Sewn & Scarred (The Fated Creations Trilogy #3)

Chapter Ninety-TwoEvaline

Chapter Ninety-Two

Evaline

I screamed against the strain, felt a shock of pain spike through my mind as my magic spun the waters below us, as it ripped the wind past us.

The ships moved below me—around me—and then Cora was standing beside me.

“It worked!” she roared above the wind, placing her hand on my arm to lower it.

I straightened, dropped my arms, and looked around us. We were one of the ships in the rear, closest to Rominia. The formation was made of up three lines of ships, all forming a circle, and we were in the innermost ring.

I took a deep breath, nodding, and looking around for Maddox, saw him fighting a few ships ahead, to my right.

I turned, ready to run to the edge of the ship and use my Water to sail me through the air toward him, to fight at his side, but before I could, I saw movement out of my peripheral.

A shadow soared into the sky, stemming from the middle of the Vasi fleet. The darkness sprung up in an arc, and Cora was screaming to the troops on our boat, on the boat around us, as Wyott turned to me.

“The arrows, some of them have a poison that debilitates us,” he roared over the clink of swords and the ripping of flesh around us. “Hundreds have already died because of it.”

My eyes were still on the arrows—they’d just made their peak and began sailing down for us all.

Rominium.

Without hesitation, I swung both hands up, and the arrows hung in the sky, a splotch of black ink over a gray canvas.

My wind held them aloft, froze their path.

I lowered my eyes to the ships. The battle only waged on Kova ships, they’d made it onto our vessels but we hadn’t made it onto theirs.

That was how I knew I wouldn’t hurt any Kova.

My hands, flexed and fingers spread in front of me, curled in, tilted down, and the arrows spun with them. Turned over until they faced their departure point, until I threw my hands down and sent the arrows slamming toward the Vasi that had shot them.

If they screamed, I couldn’t hear it over the battle cries of our own people.

I knew they had a limited supply of the solution, so I kept an eye on the line of ships, waiting for another wave of them as Wyott jolted beside me. A Vasi was jumping and grasping onto the very wood boards we stood on, trying to come up the platform to get me.

Wyott landed on one knee, sword chopping down to decapitate the Vasi until his head rolled to my feet.

His eyes were wide open, facing the sky. They were dead, they were crimson, but then they shone light. Small pricks of them appearing in his irises.

My heart thundered in my chest as I looked up, but instead of seeing a shadow of arrows coming for us, there was only a sunburst of lit projectiles, arcing across the sky.

I threw up my hands up and spouts of water shot out to douse them, to pluck them from the sky and rip them into the waters below us, but I couldn’t stop them all and gasped as they made contact with our ships, as wood splintered and flung through the air past me.

“Evaline!” Wyott roared, hand closing over my arm and tugging me just in time to miss a projectile that shot past my head and hit the ship directly in line behind us.

Panic started to crawl up my throat. This was all too much. How could the Gods possibly expect me to end Vasier, if I couldn’t even leave the rear of our fleet to try and find him?

Another Vasi tried to come up the platform, and Wyott turned to stop him.

I didn’t know where Maddox was. We were supposed to fight together, side by side, but war didn’t allow for it.

My breath was quick, my eyes were wide, and for the first time, I looked around.

I truly looked around.

If I’d thought fighting the pirates on Saxon’s ship was overwhelming, this was several hundreds of times worse. There wasn’t a moment of silence, there wasn’t a second where I didn’t see someone die.

Blood coated the deck of my ship, of the ships beside me, as far as I could see. I watched Kova die, I watched Vasi meet their end. And all the while, all I could think, was that I’d never been prepared for anything like this.

A flash of light burst into my peripheral, and I looked up to see another barrage from the catapults. I could hardly see the rear of Vasier’s fleet. They were so close to the horizon that if the sea wasn’t rocking and lifting them up in a large wave I never would’ve seen them.

But I spotted the catapults, and my magic rushed forward.

Time seemed to slow as the projectiles coasted toward us, as more Vasi swarmed our ship, running for me, to retrieve me, and all I could think about were my father’s words. The reminder he’d give me, always. The same words Maddox had said to me.

“Wielding a weapon puts you in more danger than not having one, unless you know how to use it.”

A weapon.

My mother’s voice echoed in my mind, what she’d said to me in my nightmare, before I ever knew it was her. Back when Maddox, Wyott, and I had been fleeing Kembertus.

“You are the weapon.”

My magic was the weapon .

And I knew how to use it.

I screamed against the effort as I threw both hands to my right, then ripped them up toward the sky.

Our ship—the ships around us—tottered and I saw a few people reach for the ropes that stretched across all of the ledges of the ships.

