The haze had lifted completely now, the last of its clinging tendrils wisping up and away, the gas it cleaved to dissipating high above in the constant sea winds. So there was one thing down.
“Whatever this is about, Cennydd, it’s done.” Milo set his stance, legs apart and gun snug to his shoulder. “Back off. Now.”
“Or… what?” Cennydd slid his gaze to the sorcerer, jerked his chin, then took a step to the side. “You don’t seem to understand, Milo. You’re not in charge here.” It was a snarl.
“I’m dragonkin on a sovereign preserve. What are you, Cennydd?”
A roar rumbled from up the slope—blurred with sluggish confusion, but anger shot through the deep-throated call that followed. Milo had never heard this particular call before, but the feel of it, the colors that seeped into the still-swirling airstream, were clear.
Danger. Warning.
The cow beside the fence stirred.
The sorcerer took a step back, gaze flitting everywhere while trying to keep one eye on Milo. He’d noticed.
Cennydd hadn’t. “What am I? What am I?” Outraged. “What are you, Milo? Besides a Dewin by-blow who lives off my taxes and thinks he has the right to—”
“For pity’s sake, Cennydd, you’re seventeen! You’ve never worked a day or paid taxes in your bloody life!”
“—dictate everything about the national bloody symbol of my country, taking—”
“It’s my country just as much as—”
“—over things you’ve no business touching, let alone—”
A fountain of raw power hit Milo square in the chest. His shield kept it from doing physical damage but it certainly didn’t feel that way. The impact rocked him so hard he almost toppled backward. It knocked the breath from him, nearly made him drop his shield altogether. He did drop the hex working against the sorcerer’s shield. The magelight plummeted several lengths before Milo caught it, shoved it back up, and tried to redirect a stream of power at his failing hex. Cennydd moved in, and though Milo’s wards prevented Cennydd from actually grabbing the gun, it dinged Milo’s concentration badly enough that Cennydd’s quick shove at the shield was enough to make Milo stumble.
The cow lifted her head. The calf shook his, as though trying to clear it.
Two dragons roared up the hill this time. Three.
And somewhere, not too far, Lleu barked.
Milo wished he could stop time. Freeze everything in place only for a moment so he could regain his bearings. Everything was happening too fast. And then nothing at all made sense as Cennydd’s nimbus flared, carmine to russet shadowed with black as dark as well water, then surged out in spiny trails that all but screamed hatred and fury and ill intent. Milo was still trying to process it, get his mind to accept what he was Seeing, when Cennydd—Cennydd—pulled a thread of power from the ground between his feet, curled it into the shapes of a hex Milo’d never seen before, and hurled it at Milo.
Hot and bloodshot, with hobnail edges tipped in pitch. Malicious. Deadly. And from far too close.
Natur magic. Cennydd was a witch. Cennydd.
It hit Milo’s shield dead-center. Seeking out and chewing at the spaces in his protection charms. Hurting as it tore and shredded, and changed direction every time Milo adjusted to counterattack.
“You—”
Milo couldn’t finish the accusation—You’ve been hiding this all this time—because the sorcerer took the opportunity to intensify his own attack. The ground beneath Milo shook, shuddered, rising up just as Milo took panicked steps back, and gouging a strip that could’ve buried him. Would have. Because these two weren’t only throwing painful hexes and deflecting wards at Milo—they were striking with lethal intent.
Assaulted on two fronts, magic flying everywhere. Milo tried frantically to tighten his shield against the shards of the hex patiently tunneling through it, shaped his magic into dual blunt-force barbs and slung it outward. It smacked Cennydd down to the ground, and forced the sorcerer back right up against the fence. Milo shoved, pinning them both where they were, and gritting his teeth against the sweat dripping down to sting and blur his eyes as they fought him.
He was fading. Tiring. Hurting enough to start losing his focus.
Cennydd shouted—“Let me up, you’ve no right!”—but the sorcerer had gone still, his eyes on the razorback cow that was on her feet now, swaying only paces away from him and clearly moving herself between him and her calf.
