by Karen Chance
“Not with our plan—”
“—and it’s stressful. You already have enough on your plate! How are you supposed to handle your job and take on his strain, too? And for how long? Lady, it will break you!”
I stood back and crossed my arms. “You think me that weak?”
“I think you’re that weak,” Agnes said, passing by.
“No one was talking to you!” Rhea told her furiously.
Agnes just smiled and wafted on, over to where I guess a lesson was happening. The little girls had been corralled over by one of the walls, facing the flowering vines. They appeared to be trying to cast some kind of spell on them, only I guessed it wasn’t going well, because nothing was happening.
I turned my attention back to Rhea.
“Gertie said think outside the box,” I told Rhea. “I’m thinking outside the box.”
“Just make him take the spell off!” Rhea said, in a furious whisper. “I thought that’s what we were here for!”
“So did I. But that won’t work—”
“According to who? Him?”
“No,” I said firmly. “According to me. He even offered. But Rhea, he doesn’t remember shifting this last time. He showed up in his night clothes because he didn’t even take time to dress! If he took off the spell, he’d just have it recast when the next episode hits. He can’t trust himself—”
“And neither can we!”
“We can now, at least for a while—”
“You don’t know that! Not to mention not knowing what this could do to you! You can’t risk it—”
“I also can’t leave him to rot in a chrono cell while everything goes to hell!” I snapped, because she didn’t seem to be getting this. “Or until he shifts back in time again, and Gertie kills him—”
“Well, someone has to do your job,” Agnes opined, having gotten close enough to hear that last remark, because she was chasing a stray.
“Go back to whatever you’re doing,” Rhea told her. “This is none of your business.”
Agnes smiled at her and shooed the child back toward the waiting governesses, with a little pat on her backside. And then turned to us. And one look at her face told me that she’d been waiting for this for a while.
Great.
So much for a peaceful lunch.
“It isn’t any of my business,” Agnes said sweetly, “when my Pythia has to exhaust herself, running all over the timeline, cleaning up your Pythia’s messes?”
“It wasn’t her fault!” Rhea snapped.
“Then whose fault was it? She lets a vampire, of all things, hijack her power, and then signally fails to rein him in. She can’t judge her shifts properly, and almost splits her head open on a rock. Not to mention allowing said vampire to completely trash the timeline!”
“He’s sick! He doesn’t know what he’s doing!”
“Then he should be put down before he kills the rest of us.”
“This has nothing to do with you—”
“Nothing? He was in the fifteenth century,” Agnes said, getting in her face. “If he trashes the timeline then, it affects us now—just as much as you. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand that. Not when, on top of her other flaws, your Pythia picks an heir who can’t even shift!”
“Okay, cut it out,” I said, because ragging on me was one thing, but ragging on Rhea was something else. And because I was afraid that she’d run away again, and we still needed to talk.
But Rhea wasn’t looking like she felt like running away.
Rhea was looking pissed.
And, for the first time, she didn’t just remind me of her mother. I could see her father in her, too, as she squared up with Agnes. Something in the set of the jaw, the mulish tilt of the chin, the fire in the eyes.
Although that last one was kind of true of both of them right now, and—
And I should probably be doing something to de-escalate this, shouldn’t I?
“Cassandra?” I heard my name called, and looked toward the door, where Gertie was standing eating a pear. “May I see you for a moment?”
Not really the time, I thought, but okay, that might do as a distraction. But Rhea wasn’t interested in distractions. “I’ll stay here,” she told me flatly.
“Um,” I said.
“Cassandra?” Gertie was sounding impatient. “Now, if you please.”
Damn it, Gertie! I thought. But I stomped over anyway. “What?”
“Pear?” She offered me one.
I looked at it blankly. It was fat and yellow, with a blushing bottom. It was a nice pear.
It also made no sense at all.
“What?”
“Yes, I have an apple,” Gertie said, and jerked me inside.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, because this was bizarre, even for her. But she just shushed me and turned me toward the crack in the door. It was still open maybe a quarter of the way, giving us a sliver of a view, although why we needed one, I didn’t know. I needed to get back—
“Watch,” Gertie said, and ate pear.
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I watched anyway. Don’t argue with teacher, I thought. Only I didn’t know what I was supposed to be watching.
The little girls were the easiest to see, still facing their wall. Or most of them were. One was playing with a doll she’d smuggled out, hidden in a fold of her dress, and another had squatted down to examine a fat green caterpillar. But most of the rest were dutifully reciting something, I didn’t know what, because it was in some other language.
“A test,” Gertie said, her voice low.
“For what?”
“To see if they can age a flower.”
I looked back at her. “How? They don’t have access to the Pythian power yet.”
“No, they don’t,” she agreed. “The question is, can any of them get its attention?”
I didn’t understand what she meant. And then I did, when one of the little girls, a brunette with scads of ringlets falling halfway down her back, managed . . . something. The flower didn’t change, but I felt a stirring anyway, a brief swirl in the air like the breeze fluttering her hair.
