Free Lost by Sarah Prineas

shadow-hands snaked around my neck; I gasped, and my breath came out as a puff of dust.
    I dropped the vial. The glass shattered and the emulsion splashed across the floor. Then I dropped the saltpeter.
    The blackpowder elements mingled.
    The slow explosion started, with a muffled whumph and a cloud of gray smoke.
    Across the room, the candle sputtered out and the room went dark. A heavy, stone feeling spread from my neck into my chest.
    “Lothfalas!” I gasped. If the explosion didn’t get the magic’s attention, I was dead.
    The magic heard the spell! From the floor, white-bright embers exploded, washing upward, swirling around the Shadow; it flinched away from me and, as the light burned through it, burst apart with a muffled puff into a cloud of black dust. Its glowing purple-black eye hung in the air.I reached out and snatched the eye as it fell.
    Then the wave of light flung me back against the wall and I went out.
     
    I clutched the Shadow’s eye, my fingers stiff as stone so I couldn’t put it down. The eye struck spears of heavy numbness up my arm and into my bones. This must’ve been what Dee had felt just before he’d died.
    I blinked away the blackness to find myself lying against the wall in the duchess’s room.
    Someone had come into the room; the candle was burning again, over by the duchess’s bed.
    My face was pressed into the floor; I felt the grittiness of dust under my cheek and smelled the smoke from the explosion. Through the hair hanging down into my eyes, I saw the dust-covered stone floor, a rug scuffed into a corner, shards of blackened glass from the vial of sulfur emulsion.
    Feet in black leather shoes crunched over the dust, a cane tapped; I saw the hem of a magister’s robe. Nevery. He crouched down and brushed thehair out of my eyes. I was too frozen into stone to speak.
    “What happened here, my lad?” he said quietly. He rested his hand a moment on my stone forehead—I couldn’t feel his fingers. Then he stood and strode to the door. “Guards!” he called in his deep voice. He came back in, cast his eyes around, then crouched beside me again, fingering the black dust that lay all over me and the floor, picking up the shards of the vial. “Ah, I see.” He swept up all the shards and put them into his coat pocket. Then he went over to the window and opened it.
    Coming back over to me, he took off his robe and wrapped me in it, then—“Quietly now, boy”—picked me up and carried me out to the hallway. He paused, looked around, and carried me farther, to the stairs, where he set me on a step, propped up against the wall.
    A guard came rushing up the stairs. “Yes, Magister?” he panted.
    “A Shadow has attacked the duchess,” Neveryanswered. “A guard is dead. Get Trammel up here at once.”
    The guard hurried away, and after a minute two more guards raced up the stairs, followed by Trammel, holding a burning locus magicalicus in his hand.
    “Stay here, lad,” Nevery said, and swept up the stairs with Trammel to the duchess’s room.
    I wasn’t going anywhere.
    After a minute, Captain Kerrn went by, taking the stairs two at a time, not noticing me.
    I closed my eyes and hunched over, feeling my heavy, stone heart beating slowly inside my chest. My fingers felt frozen around the Shadow’s eye, and heavy numbness flowed from it, up the bones of my arm.
    A guard carrying a werelight lantern went by, followed by Rowan, who wore a sword in a scabbard belted around her waist over a white nightgown.
    As she passed, Rowan saw me. She came andcrouched on the step below mine and peered into my face. “What happened?”
    My teeth were clenched by the stone spell. Even though I wasn’t supposed to talk to her, I needed to tell her to go on upstairs, to check on her mother.
    Rowan turned to the waiting guard. “Mira, go find some blankets.”
    The guard went off. Rowan sat on the step beside me. People passed us, hurrying up and down the stairs.
    She took my hand. Not the