet, commanding the branches to snip and prune themselves with finesse born from decades of gardening.

The Colynes witches were cooking up something, two of them working together in a spell that was steadily building as their sigils wove nets in the air.

“The boats,” Oraik yelled. He grabbed my shirt and towed me towards the wolf-boats hanging over the side of the warship.

“Kalcedon!” I yelled. He glanced over his shoulder and saw we were moving. With a quick leap away from the battered and twisted ground we’d stood on, Kalcedon began to back up in the same direction, still throwing power. Not every shot hit someone. Some simply blasted holes in the deck. Large ones. The ship was beginning to tilt downward away from us, the whole deck at an angle as it took on water.

Across from us the Cachian ship arrived. Grapnels soared through the air and crunched into the rail, yanking the two ships close. We all fell as the deck bucked. A wave of Cachian Temple magic roiled across the far deck; sleep spells, by the way the Colynes soldiers nearest to them dropped their weapons.

“Get the prince,” I dimly heard someone yell. I stumbled up, desperately forming another shield, this one even weaker and sloppier despite the buckets of power I tore from Kalcedon.

A spell slammed into the shield from the Colynes witches. It was something nasty I couldn’t quite make out, something heavy. It felt like poison. It roiled over the surface and pocked into the shield, pressing into the spaces between the sigils and worming the enchantment apart bite by bite.

“Meda!” Oraik shrieked. I turned, my aching fingers desperately curled into the spell, in time to see a soldier lunge at me. He’d somehow managed to sneak around to our far side without any of us noticing. He was behind the shield.

A sword sheared into my vision. The soldier yelled a triumphant battle cry. The blade was so close to my head that I had a clear knowledge that it was going to hit me, without any time for my body to react.

Kalcedon had twisted at the sound of Oraik’s shout. And he was fast, faster than I was. He cast something; I didn’t see it; only felt it. The sword jumped away from me.

Into Oraik’s side. Through flesh. A sound, wet and dull, and a cry that shredded my ears. The dagger I’d handed him tumbled from his grip.