He slowed. “What task?”
“Draw your sword.”
He did, and a sound of surprise escaped him. Jessa suddenly stood only an arm’s length from him. She wandered still and her words made no sound, but it was her. The expression she wore, afraid yet refusing to be afraid, could not be replicated by a soulless lich. This wasn’t an illusion.
“All you must do,” it said, “is cut her down.”
“No.” He set the word aflame with his fury.
The mist swirled beside him, beseeching tendrils curling around him.
“I know there is a link between you. I can see the magic binding your lives. That, too, I have the power to sever. You will not die with her.”
“No.”
“So certain of your answer? There must be a desperate reason behind your foolish quest to my realm. What if I offered something more? I could destroy your enemies with a thought. Would you like that? Freedom from your true names and the annihilation of your foes?”
No. The answer repeated in his mind, but he didn’t say it aloud this time.
"All you must do is take her life,” it cajoled in a simpering choir. “She can't see or hear you. She'll never know it was you. You’ve taken many lives. I can see the brutality in your eyes. What's one more? One final killing in exchange for something far more important than a trifling human.”
She was far more than trifling to him.
Simith lifted his sword, a sword suddenly heavier than any other he’d ever wielded.
One more life. One more killing.
He thought of all those depending on him, all those who might perish if he failed.
“Kill the verse maker,” the lich hissed softly. “Give her to me, and you’ll have the victory you desire.”
Simith took a step toward Jessa. He felt sick inside.
“Every time you take a life, part of you dies with them.”
“You made a plague of your pain.”
“Your brother would be ashamed of what we’ve become.”
But the fairies deserved to be annihilated. Didn’t they? Yet, not long ago, he’d believed the same for the trolls, and he’d been wrong. Devastatingly wrong. Simith looked at his hand holding the blade. He thought of all the lives he’d extinguished. He’d had no right to do that. He’d had no right to the violence he’d visited on others, no matter the wrong inflicted on him. This entitlement to vengeance was the true sickness. It only led to more pain.
He could not do this. He would not. He refused. For Jessa’s sake, and for his own. Peace could not be won with more death.
“We'll win this challenge by finding the heart of your valley.” Simith’s voice rose to a shout. “I no longer need a sword to be victorious."
Simith threw down his blade. He stripped off his bandolier and hurled it into the pale gloom. A wall of mist ushered Jessa from his vision, and in her place stood the cottage they’d entered through. Simith almost believed it a mirage. He had reached the center of this place already?
“My captors did not provide much room to wander on my leash,” the lich said, voices tripping and trickling the words in a mad ramble. “They did not like to reach too far into the cage for their rabid hound. You impress me, darling butterfly. Wiser Fae than you have fallen to my traps.”
Simith stepped onto the house’s threshold. “We have beaten your challenge. Fulfill your side of the agreement.”
The door swung open. This time, instead of a filmy mist, scarlet filled the doorframe in a pool as dark as blood.
“What is this?” Simith demanded.
“The magic you seek. As agreed.”
“Then use it.”
“Ah, but I did not agree to that. I swore to provide you with the power to erase the true names of all pixies, and here it is. If you want it, you’ll have to use it yourself.” The proclamation came slathered in a wicked smile.
Simith touched a hand over the tattoo on his chest and realized the depth of their miscalculation. Power of this magnitude would not work when funneled through a conduit. Only raw magic—magic the Fae possessed through the power in their blood—could wield it and survive. If he used it, his life would burn away.
And Jessa’s along with it.
Despair sunk deep into his skin. He had no choice.
“Jessa,” he whispered. “Forgive me.”
Simith stepped forward and plunged both hands into the crimson pitch.
Chapter Eight
Jessa had just finished the final couplets of her second poem when a man’s agonized cries erupted. She jumped. Her breath seized. That sounded like Simith. Jessa whipped round and round trying to determine the direction it came from, but it came from everywhere.
Frantic, she called out to him. “Where are you?”
The only reply came in the ragged sound of his pain. She started running, directionless and desperate.
“Tell me where you are,” she cried. “Simith!”
His voice weakened. Faded to nothing. She ran faster, bursting with abandon through the mist, dragging threads behind her. It was like sprinting through cobwebs.
“Jessa,” the lich breathed beside her, slithering the ‘s’ like a worm in her ear.
Jessa jerked away with a shriek, wheeling her arms to keep from falling. Her heartbeat roared in her ears as a face pressed against the veils of white. The fleshless contours of a skull took shape, hollow pits for eyes leering out at her.
“Halt your flight, precious mortal.” It murmured the next words like an intimacy between them. “Your sweet pixie has completed his task and freed his race from their true names.”
Her mouth opened, hope unfurling. “He did it? He won the challenge?” She paused. “Then why are we still here? Why-Why was he screaming?”
“I’m afraid it required much more of him than he expected. Per the terms of our agreement, I will release you both only when he has a new name. Unfortunately, he isn’t awake anymore to give himself one.”
He was hurt then. Dying? He would not have left her out here alone voluntarily.
“Where is he?” she snapped.
“I will show you, I will, yes I will,” it promised while the skull danced in circles around her like a decapitated head. “If you give me the third poem. The one of loss.”
