A Trial of Sorcerers: Book One by Kova, Elise (universal ebook reader .txt) 📕

couldn’t wait to show her how to use it. He’d taken her to a nearby pond and they’d spun and spun on clumsily made blades until they were sick.

Now, they swerved around and around, making lazy progress forward. Eira tilted her head back and stared at the stars above her, swimming through the sky in her dizzy haze. The sky and all its vastness above her. Her brother’s laughter filling her ears as he hooked his arm with hers. The smile they shared…were the last things she saw before the flash.

Light glowed underneath the surface of the lake. Bright and hot, there for only a moment. The darkness was twice as thick the second after it vanished.

Ice cracked underfoot, shattering with a violent explosion. Eira tumbled, her arm slipping from Marcus’s, and they plunged into the inky depths beneath them.

Water rushed around her. Her waterlogged clothes tried to pull her down. Eira inhaled in shock and her magic activated from a base instinct to survive.

Water wouldn’t hurt Waterrunners so long as they had magical strength.

A pocket of air surrounded her nose and mouth, the water pressing against it in a fight against her powers. Eira gasped and sputtered, getting her bearings underneath the water. Marcus was in a similar position, already kicking to the surface. She followed behind him.

Perhaps they weren’t as far off track as they’d thought and this was a test. Or perhaps whoever had been trailing them decided that they had been having too easy of a time and saw an opportunity to make their lives more difficult—even the playing field. Either way, they would be up on the surface soon.

Or so she thought.

Light spun into existence, weaving from between the shadows. It snapped into place just under the surface of the water, stretching from bank to bank across the lake. Marcus slammed into the barrier first.

Eira didn’t even try. She recognized this glyph. She’d seen it, night after night, on a much smaller scale.

Break my shield, Deneya had commanded.

Marcus summoned a spear of ice, slamming it as hard as he could into the barrier. The water slowed him down, but even if it hadn’t, the result would’ve been the same. Eira watched as his spear shattered against the shield.

She felt removed from her body, detached from the creeping horror that was all sharp fangs and gnashing teeth making its way up her spine.

What kind of test was this? Eira’s mind whirred around the question as she saw her brother pressing against, slamming into, and magically assaulting the shield that kept them underwater.

The shield couldn’t be broken. Deneya had admitted as much. Why was it here?

She swam over to Marcus, grabbing his elbow before he could punch his bloody knuckles again into the shield.

Stop, she mouthed. It was impossible to communicate effectively underwater. They only had so much air in the small bubbles around their nose and mouth and he was using his up quickly with all the exertion. Wait.

Why? he worded back, looking frantically between her and the shield.

She brought her fists together and made a breaking motion in time with a shake of her head. It can’t be broken. She hoped he understood.

His eyes continued darting between her and the shield. Marcus waited several seconds before trying to break it once more.

Stop! Eira tried to grab for him but he ignored her.

He was going to exhaust himself. This had to be a test of endurance. If his magic ran out, then the little bubble would collapse.

He’d drown.

Eira pressed her nose to the shield, seeing nothing of the dark world past the glowing, spinning lines. Come on, she thought. This is enough; let us out.

The reverberations of Marcus’s attacks through the water were torture. Eira listened to their thrums as numbness set in on her, colder than the water around her, colder than the ice of the mountaintops. The shield wasn’t going away.

Marcus’s magic flickered as he tried to summon another club of ice. It melted away into the water. Eira saw the moment his power wavered and the bubble collapsed. It was back in a moment, him coughing and sputtering.

No, this is too far.

Eira turned to the shield, finally lodging her own magic against it. The moment she tried, she could feel how thin her power was already from trying to keep her alive. Fighting against the laws of nature took a toll on any sorcerer; there was only so long they could hold out. And even if her magic was strong enough, she’d run out of air in her tiny bubble, pass out, and then drown.

She began attacking with the same frenzy that Marcus had. She placed her hands against the shield, her own disk of ice forming beneath it, that Eira tried to push up against. It didn’t budge.

She sent her magic to the other side of the shield, watching ice spike up on the lake top frantically. Help, she imagined the ice spelling. Help!

Marcus grabbed her shoulder with wide eyes. Help. His mouth made the word she’d just been thinking and Eira watched as the bubble collapsed.

Without thinking, Eira reached to her face, taking a part of her own bubble and attaching it back to his. She held it there with her own magic. Marcus coughed and sputtered, his eyes going hazy.

They had to get out, now. If they couldn’t they were doomed.

Eira faced the shield and pressed her hands against it. She pushed her fingers so hard into it her nails splintered and bent back. Blood mixed with the dark waters. Eira visualized her magic stretching through the Lightspinning, weakening it, fracturing it.

Stop. Stop. Stop! she screamed mentally.

She imagined her icy tendrils extending all the way back to the person who made the shield. She’d kill them. She’d freeze them alive—Deneya, Ferro, someone else, she didn’t care. She’d kill to save her brother if that’s what it took—freeze over everything, close it all off.

Stop!

Her magic spiked and the world went dark. The bubble around her mouth collapsed and Eira inhaled a