Page 57 of Heart’s Rescue

My words hover in the air above Arryn’s cloak, a white cloud of promises. I close my eyes and bring my magic up out of the ground. When I open my eyes, the snow is streaked with inky tendrils. The world’s gone flat and colorless, so my eyes must be doing their blue flame thing. Thank the voids Arryn isn’t looking at me.

I tilt my head up to the glowsoft orbs and call my magic to me. They’re warm, these smoke tendrils, these pieces of the void that listen to me. They wrap around my legs like vines, tight and solid. Arryn gasps when they touch her; her grip tightens around my waist.

“It’s okay,” I say.

She’s shaking when the magic reaches her waist. I’ve tried to go gently, to hold her body as softly as possible, but you can only be so gentle when you’re going to pick someone up.

“It’s okay,” I whisper again as the magic creeps over our chests, tightening in thick, hot, black bands around us. “I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall.”

Arryn whispers something in return. It almost sounds like I know.

Magic reaches our shoulders, wrapping us together in a cocoon. It’s sliding and shifting all over our bodies, and I wish I knew how to reassure Arryn, how to tell her that it just does that, it’s never still, but it’s strong and solid and it won’t let her down, but I can’t find the words. So I just take a deep breath, and my magic lifts us into the air.

Arryn’s body stiffens in my arms as her feet leave the ground. A moment later there’s a crunching, churning, grinding tumult beneath us as my magic tears through the ice on the riverbank, and then the restless splash of frozen water. I feel like the river is angry, like it’s reaching for us, trying to tear down my magic and pull us both beneath the ice.

But you can’t tear down something made of smoke. My magic moves through the water like a blade, like a ghost, carrying both of us in its shifting, sliding embrace. And then we’re across, safe on the far side of the river. I set us down as gently as I can, but hitting the solid, snow-covered ground still feels like a slap to the face. My teeth slam together as my boots bash into something hard and cold instead of yielding and warm. Arryn’s skull knocks into my chin, and the two of us fall apart as my magic unravels. I slam my eyes shut before Arryn can see the flames that would scare the voids out of anyone living in the Outer Ring and sink my magic back into the ground as quickly as possible.

“Oh!” Arryn gasps.

Her voice is high and light, as if she’s about to laugh. Or, more likely, to scream.

Slowly, I slide my eyes open. The world is back to full color, thankfully. Arryn’s standing next to me, her chest rising and falling, her eyes wide, and her cheeks flushed with what’s probably some unholy combination of terror and permanent life-long trauma.

“We made it,” she says, and now she’s smiling at me. Smiling at me like we’ve just won a battle or something.

I turn back to the river. The ice has been destroyed; huge, jagged pieces grind against each other in the swirling current. My magic ripped a path along the bank, churning up straw-colored sand and gray mud that probably hasn’t seen the top side of a snowbank in decades. The destruction ends right here, at my feet.

That’s me. Always making an entrance.

“Yeah,” I say. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Arryn is still panting beside me. She turns from me to the river and then back to me. Then she laughs. It’s a bright, beautiful laugh, and it makes me think of stars or the sea or some other fairy tale from the Worlds Above.

“We made it,” she says again.

And then she cheers. It’s a sound of wild triumph, a victory cry, and I realize I’m smiling even though I have absolutely no reason to be smiling. Arryn spins in a circle on the snow, her arms raised, her head tilted up toward the ceiling of the world and, by all the screaming voids, she looks so beautiful. So beautiful and wild and free, filled with a joy that not even the void could swallow.

“You’re nuts,” I say, but I’m smiling as I say it, as though her sudden, wild happiness was contagious.

Arryn grins at me, then raises her hands above her head and cheers again. Her cry echoes off the ice and snow, the dead trees, the frozen air. I could almost believe they can hear her in the Worlds Above.