Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns #4) - Kendare Blake Page 0,23

and a sickening scream rings out, cutting off abruptly at the sound of popping, as a hand of clenched knuckles. Worse still is the ripping noise that follows.

“I can’t . . . ,” Eamon sputters. He falls to the deck and grabs hold of Mirabella’s skirt. “I can’t!”

“You can! Focus!” She calls her storm again, eyes to the sky where thunderheads gather beside the moon. Crackles of lightning give them their eyes back, showing the strange shadows that move through the mist. “Wind,” she whispers. And the wind obeys. The elementals who remain still fight beside her; she feels their push added to her own. Their wind cuts through the gray, the diseased whiteness that surrounds them. But it is not enough. It flows through the mist like a sieve, and the mist keeps advancing.

Has it grown stronger since she last faced it? Has it taken her measure and learned new tricks?

“Ah! Help me!”

She looks down and sees Eamon half swallowed. She grasps his arm and pulls him closer as he screams.

She cannot save them. She will watch them all torn apart, turned inside out, one by one.

“Into the water!” She drags Eamon to the side and throws him overboard. “Dive! Swim for shore!”

Above, the storm bears down upon the mist. She grits her teeth, sends it coursing through the center of the blemished gray whorl. She sends lightning to crack it from the inside. Gusts to churn the waves and force the mist back to sea. Her blood sings with the rage of the weather, rage this time, not joy or freedom; she is not running on the cliffs of Shannon’s Blackway or singing a sailor safe. Her rage is blacker than the clouds that pummel the mist, louder than the wind that screams in her ears. And before it, the mist recoils. It comes apart. It turns tail and runs.

Mirabella holds the storm high long after she could let it rest. She holds it until the last weak wisps of white disappear back into the darkness.

Katharine and the Black Council watch the battle from the safety of shore, gathered before their torches, dark clothing and cloaks giving them the appearance of a murder of crows. When the elementals had cast themselves out to sea, it had taken so long for the barge to reach its destination that Cousin Lucian and Paola Vend had grown bored and started to idly complain about the state of the docks. But since the mist rose, Katharine has heard nothing aside from faint, fast breaths.

She sees them in her periphery, watching, their sight extended by spyglasses. Katharine does not bother with one. The mist is vast. She sees it swallow the barge easily enough. And her sister’s storm is impossible to miss booming out over the water.

They feel it, too: as the wind flaps through their clothing, and the rain, stinging cold and miserable, sticks their cloaks to their bodies.

“They are ditching into the water,” Antonin says. “They have failed.”

“How many are left?” asks Rho. “We should have had launches ready to retrieve any who made their escape.” She turns and barks to the queensguard, giving orders without waiting for Katharine to agree. But that is all right. She would have agreed, anyway.

“There’s blood,” Bree says, and gasps. “So much blood, on the deck.”

“Come on, sister,” Katharine whispers. “Save them.”

And as if she heard, Mirabella’s storm twists down upon the mist, joining the battle like lines of fresh cavalry. It batters the white down into the water and tears bits of it off to disappear. Just below her skin, Katharine feels the dead queens stretching toward Mirabella in awe. She cannot blame them. More than once she has wished that she were born the elemental. A storm like that would be a very useful pet to have. She watches the lightning strike and crackle across the sky in bright veins. She can see just when Mirabella tells it to attack and just what she asks it to do.

When the storm weakens, the torches on the barge relight, signaling that it is over, and that the elementals live.

“Launch the boats, Rho, like you said.” She turns to the stunned queensguard and claps her hands at them. “Now! Hurry! Make sure that they have aid!”

They go, and Rho goes with them. Katharine faces the rest of her Black Council. Bree looks so relieved that she may weep, and Luca’s lips curl in a small pleased smile. The others bow their heads, shivering in the winter