by Eva Chase
Jude clapped me on the arm. “Connar’s got his excellent Physicality skills. We’ve got Professor Viceport on our side for that area too. And between almost-Baron Ashgrave here and Rory, we’ve got Insight well covered.”
“You can’t downplay your Illusion skills,” I said.
He shrugged, without the wince I might have expected if I’d made that comment a few days ago. His hand came up to touch the conducting piece Professor Viceport had given him. “I’ll do what I can, but I don’t think we should make any plans that revolve around me. I still can’t count on sustaining any spell for longer periods.”
“Persuasion is where we’re weakest,” Declan said. “As strong as Malcolm is, he can’t face off against two barons who specialized in it—and both of our Persuasion professors left to join the barons too. Not that we’d necessarily have wanted to use that as a major combat tactic, but we’ll need to be on guard against them using it on us while we’re launching our efforts.”
Jude tapped his finger against his lips. “Rory did have a good suggestion about breaking apart our enemies’ attention. Divide and conquer and all that. There’ve got to be some other strong Illusion mages here—Professor Burnbuck would know who’s the best. If we could conjure the impression of a whole additional army coming from a different direction…”
“Illusion is my strength just as it was your fa—Edmund’s,” Hector said. “But the barons will know that. If we show up in much greater numbers than they’d expect, the first thing they’ll do is test for illusions.”
Jude let out a huff. “Too fucking clever for their own good—or ours, anyway.” He aimed a crooked grin at me. “It’s too bad you can’t conjure a whole actual army to do our bidding. A squadron of golems or the like?”
I could maybe have constructed three or four humanoid figures and kept enough control over their movements for them to join a physical attack, but that was hardly a balance-tipping force. “It’s not really physical might we need anyway,” I pointed out. “It’ll just take one spell to blast a conjuring like that apart if we’re trying to maintain a bunch of them at once.”
Some of our other allies drew closer to join the conversation, and I let myself drift back a couple steps. If they came up with an idea that would require a large Physicality effort to make it work, they’d let me know. Declan had a good sense of what was possible or not in pretty much every realm.
My gaze drifted across the room and caught on a bunch of pale faces in a huddled group that had just slipped into the room. Some of the Naries had stopped bothering to wear their scholarship pins regularly, but it was easy to tell from their demeanor that these weren’t fellow mages. I spotted Rory’s dormmate Morgan and her friend Brandon who’d helped us out the other night among them.
Seeing them stirred something in my mind—the first glimmer of an idea that had hit me as we’d been crossing the grounds this evening. I went over to see what they’d come for and whether being around them might shake more inspiration loose.
A couple of the Naries recoiled a bit at the sight of me, but I guessed that wasn’t surprising given what they’d endured at the hands of many of my classmates recently. I was used to my presence unnerving even fellow fearmancers. I kept my stance as relaxed as I could manage and pushed my mouth into a mild smile. “Hey. Is everything all right?”
Brandon stepped forward, apparently the most confident of the bunch after spending as much time as he had working with us directly. “We were just wondering what’s going on. The news has been crazy—what we can get of it now. You’re obviously making plans.” His gaze slid past me to take in the rest of the room.
“We’re going to be making a move against the barons—hopefully very soon,” I said. “We just want to be sure it’s one that’ll work. As far as I know, there isn’t any major threat to the campus itself right now.” Although the Naries were the most vulnerable of anyone here, I didn’t think the barons were likely to bother hassling them because of that exact same weakness. “If you see anything unusual—more unusual than things have been the last few weeks—let one of us know right away, though.”
He nodded. “If there’s anything we can do to pitch in, we’re happy to step up.”
He made the offer with such confidence that I had to admire him. Here he was, a guy without magic surrounded by mages, witnessing the breakdown of his society because of some of those mages and unable to stop it even with his non-supernatural talents, and he still said those words as if he didn’t doubt for a second that he could contribute something.
Why wouldn’t he want to? It was his people even more than it was ours out there, hearing their leaders making horrific announcements, watching the violence as those who protested were mowed down…
A memory of one of those videos flickered through my head: the rattle of gunfire, the sparking of a fallen electrical wire. My breath caught in my throat.
“There might be something, actually,” I said. “If we wanted to buy or make things you can’t buy in a regular store… you’d have some idea how to look up where and how to do that?”
Brandon’s eyes glinted with curiosity. “If anyone’s ever done it before, there’s probably a record of it on the internet somewhere. And if it’s on the internet, I can find it.”
I hustled back to the main knot of discussion. Declan was saying something about negotiation tactics, with Holden nodding along. The word made my entire body balk.
Barons Nightwood and Bloodstone and those who stood with them had lost any right to negotiation. They deserved to fall.
“I know how we can turn the tables on the barons,” I said the second there was a brief pause in the talk. “And it’s a strategy no one there will be prepared for.”
Several pairs of startled eyes shifted to me. The weight of those gazes made my chest tighten, but I barreled on to answer the question in them.
