At least he hadn’t regressed to pissing everywhere. Milo thanked the goddesses for small favors.
He didn’t bother with lights. Another tick in the Random Chance column. Old Forge was too far out from the village proper to justify having electricity run, and erecting the poles and stringing the necessary cables along a property where dragons wandered was only asking for trouble. Milo was tired, he wanted to sleep, so he reckoned it was better to keep his eyes adjusted to the dark. He only lit a tiny magelight by which to see as he found the tea he wanted, filled the infuser, moved the kettle from the warmer to the cooker, and then propped himself against the kitchen window to wait. And because he hadn’t bothered with lights, he could see it clearly when the mist rose.
Not uncommon, of course. Fog was as ordinary on the northern coast as sand. And there was always at least a light mist hovering over the thermal spring. This one, though… this one was....
Milo blinked, clearly seeing things, then squinted, because no, he didn’t think he was. A murk really had just bloomed out of nowhere.
Ty Dreigiau sat atop the highest point of Kymbrygh’s northmost cliffs like a battered old jewel in a cragged and pebbled crown. And though one couldn’t see every detail of the preserve from the tower house’s vantage, it did claim an overview of the constant downward slope of the expansive estate, pastures and pens and fences and forge. The high, sheer drops of the cliffs down to rock and sea were enough of a deterrent on the west and north, but the horseshoe thicket—ash and silver birch and evergreen—formed a natural barrier between the inner and outer fences on the eastern and southern perimeters. And all of it could be easily viewed from Ty Dreigiau’s kitchen window. On a clear day, Milo could see all the way down to Whitpool. On a clear night, he could just make out the lights all the way to Maura.
So he marked it when the fog rolled up not from the ocean, or even the pools and streams that hugged Whitpool like a mam’s sturdy arms as they burbled north and west and out to sea. This haze sprang up all at once from inside the preserve, moving not from the thermal spring, but toward it.
It made no sense.
The thing was, that spot, that origin point from where the mist was rolling… he knew that spot. And not only because he knew every inch of the preserve and could tell you which dragon liked to sun on which particular rock, or which ones had been fighting and clawed up which patch that needed a fill before the ground turned hard and frosted. He knew that spot, because he’d had to fix and reinforce the wards too many times over the past two years. He knew that spot because someone had broken the wards, several times, and no one had been able to figure out who or how or why.
And now there was this queer fog springing up from that spot, reaching distinctly north and a touch east, and blossoming out toward....
“The thermal spring.”
Something in Milo’s gut dropped, and he didn’t quite know why.
The kettle jostled on the hob, just waking to a simmer. Milo jolted at the sound, huffed annoyance at himself, and pushed open the window. Stuck his head out and listened.
The silence was… complete. Unnatural. As though he’d gone deaf in the space between the kitchen and the window’s sash. No muffled dragon calls. No night sounds. No soft coos or clucks from the chicken coop across the yard. No constant crash of waves. It was as if the entirety of the world outside the kitchen had abruptly misplaced the very idea of sound.
Milo pulled back, the ordinary hum of a lived-in house colliding with his eardrums all at once like a whip cracking in his skull. The tinny hollow wheeze of the heating kettle was a warning bell pealing behind his eyes. Ellis turning over in his sleep two floors up was the startling din of a rockslide.
“Magic.”
Elfennol magic, at that.
He didn’t even think about it—Milo opened himself and Looked. Saw the tendrils of it right away. Foreign and off. Milo could See it now, how the magic sought out the vibrations in the air, reached out with shards of violet and pierced them, silenced them. It stretched in a band that had to be deliberate, because it didn’t cover the whole of the preserve—the entire eastern side of Old Forge was fine. Unaffected.
Not so to the west, though. A wide ribbon of nebulous amber swept from the southwest corner of the preserve, up and up, and stopped just short of the house itself. Generations of wards and protections laid over ancient stone repelled it in a strangely beautiful clash against a barrier of indigo.
But it was what was underneath that odd insentient conflict that made Milo suck in a breath and take a step back. Slam the window shut.