“And then you’ll show me where Simith is? No searching. You’ll just lead me there.”
“Yes, oh yes. Recite to me heartbroken verses. With each one, the path to him will open. Here, proof of my good faith.”
A wedge of space, clear of fog, opened to her left.
She stepped toward it. “Okay.”
“Rules first,” it said. “This time you must give me a poem of your own. No more recitation. No more the words of others. Yours, only yours, can deliver you to your pixie.”
Jessa’s throat constricted. “Why does it matter?”
“Because I desire it. I desire the sound of your pain, a lovely music for my soundless realm.”
“But I,” she licked her lips, “I haven’t written anything like that.”
“Then create,” its cacophonous multitude snarled. “Improvise, or wander here forever lost.”
She tried. She cast her mind toward the well of feeling deep inside where her inspiration once dwelled. The same old block sat in its path. She couldn’t see around it, couldn’t reach past it. It was like trying to step through stone.
She’d done improvisation before. On a dare, in a café, and come out with one of her best works. The old Jessa could’ve done this easily, but she was long gone. The person she’d become didn’t have that same command over words. She could feel them bubbling in her chest, aching for structure and release, but they smeared together, out of focus and out of reach.
It’s you who has abandoned them.
Simith’s comment from the night before returned. Could it be true? Had she been the one to abandon her art, and not the reverse? Her work had once been the focal point of her life. It had defined her. Why would she ever leave that?
Her family had boarded that plane for her. Their love had killed them, a love that she’d never fully trusted or appreciated while they lived. If not for that award ceremony, if not for her poetry and the way it had always set her apart from them, they would still be alive. If she hadn’t been so difficult for them to understand, maybe they wouldn’t have felt like they had to be there.
Ah, but they were proud of you. That was clear to see.
She hadn’t believed Simith when he’d said that. Jessa reexamined his testimony. There was a benefit to having a witness to her memories. Grief skewed recollection, sculpting it into landscapes that looked different depending on the light. Maybe she didn’t remember things as they truly were, but rather through the filter of insecurities amplified by loss.
Jessa shut her eyes. She pictured the faces of her family, dear faces she missed with an agony that felt like injury. The truth came into focus. One didn’t need to understand all of someone to love them. Her family had loved her passion for writing even if they didn’t share it. They were passionate about her, and love stepped over boundaries as if they didn’t exist.
All this time, it wasn’t the words that had left her, but she who’d blamed them and pushed them away. She'd been running from herself, and she was out of breath. If she wanted to save herself—to save them both—she had to stop.
Before doubt could jab her into silence, Jessa threw herself blindly into it. She tried a couple of entries. She hesitated. She stuttered. Two false starts, and finally she began.
It was terrible. Blunt rhythms and flat imagery, but the mist parted all the same. She pushed on, stretching that part of her mind like a sore, unused muscle. And then, a few stanzas later, almost without her noticing, it wasn't terrible anymore. She reached for words and they were there, as if gathered in a bowl for her scoop out with her hands. A poem of loss took shape. It came to life, brackish and full of thorns.
She spoke of the rain like a sky of grief. Of the wind and missing voices. Of the drowning soul. It never came close to articulating what it was to lose those she loved, but it sketched a shadow, like an afterimage from an nuclear blast burned onto the walls of her heart. Mere wraiths of her despair, yet they brought a sense of connection with herself she’d thought forever lost. It dragged her pain into the world like an incantation and made it real, a weight she could touch. She hadn't realized it could be this way, how admitting it aloud—I am hurting. I am lost.—there was rescue.
Moisture rolled down her cheeks. Tears fell into her palm when she wiped them. She was crying. She laughed in astonishment, the sound water-logged and more alive than any laughter she’d expressed for months.
"Such lovely suffering," the lich said gleefully. "There, human, behold your prize."
With a sigh, the mist before her peeled back like flesh parting under a blade stroke, revealing a house identical to the one they’d entered. She picked out a prone form sprawled across the threshold, wings splayed beneath him like colorless stained glass.
“Simith,” she choked.
Jessa rushed to his side. He was so pale. His lips were parted, his eyes half open and staring sightlessly. She reached for his hand, but drew back. His hands were smoking and completely covered in red. The scent of burned flesh almost made her gag.
Jessa began to shake, but refused to recognize the conclusions forming in her head or the agonizing sense that she had lost something deeply special to her. She slid her fingers over his pallid lips. Breath fluttered under them, eliciting a sob she had no chance of holding in.
“He screamed so beautifully. A nocturne of agony.” The lich’s cascading voices caterwauled as if in imitation, abstract bodies forming in the miasma, a writhing, twisting grotesquerie. Jessa squeezed her eyes shut to block the sight.
“But we won your challenge!” she screeched at it. “We held up our side of things. Let us go.”
“Sadly, I cannot. He must have a true name for you to leave, and he has not given himself one. Nor does it appear he’ll manage to before he dies.” The skull reappeared. It had no lips to smile but she sensed it there nonetheless. “Three new souls to add to my garden.”
Jessa shifted Simith closer so his head rested on her lap. He blinked once, slowly, but didn’t seem aware of her.
