hand.
A shock, the pain bone-deep, snapped at him, throwing his hand up and back, and he saw part of the magic rise, as if to strike him again, like a snake.
He shoved the pain aside, ripped his knife from its sheath and stood, muscles bunched, teeth clenched. Ready for battle.
Helpless.
This could not be happening again. It could not take another from him.
A cry of frustration and fear tore from his throat.
Kayla was still, no longer looking at him but straight ahead, encased in rippling, transparent light. He tightened his grip on his knife, thinking to somehow shave the top layer of magic off, but as the thought formed in his mind, the glow thinned.
The magic fell from her and pooled at her feet, coalesced and rose up, a spinning sphere once more. It darted behind a tree and was gone.
Rane closed his eyes. He wanted to put off the moment of looking at her while he gathered his strength. Seeing her encased in wild magic had brought back the worst memory of his life, and he had to find the core of steel within to get him through whatever came next.
“What did you think it was doing to me?”
Her hand slid down his arm, tentative, and he flinched in surprise.
He snapped opened his eyes, and she was staring at him, biting her bottom lip. Perfect. Normal. Unchanged.
“I thought…” he had to clear his throat. “I thought it was transforming you into…”
He thought again of the way it coated her, like slime, and shuddered.
“Into what?”
“The same thing as my father.”
* * *
She had felt something. A tug of…warmth, of interest. A feeling of belonging, and friendliness.
It worried her more than if she’d felt nothing, or pain. Why cover every inch of her body? What had the wild magic done to her?
Rane didn’t help. He kept looking at her as if expecting her to grow another head or turn to stone, and irritation and fear made her hands jerky and her step clipped.
“What happened to your father?” She asked the question with a snap in her voice, turning to look at him over her shoulder.
“He’s a piece of wood.”
She fell, hard and badly, landing on her side and scraping her shoulder, her foot still caught and twisted in the root that tripped her.
Rane crouched beside her. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, wincing as she levered herself up. Bruised, scraped, but otherwise, unharmed.
“Wild magic turned your father to wood?”
He gave her an unreadable look. “We were working in the forest, my father, brother and I. My father cried out and we ran to him just as wild magic rolled right at him, through him. When it disappeared he was a wooden statue of himself. Well…” He hesitated. “Not a statue, really.”
“What then?” She felt sick.
“A tree. It’s been three years, and he’s begun to grow leaves in summer, on his head and along his arms and legs, like hair and clothing.” He reached out for the packs she dropped, and she saw his hands were shaking. “It would be better if he were a carving. The way things are, I have the feeling he’s still alive in there. Like that woman in the clearing. He might know what has happened to him. Perhaps he sees us when we visit him. Like her, he could be mad.”
“Is that when you and Soren started hunting wild magic?”
He nodded. “At first, we thought to find it, beg it to change him back. But we realized soon enough it never would. It seemed completely uninterested in us. Never touched us. Never harmed us. And by following it, we found the things it created and left in its wake. We’d stopped chopping wood, and we’d both left Jasper’s employ the year before. We needed to eat, so we started selling what we found.”
She thought of her anger at him the night she’d gone back to the woman in the clearing, and felt the heat of shame on her cheeks. “What happened next?”
“I was away, selling what we’d found—to Jisuel—and Soren discovered how wild magic is formed. He’d always said it must be to do with Nuen,
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