Soul of Flame (Imdalind Series #4) (25 page)

The vision flashed from the alley to a foreign river, the wide, winding brown sludge turning red as I watched.

“The war begins in the dark of night,” my voice rang out as I watched myself run into a solid cliff face, the stone carved with a man atop a horse. I ran through the stone like it was little more than air, Ilyan and more than a dozen others following me.

My sight flashed from the ornate carving to one of Ilyan holding me against a wall, his arm strong as he protected me, his face hard as he faced an enemy I couldn’t see.

“Válka začíná v temnotě noci,” the same male voice echoed around us, the sight changing to those same red roofs, bathed in firelight as they burned away, the long tongues of fire reaching into the dark night sky.

“With hell behind and hell before,” my voice spoke on its own as the fire left my sight only to see myself standing on a burning rooftop, draped in the same long cloak I had been wearing in the last image.

“S peklem zezadu a peklem vepředu,” the voice spoke again, and this time I understood what was happening. My magic had connected to my father’s, the sight opening between us as he experienced this sight as I did, hand in hand.

“One must fall before the light,” I said as blood flowed down the dark cave floor. It trailed through the bodies of men I had never seen, the amount of bloodshed twisting my stomach even through the dampened emotions the sight gave me.

“Jeden musí padnout před světlem,” he spoke the words as the blood continued to run over the stone before the sight fell on the loosely curled fingers of a hand, a hand I was sure to be dead. I waited for it to continue, to show me who was to die, but the vision faded to nothing, leaving me in the glowing red embers again.

“Je rozděleno,” we said together, our voices perfectly matched in the darkness of my sight as I spoke words aloud that I did not understand.

The sight left me just as my breathing picked up, my eyes still drifting in and out of focus. I gripped the table as I waited for the strobe in my vision to slow, to recover from the intensity of the joint sight I had been infused with.

Ilyan moved my hair aside as he pressed his cool hand against my neck, my Drak blood so sensitive that with his touch I was flooded with his words and thoughts, the images of his thoughts coming so fast they flashed in a blur of color.

“Where?” I asked, my voice so strained and elongated it almost didn’t sound like me.

“Where what?” I heard Ilyan ask in alarm, the roofline of the city flashing in my mind, the screams of the people echoing in my ears.

I groaned in physical pain as the recall left, leaving me heaving as I tried to fight through the dizziness that still felt like it was trying to move into me.

“Where… is that?”

“Prague.”

Ilyan’s emotions spiked through me as Sain’s answer sent him into a panic. His demand for knowledge came quickly, the context easily understood, even though he spoke in Czech.

The images of his home flowed from him so fast I couldn’t stop them. The memories of his life matched up with the sight until all that was left was a jumble of fear and happiness.

Edmund is going to use the Vilỳs to attack Prague. To use the humans to create an army, a magical race that only he can control.
I sent the words into Ilyan’s mind as I looked into him, his wide eyes boring into me.

“When?”

Soon
, I wanted to answer him, to send the words to him, but I couldn’t.

The time table made no sense. Edmund was due to arrive in Rioseco at any time, to fight in the battle that the sight had shown would be his end. When I would kill him.

Which could mean one of two things.

I would either fail and give Edmund a chance to build his army, or the attack against Ilyan’s beloved home had already begun.

Ilyan’s eyes were desperate as I looked into him, his pained need for knowledge breaking my heart. I couldn’t tell him.

“It’s too late,” Sain answered for me. “It has already begun.”

Ilyan’s eyes widened as his jaw clenched, the look in his eyes almost haunting. I could feel his anger and feel the pain over the knowledge that he could do nothing.

I grasped Ilyan’s hand, desperate to give him the calm he needed—desperate to help him find clarity—when a yell broke out from somewhere in the abbey. A deep, masculine scream that echoed through the stone hallways of the abbey before it reached us.

My blood sped at the sound. My hand wound tightly around Ilyan’s as the sound came again, Ilyan’s fear at a possible battle flooding into me.

Not yet. I wasn’t ready yet.

I sent my magic away from me in a tidal wave that crashed over the abbey, filling every nook and cranny until I felt the source of the scream, the answer freezing my blood.

