blade free. A stomach-rolling snap sounded as it tore from her, and she fell forward, still. I scrambled to catch her, and a thick hand took me by my throat. I grabbed Isabelle’s dress, desperate to stay with her. There was supposed to be an after.
“This is unfortunate,” Henry said, yanking me to my feet.
Winter had come and gone, and there was nothing left in me.
“You are truly more trouble than you are worth,” he said to Coline, not even looking at me. He lifted me higher and higher until I hung from the gallows of his grasp. “Surrender to face justice, or I will kill her now.”
Twenty-Nine
Emilie
No one would save me. No one could save me.
There was freedom in knowing the closeness of death.
I channeled more magic than I ever would have dared through his hand holding me, raking it across the muscles of his hands as I would if I were debriding a wound, and he pushed me away, the leftover magic creaking in my aching bones. A soldier tried to attack Waleran. The chevalier waved his hand, power leaping between them. Smoke curled from the soldier’s nose and mouth. He gagged and fell.
As did the five soldiers around him.
Beneath the bright noon sun of a blue Demeine autumn day, Waleran was at full power. The soldiers couldn’t touch him, and he needed only to channel a small gathering of the noonday arts to down five at once. I tried to reopen his old wound, and Pièrre’s magic ripped me away from it. Charles looked from Pièrre to Waleran and then down at his own hand, his face inscrutable. I knew that look.
Charles had an idea.
I picked up a soldier’s knife. Waleran’s back was half to me, his face turned to stare at the soldiers. I sprinted to him and buried the knife in his shoulder. Waleran roared and flung his arm back, catching me in the face. I went flying and fell. He stalked after me.
Charles crept up behind him.
“You can’t kill me,” Waleran said. “What part of that statement doesn’t make sense to you?”
I gathered magic so he wouldn’t feel what Charles was doing, and Waleran laughed.
“I wasn’t trying to kill you.” I laughed and pushed myself up to my feet. “I was distracting you.”
Waleran pulled the knife from his shoulder. The skin of his newly repaired throat reddened and swelled. He coughed, blood dripping from his nose, and threw the knife away. His breath caught in his chest, and he stumbled, fingers scratching at the scarlet rash seeping across the skin of his neck. The wound oozed, and behind him, Charles released the last of the healing arts he had been channeling. I laughed again and doubled over. Waleran fell.
Charles hadn’t undone his healing.
Charles had healed him—altering Waleran’s body alchemistry until his natural defenses recognized the new pieces as someone else’s and attacked them. Charles had turned Waleran’s body against him.
Waleran, again, for the final time, bled out in the grass.
A soldier whooped, and I fell back into the dirt. Madeline, healed, crawled until she was sitting next to me. I wanted to laugh or cry, but there was nothing left in me to fuel the movements. All I could do was stare at the sky.
Pièrre and his one remaining hack didn’t surrender. The soldiers that were still standing surrounded them, keeping a good ways back after Pièrre stopped the heart of one. Still, he channeled through his hack. He wasn’t worn down at all.
Charles sunk into the grass, legs crossed like a tailor, and nodded. “Let’s heal the soldiers. We can deal with him after.”
“Or during, if he tries anything,” Madeline muttered, twirling the sliver of metal that impaled her between her fingers. “He knows he’s lost. There’s no telling what he’ll do.”
We walked through the field and healed the injured. Louis worked on a particularly complicated injury from Waleran’s spear, his years of experience more useful than the other three of us combined. Charles finished healing a downed soldier and rose to his feet, knees shaking with effort. I hooked an arm through his, and we leaned against each other. He was a marvel of nuance.
The healing he had channeled was so well controlled and powerful that it held together the torn edges of a lung without wearing away at the rest of the soldier’s body.
“He’s good,” I said, knocking the soldier out with alchemistry. I was certain that I would either be awake for days or sleep for weeks when this was