Page 14 of Lies That Blemish (The Ember War #3)

Valor

For days, I’d been feeling foot pain around Tetra. It took me a while to put two and two together, and now I knew. Her pain was calling to me. I’d been around a couple of other injured people at Sky Reach. Just passing by them in the hall, their pain called to me, too, so I ran quickly to get away. But Tetra… I couldn’t ignore the pleas of her body any longer. The muscles, tendons, nerves, and bones were all crying out to be healed. That was the other creepy thing. I knew what tendons felt like, what they looked like without skin. All in my head. I could see it. I’d been seeing Tetra’s twisted foot in my mind’s eye for days, begging me to resculpt it like an artist with clay. It terrified me, so I’d ignored it. I ignored Zara’s inquiries about it, too. But I couldn’t ignore them any longer. Now, I was one hundred percent certain I could heal her foot. I just didn’t know the cost. Would it take from me? The energy had to come from somewhere. I knew that, too, instinctively.

Aisling didn’t believe it. She was watching Zara and me skeptically as we approached Tetra. Golden arcs of color lit up the living room walls as I walked toward her.

‘Is this healing magic?’ I asked Zara about the gold.

‘I suspect so. It is not a magic I had before bonding you,’ she told me.

It seemed whatever I was about to do, I needed Zara with me, because she had more of the golden stuff coming off of her than I did.

“Lie down,” I told Tetra, moving the tendons and bones in my mind’s eye from her mangled foot. It was as if someone had taken an x-ray of her deformity and then placed it into my head. But instead of a black-and-white x-ray, this had blood vessels and tendons, each one moving out of the way, twisting and turning into the right order as I worked through it like a math problem.

Tetra plopped onto the ground, wincing as she pulled her slightly swollen, red foot out before me. A sharp pang of pain hit my right foot, and I grimaced at the same time Tetra did.

“Don’t try this if it will hurt you,” Tetra told me as the pain in my right foot got worse, throbbing like a heartbeat, each time with more agony.

“It already hurts,” I told her. “How have you lived like this for so long?” I asked, and tears filled her eyes.

The picture of her foot in my mind’s eye finally reached perfection, and I sighed in relief as if I’d just worked out the worst mathematical problem Elaine had ever given me.

“What do you mean?” Tetra peered at the way I kept off of my right foot, holding it up slightly to dull the aching.

Crouching down beside her, I could hear the room holding their collective breath. Zara stepped closer, too. The bands of golden light glowing on Tetra’s face now.

“T, if this hurts me, it’s worth it,” I told her. Then I placed my golden-glowing hands on her hot right foot—the image in my mind snapped as an earth-shattering pain splintered in my foot, breaking it into a thousand pieces.

Golden light exploded off of Zara, too, blinding the entire room momentarily. Then Tetra and I both screamed as the pain became too much, and blackness took me.