But there was no breeze in the courtyard; the walls were too high. And this one felt less like air than like the quicksilver energy of the Pythian power. I closed my eyes and almost saw it: a glittering stream, not thick and full, but scattered, like glitter on the breeze.
But there, nonetheless.
Called up by a little girl’s enchantment.
“One to watch,” Gertie said, even as the brief flutter petered out.
And then came roaring back, but not as a thin spread of particles this time, but thick and strong and purposeful, a torrent of power instead of a scattering, like a summer storm.
“What the—” I said, and then the door blew open, slamming back against the house as if caught in a gale.
Or a fight, I thought, catching sight of the rest of the courtyard.
“I told you I needed to get out there!” I said to Gertie, as my acolyte faced off with her own mother. I started forward, but Gertie pulled me back, and she was surprisingly strong for an old woman.
“Let me go!”
“Shush,” she said, and shut the door partway again.
I didn’t know why she’d bothered. Neither girl looked like they had eyes for anyone but each other. Especially Rhea, who was practically incandescent.
“You take that back!”
Agnes grinned at her insolently. “Make me. Oh, but I forgot, you can’t.”
“I can!” And shit. A wand had just appeared in Rhea’s hand.
“Okay, no,” I said, but Gertie had an arm around my neck.
“Give it a minute,” she hissed.
“We don’t have a minute!” And damn, it was true.
I vaguely saw the nursemaids shooing the children toward a door on the other side of the garden; saw Gertie’s magic throw up a shimmering barrier halfway across the yard, shielding them; saw a swirl of the
Pythian power descend and turn Rhea’s wand to ash.
And then it was on.
Oh, it was freaking on.
I tore away from Gertie’s hold and rounded on her. “They’ll kill each other!”
“You have so little trust in your acolyte? That she would harm her own mother?”
“I’m not talking about her—”
“Agnes knows what she’s about.”
“—and accidents happen—”
“Not in chimera,” Gertie said, causing me to break off and stare at her.
Chimera was an advanced technique in which the Pythian power made a duplicate body for its user, splitting the soul in two so that one Pythia could inhabit two places at once. Or no, that wasn’t exactly right. The soul wasn’t split; it was more like grabbing a balloon in the middle and having it bulge out at both ends, with the bulges each getting their own body.
It was used mainly for training exercises, since halving a soul halves its power, which made it dangerous in real combat. But for training it was perfect, as the body created in chimera could be damaged or even killed without hurting the original. The soul merely snapped back to its origin if one body was destroyed.
But if Agnes was a copy, that meant that she’d planned this. Both of them had, I thought, watching Gertie munch pear. But they’d forgotten one little thing; Rhea wasn’t in chimera!
I started a spell, intending to shift my damned acolyte out of there, but Gertie shut it down. “Let it be.”
“You let it be,” I snarled. “Rhea’s vulnerable!”
“Doesn’t look vulnerable to me,” Gertie said, as I turned back to what was now a full-out battle.
Because Rhea had been raised by the covens, and she always carried two wands.
The second was out and blasting, dealing Agnes a blow hard enough to send her flipping over backwards. But she’d been shielded and landed on her feet, with the only harm I could see a badly bitten lip. She licked the blood away, a strange smile coming over her face.
And then threw a blast of her own that Rhea dodged, but which hit the old oak. Which promptly became a new oak, when it de-aged to maybe half its previous size. It also threw out a mass of new, green leaves that floated gently to the ground like confetti as Rhea and I both stared at it.
And then I was shifting—
Nowhere, because Gertie slammed me back into place before I could.
Damn it, she was crazy! They were all freaking crazy and I should never have brought my acolyte anywhere near this place. She was going to get killed!
But she wasn’t going down without a fight. Rhea snapped out of her shock and started throwing spells, so rapid fire that I could barely keep up. And, clearly, Agnes felt the same. But then, she didn’t need to.
She’d thrown up a time shield, a nifty little thing that I was still working on, because it was a damned difficult spell. It was also damned useful, however, as it aged out of existence anything sent at you. That included both conventional weapons as well as spell fire, as Rhea was discovering.
So she changed tactics, blasting the ground at Agnes’ feet instead, causing dirt and pavers to explode upward and a sizeable hole to appear underneath the other girl. Agnes lost her footing and her spell wobbled. But before it could fall, she’d shifted, popping out of existence right before Rhea’s latest spell tore through the air, and materializing behind her.
“No!” I yelled, my voice almost lost in the sound of spell fire hitting the far wall of the courtyard.
But Rhea heard me.
And I guess Agnes did, too, because when I burst out of the door, Agnes laughed delightedly and threw a spell my way that I brushed aside, sending it plowing into the dirt, and causing a weed patch to spring out of the ground, waist high.
But I didn’t dodge the second one. A shift caught me, halfway through a step, at almost the same time that Agnes’s spell hit down. But it hadn’t been thrown by her.
I had a half second to see Rhea’s desperate face, her out flung hand, her widened eyes as she realized what she’d done and tried to pull it back—
But it was too late.
And then the garden winked out and I materialized somewhere in the air above the Thames.
Way above, I realized, as gravity caught me.
