Page 50 of Acolyte (Tempris #2)

Skye’s heart may have stopped then. Six months? How was that possible? It had only been two weeks since Ebondrift.

He opened his mouth, a million more questions already forming on his tongue, but then she was shushing him, looping an arm through his as she pulled his attention back to the pond.

“Taly, we need—”

“ Shhh .” She pointed towards the pond. “Watch. Listen . This is the reason we’re here, after all.”

Skye followed her stare, straining his ears. He hated not having his magic—he felt blind and deaf, completely cut off. But eventually, slowly, voices trickled over the hill, along with the crunch of snow and the scrape of metal.

Two figures appeared, and Skye blinked, his heart giving a painful lurch. “Is that…”

“Yes.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “That’s us.”

The boy, a gangly dark-haired fey no older than fourteen, was laughing, walking hand-in-hand with a gray-eyed human girl that smiled up at him from beneath a wild mop of golden hair. They were both dressed for the snow, carrying skates and rucksacks and dragging an old wooden sled.

“Is this a memory?” Skye asked, nearly choking on a laugh when his younger self slipped on the ice.

He had been clumsy at that age, always tripping over his own feet.

But in this case, that tiny version of Taly—far too small to already be ten—had definitely pushed him, even if she tried to play it off.

“Yes and no,” Taly said from beside him. “It’s the past.”

“What’s the difference?”

Taly smiled, but instead of answering, she said, “You were all legs.”

Skye hated the heat he could feel creeping up his neck. She was right. He had grown five inches that year, and it was all in his legs. “I was awkward. And skinny.”

“You were adorable.”

Taly leaned her head against his shoulder, and for a little while, they simply watched.

Occasionally making comments. Laughing when one of them would fall.

When it came to ice skating—or anything really—Skye had always been fixated on speed, and unsurprisingly, his younger self was skating circles around the pond, trying to go faster with each successive loop.

Taly, however…

Well, Taly had always been good at anything that required rhythm, whether it be music, or dancing, or even singing. It was one of the reasons that after so many years, Sarina was still trying to turn her into a lady, despite a complete lack of enthusiasm for the feminine arts.

“Why did you stop skating?” Skye asked, watching as that ten-year-old girl executed some overly complicated series of jumps and twists that made his head spin.

“Do you really not remember?”

“No.”

She winced. “You’re about to. ”

There was a yelp, and Skye turned just in time to see that little girl trip over a crack in the ice.

He tried to scream—from surprise, to warn her, he didn’t know—but she was already falling. Already skidding across rocks and twigs and ice.

She landed mere inches from their feet, face-down, panting and gasping for air as the snow around her began to turn red.

Skye was on his feet in an instant, but Taly grabbed him, pulling him back a step. “Just watch,” she said. “They can’t see or hear or feel us. This is the past. It’s already happened. There’s no point trying to intervene.”

“Taly!” Fourteen-year-old Skye was half-skating, half-running across the ice. When he hit the edge, he scrambled through the snow, reaching for the girl.

Taly slowly curled in on herself, clutching her leg as blood welled between her fingers. The fabric of her trousers had been slashed from ankle to knee, and a long, angry gash ran the length of her calf.

“Shit.” Skye gently removed her skate, then ripped away the ruined fabric. His hands were shaking as he prodded at the wound. The skin had been shredded, and beneath the smear of blood and mangled flesh—a flash of white. Bone. “Shit, shit, shit...”

“Em?” Taly said, her voice breathy and thin. Her face was streaked with dirt, wet with snow and tears. “I’m fine. It doesn’t hurt that much.” A lie. There was pain in her eyes. “Just take me home.”

“No, this cut is too deep.” Skye wiped at his eyes, smearing blood across his brow. “I… I don’t know if I should move you. ”

“Em—”

“Just give me a minute,” he snapped, his panic getting the better of him.

“Wait.” Skye began to circle the scene. “I remember this.”

Hands clasped behind her back, Taly leaned over, grimacing as she inspected the wound on her younger self’s leg. “I’m surprised you forgot.”

“I have an idea.” Skye tore off his skates. “Stay here,” he said as he began to run barefoot through the snow, back to where they’d left their packs on the other side of the pond. His aether flared, like violet mist in the cold winter air.

He was there and back in seconds, digging through his pack as he skidded to his knees beside her.