It wasn’t the battle.

I had thought I had failed.

Thanks to the fight Ryland and I had gotten ourselves into, no one except Ilyan and I knew what I had tried to do.

What had apparently worked.

Dramin had woken up.

Sixteen

Dramin.

I spoke the word into Ilyan’s mind before I bolted away from the table, my red shoes slipping on the stone as I ran away from the kitchen toward the faint pull of magic that throbbed and pulsed as Dramin tossed in his bed.

I focused on him as I ran, my stomach dropping in alarm as his magic ebbed a bit. The weakening strain worried me that he was slipping away again. I needed to get there before that happened.

I had made it down one hall before voices and footsteps erupted behind me, the thunderous tumult making it obvious that everyone was following me. I picked up my pace as I turned the last corner, my feet slipping on the rubble from where I had thrown Ryland into the wall. I could see the wide door just ahead, the wooden slab inset in the stone.

I took the last few steps at what felt like a snail’s pace, though I knew I was running; the door swung open as the flare from my magic pushed it. When I slid into the door frame with a loud grunt, Dramin turned toward me, his green eyes hooded and tired.

Everything stopped as our eyes met, my face heating and burning as I looked into the bright sheen in his eyes. I had thought I hadn’t been able to heal him; I had thought I had failed. I couldn’t have been happier to be wrong.

“Uncle.”

“Silnỳ.” His voice broke and cracked as his weak body tried to push himself to sitting.

I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face, my joy at seeing him awake temporarily trumping the guilt I felt at putting him there. I entered the room at a dead run, my arms wrapping around Dramin as I tackled him, pushing him right back down onto the bed.

He grunted at the impact, his arms stiff before they came to wrap around me, his touch calm and hesitant. I felt the soft touch on my back, and I snapped, my guilt and sadness tumbling together until they ran down my cheeks in warm streams.

“I am so sorry,” I sobbed into him, my voice breaking as my chest heaved, everything in me tightening in despair. “I d-didn’t mean to. I am s...sorry.”

I pushed the words out the best I could, hating when the stutter came back yet pushing past it. I needed to tell him. I needed him to know that it had been an accident. I needed him to understand.

“Silnỳ,” Dramin said in my ear, his voice so soft I could barely hear him. “Dear child, you did nothing other than what the sight had shown, nothing other than what was in your heart, and I do not fault you for that. I never could.”

His arms wrapped tighter around me, his words digging into my soul as the tears came faster. The weight that had hidden itself in the deep pit of my heart vanished, taking a tiny bit of the stress I had harbored with it. I gasped for breath as my body relaxed, the now joyful tears that slid down my face increasing as I felt the others enter the room.

“Dramin,” Ilyan gasped from the door, his voice a wave of awe that washed over us. His quick gait pounded through the surprised silence, his hand landing lightly on my hip as he came up beside us.

“You are well, my friend,” Ilyan whispered, the emotion choking his voice away.

Dramin looked toward him and chuckled, the sound that I had grown so used to—the sound I had missed so much—warming me. I had almost expected never to hear it again. Hearing it lifted the fear that had lived in my heart and warmed the chill that had dwelled in this room. It was its own form of magic.

“You’re alive.”

The irritation that was so normal in Thom’s voice was choked by his joy, his face pale from where he stood in the doorway. I moved to the side as Thom rushed to his friend, embracing him as a brother. The two men clung to one another as Wyn and Sain helped Ryland into the room, his agitation obviously growing alongside the heightened emotions that surrounded him.

They moved in slowly until Sain caught sight of the scene in front of him. He froze in place, the deep emotion that I had wanted so desperately to see over the past few days glistening down his cheeks.

“Můj syn,” he whispered, and although I didn’t understand the words, I caught the meaning, the joy at seeing his son alive.

Sain rushed forward before the echo of his voice had fully faded, his feet stumbling over themselves in his desperate need to reach his son.

“Tatí,” Dramin whispered, the break in his voice making it clear that he, too, was weeping, but I didn’t see that.

All I saw were his hands wrapped around my father’s. His father’s.