Murky grays with silver shoots winding out and out; fuzzy jades coiling into muddy corals, and fizzing into a broad swath of friendly saffron belied by the hostile garnet creeping beneath it. Except it wasn’t all magic. There was… something else there with it, mixing with it. Gaseous, invisible to the corporeal eye yet thick as smoke to Milo’s. Merged with the magic, it rolled into something else, something more, something patient and frighteningly resilient.
Sleep, the fog said. Hush.
And whatever the vapor it was fused to was, the magic that carried it pulled and pushed. Insistent. Seeking. Never letting up.
He was already throwing open the door to the mudroom, shoving his bare feet into muddy boots, pulling a shield around him against the alien magic, and snapping up the rifle on his way out the door before he’d decided to even move. Lleu’s soft warning whuff from upstairs was cut to silence as Milo crossed the mudroom’s threshold and took off across the yard.
The preserve was big, widespread, and pocked with dips and ruts and hillocks made by massive claws or whipping tails or enormous feet smacking down in hard landings. Any number of things lurked to catch at one’s ankles or knees and break a bone or worse. Luckily it was also all downhill. Luckily Milo could spread his magic ahead of him, around him, See it all, and let the downward momentum pull him along as he crashed through pastures and copses, leapt gulleys and furrows, trying to ignore the strain of his lungs and the hard jolts up through muscle and bone.
He was winded, side cramping and legs going to rubber, when he approached the thermal spring, slowing before he reached the nearest cave mouth in case the silence wasn’t affecting the dragons. It was possible. Magic was chancy with dragons—one never knew what charm might work on which dragon, and even that wasn’t consistent. And it wouldn’t do to startle a sleeping dragon in its nest.
Caves spring-carved from ancient limestone. Warrens and pockets and crags that dropped abruptly into nowhere. Warmth for creatures that weren’t quite coldblooded, but close enough. Trust for creatures that chose dragonkin based on things even dragonkin didn’t understand. Safety for creatures that placed themselves in the care of a preserve and depended on their dragonkin to stand the watch.
They were sleeping. All of them. Milo shouted, just to check, and though he could hear himself clearly inside his shield, the thick haze outside it caught the sound, snapped it up, and slashed the vibrations to shards until they scattered into nothing at all. There wasn’t even an echo against the cave walls. Not one dragon stirred, curled in their piles. Not one so much as twitched in its sleep.
He was going about this all wrong. He could See the magic, and yes, it was powerful. But so was he. And maybe he hadn’t even really known this kind of magic existed, that anything could do what it was doing, but Seeing it, being able to pick it up from its endpoint and trace it backwards, decipher its weave, was how he’d managed to excel at school. Cheating, his mam would call it if she knew, if she even suspected. And then she’d have some choice words and ready lectures, worried eyes and angry glares, until he promised he’d never do it again. But was utilizing a natural talent “cheating” any more than a person using superior strength in a physical contest?
Milo had never believed so. And he was bloody good at it.
He sucked in a calming breath, waited until his heart stopped hammering in his ears. Reached out and… touched. Found the prickly jags at the tips
of the charm—no, not charm—the tips of the hex that overlaid the physical fog. Plucked at them. Prodded at them. And when he found the strand that led back to the foundation of the hex’s weave, he twisted it, ever so gently, until he got a good grip and—
The careful tug wrenched immediately into a forceful yank, so quickly Milo had to pull back a bit to avoid getting snapped with the recoil. Like coaxing glittering fragments from a filament inside an electric light, the initial draw was the hardest part. And once Milo had hold of the end of it, everything started to unravel. It was like combing lambswool—forcing his own magic through the foreign power sealing hex to haze, and raking it through the tangles, separating one from another. And once he had the two in his own hands, he sent them spiraling, unwinding, whirling up and away skyward.
The fog began to lift. Magic and material both wafted into a slow-rolling vortex, and though it wasn’t moving as quickly as Milo would like, it was probably just as well. He didn’t know if the sorcerer on the other end of this magic could feel it unwinding from this distance, but if they could, Milo had just lost any surprise advantage he might have had.
