“It’s a trap,” Teddy said.
She turned around to go back the way they came, but she could just make out Drew and Dixon descending the trail toward the edge of the long bridge.
Teddy turned to look at her, his hand brushing her bloody side. “I thought you healed quickly. Why are you still bleeding so much?”
Stella had wondered the same. “I don’t know. Maybe they?—”
Rett’s words flew through her mind again.“Let’s see how you do fighting like the rest of us mere mortals.”
Teddy grabbed her arm. “What is it?”
She brushed her fingers to her side, staring at her blood. “I think maybe they used Godsbane.”
Teddy’s eyes went wide. “Does that mean you can’t use your magic?”
She snapped a flame to her bloody fingers. “No. I think it just means I won’t heal the same way or be able to do intricate memory recovery until it’s out of my system.”
“How long will that take?” Teddy asked.
Stella shrugged. “Longer than the next two minutes. It looks like our best way out is down.”
The river rushed far below them.
“The fall could kill us,” Teddy said.
“Not if you break it with a gust of wind while I ease the water up a bit.”
He looked at her skeptically. “That’s a lot of coordination.”
“We have about thirty seconds until we have to jump either way.”
Teddy stared down at the water and fear seared through her chest. “Might be a bad time to mention that I can’t swim.”
“What?” Stella stared at him in disbelief. “How is that possible? You’ve spent a month every summer in Olney.”
“A prince cannot be bad at things.”
“Bullshit. Jalen is a terrible archer.”
Teddy laughed, both from the stress and at the truth of that assessment. “He is. But I never learned to swim, and the older I got, the more awkward it would have been.”
Stella grimaced down at the current. “All right. Hold on tight and do not let me go. When we jump, you need to send a gust up to slow our fall. I’m going to try to steady the current, but it’s going to be rough and very cold. Whatever happens, do not let go of me. I cannot fight the current to get to you if you do.”
She felt the first prickles of a storm as she glanced to where Rett and his friends charged onto the far end of the bridge. The whole structure swayed with the added weight.
She met Teddy’s golden eyes. “Trust me.”
He nodded and lifted her onto his back. Stella wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and jumped.
The wind tore at her hair and she swallowed a reflexive scream as they plunged toward the water. They fell for what felt like an eternity.
Stella reached her magic wide. Water summoning had always been so sluggish for her; the violence of it was similar to fire, but it was slippery, harder for her to channel and control. It tore through her energy stores so much faster than fire and required the sort ofattention that she didn’t have while free-falling in the arms of a prince who would drown if she let him go.
Teddy’s sudden windstorm arrested their fall just enough for her to draw the water up.
“Hold your breath,” she shouted, her words instantly lost in the wind.
They plunged into the column of water. The jolt rattled her bones and stung her exposed skin. Stella gasped out half of her air at the shock of the frigid water.