The water levels shifted as a tidal wave rose up, larger than any wave I’d ever created. Larger than the waves that had taken out Captain Brentyn’s ship.

But that was because this wave needed to take out far more than just one.

It rose into the sky, beside the rear of Vasier’s fleet, and for a moment, the war around me slowed. The slam of swords striking, the screams of the fatally wounded, hushed as everyone turned to look at it. At the behemoth of Madierian Sea blue that stretched into the sky.

I ripped my hands to my left, and the wave followed. It crashed down onto his ships, and several dots of light on their decks—loaded catapults—extinguished.

The wave leveled the rear of his fleet, dozens of ships, and hundreds of Vasi.

Something inside of me shifted, an instinct deep within beginning to scream as loud as warning bells, and I pulled my father’s sword just as a Vasi sprung up from the lower deck in front of me, reaching out as he landed on his knees.

My left hand curled over the thick hair on his scalp at the same moment that my sword cut through his neck, and I ripped his head from his shoulders.

The movement threw my weight to the side, and as I caught myself on the banister of the ship beside me, my eyes flicked to shore.

There, standing and ready to run into the water, were the Kova who’d traveled with us to the Kromean Kingdoms. The Kova who’d needed to heal away the Rominium coursing through their veins.

I moved to stand at the rear edge of the ship, the Water Caster who was trying to help with the tilt of the ships stood beside me, shaking. I lifted a hand and a platform of water rose from the shallows in front of the Kova on shore, they looked up and must’ve seen me, because they all stepped onto it, and I pulled them to the last ship in the back of our fleet.

A ship stood between us, but Grant, Fredrik, Nash, Charlotte, and James, and all the others nodded at me as they landed.

I breathed a sigh of relief, we needed all the help we could get and I moved to turn toward the Sorcerer beside me, to tell him to hold the ship as I went forward, to look for Maddox and to look for Vasier.

As I started to turn, a flash of light burst through my peripheral, and the Water Caster shrieked. Pain lit the back of my shoulder before he was silenced, and fell back into the edge of the ship, momentum toppling his body up and over the edge of it.

With his face, chest, and torso on fire.

I smelled the burn of my clothes, of my hair, and spun, water from the sea below spraying up to extinguish it before my fingers prodded the raw flesh.

Fire.

My eyes narrowed, and scanned all the ships in front of us.

It wasn’t launched from a catapult, it was too small.

But I didn’t have to look long, because there was another one coming.

Born from a ship in our formation, six ships ahead and to my right. The fireball soared through the air, and I extinguished it with a spout of water.

He threw another and another, and they all ripped straight for the Air Caster on my platform. Then for Wyott.

I leaped in front of them and threw up a wall of my own fire, heard the whistle of his die against mine.

I stood, releasing it as I did, and pinned my eyes on him.

Lauden.

Without hesitating, without waiting to tell Wyott where I was going, without looking for Maddox and where he was, I sprinted toward the edge of the ship, planted a foot on the banister, and flung myself off of it.

I didn’t make it to the next ship, but a platform of water sprung up to catch me, and I jumped from it onto the ship. I ran to the front of it, dodging Vasi hands and swinging swords, scaled the ladder up to the platform on the bow, and jumped off of it.

My Water picked me up and delivered me to the next ship. Over and over, until I was gasping for breath at the effort as I landed onto the sixth ship in a lunge, one knee hitting the ground but the other foot already planting against it and pushing off.

Lauden smirked as I ran for him, standing on the front platform of a Kova ship.

He threw another ball, and I dodged it, throwing myself off the platform where I stood to the deck below.

Be careful, Eva, Maddox whispered down the bond, and it was when I realized he had eyes on me.

I didn’t respond, couldn’t break concentration as Lauden launched another ball of flames toward me, straight for my face.

Vasier wasn’t here to yell at him, this time.

I ran across the deck, dropped to my hip, and slid along it to dodge the next stream of fire he sent my way, and when I made it to the base of his platform, where he couldn’t see me anymore, I ran to the opposite ladder that I’d been running for. Knew he would be waiting for me if I didn’t.

I ripped myself up the ladder, ignored the way my muscles screamed in protest, and landed on the platform beside Lauden, only a few paces away.

He spun to me, a flash of annoyance on his face, and held his hands up.

I launched myself into a sprint toward him, pushed through my legs, swung up my arms.

Fire glowed in his hands, but I only dropped my shoulder, planted it in his chest, and continued to run.

I felt the sear of his Fire on one hip and across my waist as Lauden folded in two at the impact.

But I didn’t stop, only screamed against the pain of his burns, and ran until his back was hitting the edge of the ship, and we were tumbling over it, and into the waters below.