“No, I came out here for a picnic. Of course I want to do it. Release me.”

I drew in a breath of damp sea air, then let it go again, shaping it into the most terrible word I knew.

“Exsolvo.”

Zaira closed her hand. When she opened it, a pale blue flame licked up from her fingers.

It was a small thing, for now, but wicked as a hooked knife, lovely and fatal. It clawed the air with hungry yearning. Balefire.

The slim twist of flame leaned toward me, against the wind. I took a step back.

“Hold your ground, Lady Amalia.” It was Balos’s voice, deep and firm. He stood twenty feet down the beach in the opposite direction from Marcello, one thickly muscled brown arm lying lightly across the shoulders of Jerith, his Falcon and husband. “You need to get used to it. You can’t let it distract you in an emergency.”

“It’s hard not to get distracted by something that wants to kill you,” I muttered.

“It’s nothing personal.” Zaira grinned, but the corners of her eyes showed her strain. “It wants to kill everyone.”

“Now light something on fire,” Jerith called. Somehow, he sounded more like a child daring a schoolmate to cause trouble than an older warlock instructing a young one.

Zaira flicked her wrist at a squat bush with shiny, round leaves. A spark leaped from her hand, searing a bright path through the air, and landed inside it. Blue-white flames sprang up from within the bush, crawling hungrily up its blackening branches, withering every leaf to ash.

“Keep it contained,” Jerith said. The mage mark gleamed silver in his eyes as he watched Zaira’s face. “Don’t let it spread.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Zaira snapped.

“Oh? Then what’s that?” Jerith jerked his chin at the fire.

Only a jutting charred stick remained of the bush. But the blue flames reached higher than ever, straining for the tree branches above. Thin lines of flame meandered outward, searching, following the bush’s roots under the ground.

One slithered along the sand’s edge—thin, powerful, and rapid as a snake—heading toward Marcello. I sucked in a breath, but held back the word to seal her power again, though it strained behind my teeth. I had to trust her to handle it. That was half the point of this exercise.

Zaira sliced her hand through the air. The balefire went out, fast as a blink, leaving a smoking black smear on the ground.

“See? Fine. Completely under control.”

Thank the Graces. “Revincio,” I sighed, sealing her power.

Jerith shook his head, a diamond glittering in his earlobe. “Control will be much harder when it’s a company of Vaskandran musketeers or some Witch Lord’s pet chimera coming at you with venomous claws.”

I shifted my feet uneasily. “We’re not at war with Vaskandar.”