The cow growled. Fire lit in her belly.
Milo should be hoping the sorcerer’s shield would hold against a potent blast of concentrated flame, but right now he was sort of hoping the opposite. He could use a hand here.
As though he’d called it, the sound of hoofbeats echoed down the hill, with throaty yips from Lleu, and a rough shout, a simple but deep and commanding “Hey! Hey!” that could only be—
Milo whipped around.
Fearsome in the uneven pulse of the magelight, bareback astride Poppy at full gallop, bent low over her neck, teeth bared, hands tangled in her mane, and hair whipping out behind him like a Wild Man from legend.
Ellis.
Relief teased at Milo for only a second before dread took over. These two were deadly dangerous, not aiming to merely wound or incapacitate Milo but to actually kill him. And Ellis had no magic. Milo had the gun. Had the gun. He had no idea where it was now and no recollection of having dropped it. Didn’t matter. Ellis was heading for the heart of this fray with nothing but his forceful will and good intentions.
And the dragons were waking up. Confused and angry dragons were waking up. A dragonstone wasn’t going to protect against that.
Milo couldn’t allow it—absolutely could not allow Ellis to barrel into this with no protection. And yet Milo was already stretching things far too thinly. His magic was split in four different directions, and the constant barrage at his shield was scattering his concentration.
He could scarcely protect himself. There was no way he could protect them both.
It wasn’t even really a choice.
Milo rammed out a burst of power, enough to finally kill the malicious little hexes gnawing his shield, then disentangled it from around himself and bunged it at Ellis. More power, pouring into the shield as it found and gathered at Ellis, and once it was secure, Milo allowed himself to breathe again. It turned to a wheezing laugh when the shapes of a howler and a blackhorn came swooping down the slope, low enough that their powerful wingbeats blasted dirt and grass across the ground and whipped it all into gritty dervishes. Fire glowed in their bellies, piping up their throats, silhouettes nearly flanking Ellis like outriders as he just kept on coming.
It was beautiful. The stuff of paintings and fireside tales. The laugh burbled out of Milo, rose a giddy octave or two, then turned to a scream when pain like a burning brand sizzled between his shoulder blades and sent him to his knees.
Everything just sort of… blurred.
Cennydd sneered—“It’s what you get”—as he sent another jab of power through the hex, spotty face pale as dough but pulled into satisfied shapes when Milo’s shirt started to smoke at the edges of the magic. The spiky pain trebled.
Milo couldn’t hold back a shriek that turned to a breathless grunt as he doubled over.
Ellis shouted, “Milo!” and leapt from Poppy’s back.
The blackhorn roared overhead.
The sorcerer said, “Bloody damn, kid,” in a thick Verdish accent and backed away as Cennydd shouted, “I had to, he made me, you saw it!”
The hex burrowed through skin, muscle, burning, clawing, eating its way toward Milo’s spine. Agony.
Milo tried to scream again but he had no wind.
The cow stretched her neck over the fence, opened her mouth. Milo had only enough time to register the petrol and sulfur smell, the fuel dripping over her teeth like drool, before a jet of fire shot from her throat and strafed the ground between her calf and everyone else.
Ellis ran through it, right toward Milo. M
ilo gritted his teeth, trying to keep the shield tight and strong as Ellis charged toward him.
Cennydd shrieked, crouched behind his shield for one second, two, before he turned and legged it into the trees.
The blackhorn circled ’round and followed.
The sorcerer was already gone. Somewhere.
Thank every goddess, because Milo couldn’t hold the shield around Ellis anymore. The pain wasn’t letting him concentrate. It wasn’t even letting him move.
The blackhorn disappeared over the treetops then bellowed, presumably at Cennydd, because Cennydd’s magic dissipated all at once and took the violent, spiteful hex with it. And while it stopped trying to chew its way through Milo, the pain went nowhere. It kept ripping through him like he was being flayed, like he was on fire, and maybe he was.
Screeching, the howler made a quick descent then lofted into a dive at the razorback, talons reaching out and grazing scales, and then again, until the razorback stopped spewing fire and lowered her head. Growling. Feral gaze flicking everywhere. One wing extended to cover the calf, who was only sitting there, blinking.