Three new souls…
She touched his face with one hand, the other moving to cover her belly. Her family, she realized with sudden, startling clarity. The only family she had left. A ferocious rage rose up in her. No, it would not end this way.
“If he needs a name, I’ll give him one.”
“Impossible,” it hissed with a vehemence that hinted at apprehension. “You cannot. You have no magic to bind his life force to it.”
“Our lives are already bound together by magic. I think I can.”
She smoothed sandy locks off Simith’s fevered brow, struggling to hide her doubt. Could it work? She had no idea, but it felt right. Their spirits swam together, saved and endangered by one another, an observer to all their sorrows and joys. And something more. Something that stirred each time she looked at him. Each time he touched her. There was magic in that, too.
Jessa tugged open his leathers and unlaced the tunic he wore beneath. The once defined shape of his conduit tattoo appeared damaged, the raven feather smudged wildly in untamed edges like a charcoal rubbing. She slipped her hand over it. Closing her eyes, Jessa called out to him in her thoughts. She brought to her mind a stream of his memories; the mischievous boy; the heartbroken adolescent; the ruthless warrior. And her friend, a complexity of all three, a soul stacked with regret and nearly extinguished hope, layered with goodness and fault, just like her.
His heart thudded beneath her hand. She reached out to it.
Let me name you.
Warmth brushed against her palm like a weakened pulse, faint and fading. His magic? Jessa didn’t dare open her eyes for fear of losing the connection. She leaned down by his ear and whispered a name.
The lich let loose a punishing screech that battered her ear drums—and just as quickly disappeared. The suffocating mist vanished, and Jessa looked up to find herself on the lake’s shores once again. Above her, the light of a grey-blue sky sank toward nightfall.
Leaves crunched behind her, and she leaned protectively over Simith, who still lay in her arms. When she saw General Seshi emerge from the forest she melted with relief. Seshi didn’t look all that gratified to see them, her bright eyes on Simith as she came to stand over them.
“You were successful?” A hard demand.
“Yes, we did it.”
Seshi’s fanged teeth clicked together twice. She shut her eyes as though a crushing weight had been lifted.
“Simith’s hurt,” Jessa said. “Badly hurt. I think he’s dying.”
“I suppose he did something heroic in there and honor demands I save his life,” she growled as if he’d injured himself to spite her. She didn’t move to help him.
Jessa knew why the troll hesitated. She’d seen the reasons for it and understood. He was still an enemy to her eyes and always would be.
“Please,” Jessa whispered.
Nothing in the general’s face softened. She knelt down, glanced at his scorched and bloody hands, at the warped remains of his conduit visible between the open folds of his clothes. An emotion darted across her stoic expression. Surprise. Still, she didn’t move.
“Please,” Jessa said again. More tears spilled from her eyes. Now that they’d begun, she couldn’t get them to stop.
Seshi sighed. “That I should be called upon to offer mercy to he who never gave us any,” she muttered bitterly. Drawing a slender chain of interconnected metal links from around her neck, she then settled her hands over Simith’s chest. “I will heal him, but it’s likely I’m only saving his life to face the executioner later.”
Chapter Nine
> Simith’s return to the world arrived inch by inch. Sounds first, voices beside him. His mother. His father. Their words came gently, soothing, filled with such worry and love he almost believed the life he’d lived was merely a dream, that he was a boy again sick with fever soon to pass. He could’ve sworn he heard his brother’s voice as well.
“It’s not time yet to fly, little brother,” he told him softly. “Stay here a while yet.”
“Don’t leave. Don’t leave me alone.” Simith wasn’t sure if he’d managed to say it, but Cirrus chuckled in that bemused, slightly exasperated way of his, the sound so familiar it wrenched Simith’s heart.
“Worry not. Rimthea and I will come back when you’re ready.” His voice faded. “And remember, you’re never alone, Sim.”
Someone touched his face. Jessa. He still couldn’t see, despite the sense that his eyes were open, but he knew it was her. She spoke. Quiet poems that comforted his unsettled spirit. He reached for her with aching hands that stilled only when her fingers slipped into them. And as always when he slept, he saw only her.
When he next awoke, Jessa was no longer there. His sight had returned as well as an acute awareness of his body. Everything hurt, though only his hands were bandaged. The raw magic. He shuddered to remember drawing it into himself, the way it consumed him from the inside like candlewax melting beneath immolating flame.
How had he survived? He observed the angled canvas walls reaching toward a high pinnacle. He was in a tent. Not a fairy tent, however. The rugs beneath him held the black and white patterns typical of troll weavers. He tried to sit up, but the attempt turned all his hurts into white, hot agony, and he gasped.
Then his mother and father were there. A testament to his condition that he hadn’t known anyone was nearby.
“Stay still,” his mother said. “You’re not well yet.”
Tears fell freely from her eyes. Both of them, he realized. They wept. Because of him.
“Please don’t cry,” he croaked in a desiccated voice. He couldn’t bear that he’d brought them more pain. The sight fractured him. “Please, forgive me.”
Magic Underground: The Complete Collection (Magic Underground Anthologies Book 4) Page 169