Chapter Forty-Five

Eadric was a son of the Goddess of Sky. Lady Audra, the protector of Cyeji and the House of the Falcon.

Yet when the portal spat him out thousands of feet above the earth, in the middle of the Immortals-damned sky, his most potent affinity was utterly useless.

His body plunged through a damp blanket of clouds. The wind snapped and growled at him like a feral hound. For a moment he was lost in a world of thick gray haze, and then the clouds thinned and he emerged at last to find the earth sprawling out in every direction. Below, a wide river cut swiftly across rolling emerald slopes scattered with trees, rushing with white froth silenced by the roar of the wind. A little farther north, blue-tiled roofs surrounded a city shrouded in mist and enclosed by a circular wall.

Unless a storm cloud or a bolt of lightning could save a human from splatting into a thousand scraps of flesh upon impact, he might as well have chucked his affinity stone into the heavens and wished it to sprout into a pair of wings.

He had his wind affinity, of course, but it was far weaker. And at this speed, it would more likely cause turbulence than serve as any form of aid.

Eadric cursed, his heart slamming against his ribcage in panic. He had never liked heights, and falling off that roof in Axaris had only augmented his fear a hundredfold. Nothing could have made this worse—except, where in hell was Asterin? The portal had torn them apart. He had no idea where she’d ended up—halfway around the globe, perhaps, but with her omnifinity she could easily harness a combination of the wind and the water and the earth and whatever damned else to catch her fall.

The hem of his shirt escaped from where it had been tucked into his trousers and flapped into his face. He clawed it down desperately, blindly, the fabric and the wind battering his ears, only for all of it to fly back up again as soon as he let go.

A voice that could only belong to Rose chided him in his mind. Fighting your own shirt. What a way to squander your final moments.

If Rose were here, he knew she would have come up with something clever. Eadric himself had always been resourceful—it was what had kept him alive up until now, and why Miss M had taken him under her wing. He could imagine his childhood mentor now, with her unsettlingly sharp cobalt eyes and silk gloves, the unyielding steel of her voice as she taught him how to use his magic to feel out the vibration and pitch of secrets spoken behind locked doors.

Think, damnit.

Gritting his teeth, he angled his body and finally managed to yank his shirt out of his face. With his affinity stone gripped in his fist hard enough to bruise, he conjured up a cloud. A tall, dense cloud—a thunderhead, stretching upward into the atmosphere and crackling with static at its heart. A cloud like this couldn’t naturally form without warm air or water. But he descended from the House of the Falcon, and he would be damned if he let some chilly air get the better of him. The humidity increased with the building of vapor and he felt the shift in air pressure like the brush of a feather in the back of his mind. He rose higher as the wind picked up to a roar and the storm funneled into a column—a tornado—around him.

His brain told him he ought to be oxygen-deprived or even dead—but just like how Asterin’s ice would never give her frostbite, and Quinlan’s fire would never burn him, the tornado became a part of Eadric. It would not bring him harm.

And when he looked down, he had stopped falling.

“Immortals,” he whispered to himself. Lightning flashed above him, illuminating the interior of the funnel in shocks of blue. He began to laugh. Maniacally.

Before he could bask in his glory for long, however, the tornado swerved and threw him violently sideways. He cursed and tried to rein it in, to compress it, but some other force out of his control had breathed the storm’s embers into a raging blaze.

He shielded his face as debris from the ground below whipped into the air and sliced into his flesh like shrapnel. Sprays of crimson misted into the air, but the vortex quickly sucked them away. The rapid blood loss made him light-headed. He plunged right down the eye of the storm, the clouds near the ground dispersing, his hold on the tornado weakening.

A frightening crackle deafened even the loudest shrieks of the wind. Where water droplets whirled, they froze, crystallizing in a surge of ice so powerful that the tornado actually halted in its tracks.

He had nothing to cling onto, not a single wisp of magic to save him from dropping like a stone through the hollow shaft of ice.

A strangled cry clawed out of Eadric’s throat.

As the frosted ground rushed up to claim him, a chunk of the ice at its base shattered.

Asterin barreled through, her expression fixed in a fierce snarl. She thrust her arms toward the sky. Toward him. As if . . . to catch him.

Then a gust of glacial wind knocked into his chest mere feet from impact. It buoyed him into the air before lowering him gently to the ground.

Eadric sank onto his knees upon the freezing earth, gasping for breath, his arms limp at his sides and his neck arched to the sky. Slowly, he lifted his stare to the twisted column of ice grasping for the heavens, hidden but for a perfect circle of cerulean.

Savage tempest, tempered to submission beneath Asterin’s hand.

“Ah,” Eadric managed.

Then he promptly blacked out.