There was a high shout from up the hill. Glynn. Running toward them, three more dragons winging behind and past her to skim by overhead.
A swath of fire, high and hot, was eating the ground. Not at the tree-brake yet, but it would only be a few minutes.
“Milo!” Ellis skidded to his knees at Milo’s side, patting at the smoldering hole in Milo’s shirt. “Oh no.” Patting more gently when Milo yelped and seized at the pressure. “Bloody—don’t move. All right? Milo! Just stay still, don’t move, I’ll—”
“Can… hardly… breathe”—barely a whistle, forced from between teeth clenched tight—“let alone… ah... move.”
Milo shut his eyes, reached out with his magic, put everything he had into dousing the fire, because Old Forge was too far out for the fire brigade to do much good. And anyway, the dragons were riled—it wouldn’t be safe. It wasn’t safe now.
Ellis was still grizzling at Milo—“D’you hear me? Answer me!”—but Milo couldn’t listen, couldn’t understand, couldn’t do anything but try to hang on to his mind through the staggering pain, and… there.
Found the shapes of the fire. Twisted them. Changed them. Obliterated them.
It was all Milo had. Everything that was left. He tried to hear Ellis’s voice telling him he was all right, everything would be all right, but the pain flared out, expanded, mutated into a leviathan that snagged him in jagged claws and dragged him down.
It was almost a relief to let it.
Chapter 11—Development
: the central dramatic section of a sonata form that moves harmonically through many keys
He was out for three days. Or so he’d been told.
He woke to Lilibet, leaning over him with her cool greens and serene blues, pushing healing charms into him with tender touches and calming whispers.
Whitpool had no hospital but for the surgery on the Home Guard’s base, so Ellis had hunted down Rhywun Collins in the middle of the night to come sedate Milo and keep him that way until a proper Natur witch could be found. The damage was magical and so must the healing be. But there was no one in Whitpool who had the magic necessary—Cennydd, Milo thought groggily, Cennydd’s had it all along—and instead of wasting time trying to track down someone else, Ellis had intended to send word to Lilibet the moment the telegraph office opened in the morning. He instead received an odd look from the man at the counter and a message just finished transcription: Arriving a.m. train.
“Of course you are,” Ellis had muttered, thrown some money at the man anyway, and gone to the railway station.
“Because, unlike me,” Ellis told Milo, “Mam has useful Dreams.”
It was quick after that. The pain was still there but not nearly as mind-bending, and the bleariness came and went but was manageable. There would be scars, but, “Every hero needs a scar or two,” Ellis said, smirk trying for cocky but too tender and worried to get there.
Milo didn’t feel heroic. He felt… odd. Removed. Hurting but calm. Glad beyond sense no one else had been hurt and the dragons were all safe, though thoroughly nettled and restlessly taking it out on each other.
Lleu’s barking had woken Ellis, he’d said. That, and the kettle screaming on the cooker. And then he’d seen Milo’s light, and just....
Every goddess save him—what if Milo hadn’t thrown the shield at him? What if one of the dragons, drugged and angry and frightened, had gone after him? What if—?
What if?
Lilibet let Milo up two days later. Partly because Glynn had sworn to not allow him to resume any of his duties yet, and Howell had backed her up with a stern glare and a somber “We have you, son.” But mostly because Dilys showed up, a one-person army of cheer and sarcastic humor, and commandeered the subdued mood like a diminutive, domineering general.
“How are all you people getting in and out of the preserve?” Milo wondered.
They were in the upstairs parlor with its shabby couches and sea-facing windows, open now to catch the fresh breeze and “Put a bit of color in your cheeks” according to Lilibet. “You are not to move,” she’d told Milo, “until you’ve finished a pork pie and drunk two cups of tea.” She’d deposited Milo on the fat armchair Lleu agreed to give up in return for making a bed of Milo’s feet, then demurred the impromptu tea party to “you young folk” and retired to Ceri’s study.
