With a sickening twist of rage, Colin realized it had all been a ruse. The entire fight between them had been nothing but a distraction. Walter had simply been keeping Colin occupied while the Well continued to fill.
Colin snapped his attention back to Walter to find the Wraith watching him.
“You can’t kill me,” Walter said. “We can’t die.”
“No,” Colin said, shifting his grip on his staff. He felt something deep inside him harden. “Not yet. But I can hurt you.”
Fear flickered for a brief moment across Walter’s face as Colin lifted his staff and then drove its end into Walter’s chest two-handed, releasing the power of the Lifeblood that coursed through him through the living wood in a flood. He held nothing back, the shame that had caused him to halt his attack with the sling in Portstown and had sent him staggering from Walter here in this ruined city a moment ago burned away. Walter screamed, louder than anything Colin had heard before, the pain in the sound reverberating in Colin’s head, in his bones, and yet he ground the staff harder into Walter’s chest. Walter writhed beneath the onslaught, arms juddering against the floor and crystal slab, legs kicking, heels drumming a staccato rhythm against the stone.
When the scream died, Colin jerked his staff away, Walter’s body arcing on its side as residual energy coursed through it, then collapsing back to the floor, the Wraith unconscious. Beneath the blackened and charred circle where his staff had connected to his body, Walter’s chest still moved. He still breathed.
Colin nearly drove the staff into him again, but wrenched himself away from the body and stalked toward the edge of the Well. The Lifeblood lapped within a few inches of the edge of the stone, but it had not fully awakened. There might still be time.
He raised his arms, staff in one hand-
And then sank into the power that coursed around him, into the eddies and flows of the Lifeblood, down and down into the Well, diving deep into the reservoir and the Source beneath. He let the Lifeblood fill him. Through its power, he felt a sudden flare, although it was distant and removed. He tasted it, recognized it as Aielan’s Light, and relaxed. Siobhaen must have called it. She was the only one he knew of in the chamber besides himself who could control it.
He wondered briefly why she’d needed it, but then shoved that concern aside. He didn’t have time. The Well was almost full, almost awake. Its power had escalated and was reaching its crest. It would peak within moments. He needed to halt it, or he would never be able to stop the attacks on the Seasonal Trees. If the Wraiths managed to solidify this power, they would be able to use it for years against the three races, decades perhaps. It might take him that long or longer to bring the rest of the Wells into balance enough that he could protect its power from the Wraiths.
He searched the Source for a way to halt the awakening. Lifeblood surged from the reservoir below into the Well, the currents of the underground lake and the surrounding streams that fed and stemmed from it forcing the water higher. He knew from his attempts to balance the Wells to the west that cutting off the flow along one branch or widening it along another would affect the entire system. It had taken him years of experimentation to figure out how it had worked. The introduction of the reservoir had complicated that system immeasurably. Yet he had only a few minutes to figure out how to stop it now.
He paused his frantic search of the currents and focused on the Well in the ruined city. Trying to calm his thundering heart, heightened by the pulse of the awakening, he let himself sink into the flows beneath the city. The Lifeblood coursed through a maze of tunnels and chambers, like those the dwarren used beneath the plains. Those corridors lay everywhere, connected to the lake far beneath. All he needed to do was find which currents would ease the pressure on the one filling the Well and then divert them.
He tried to calm his breathing, tried to relax.
There.
Excitement cut through him, but he forced it back, focused on the one channel he’d chosen and then began pouring power through himself into the flows there. He pushed them to one side, tried to divert them into a new passage, as if he’d taken his hand and plunged it into the edge of a stream to affect the currents.
The Lifeblood reacted, swirling around him as if he were merely a stone, creating new eddies, but not blocking the main channel feeding the Well. The stream was too large. He needed more power.
Opening himself up further, he let more of the power of the Wells course through him, felt his presence expand in the stream, but it still wasn’t enough. He needed more. Shaking with the effort, he opened himself wider, and wider still, felt his control of the power trembling in his grasp. He had never extended himself this far, had never absorbed and held this much within himself, had never allowed so much of the Lifeblood to flow through him. He shuddered in ecstasy, on the verge of allowing it to carry him away, tasted its coldness to his core, the scent of ice and loam and earth overwhelming him.
And it wasn’t enough.
“I can’t,” he murmured, trying to push himself further, to block the flow of Lifeblood. “It’s too far along. I’m not strong enough. I can’t stop it.”
His voice drew his awareness back to his body, drew him back to the edge of the Well, the Lifeblood a finger’s breadth away from the top now. He felt Aielan’s Light burning around him, felt Siobhaen and Eraeth’s presence on the far side of the Well, heard Siobhaen shouting something, her voice thick with warning.
“I can’t,” he whispered, trying to answer her, despair beginning to wash through him.
The Wraiths were going to succeed. Walter was going to win. They’d planned everything too well, Colin and Aeren and the dwarren reacting too late.
Then pain punched through the despair, a white-hot, ragged pain that began in his back and erupted from his chest, searing through his body as it arched, someone grabbing hold of his shoulder to keep him steady as the pain widened, gripping his entire chest, sending sheets of fire into his arms and legs. He glanced down as blood gurgled up in the back of his throat, coating his mouth, and saw the end of Walter’s blade jutting out of his chest.
Walter’s breath blew hot against his neck as the Wraith whispered, “You never did open yourself completely to the Lifeblood and all it offered as I did, did you?”
The white fire of Aielan’s Light leaped from Siobhaen’s hands in an arc, burning into the outer ring of sukrael instantly, setting them afire. Their shrieks filled the blue-lit chamber as Siobhaen pushed the fire outward, the Shadows twisting and writhing as they tried to escape. Eraeth had an arrow nocked and ready to shoot, sight trained along its length as he swung it back and forth, searching for any of the sukrael that might break free, but there was no need. Siobhaen could
She filled those pits with fire.
There were over twenty of the sukrael left and they all died within the space of ten heartbeats. Their black bodies flapped in the white furnace that Siobhaen called forth, burned to embers as the Light flowed through her. She found herself murmuring prayers to Aielan, litanies from her youth coming to her lips without thought. She prayed to her ancestors, to the flames beneath Caercaern, to the fire she drew upon now, and when the last Shadow had ceased to exist she felt that fire taper off and die within her.
Weakness shuddered through her and she collapsed to her knees, then back onto her heels.
“Siobhaen!”
She turned toward Eraeth’s voice, removed from her body, hollowed out and burned to a cinder. She tried to smile in reassurance. “It came too easy,” she said, and her voice trembled. “I couldn’t control it.”
“You controlled it enough to kill the sukrael.”
She shook her head. He didn’t understand. “I could guide it, but I couldn’t control its power. It was too much. It burned me out.”
She could tell by his scrunched up look that he still didn’t understand.
Then movement caught her eye. Movement on the far side of the Well.
Shaeveran stood at the water’s edge, arms raised, staff in one hand, but his eyes were closed, his face tense with concentration. To her burnt-out senses, he appeared to be throbbing, as if he were greater than he appeared, filled to bursting. The bluish light of the Well washed over him, casting him in strange shadows.
But the movement came from behind him and to one side.
“Eraeth,” Siobhaen said in horror.
The Protector spun at the warning in her voice, bow already rising, string creaking as he drew the arrow