He backed away, determined now, and pushed his magic ahead of him as he took off down the slope, rifle still clutched in hand—not that it would do him any good if he managed to find who or what was causing this. This magic was powerful, demanding acknowledgment, and worse, obedience, nudging constantly at his hasty shield as he plowed through the mist his own magic hadn’t unraveled yet. He was moving faster than his own charms—it would be smarter to move with the haze, or just behind it. But whatever this was clearly had no good intent, and he couldn’t take the time.
The goats were all down when Milo flew through the south pasture, tearing headlong past the pen and leaping the inner fence where Cennydd had been caught trespassing only a few years ago, and Milo had thought treating him like a person would help somehow. Now Cennydd’s voice wavered in Milo’s head—You don’t pay attention, Milo—and Milo....
Milo’d had no idea how portentous that would prove to be. Until he skidded to a halt at the very edge of the trees that turned to bracken then scrub as the land rolled out and down to the cliffside of Old Forge’s western boundary. Until he spotted the shapes of two men in that same spot where the wards had been impossible to keep intact for two years, and now Milo thought he knew why.
Because there was Cennydd, crouching against the inside—inside—border fence. The razorback cow was down, apparently deeply asleep, as her calf accepted… something from Cennydd. A hunk of meat, maybe, something the calf happily lipped from Cennydd’s hand like Poppy accepting a carrot. Whatever it was, whatever Cennydd was feeding that calf, it had the same strange muddy-green and gray colors wafting from it that sometimes clung to the calf and its mam in shapes Milo had never been able to decipher. And the little razorback was accepting it like a treat. Happy. Content. Serene as old friends.
…Old friends.
The wards on the fences closest to the caves, warped and picked at for years, right where the fences ended and the cliffs began. Cennydd caught trespassing, and all Milo’s suspicions dismissed because it was Cennydd, and Cennydd was only an awkward little gobshite who had no magic. And then a razorback cow brooded on the preserve, a new calf hatched, and the picking turned to actual breaks.
A man stood behind Cennydd, watching, wary. Powerful Elfennol magic all but poured out of him, fueling a protective bubble around himself and Cennydd and the calf. Here was the source of the gas-and-magic miasma that had settled over the preserve in a soupy haze and pressed at Milo’s shield like a sentient being demanding entrance. Milo had seen that man before. Cennydd had picked him up from the train station right after he’d got done telling Milo he wasn’t safe.
There was a winch. The shape of it in the dark was distinctive. Assembled, ready, and sitting just at the lip where scrub gave way to cliff-drop. Strength charms were crawling all over it; Milo could See the sharp reds spiking through the structure. Because no wagon or lorry or even tractor could have made it through the rough landscape of this part of the preserve, and the winch was clearly meant to lift something heavy.
Milo would bet there was a harness or a sling, just the right size for a young undersized razorback, at the end of the winch’s ropes. And a small pontoon boat waiting on the rocky beach beneath the cliffs.
The fog was unrolling farther up the slope, Milo could See it lifting a furlong or three up. The man didn’t seem to have felt it yet, but it would only be another minute or two before Milo’s charms rammed against the source of the hex and alerted him. Milo kept his shield up, set the rifle’s butt to his shoulder, sighted down, and waited.
It took longer than Milo thought it would. The sorcerer wasn’t paying attention, keeping a close eye on Cennydd instead. Cennydd cooed at the little razorback, grinning as the dragon stumbled sideways then sat with a thump and a querulous little grunt. It listed, sick or sleepy Milo couldn’t tell, but the greens and grays were winding through the dragon now, so Milo suspected it was a bit of both.
“There you go, little chap,” Cennydd singsonged, for all the world like a tad soothing a child to sleep. “That’s the way.”
It was Cennydd’s hand on the little dragon’s snout that somehow woke Milo’s rage and flared it hot up his backbone. That familiarity, that soft manipulative tone, that pleased look on Cennydd’s face: satisfaction with a job nearly done.
