Defiant by Karina Sumner-Smith

Author:Karina Sumner-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Talos
Published: 2015-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

In the hour before dawn, Shai sat in silence at Mercks’s bedside, watching the wounded man sleep. It was quiet in his small room—no family, no sound of others’ breaths, only the faint whispers of air through the vents and voices speaking someplace distant.

She should go, she knew; Mercks deserved his privacy, and his rest. He was healed—or healing. She didn’t even know him. Yet she stayed, watching the slow rise and fall of his breathing, the twitch of his eyes beneath the veils of his lids.

“I …” she started, and fell silent. No use in speaking, for all that the words crowded on her tongue.

Shai ran a weary hand over her face. She wanted to curl up and lay her head on the mattress; wanted to have a soft sheet cover her, like Mercks did. She wanted to close her eyes and fall into sleep, or some quiet oblivion, if only for a while.

Anything to silence her thoughts or the chaos they left in their wake.

She’d thought using her magic was only a matter of practice. In life, Shai had avoided learning anything but the most basic of spells; there had been no need for her to do anything more. Yet in trying to work even the simple spells that children learned alongside the alphabet, she failed and failed again. It seemed she was years and millions of renai too late for simple.

Whatever instinct had enabled her to heal Mercks was likewise absent. It was only as she thought of the song she’d hummed without meaning to, and the memories the melody had conjured, that she made some small progress.

It wasn’t the singing that helped, she found through experimentation, but the feelings behind the song. When she thought of warmth—of lying curled in her bed, pillows and blankets like clouds all around her, morning sunlight on her face—she could create a spell that generated heat. Not the most useful, given the stifling summer; but a similar memory, of sipping iced tea as beads of condensation rolled down the glass, could conjure a cool breeze from within her cupped hands.

It wasn’t enough. Even those few successes had been clumsy and inefficient, the spells working only because of the sheer force of power that she’d pumped through them.

Shai looked down at Mercks’s sleeping face, as if she might find comfort within the lines and shapes that living had etched on his skin, the patterns of a life well lived. Here, in the rise and fall of his breathing, was the evidence she wanted. His healed skin, the flow of blood within his body. If she could only work one true spell, at least it had been this one.

Her magic was dying.

That thought—that knowledge—had been echoing through her head for hours now, no matter that she’d tried to ignore it or push it aside. When her magic had failed in the underground, she’d thought its brief absence akin to magic shock—that she’d used too much power too quickly and had paid the price, improbable though it seemed.

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