Chapter 10: This Is How You Kill

Elara's POV

It wasn't the count that was wrong.

It was the smell.

Nightbloom grass carried a faint sweetness underneath its bitterness, something almost metallic, like copper warming in a closed fist. But the smell hanging in the air now was heavier than forty-odd plants could account for, thick enough to coat the back of the throat. The wind was coming from the left, and the tree line on that side sat darker than it should have.

"Marla," I said. "Move back."

"What?"

"Back. Now."

The first curse came from our right and slightly behind us — I heard it before I saw it, that brief, sharp sound like fabric tearing along a hidden seam. I shoved Marla sideways and threw myself in the opposite direction. My shoulder caught a tree root on the way down, and the pain blanked my vision for a half-second. Where I'd been standing, the earth exploded into a shallow crater.

Three figures stepped out from behind the trees.

Vivian walked in the center, wearing the short traveling cloak students used for collection fieldwork. Her hair was braided neatly, every strand in place.

"Vaneth," she said. "What a coincidence."

"Vivian."

"Accidents happen in the forest all the time." She smiled, just slightly. "That second-year last year — didn't he fall on his own?"

I moved in front of Marla.

"What do you want."

"What do I want?" Her voice climbed, cracking at the top. "After what you did in the West Hall corridor yesterday — you're going to stand there and ask me that?"

"I didn't do anything."

"The Lord of Nightshade had his arm around your waist!"

Her hands were shaking.

In that single second, I understood something almost too bitter to hold: she had probably never exchanged a word with Kaelen in her life. This wasn't about losing someone to me. It was something older and uglier than that — the fact that the girl whose textbooks had been thrown into a waste bin was now standing somewhere Vivian couldn't reach, and that was the thing she couldn't forgive.

"Vivian," I said. "Lower your hand."

"Who do you think you are."

The second curse came down faster than the first, and brighter. I recognized the color — Scorching Thorn, a third-year advanced technique, banned in sanctioned duels for good reason. It didn't kill cleanly. It burned through.

I only had time to push Marla flat against the ground.

The curse never reached me.

It stopped less than a pace away, as though it had struck something solid and invisible. It held there for half a breath — and then it began to contract, its light pulling inward inch by inch, condensing into something smaller and brighter and far more concentrated than what it had been.

Then it reversed.

When it hit, it was larger than before. It struck the ground in front of Vivian, and all three of them were thrown backward. I heard the sound of bone breaking. Two trees came down.

When I got to my feet, Kaelen was standing behind me. One hand in his pocket, the other hanging loose at his side. He hadn't turned to look at what he'd done. From the moment it happened to this one, he hadn't turned his head once.

"What did you do," I said.

"Nothing," he said. "She cast it herself."

I was already moving past him.

Vivian had landed nearly twenty feet away. Her left leg was bent at an angle that made my stomach drop. The cloak was burned through across a wide section, and blood was soaking steadily through the fabric beneath. The other two were still moving — one clutching an arm, one retching into the dirt.

I knelt and pulled open my medicine pouch.

My hands were shaking badly enough that I fumbled the clasp twice. I miscounted the hemostatic powder the first two times and had to start over on the third. The bandage cloth kept slipping.

"Ela."

I didn't answer.

"She was trying to kill you."

"I know that," I said. "I'm in the Potions track. I know exactly what that curse does."

"Then why are you helping her."

"Because I'm in the Potions track." I pressed the cloth against her leg and leaned my weight into it until my knuckles went white. "The first thing they taught us in third year — the very first lesson — was that a healer who encounters someone injured in the field treats them. No exceptions. Doesn't matter who they are."

I looked up.

The two fallen trees had caught fire, and the light was rising from below, throwing everything into sharp relief — the line of his jaw pulled tight, the shadow his lashes cast across his cheekbones. In the firelight, his eyes were somewhere between gold and red.

I shouldn't have noticed that. Not here, not with blood on my hands and the smell of burning wood in the air. I noticed it anyway, and then I was immediately disgusted with myself for it.

"Fine," he said.

The smell of blood draws things quickly in this part of the forest. By the time I heard it, it was already close — the Iron-Spine Tusk, the field registry called it, shoulder-height at full growth, built low to the ground when it ran, teeth that didn't retract. The registry's note under encounter protocol read: withdraw on sight; do not engage.

It came from my left at a dead run.

I had just enough time to twist my body over Vivian's, covering her completely.

After that, there was nothing to do but wait.

What I heard instead was a single heavy impact — the dense, final sound of something very large being driven into the ground. I opened my eyes. Kaelen was standing three paces away, one hand still in his pocket, the other pressed flat against the creature's skull, pinning it to the earth. It convulsed, all four legs churning through the mud, and then it went still.

He straightened up. He reached into his pocket and produced a cloth, and he cleaned his hand with it — slowly, finger by finger, thorough and unhurried. When he finished, he dropped the cloth onto the body.

Then he turned and looked at the three people lying on the ground. His face held nothing at all — the same neutral attention you might give a table, or a stone, or any other object that happened to be in your line of sight.

"What just happened," he said, with a slight tilt of his head toward the scorched crater where Vivian's curse had been turned back, "was small. Reflexive. Barely worth the effort."

He looked at the creature at his feet.

"This," he said, "is how you kill."