“We used Nary strategies before, hacking into their law enforcement and putting up those profiles. That was the first effort we made that really slowed the barons down, even if it was only temporary. So, we want to distract the blacksuits and the others who’ll be fighting for them, and not in a way they’ll immediately detect or diffuse magically? Let’s blow some things up the old-fashioned way.”
Declan stared at me. Jude blinked and then started to laugh, but it didn’t sound derisive, maybe even a little impressed. The blacksuits who’d joined our group frowned, though.
“We aren’t going to run at them with literal guns blazing,” one of them said tartly. “Once they catch on, they can use their magic to turn weapons on us just as easily.”
Holden was watching me, waiting to see how I’d respond. Trusting that I’d have a good answer. I drew myself to my full height, bringing all the authority this body afforded me to bear.
Maybe I wasn’t an idea guy a lot of the time, but sometimes I saw things other people didn’t. And I knew with a certainty that ran down to my gut that I’d hit on the key this time.
“We won’t bring guns,” I said. “We’ll bring one-time explosives and other devices like that—enough to make them think there’s a huge magical attack happening from various directions. We force them to scatter to deal with that, and then we march in and do things our old-fashioned way.”
A small but pleased smile split Declan’s serious expression. “You know, I think that could be just what we need.”
Baron Killbrook looked around at the group. One of the blacksuits started to protest again, and he raised his hand. “We don’t have a lot of options,” he said. “In fact, until a moment ago, it wasn’t clear we had any viable options at all. Let’s at least determine how this approach would play out before we debate its merits.”
He tipped his head to me as if to say, You have the floor. A mix of anxiety and pride rushed through me. I was really leading our people too. In that moment, it didn’t feel so ridiculous to take on that role after all.
But if I was wrong, then I’d have screwed us out of our last chance to pres
erve our society and the Naries’ the way they were meant to be.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rory
When we were just five minutes from our expected destination, the blacksuit who was sitting next to me in the van cast his locating spell for the last time. It didn’t seem likely that my mother or her colleagues had moved in the past half an hour, but considering the explosive entrance we intended to make, I wasn’t going to argue against being one hundred percent sure.
His magic rippled through me with much less force than the spells Lillian and her crew had used to find my mother in joymancer custody. This time we were only reaching across a few miles rather than thousands. And he was reaching out through me tentatively, not wanting my mother to sense the brush of magic as it identified her.
I caught a whiff of her presence, a celebratory energy shot through with undercurrents of frenetic hostility, and then the blacksuit was easing back.
“Still on the Nightwood property,” he said. “I’m sure they’re in the main building now.”
In the seats ahead of us, the blacksuit who’d been performing a similar spell on Malcolm nodded. “I agree. And the younger Nightwood heir isn’t right with her father but nearby.”
“We’ll have to be careful with how we blow things up,” Malcolm muttered, but his eyes gleamed in the darkness with an eager if cool light. He was looking forward to this plan, to seeing how much we could throw off the barons and their supporters.
In a way, it was perfectly fitting that we’d be using tools created by the people they felt so superior to in order to bring about their defeat.
As soon as we’d determined that the barons were at Nightwood manor, Ms. Grimsworth had pulled out a blueprint from the library archives for us to analyze. It didn’t include any of the magical enhancements or wards the Nightwoods would have laid down over the years, and the structure itself might be somewhat outdated because of renovations, but Malcolm had been able to contribute plenty of additional information. We’d plotted out every step of this plan in detail.
It was nearly midnight now. We couldn’t have gathered the supplies we needed in any nonmagical way at this short notice. But Brandon had helped us find instructions for the creation of the sorts of rockets and other explosives we wanted to use, and Connar, Professor Viceport, and a few of the blacksuits who specialized in Physicality had gotten to work conjuring our arsenal to those specifications.
I just hoped that arsenal was enough to give us the edge we needed. We were going all-in tonight, and if the barons got the upper hand… I didn’t want to think about what would happen to us and our allies.
As anticipated, the driver pulled the van off into a secluded forest lane before we came into sight of the mansion. A couple of the other vehicles with us parked nearby. Several blacksuits hopped out into the night and gathered at the start of the lane, canvas bags that held most of our new equipment slung over their shoulders.
“Are you all ready?” Hector Killbrook asked, his expression tight. Even when he’d agreed to support us in our initial campaign against the barons, I didn’t think he’d imagined he’d end up leading a charge into actual battle. He hadn’t wanted this any more than we had—but he was stepping up, and that was what mattered.
The blacksuits all nodded, faces taut with nervous anticipation. The unofficial baron gave them a thin smile. “Launch all the devices as soon as you get in place. We don’t want to give their security people any chance to catch on and interfere.”
The bunch of them set off with spells cast under their breaths. Before my eyes, they wavered and faded into the shadowy landscape around us.
Malcolm, Hector, and I left two of the vans behind and climbed into the one closest to the road. The driver cruised a little further until we reached a small hill that hid us from view of the driveway just beyond it. The vehicles carrying the rest of our force were already parked on both shoulders, waiting for the signal to race in.