“What are you doing?” Taly’s breath came in stuttered gasps, and she looked pale—far, far too pale beneath the dirt on her face.

Skye produced a silver dagger, and without bothering to explain, he sliced open his palm.

“How did you know to do this?” Taly asked.

Skye shrugged. “I just… I was panicking, and you were bleeding, and… I figured that if my aether healed me, it could also heal you.”

Crouching, he peered into his younger’s self’s face, noting the intense look of concentration.

Blood dripped from his hand into the gash on Taly’s leg, indistinguishable from her own human blood. And when the wound closed, he ran the dagger along his palm again, numb to the pain .

Again and again. More and more blood—aether. He needed to give her aether.

Taking a breath, he began to channel his magic, feeling for that little piece of himself that was slowly draining away, out of him and into her.

He felt it as it trickled between the dirt and pebbles embedded in her flesh.

As it bound to cell and sinew, nerve and bone.

He gave it a single command: heal.

Mend what was broken.

Make it new.

Skye remembered now—the strangeness of the thing he had cast that day .

Not wrong, but… strange. So much of shadow magic was just pulling and pushing, moving aether from here to there.

It didn’t matter if it was something as subtle as sharpening his eyesight or commonplace as forcing aether through a crystal—it was all the same in the end.

But that day… that day he had felt something inside him begin to spark. Spark and transform and change into something new.

The edges of the gash began to reach for one another, the flesh threading back together. The bleeding slowly ebbed.

“It’s working!” Skye exclaimed, grinning widely.

“Em, that hurts.”

“Just a little bit more.”

“Stop!” a new voice called. The tang of aether filled the air, and then Ivain was in front of them, a flurry of snow hanging in his wake. Those stark blue eyes were wide and filled with panic, and he grabbed Skye’s wrists, wrenching him away. “What were you doing, boy?”

When Skye only stared, too stunned to speak, Ivain gave him a rough shake. “Tell me!” he demanded. “Where did you learn that spell?”

Skye’s mouth opened and closed. He looked to Taly, but her face was still scrunched up in pain. “She was hurt,” he said feebly. “She’s still hurt.”

With a sigh, Ivain let him go, turning to Taly. “What happened?” he asked as he began to gently prod at the half-healed gash.

“I tripped,” Taly sniffed.

“That must have been some fall,” Ivain said gently.

He shrugged out of his greatcoat and began ripping the fabric into strips.

“We’ll have to be more careful next time.

Although” —he rotated her leg, wiping at the blood— “it looks like you may have also broken your ankle, so I don’t think you’ll be doing any more skating for a while.

Not until a healer comes to the island.”

“If you would just let me finish—” Skye’s mouth clicked shut when Ivain shot him a look.

“Listen to me, boy,” Ivain said, kind but firm. “I’m not sure how you did what you just did, but you’re never to use that kind of magic again? Understand?”

“But—”

“Never again,” Ivain snapped. “What you just did—it’s a type of bloodcraft.”

Skye’s brows rose. “How was that bloodcraft? I was healing her.”

“Bloodcraft,” Ivain said, slipping into the role of teacher as he began binding Taly’s leg, “covers a wide range of spells—anything from healing to aether contamination to ascendancy. More so than any other discipline of shadow magic, it is the most intimately connected to aether, focusing not only on the way it moves through this world but the way it shapes it. Aether is everywhere and in everything, and our magic allows us to control it. To use it to transform ourselves and the world around us.”

Ivain moved to Taly’s ankle, pulling a dagger from his boot and using it to splint the broken bone.

“Before we had so many regulations on shadow magic,” he went on, “I could’ve taught you how to turn your skin to bone, your bones to metal.

I could show you a spell that would track a person across space and time using only a few drops of blood.

Now, however, with our numbers dwindling, I can’t.

The Dawn Court has decided that most forms of bloodcraft are too dangerous to be taught or practiced. ”

“It doesn’t seem dangerous,” Skye muttered, kicking at the snow.

It seemed powerful. Alluring. Years later, he could still feel the pull, the temptation to reach inside and find that feeling again.

“Could you teach me?” Skye asked, helping Ivain tie off the last of Taly’s bandages. “The few spells that are still legal, I mean. It wouldn’t interfere with my studies. I promise, I… I just want to learn.”