“I almost like this one,” the quiet one said. “Shame, really.” Holding Sophie with one hand, he drew a knife with the other, and Iason tightened his grip on Jarrett, whose knees gave out. Iason felt Jarrett weaken, scrabbling at Iason’s arm as he fought for air.
“We’re not here to kill you,” the quiet one said. The knife gleamed wickedly in the moonlight. “Or… not yet. See, you both managed to piss a Starian lady off something royal, so she wantsyouto watch what we do toherfirst.” With that, he drew the blade lengthways down Sophie’s forearm.
Sophie screamed.
Iason moved automatically. He twisted Jarrett’s neck, and it broke with a sick, familiar crack. But as Iason climbed over Jarrett’s body, the man holding Sophie took a step back and pushed her over the side of the boat.
She fell, gaze locked on Iason in a wordless plea, and the ocean swallowed her.
Iason didn’t know if he could swim. When he threw himself out of the rowboat, the cold water struck him like a fist. It locked his limbs as he dove, the weight of the ocean muffling all sound but the roaring in his ears, and the moonlight that filtered down from the surface was muted and dim. Below him, a shadow thrashed in the growing, endless dark, and blood bloomed in the water like smoke.
Sophie’s fingertips brushed his palm as he reached for her, and Iason thought of one of his only memories that remained whole: his sister’s grip going limp in his as the last of her strength drained away. He grabbed Sophie’s hand, but she didn’t squeeze back, and her face in the dying moonlight was waxy and corpselike, eyes too wide, mouth open.
She didn’t thrash or fight him. She didn’t wrap her arms around him or cling to his shoulders. She hung like a rag doll dragged by a small child, hair drifting in the current, and her eyes stared, unseeing.
She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve any of it. She should have grown up in relative obscurity in her old home by the ocean, with two fathers who didn’t spend all their time at sea. She’d become a noble lady, maybe pick up one or two bad habits along the way. There should have been no traitors for her to contend with, no assassins with patched-together memories to stagger into her path and drag her into the depths.
He held her head to his chest as he broke the surface of the water. Moonlight fell over them like liquid silver, something Sophie probably would have remarked upon a few minutes before.
“Sophie.” His voice was hoarse. “Sophie. Girl. Child.”
She didn’t answer. Iason’s fingers trembled as he brushed damp hair out of her unblinking eyes.
He wasn’t a healer. Only light mages were healers, and the only light mages he knew of were in Staria and were traditionally enemies of the mages who ruled Mislia. They had no love for Iason, and Iason didn’t even have the power to bind a demon. He had nothing.
Do it anyway,a small voice said in his mind. It sounded suspiciously like Sophie. The fool girl who believed in everything, who followed him to her death. She would have just willed it, somehow, and the laws of the world would have bent to accommodate her.
Iason closed his eyes. He let his awareness spread as it had in the ship, and he felt the dim magic lingering in the swiftly moving vessel, his own pale fire… and something else. Something deeper. Something below him. He probed it, curious, and came upon a magical source so powerful he almost forgot to tread water and had to struggle to the surface again. It was like seeking a candle and stumbling into a forest fire.
That would be enough. It had to be. It didn’t matter that magic didn’t work that way. Mislian mages channeled through their demons. Witches and light mages channeled through their bodies. No one drew on magic from somewhere else. But no one else was holding Sophie’s body in their arms. No one else knew her—the strange, optimistic girl who would have adopted a scorpion after it stung her. Just Iason.
“Fix it,” he whispered, dragging at the magic beneath him. It came slowly, sluggishly, like ripping a cloth in half with his bare hands, but Iason had nothing to lose. When it finally gave, the magic came rushing into him like a torrent. He could feel it filling his body, suffusing it, and Iason shook as a pale gold glow started to pour from his skin. Even the water trembled, and a wave pushed at him from below, as though something enormous were rising beneath him.
“I know I don’t deserve this,” he said, holding Sophie’s lifeless body to his chest. He wasn’t sure who he was speaking to—the dead gods of Mislia, himself, the magic—but it came out as a prayer, dragged through his gritted teeth. “But she does. I don’t love anything, I don’t know if I can, but she does,shedoes, and she deserves to live. I promise I’ll try to deserve it, if you do this. If you fix her. Make someone live, for once. Make this one person live.”
The magic bent around them, then twisted, forming an enormous, glowing net that spread over the waves. For a second they drifted there, caught in a spider’s web of magic, and then the power rushed into Sophie like an arrow to the heart, nearly jolting her from Iason’s grip. It spread out again, then snapped in, out, in, out, pulsing like a heartbeat. With every pulse, its radius tightened, until the glow faded to a shimmer in the water around them.
“Sophie.” Iason held her up, stroking her hair. “Please.”
Sophie’s eyes opened, and for an instant, they shone gold. Then the gleam faded, and she was just Sophie again, plain and unmagical, coughing up water and clinging to Iason’s neck.
“I thought I was going to die,” she sobbed, and Iason held her, shaking, as she wept into his shoulder.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I have you.”
Beneath them, another wave rolled upward, and Sophie tightened her grip on Iason as a low, horrible rumbling rose from the depths. The magical source Iason had drawn from wasn’t gone at all—it was still there, coming closer, impossibly fast.
And it wasroaring.
The water burst around them like a broken fountain, and Iason nearly let go of Sophie as dozens of slender, twisting creatures came to the surface, sliding over his arms and along his sides. They were water dragons, hundreds of them,thousands, feasting on foam and snapping at the water that fell over Iason and Sophie like rain, winding about each other in a boiling mass.
Then a massive dragon erupted from the ocean and blotted out the moon, silver light gleaming on its pearlescent scales. Its head was enormous, wings wide enough to envelop a ship, neck long and sinuous as a snake rearing to strike. It roared again, and the water dragons hissed back, making Iason feel like he was standing at the base of a thundering waterfall.
He raised his hand to cast a spell, but the dragon simply ducked its head and dove, and Iason only had time for a hoarse, broken shout before it emerged again beneath him. Water sluiced off it as it surfaced, and Iason, in desperation, clung to one of its scales.
“Hold on,” he shouted, with Sophie clutched tight to him.
He’d done this. This was an Old One, surely—a remnant of the dragons of Mislia that had gone extinct when the mages shot them out of the sky—and he’d angered it, drawing on its magic to heal Sophie. All he’d done was prolong their deaths so Sophie could die again in terror at the hands of an ancient beast.