As soon as the explosions started, we’d gun the engines and tear right through the gate onto the main Nightwood property. The rest—well, it was difficult to predict how the barons and their companions would react. All that mattered was making sure that if they left the property, it was in cuffs.
Or in coffins.
I swallowed hard, not letting myself dwell on that thought. After the way they’d slaughtered the joymancers and Shelby’s colleagues, I couldn’t summon much in the way of guilt about turning that violence back on these people to stop them from doing even worse. I still didn’t enjoy the idea.
The barons had pushed us to this point, I reminded myself. My mother had forced the situation. If we didn’t put all the power we had into stopping them now that we’d seen just how far they’d go, we’d have as much blood on our hands as they did.
Malcolm sat tensed next to me, his gaze trained on the windshield, even though he couldn’t see the house where he’d spent most of his childhood yet. Even this road must have been so familiar. I was going up against a woman I’d only known as my mother for a month. He was facing off with the parents who’d raised him. I couldn’t imagine what he was feeling right now.
“I’ll kill him,” he said in a quiet, strained voice, without looking at me. “If it’s him or us, which it basically already is—I will.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was looking for agreement or an argument. Before I could offer anything at all, a cracking sound split the air. Orange light blazed against the darkness up ahead—a flare of it here, another over there. My pulse hiccupped as the driver hurtled us forward.
The mages in the cars in front of us had been prepared to batter our way onto the property. Our van roared down the driveway in the midst of our allies, and those at the lead would have been launching the spells they’d prepared. With a screech and a clatter, the gate burst right off its hinges. We raced past the wall.
Flames surged amid the trees on either side of the expansive house. The multi-car garage had collapsed in on itself; glass and other debris lay strewn across the crumpled roofs of the vehicles that’d been parked outside. More fire licked up one side of the house itself where the windows had shattered and the stones were cracked and blackened.
Enemy blacksuits streamed from the front doors to run across the property in every direction. Our allies knocked several of them to the ground and pinned them there with a few quick castings allowed by surprise.
We all leapt out of our vehicles. At the same time, more people careened out of the house under the glow of the entry light, most of them looking a little dazed. Baron Nightwood’s guests wore the same sorts of finery as I’d seen when Baron Stormhurst had hosted a gala weeks ago. A couple still clutched champagne glasses as if those would shield them.
This hadn’t been a strategy meeting. The barons had been celebrating with their allies, toasting to their victory that was destroying the Naries’ society more with every passing hour.
Anger flashed through me, as hot as the wafts of heat and smoke carrying on the breeze. I tossed out one spell and then another—the ones the blacksuits had coached us on—to lock this woman’s legs and topple that man to the ground.
Several of the mages hurled spells back at us with much less restraint. Cressida cried out as a bolt of energy drew a gash across her cheek. A punch of energy sent Declan staggering back into the hood of a van with a pained grunt.
A few of our blacksuits charged into the house to look for the prisoners. I couldn’t tell for sure if they made it very far. A few seconds later, the remaining barons strode out with more of their supporters. My mother’s hair whipped in the wind, and magic shimmered around her body. In that first instant, she looked as if she were on fire.
A roar broke through the chaos. A huge scaled shape rose up over the battle with flaps of its massive wings. Connar had shifted into his dragon form. He plowed through the mass of fearmancers in their fancy clothes, sending them toppling. Even the barons stepped back.
The sight distracted me enough that I wasn’t qu
ite prepared for the next spell that hissed my way. Someone yanked me to the side while they snapped out a casting word. The attack crackled away with a stinging spray of sparks. Maggie let go of me with a quick squeeze of my arm.
I didn’t have time to say so much as a thank you. The mages who’d managed to avoid Connar’s sweep were throwing more hostile magic at us, fast and furious. The flames around the fringes of the property were dying down. The blacksuits who’d run off to investigate the explosions emerged from the woods to join the fighting. Even with the people we’d managed to paralyze or been forced to deal fatal wounds to, there were more of our enemies still fighting than there were of us.
Jude let out a battle cry and flung a couple of our smaller conjured devices across the courtyard. They blasted through the asphalt and toppled several more of our enemies. Connar’s dragon lunged down at the crowd again, slamming through those still standing. A clear space opened up between us and the barons poised on the house’s front steps.
Both of the barons were shouting casting words of their own. Baron Nightwood’s face had turned blotchy with anger. His lips curled with what looked like a snarl as he flung his next spell, one that slashed through the shields we kept bolstering and flayed open the chests of two juniors just a few feet from where Malcolm stood, by one of the other cars now.
The Nightwood scion’s arm jerked up, but the rest of his stance stiffened with momentary hesitation. He’d defied his father and told him off to his face, but he hadn’t outright attacked him before. And he’d been so horrified by the thought of following in his parents’ footsteps, of somehow becoming as vicious as they were.
I barely thought, only acted on instinct. A casting word that had become familiar slipped from my mouth. I focused on Malcolm with the curl of my fingers toward my palm and propelled that sensation with my magic to his free hand. Not teasing or challenging the way we used to play this game—just extending a simple gesture of my support and love.