All I saw was the greeting that I had so desperately wanted, the love behind it one that I wasn’t so sure I hadn’t pushed away.

Jealousy rocked through me, green and bitter in my veins. I stumbled away from Ilyan’s side, fighting the need to run away and destroy something, to scream, to mourn what I had lost when Cail had murdered my mother.

A family.

The realization rocked through me, my heart clenching as it felt what I had been trying so hard to ignore. I think a large part of me had healed Dramin because it was the right thing to do. However, another, much smaller part had broken my father’s rule in desperation to gain back the closest thing that had felt like family.

To prove that I didn’t need him.

“My boy, my boy,” Sain said as tears streaked down his cheeks, his words adding yet another stabbing pain to my heart. “You’re alive. After so long…” Sain’s voice trailed off into Czech as he clung to Dramin’s hand.

My heart seized with want as I watched them, pain moving through me as it tried to drum up the anger that I was working so hard to hide. I couldn’t stay here. I let the shaking sadness out and moved toward the door, staying in the shadow and as close to the shelved wall as I could in an attempt to go unnoticed.

“I don’t understand,” Sain said, “Joclyn saw your death. How is this possible?”

I froze in place at the sound of my name, my eyes shifting toward them as I pressed my back into the high shelving. For the first time since Sain had come to him, Dramin looked up to me, his eyes widening at where I stood, waiting for the reprimand to come. I looked into my brother, but instead of frustration, I saw the pride that he had looked at my father with a few minutes before. My chest loosened with that look, my heartbeat steadying with the hope of being welcomed.

“Joclyn healed me, Tatínek.”

To me the words were a calm, comforting cloud of acceptance, however my father heard anything but. His focus snapped to me, the pride in his green eyes vanishing.

“You healed him? After I commanded you not to?” Sain asked, the disgust in his voice catching me off guard, and I flinched, wishing I could hide myself into the shadows for one breadth of a second before the girl I had become came shining through, leaving the girl my father had abandoned behind.

“Commanded me?” I asked, unable to keep the scoff out of my voice. “You wanted me to let him die.”

“It was what your sight guided you to do.”

“The sight was wrong.”

Sain’s eyes widened at my words, his anger strong before it slid from his face, leaving him blank. I knew I should have felt bad for saying that, to deny something that I knew he revered, but I couldn’t stop the words. I couldn’t lie to him just to try to win his affection. It was not who I was. Not anymore.

“The sight was wrong? How can you say such things? No Drak would say such things.”

“Then maybe I am not a Drak,
Sain
,” I said, snapping his name out in disgust. “Letting someone I love die is wrong.”

My words were hard; I knew it. I knew it, and I didn’t care. This wasn’t like the fight with Ilyan—when I had said things that I didn’t mean—because I meant these. I needed him to understand me.

I stepped closer, my eyes pinned on Sain, knowing that if I looked anywhere else, my resolve would weaken.

“Do not deny the gift the earth… the mud has given you…” Sain said, his voice finally moving above that calm tone to rumble through the air around us.

“What gift?” I interrupted him, the screech in my voice hitting a level I hadn’t heard since before Santé Fe. “You make it feel like a curse. A curse I want nothing to do with. I do not want to die. I do not want him to die. Not every sight can be true, Sain.”

“You speak of things you do not understand,” Sain hissed, the sound as quick and painful as if someone had slapped me.

“I can’t understand what I don’t know,” I snapped back, hating how my defenses had gone up just by looking at him. “I can feel the power of the sights in my bones, but even with that, how can I walk into battle knowing that I am going to die? How can I let Dramin die if my magic begs me to heal him?”

I extended my hands toward him in hope of an answer—almost pleading with him to tell me—but he stood still, the hard glaze in his eyes boring a line of pain right to my heart.

I dropped my hands as I forced myself to look away from him, my eyes darting around the room as I tried to process the denial I had just experienced. Wyn stood by the door, her lips a hard line as she watched, the confusion on her face as clear as I was sure it was on mine. Thom’s joy had been temporarily trumped by his standby scowl as he tried to make sense of the anger that had taken over such a joyous moment.