Free The Blaze Ignites by Nichelle Rae

as I continued to
battle this odd fatigue. “What? She wasn’t evil!”
    “No no, she wasn’t evil but. . .”
    “And Jonoic’s dead! You killed him!”
    “I know Azrel, but listen to me. Nekinda had
a link in her mind, put there by Jonoic, which stretched straight
to Hathum. Jonoic put it there, knowing that if he failed to see
proof of who you were, Nekinda might, as you usually associate more
often with Good people like her.”
    I looked up into his intense blue eyes, “How
do you know?”
    “Nekinda warned me herself when Acalith and I
first found her. I didn’t tell anyone else because I didn’t want
her sent away before she could see her son healed.”
    I closed my eyes tightly and pressed my face
against his chest again. He held me tight. Nekinda had seen every
shred of proof that Hathum needed in order to prove that I was the
White Warrior. She’d seen my eyes fill with my white tears when I’d
almost wept at the first sight of her. She’d seen me kick open the
wagon door in a unique way no one else would be able to do, and
she’d just seen me use my magic to heal Cairikson.
    “But why kill herself?” I asked, my face
still pressed into my brother’s chest. “If Hathum has seen me
through her, then he’s seen me already.”
    Rabryn rubbed my back. “Nekinda told me she
could feel it when Hathum checked in on her. He wasn’t watching
while you interacted with her. If he had been, she probably would
have killed herself sooner.” He kissed the top of my head and held
me tighter. “She saved your life by ending hers. Now Hathum can’t
see any proof through her.”
    Damn him! Damn that man for using innocent
lives to get to me! As I looked at her I was finding it difficult
to comprehend what she’d just done, yet at the same time I felt a
new sense of pride and responsibility. A new awareness of who I
actually was came over me for a moment. Good people were willing to
do unimaginable things, like a mother stabbing herself in the heart
and leaving her very young son orphaned and abandoned, for the sake
of Goodness; and I was the Warrior of Goodness.
    “It doesn’t surprise me,” Addredoc suddenly
said as he looked down at her, “that she would have such strength
in her loyalty to you to do this.” He gently closed Nekinda’s eyes
and looked at me. “She was a Galad Kasian and they are all loyal to you.”
    How odd this new realization felt to me. I
was the White Warrior. I was the essence of everything Good. I had
the earthly power of the Gods of Light hanging at my hip. I
couldn’t hide from it or run from it. It was there, and I had to
deal with it.
    Yet another part of me could only recall the
suffering my father and I had been through because of it. I
couldn’t stop resenting my magic and my sword for such hardship and
difficulty. It seemed a cruel joke that my father and I should
suffer so much on the Light Gods’ behalf.
    Suddenly I realized what it was going to take
to open that “window” in my mind that Rabryn was talking about,
that window that needed to disappear so my magic and I could be one
whole being again. I had to let my past go—my past and my father’s
past.
    Yet again here was another cruel joke being
played on me. How could anything, or anyone, expect me to forget
all of that? I still bore scars physically and mentally from my own
past, and my father’s past still followed me into this age because
people still hated the White Warrior.
    How was I supposed to defeat 3,000 years of
the past? How was I supposed to defeat 3,000 years of animosity
towards my father and now towards me? I was rejected throughout
Casdanarus, and however far beyond it the world cared to remember
my father. It was an impossible task to forget the past because the
past hadn’t forgotten about me, the White Warrior.
     

Chapter Four
    Ortheldo
    Nothing I did seemed to calm him. He kept
crying for his mama. He was too weak to struggle against me because
he’d been so recently ill, but he