Sorceress Awakening Read Online Free

his lips and caught their individual scents on his tongue, committing
each to memory. When he had them all, he sent his magic to hunt them.
    Back at his lady’s side, he lifted her into
his arms, gathering her closer so he could share some of his heat. She was far
paler than she should have been. Her magic should be healing her, and yet it
wasn’t. Why?
    While she’d been injured by creatures of
darkness, her injuries didn’t look great enough to cause this kind of weakness.
For that matter, her attackers shouldn’t have been much of a threat. Even without
her memories or the knowledge of her powers as the Sorceress, she should have
had power and instinct enough to destroy what he had dispatched with ease.
    Detaching a portion of his consciousness
from his body, he sent it into the woman lying senseless in his arms. Her power
still drained away.
    He checked the weavings he’d placed over
her wounds, but they were holding. No power hemorrhaged from those points.
Elsewhere then, but where? His consciousness stretched beyond his body,
following the scent trail of magic back to its source. A tree. Two long gashes.
Heartwood deep.
    By the Light, his lady was a dryad. How had
he missed that fact?
    Blood leaked down the tree’s majestic trunk
and saturated the ground at its roots. Instinct jerked him into motion and he
summoned wards to shield the wounds. The prickle of power danced along his skin
a moment before he directed the spell. An insubstantial webbing spun out
between his outstretched hands, like a delicate blue lattice. It adhered to the
bark and sealed the wounds, preventing further loss of the hamadryad’s blood.
    A hamadryad in the Mortal Realm.
Impossible. A dryad’s spirit tree required magic to grow.
    Yet here his lady’s young hamadryad grew,
defying everything he knew of magic. She must have had a small cutting with her
when he’d rescued her from the Battle Goddess’s kingdom and brought her here.
    Her soft moan brought him back to the
present. It didn’t matter how her spirit tree came to be here. Here it grew,
and here it bled its lifeblood upon the ground. He dropped to all fours and
padded over to the tree. Circling, he sniffed at the ground until he pinpointed
the area where the greatest concentration of magic saturated the loam. The
scent of sap and blood triggered instincts and dragged him back to memories of
his infancy.
    He had first come to awareness hearing
his mother’s deep slow heartbeat and the sounds of wind and lashing rain in her
branches as he grew within the heart of her tree.
    There was something here he needed.
    Safe in his watery cocoon, deep inside
his mother’s wooden heart, he’d grown strong.
    Ah, yes.
    Along with the food and water of the
earth, he had absorbed his dryad mother’s memories.
    There it was—the knowledge to heal his
mistress. More of his memories returned, both recent and ancient. Heal her
hamadryad and the dryad should live.
    Tonight, the second time his lady had
called to him in this life, had been as chaotic as the first. Worse. Now she
lay dying along with her tree. If her hamadryad had been older, he could have
put her in the tree to rest and heal, but such an attempt in this magic-less
place might kill the tree. He scrounged his mother’s memories for other healing
methods. He needed to find another way, something that would work in this
realm.
    And quickly. The power was dissipating,
sucked up by the earth like water on drought-cursed land. He dropped into a
trance and summoned his power for the delicate work of separating his
mistress’s magic from the magic-starved land.
    The greatest concentration of magic pooled
just below the grass, in the layer where small fibrous roots sought food and
water. With one hand pressed against her trunk and the other on the ground, he
flexed his talons. After he absorbed the magic from the ground, he drew it up
into his body, purified it, and returned it to the spirit tree. He drained the
small pool and reached