Page 79 of Darkest Magic

The first one to get through Linden’s guard was a Force strike, low and fast on his off side. He turned into it the way he took everything, square and unflinching.

I was close enough to see what happened next.

Bark sheeted over his forearm like armor.

It was fast, between one breath and the next. A skin of rough grey-brown wood rising up out of his own skin exactly where the blow was going to land.

The strike hit it and the bark took the hit, charring and cracking down its length with a wet splitting sound like a wet log in a fire. Before the crack had finished it was already regrowing under the char, knitting pale and new. A second later the bark sloughed off and there was his ordinary forearm underneath, unmarked, and he was already squaring to the next thing as if nothing had happened at all.

That wasn’t the end of it either.

A minute later a Force wave came in that was big enough to take the both of us out. I watched from the corner of my eye as it came toward us, turning wet ground to soup as it went, and I knew that if it hit us it would put us flat on our backs. But when it reached us nothing happened.

The ground seemed to creak under me and I glanced down only to find that the mud under our boots had gone hard, root-laced and knitted through. A mat of something pale and woody had grown throughout the churned earth in the time it took the strike to cross the gap, and the wave broke over it and died. As I watched grass came up in a green ring around Linden's feet that was the width of my two armspans, on a field that had quickly devolved into being a bog everywhere else.

Nobody noticed it, because most people were off watching Kit be spectacular, which was what Kit was for, and every other student out there had something coming at their own face.

I filed it next to the wolf at the treeline, and the ivy in the stacks that grew toward his chair, and the pressed fern that always looked greener near his hands, and suddenly I knew I was seeing another part of him, of his power that he kept hidden, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to channel his power.

The sensation of being watched was what caused me to break my fascination with Linden and look around. Vivienne Mallory didn’t miss whatever had just happened. I watched her watch us from the middle of the field with her hair still perfect. Striped jersey blazing in the sunlight.

She had realized that there was no going through Linden, who wasn’t moving and wasn’t tiring and hadn’t been marked by anything that had been thrown his way. I could almost see her decide that they’d go around him to get to me, and they’d do it in the one place in the whole school where nothing was anybody’s fault, because on a scrimmage field there were no incidents, only accidents, and accidents happened to everyone, especially when so much magic was flying around.

Kit had pushed the solids front so far back that the whole thing had folded in on itself, the groups and lines had splintered so far that people were now throwing in every direction at once, and nobody could say who had any business standing where. Some students would clearly catch a flash of green and let their power fly, whether it was stripes or solids was only something they realized later, which meant that a lot of people were firing at their own team.

Vivienne and her sidekicks seemed to melt into the throngs of people and powers for a while. I caught glimpses of her occasionally as she and her two came round the outside of the fighting along the left edge, where the grass was still whole and the instructors weren’t looking, but by the time I noticed, they were behind me.

It started small enough to deny. A shove from Vivienne first. I knew because I remembered the way her power felt and this was something I’d channeled before. It was a touch harder than the drill called for, even though we were going all out, there was still supposed to be decorum to the fighting. Her blow was enough to rattle my teeth in my head but not enough for any instructor on the edge to so much as turn. When I tried to face her, readying myself to grab her next strike, she was already gone.

Then Honora, off to my left, pulled the damp out of the air and froze it under me. When my foot went out from under me I went down hard, full length, the wind knocked clean out of me like something out of a cartoon. To the men who walked the edges it probably read exactly like a provisional girl losing her footing on wet ground.

“Watch your feet,” one of the instructors called, bored.

I got up. I always got up.

Linden glanced at me, but was too busy taking the majority of the attacks that were flying in our direction to be able to help, if he even realized what was going on.

He had turned to face one of those attacks when Gideon put a shoulder into me as he charged past. The immovable bulk of a Ward who’d simply been moving across the field, shield in place, and the breath went out of me a second time.

The three of them had a plan, and I couldn’t have proved it to save my life. That was the cruelty of it. Open warfare I could have fought against, but there was nothing to fight in an accident.

Then they stopped being careful. Honora pulled the cold a second time and she didn’t put this one under my foot. It went across my ribs, and for about two seconds it was nothing at all, which was the entire trick of it, a numb stripe laid down my side with no pain anywhere in it. I thought, clearly and stupidly, that she’d missed.

Next came Vivienne. This strike came in at my back, and I never got my hands up or my eyes on it, which it turned out was the entire point, especially since I was still channeling Kit. Her hit took me off the ground.

And straight into Linden.

Both hands flat between his shoulder blades. I hit him hard enough to move him half a step, which nothing on that field had managed all afternoon. Then I grabbed on, because my feet weren’t listening to me and suddenly I was falling and he was the only solid thing stopping me from eating a face full of mud.

My power went into him, and something came back. It wasn’t fire. That was the first thing, and it hit me like I’d missed a step in the dark, making my stomach lurch.

Kit’s power came at me as heat and hurry, a thing already leaving, already halfway spent by the time I had it. This didn’t come at me at all.

It rose.

It came up under my hands the way water filled a footprint in wet ground, slow and unbothered, and it kept on coming long after I’d expected it to stop.

I felt like I was falling into something cold and green and enormously patient, roots under a hill, a hundred years of something standing perfectly still in one place and getting bigger, and somewhere down in the middle of it, moving, there was the wolf. And behind the wolf there was more, and that was the part I couldn’t make fit anywhere. The school had a box for him, Wild, the body was different though, and whatever I had my hands on was not just a body.