Sharon Shinn - Reader And Raelynx

Cammon felt as if he had been slapped by certain knowledge. “Senneth!” he exclaimed. “Give it to me!”

Senneth opened her eyes and stared at him. “What?”

He had his hand out to her but he was looking around at the others. “And Kirra-give me your lioness charm. Ellynor, what do you have? One of those black opals you Lirren girls wear? Let me have it. Donnal, do you carry anything you can give me?”

Kirra understood first. “Oh, this is like the time you helped me change Justin!” she exclaimed, rooting through her pockets for the small stone lioness she always carried. “You’re going to feed our power to Amalie.”

“I’m going to try,” he said.

Senneth had already stripped off her wedding gift. She lifted it to her lips, gave Tayse a smile from over her shoulder, and passed it over. “If it melts in your hands, I swear I’ll never forgive you,” she said.

Ellynor offered him a gold bracelet set with black opals, but Donnal shook his head, smiling. “I don’t carry anything like that,” he said.

Kirra took his hand. “ I’ll be his charm,” she said. “You can pull his magic through me.”

“I don’t understand,” Valri said.

“Cammon is an amplifier,” Senneth said. “He can take someone else’s magic and boost it with his own.” She shook her head. “Impossible to explain. Impossible to understand. But he seems to think he can feed all of our power through his own, and give it to Amalie, and make her even stronger.”

Cammon slipped Senneth’s pendant over his neck, fastened Ellynor’s bracelet around his wrist, and cupped Kirra’s lioness in his hand. He felt prickles of magic dance along his skin; his blood was bubbling in his veins. It was hard to stand still. “I think I can,” he said.

“Please don’t,” Valri whispered. “Amalie, please don’t do this.”

Amalie kissed her stepmother on the forehead. “Valri, I must.”

From across the field came Coralinda’s voice, raised in mockery. “Senneth! Have you failed so quickly? Have you spent all your power on one attempt to destroy me? Or do you finally see how my goddess protects me from all such abominations as your magic?”

Without another look at Valri, at any of them, Amalie turned to face the Lestra and took a few steps deeper into the valley. “I will duel with you on Senneth’s behalf,” she called, and quiet though her voice was, it carried across the field that separated them. “Coralinda Gisseltess, I will strike you down.”

Amalie did not throw her hands in the air or take a melodramatic pose. She merely folded her fingers before her, and bowed her head, and thought about Coralinda Gisseltess. Cammon could almost see her mind building a bridge across the valley, a tumbling, haphazard structure that nonetheless raced across the grass and flowers with an implacable speed. And across this insubstantial structure her curious soul went questing, and crowding behind her came the blinding energy of a half dozen mystics.

It was as if she had opened a tunnel for an invading army, and Cammon felt himself standing on the threshold of the tunnel door. They stampeded across him-Senneth blazing in the lead, Kirra and Donnal bounding after her, Ellynor and even Valri stealing behind the others, armed with dark and mysterious weapons. They were across the pathway-they were descending upon Coralinda-they were laying about them with blade and claw and sorcery.

A shriek of pure rage went up from across the valley, and it was so forceful it seemed to rock them all backward. Amalie stumbled, and Cammon briefly lost his footing. A silver onslaught had set all their own soldiers in retreat-Coralinda’s mirror magic turning their own weapons on them, forcing their armies back across the bridge.

But only briefly. Cammon felt Senneth’s surge of renewed determination, racing through him with an actual heat, pouring into Amalie and back across that bridge. The others, too, pressed closer, offered him more, filled him with wild and kaleidoscopic impressions. Senneth raged in orange and gold; Ellynor and Valri brooded in saturated blue. Kirra and Donnal danced between them, shifting and uncontainable. Cammon had the strangest thought that he was a prism in reverse, collecting the whole spectrum of color, feeding it into an indescribably delicate piece of crystal, and compressing it into a single beam of pure unadulterated light.

That light broke against the blackness that was Coralinda Gisseltess, and was absorbed, and reformed into something still and dark and insatiable. She ate their light, she negated their color; they drove themselves against her, and she did not waver at all.

He felt Senneth’s body burn higher; he was flushed with fever. Hotter. Impossible that anyone could sustain such a temperature. Hotter. She staggered a few steps toward him, cried out in a hoarse voice, and fell to the ground.

Instantly, there was chaos. Amalie faltered; Kirra dropped to her knees beside Senneth. Coralinda’s black-and-silver counterassault came charging across the bridge, straight for the princess.

“Kirra!” Cammon shrieked, frantically summoning some of his own buried power, feeding to Amalie any of the fuel left in his own magic. Coralinda’s dark force was halted at about the three-quarter mark. “Leave her! I need you!”

Tayse was on the ground beside Senneth, and Kirra leapt to her feet again, pouring a furious stream of energy directly into Cammon’s head. It wasn’t enough. Coralinda was regrouping. In seconds, she would begin battering against their greatly weakened defenses.

Cammon sent an impassioned plea a mile away, across the battlefield. Jerril! Areel! Help me! he cried. He felt Jerril’s attention jerk his way, felt Jerril’s power immediately and completely accessible to him. More slowly, he sensed Areel scan the battlefield, comprehend the plea, and unlock the closed treasure chest of his mind.

Power poured through him like rainwater through a parched riverbed.

But there were other mystics on the battlefield this day.

He sent his mind skipping across the royal camp, seeking out those Carrebos recruits, begging for assistance. One by one, startled or frightened or pleased or confused, they responded to him, turning from their ordinary tasks to wage an extraordinary war against a common enemy. Their power rolled to him in a bewildering array of strengths and colors, but he bundled it all up, coiled it into a weapon, and thrust that weapon into Amalie’s hand.

Coralinda’s army was halted, but he was not sure it could be defeated. For a long moment they all stood frozen, tense, suffused with magic, perfectly balanced and perfectly opposed forces that could move neither forward nor back.

A single plaintive yowl split the silence. Cammon was startled to feel a warm weight suddenly push against his thigh, and he stared down into the savage face of the raelynx. It made that piteous noise again, and again batted its paw against his leg.

Sweet gods. This lawless creature was offering him its own wild power.

Cautiously, Cammon opened his mind to the raelynx, but even so he was not prepared for what boiled into his body. A rush of violent red, a fever-bright fury, a thoughtless and primitive instinct for carnage. He took the raelynx’s rage and magnified it and fed it straight into Amalie’s veins.

From across the valley, Coralinda choked and stumbled, and Amalie’s forces pushed her back to the halfway point of the bridge.

But only halfway. They were locked again in symmetrical combat-too strong to yield to the Lestra, too weak to destroy her. All the mystics in all of Gillengaria could not defeat Coralinda Gisseltess.

Behind him, small noises-a whispered word, the rustle of clothing. Help me stand , said a voice, very faint. There was the sound of a boot striking a rock.