Like morning mists fleeing the sunlight, anyevidence of his treason evaporated.
And the grips on my heart vanished.
I gasped in chunks of air and, as soon as I could control my muscles, I staggered down the charred steps off the dais and to Callista.
She lay unconscious on the floor. Her brother now knelt next to Koan on her right while Jolter, Molanna, and Forten knelt on her left. They all moved back a few feet as I rushed haphazardly to her side. I searched for a pulse on her throat with one hand and wiped the hair away from her face with my other.
“She’s alive,” I whispered, keeping a hand on the side of her head.
Koan knelt next to me. “She said he shot magic at her that would poison her blood like the rose bush.”
I groaned. Guyan had poisoned the rose tree and my parents… and now Callista.
“Then,” Koan added, “he used magic to attack her lungs. She could still breathe and talk, but it sounded like she was wheezing.” His voice caught, but he pressed on. “She struggled for breath, but she kept saying it would be okay until she suddenly just collapsed. I checked… She didn’t have a pulse. But when you… When Guyan disappeared, her pulse came back. But she’s still unconscious. I… I tried to heal her, but my magic can’t find any injuries.”
I moved my hand to the top of her chest, as close to her heart as I dared get without offending her brother’s sensibilities. Koan’s family was powerful, and their magic was strong—there was a reason they were some of the oldest and richest nobles—but Koan was barely an adult. I had decades more practice in healing.
I poured my magic into her body, scanning for internal injuriesand moving to her blood. It had to be some kind of blood poisoning—probably Guyan’s first strike that had seemed so harmless. But like the healers who had attended my parents, I could not isolate an injury.
My heart hurt. I felt it ripping in response to Callista’s pain, like it protested the agony that burned through her blood now.
My heart felt her pain.
The realization dawned on me with so much power I gasped out loud. Not all of the emotions I’d felt during the last few weeks had come through the mistek bond. Some of them—every emotion I’d felt from her today—had come to me through the tender connections we’d offered each other as we’d shared our feelings, our vulnerabilities, and our hopes. They were the links of love—the fragile hopes that the most powerful marriage bonds were built on.
“Did you find it?” Koan asked.
“Not yet,” I whispered. “But… wait.”
I could not tell them that our hearts had been building a bridge between each other for weeks. I was not ready to confess to the crowd around us that I needed her to live more than I needed to live myself. They did not need to know that my heart, cursed organ that it was, had found the key to saving her.
I might leave them without a king after all, but I would give them a queen who would love them.
I stopped channeling magic the way I had for my entire life. I lifted up her hand and pressed the back of her palm to my lips. “Live, Callista,” I whispered against her skin. “Give me the poison and live.”
I clutched her hand close to my heart and closed my eyes, focusing all my energy on the rawlink between us.
If only you were married,my mind mourned.Then you would have a proper bond between you, and finding the poison would be simple.
Ah,my heart corrected,but that marriage bond would make this procedure impossible. If you were bound by marriage, a lethal blood poison would kill you both.
And then I found it. The magic poison Guyan had buried so deeply that it masqueraded as an untouchable illness. Power surged from my heart into hers. It traced through her body, touching every drop of blood and every particle of poison, and drawing it out. I could not destroy the poison with my magic—Guyan had tied it to her blood in a way that my flames could not isolate.
But my heart touched hers.
My heart could draw the poison out of hers.
And I did so gladly.
Chapter 35: Callista
Istood in a forest fire. Flames surrounded me, scorching my skin, but also burning through my blood. I tried running away from the fire, but I could not escape the pain. Every part of me hurt.
And then something cool touched my hand. The heat in my head faded. The pain that burned through my entire body flowed to my chest and then… disappeared.
A cool hand touched the side of my face, and a voice—a familiar voice, one that brought the warmest, sweetest, safest feelings—whispered my name.
Aedan.