Well, shiiiiiiiiit.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I cracked open the door.
There was no light and the curtains were drawn, so I wasn’t sure anyone was even in there. But then a lamp flicked on, shedding a small glow around a girl in a bed. She was in my favorite pose lately, with her knees drawn up and her chin tucked down, sitting by the headboard. A little lump of an acolyte who looked like she’d seen better days.
Way better.
“Can I come in?” I asked softly.
I got what I thought was a nod, so I slipped through the opening and closed the door behind me. It was dinnertime, and everyone else was downstairs in the big dining room, where I hoped they’d stay. I schlepped over to the bed, dressed in one of Gertie’s old nightgowns and a robe that was far too big for me. But it was better than the still damp, used-to-be-white gown that I’d shifted back in.
Gertie had dosed me on arrival with half a dozen potions, after she realized where I’d been, and had threatened several more. Why London had what was essentially a petri dish of plague running through the city was beyond me, but it wasn’t my main concern. Rhea was.
“You should have let me go,” she said, after I’d put the tray I was holding onto the bedside table.
“Go where?”
Her hair had fallen over her face, but I could see glimpses of a tear stained, anguished countenance that made me want to hug her. But I somehow got the idea that that wouldn’t be welcome. Her shoulders were tight, and the hand that gripped the blankets was white knuckled.
I got up again and moved the lamp over slightly, so that I could fix us some tea. Personally, I’d have preferred another beer, but it seemed that Rhea had filched the last of the cook’s supply earlier, and there wasn’t any more. So, tea it was.
I handed her a mug. The room was cold, winter having snuck back in after dark, so it served as handwarmer and a tea holder all at the same time. I made myself one as well and sat on the edge of the bed.
For a while, we just drank tea.
“This stuff really does make things better,” I finally said. “Like life can’t be all that bad if you have tea and shortbread.”
I offered her a plate of the latter, because she was currently missing dinner, but she shook her head. So I ate one myself. I discovered that they tasted pretty good dunked in tea, especially milky tea, and ended up eating two more.
“You better have one,” I said. “Or I’m likely to eat the whole plate.”
Rhea finally looked up, and her face didn’t seem to know what to do with itself. I saw a flash of disbelief, some confusion, and something that looked a lot like shame. But she finally settled on anger. “You should have let me go!”
I thought about eating another cookie, but it had seriously pissed me off when Gertie had just stood there, munching pear at me, so I didn’t. “I suppose you mean when you tried to leave court?”
“Yes! A month ago, I tried to go, but you had Rico bring me back!”
I actually hadn’t told him to do that, although I would have if I’d realized what was happening. Luckily, Rico paid more attention to my pretty young acolyte than I did sometimes. But I didn’t think that now was the time to bring that up.
“If you want to leave because you don’t want the job,” I told her. “That’s one thing. But to leave because you’re afraid—”
“I’m not afraid!”
Rhea looked so indignant that I had to hide a smile in my mug. “Okay, you’re not afraid,” I agreed. “That’s good to know, because the training routines around here are a little—messed up. But they do get results.”
“Results?” She stared at me. “I almost killed you!”
“It wasn’t that far of a drop.
Although I suppose I could still develop diphtheria or something—”
“How can you joke about it? How?”
I got up to make myself some more tea. “Pritkin used to drop me off cliffs in training. This really wasn’t that bad.”
Rhea threw back the covers and got up. She was in a high-necked flannel nightgown, something an eighty-year-old might have worn, but on these kinds of nights, it made sense. She didn’t go anywhere and she didn’t pace, probably because there wasn’t room. With all the old furniture they stuffed in here, I was starting to think we’d been bunking in the storerooms.
She wrapped her arms around herself instead and stared at me.
I sat on a chair by the bed and drank tea.
This seemed to upset her.
“Did you know?” she asked intently. “What they planned?”
“No. I wouldn’t have let them do that to you. Which is probably why they didn’t tell me.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” Rhea ran a hand through her hair agitatedly, and walked over to the door. But since it was all of five feet away, it didn’t seem to help much. “I’m sorry,” she told me, after a moment. “I’m not thinking clearly.”
“Lots of that going around.”
“It’s just . . . I’m supposed to be able to help you. I want to help you. Lady Herophile was right; I should have been with you, when you went after the vam—Lord Mircea,” she corrected herself. “I could have helped you.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
It was a mild enough question, but it seemed to hit her like a lightning bolt. She whirled suddenly, from facing the door to facing me. “I don’t know!”
“I think you do, though.”
She stared at me, her eyes huge, and didn’t say anything.
“Gertie has all these things,” I told her, after a minute. “I guess you’d call them teaching aids. Do you know where she took me yesterday?”
She just looked at me some more and shook her head.
“Into a . . . I guess you’d call it a tangible memory. Something her grandmother made for her before she came to court. Time in a bottle, where the same day plays out, over and over. She likes to go back there sometimes, have dinner with her nanna, dig for clams, play with this crazy dog. It’s nice, I guess. It’s right on the water, but I didn’t think to ask her where.”