“Oh, well, ehm.” Weirdly sheepish, Ellis dipped into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the dragonstone. He held it up with a shrug.
Milo’s gut curled. “Oh, Elly. You can’t… that’s not enough protection for—”
“We’re being very careful,” Ellis cut in, tucking the stone away again with a glare at Dilys’s muttered “Like a bloody anxious auntie,” but for the most part he ignored her, and told Milo, “I bought a car to keep at the forge, and we—”
“You… bought a car.”
“Well, you don’t have one.”
“You bought a car. To keep at the forge.” Milo shook his head. “Elly, you can’t just—”
“Except for the part where I can. And the part where I did.” Smug. “And anyway, I bought it for Howell, so you have no say.” Ellis shrugged with a waggish grin. “I need some more moles made for subsoiling, and all the blacksmiths worth anything in Wellech are full-up with backorders, what with Her Majesty’s agro-boffins cracking the whip. Howell agreed to knock some together for me and ship them on, and I suggested I pay for it with a car.”
Milo frowned. He was pretty sure they were called agriculture executives, and not agro-boffins, but—“What the deuce is a mole for subsoiling?”
“Oh, it’s this iron… thing. Shaped like a bullet. About yea big.” Ellis spread his hands shoulder-width apart. “You drag it under the soil to create drainage in heavy lands where there’s clay layered—”
“Elly, it would take several thousand ‘iron things’ to equal the cost of a car!”
“There are brackets, too.” Ellis caught Milo’s incredulous look and rolled his eyes. “So he’ll owe me a few. And I need them.”
“Where’s he supposed to get the iron? I thought there was a shortage.”
Ellis shrugged. “I have a great deal to do with running Wellech. Wellech has mines.”
Save them all, he had an answer for bloody everything. Which might not be so annoying if they weren’t all so inarguably and damnably reasonable.
“It’s not like a car will go to waste,” Glynn put in with a halfway moony glance at Ellis that just wasn’t fair. “He’s got the money, and now Tad’s got a car. Play your cards right and maybe we’ll get a decent tractor next to drag that winch Cennydd left behind up to—”
“Glynn.” Milo rubbed at his brow. “We can’t just accept—”
“Family can. Family does.” Dilys wagged a finger at Milo. “Now hush or I’ll buy Glynn the bloody tractor just to watch you squirm.”
Ellis tried, Milo could te
ll Ellis tried really hard to stifle the snort, but it came out anyway. He coughed to cover it, and went on, “It wasn’t a whim. We couldn’t go traipsing up and down the road with no escort, not with the dragons only just settling down, and yes, I’m well aware the stone isn’t a substitute for dragonkin. So we improvised, since—”
“You improvised,” Milo muttered, strangely embarrassed but grateful too. And maybe he was embarrassed because he was grateful. He couldn’t tell.
“Yes, all right, fine—I improvised, since buying the car will end up costing me less than keeping a hire car handy, and something was necessary. It’s safer for us to come and go in a covered vehicle, you know it is. Plus, try getting a driver to come stay at a dragon preserve to be at our beck and call. For pity’s sake, even the people who’ve lived here all their lives don’t come near the fences unless they have to.” Ellis paused, scowling, perhaps reminded, as Milo was, that Cennydd had lived here all his life too, and look how that had worked out. “Anyway.” Ellis shook it away. “I’m the official escort until you’re… ehm.” He waved at Milo’s general state of bedclothes and blankets and endless cups of Lilibet’s healing tea. “Mam didn’t want to mess with the wards so we’ve been using the forge’s access road. Though she did what she could with the ones that were broken.”
“I laid some of my own over what Lilibet did.” Dilys shrugged and propped her socked feet on the tea table. “It should hold until you’re up and about.” She sat back and dug her shoulders into the cushions of the settee across from Milo, nudging Glynn with an impish smirk. “Though this one was just as much a Nervous Nellie as Ellis while I did it.”
Glynn nudged right back. “It’s barely two furlongs from the springs, and I’m not dragonkin. If one of the dragons had—”
Sonata Form Page 20