And the job’s intent was plain now. Somehow Cennydd had managed to get past the wards. Somehow he’d got close enough to at least this young dragon and its mam that they’d allowed him to approach and had even taken food from his hand. Milo didn’t know how—neither Cennydd nor his accomplice were dragonkin, Milo would bet his life on it—but Cennydd had nonetheless clearly insinuated himself into the graces of these two razorbacks. And the winch and the attempt to make sure the whole of Old Forge slept through this little mission told Milo why.
No wonder these two dragons had been so complacent with Ellis, dragonstone or no, clan or no. Cennydd had doubtless been training the calf to this since it hatched.
Milo’s teeth set tight. His hands on the rifle tensed.
He Saw it when his magic collided right up close with the sorcerer’s. The sorcerer clearly felt it—he jerked back with a frown. Unable to See at least, Milo could tell, because the man shut his eyes, groping for the shapes of his magic, and flinched back when he touched Milo’s instead.
“Hold right there, both of you,” Milo growled, magic flaring at his back, spiking up and out in warning as Cennydd spun in his crouch and the man whipped a thorny little hex at Milo. It whapped Milo’s shield with a flutter of sparks but flattened against it and fizzed into nothing. Milo barely felt it.
A test. A cautious prod more than an attack. The hex reeked of Elfennol magic, thick with fire and crazyjane whorls of barbs and glinting arcs.
Milo sent a magelight high above him, pulsing in steady flashes to hopefully attract the attention of… someone. The Warden assigned to keep an eye on the preserve, maybe, but if this sorcerer had managed to put dragons to sleep....
“Ah, Milo.” Cennydd stood slowly, that smarmy smile slicking his mouth, and his hands out to his sides. He took a step toward Milo. “I see you’ve—”
“Stop, Cennydd. Not another step.” Milo adjusted the rifle at his shoulder. “I’ve heard getting shot in the kneecap really hurts. I don’t have to kill you to stop you. But I will if you make me.”
Milo had no idea if that was true.
Cennydd seemed to think he did—he laughed. Took another step. “Oh, come on, Milo. You? You couldn’t kill a fly, let alone—”
“Yeah? For the dragons?” Milo let it curl through his teeth. “I’m dragonkin, Cennydd. You know how much I love them. I feed things bigger and smarter than you to them every day.” He pulled the hammer back with a deliberate click. “You really want to try me?”
“No, no, you’re right.” Cennydd was still smiling, trying for charm, or… something
, but not getting even close. “How about another trade, yeah? For old times’ sake.”
“A trade.” Milo snorted, derisive. “Like the one where you trespass on a protected preserve and I don’t let a dragon eat you for it? Which, I must say, I’m rather regretting just now.”
“Well, I was thinking more like you walk away, and my friend and I will let you. But I’m sure we can—”
It was distraction. Milo only realized it when the hex punched the wards of his shield with a force that was no small testing jab this time—it stabbed, hitting with a sharp impact that sent pain into Milo’s thigh, right where the hex hit the shield and tried to burrow its way in. Milo stumbled at the hot throbbing sting of it, maybe cried out a bit. But he kept his head and shot a return volley full of his own tiny hexes that covered the sorcerer’s shield and bonded to its construction, gnawing in and working at the foundations of the wards, not even bothering to try to pull the threads apart, but ripping through them with sharp little teeth.
Distraction again. Cennydd had moved in right up close, only paces away from Milo now, and still edging in.
Milo bared his teeth and jerked the rifle. “Stop!”
Cennydd finally did. Still too close. Within arm’s reach now. The pulse of the magelight made the set of his face something feral and ugly.
But Milo could handle this. He could keep them both at bay for quite a while, he decided. Unless Cennydd forced Milo to shoot—and Milo would, at least to wound, and maybe that would actually be better, take one of them out of play. Milo would decide that when he was forced to, but he could hold against the sorcerer for a long time before he was forced to rethink an open stand.
He was using a lot of magic—still unwinding the last of the hex that guided the fog, maintaining the wards of his shield, holding the flashing magelight, working at the sorcerer’s shield to at least pull the dragons from behind it—but Milo had a lot of magic. And though his didn’t come from the infinite elements around him, something he could instantly replenish by robbing power from elsewhere, it was still a considerable well. He had a while before he started to flag.
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