The prison had held Ymrys for a hundred years. It would hold him no longer.
He hadn’t killed the man they’d accused him of killing. Not directly. The magic had gone out of control, but magic did that sometimes. There was no way to predict it when the weather took a rapid turn and lightning tore through the sky and the clean, sharp smell of the storm rose bright through the nostrils and the front of the forehead and ripped the magic out faster than it was meant to come, power calling to power. It could be brilliant and beautiful, letting the lightning sing into the blood. Or it could be violent, and painful, and deadly.
The other man had died in flames. That he’d just left the bed of Ymrys’ lover was nothing more than coincidence.
They’d taken Ymrys’ magic. Taken it, stripped it from his veins, and closed him in the tower. For a hundred years, he’d been separated from the world and the wind and the clashing lightning by a wall of stone three feet thick. A hundred years alone, powerless.
No more.
For they hadn’t taken all his magic.
It had taken care, concentration. His hands flat against the cold glass of the tiny window, high in the wall, where he had to cling with his feet in the small grooves between the stones. Outside the lightning sparked and flashed, and he took in the tiny sparks that made their way through the glass. So tiny he could barely feel them at first. Wasn’t even sure he was drawing it in for a long time, until, after nearly ten months of touching every storm he could, he felt a rivulet of power slide along his arm.
Tiny sparks. The sparks of the lightning calling to the tiny sparks still left in his blood. But in a hundred years, they had become so much more.
The storm that was coming would be the last he’d need. He’d felt it coming for days, as the pressure and the power grew. More than natural power, this storm fed on magic, had been nurtured with magic.
It would be enough.
Inch by inch, he worked his way up the inside of the wall. The storm was growing outside, and as he eased himself over the edge of the windowsill, he could see the dark, rising clouds, the brilliant flashes of lightning. Thunder shook the stones.
He pressed his palm flat against the glass and took it in.
It filled him, tore through him, as if the magic took the place of his blood. He let it pour into the magic already inside him, and they pooled together.
Filled him. And then transformed him.
The lightning struck the window and burst through. The bolt penetrated his chest, and he became power.
And rose through the window and he caught the gust of the storm and let it take him, out and beyond, away. He was magic, he was power, he was light and the heart of the storm.
And free.