The Golden Basilisk (The Lost Ancients Book 5)

by Marie Andreas

  Padraig’s smile as he looked down at me was smaller than Lorcan’s but also felt more genuine. He was also better at hiding any concern he did have from his eyes.

  “Stay still, this won’t hurt at all,” he said as he held both hands over me.

  I felt nothing, but after a few moments he pulled back. “There is a spell at play here. Something very old and strong, it’s been blocked, but it’s peeking through the cracks. It’s trying to shatter whatever is blocking it.” His words seemed to make more sense to Lorcan, who nodded. Alric and Covey looked as confused as I felt.

  “So someone put a spell on me to have a nightmare?” Granted it was a nasty one, and I wasn’t sure how well I was going to convey that in Lorcan’s notes, but a bit over the top for someone to waste a spell on.

  “No. But this isn’t the time to discuss it.” Padraig smiled as he saw the look on my face. “I will explain it, I promise. But right now you should write down what you can and go back to sleep.”

  The three elves filed out and Covey stayed on her cot.

  “So?” She gave a pointed scowl at Lorcan’s paper and quill. “Are you going to write that down or not? I’d like to get some sleep tonight if I can.”

  The glare I shot her felt good, even if it really wasn’t aimed at her. How could someone have cast a spell on me that was old enough to be called old by a pair of very old elves? And so I would have a nightmare? I wondered if the time travel had triggered it. Maybe I’d picked up something on the trip back. It had felt a bit like I was drifting about in there.

  I wrote down what I could. Something triggered me thinking back to the people who had been against me, us, since this entire thing began. The feeling of overwhelming guilt had vanished once I’d woken up completely. I tried to capture it as best I could anyway.

  I looked down at the brief paragraph and sighed. Not much for Lorcan to go on, but it was something. Covey waited until I dropped the quill and paper next to my cot, and commanded the glow to turn off.

  I didn’t have any dreams after that.

  The next morning came bright and sunny. Obviously another change from the formerly gray and dismal Null of the past. This one had far more appropriate weather. Deserts meant sun and lots of it. We weren’t in summer, so it wasn’t as hot as it could be.

  Covey had already gotten up, made her cot, and left by the time I awoke. I would have liked to sleep longer, but the thin curtains made that a useless thought. This house was probably a boarding house in another life, or a cheap inn. Either way the owners didn’t want people lounging around in bed.

  I looked through my sad clothes, then noticed the satchel was near the door. Dueble had been right to pack the clothes. I grabbed my clothes, looked down the hall toward the washroom, and scurried over. I did miss Siabiane’s chambers. Thinking about where they were now, buried under the jungles of Beccia, made me even sadder. I quickly took a shower, changed, threw everything else back into our shared room, and went downstairs.

  I passed the table on my way to the kitchen. It was nicely set with a lovely breakfast, but there was no sign of a bunch of passed-out, chocolate-covered faeries on it.

  “Where did the faeries go? And is one of these plates for me?” There were two that had hot food on them.

  Lorcan nodded as he came out with a pot of tea. “They seemed recovered, so they went to fly about and see what they can tell about our missing mages. They took the two constructs with them. And yes, you and Alric were the last two up.”

  That was shocking. Alric rarely seemed to need sleep. Of course, I had no idea what time he’d left the suite when he and Siabiane went to look at Padraig, which was the last time either of us slept. I glanced over to where Padraig, Covey, and Kelm were in animated discussion. It was odd seeing the Lorcan and Siabiane who existed before the battles. It would have been difficult to see Padraig, unscarred, but also destined to remain unconscious for a few hundred years while his beloved culture crumbled.

  I was glad I hadn’t seen him.

  I’d gotten halfway through my eggs and toast, and most of the tea, when Alric stumbled downstairs. He flopped into the seat behind the only other full plate of food. I poured him some tea and slid it over to him.

  “Are you okay?” I kept my voice down, but didn’t need to. The others were all busy debating the best way to get the relics and get out of here.

  He rubbed the side of his face. “Not really. Nothing big, but I had a horrible nightmare last night.” He finished his tea almost in a single gulp and Lorcan came by with a fresh pot.

  “A nightmare, you say?” Lorcan had been involved in the other debate as well, but the word nightmare caught his attention. “Can you recall what it was?”

  “No.” Alric concentrated on his toast and eggs.

  That was far too abrupt to be the truth and Lorcan looked like he realized it as well. “If it comes to you, please tell me. The fact that both of you had such a night tells me that time travel was most likely the cause. Or at least the trigger.” He nodded then went back to the living area where the others were.

  “What do you think?”

  He finished his toast slowly. “I think there could be some truth to it. Your screams from last night were echoed in my dream.” He started to say more then went back to his food.

  “Me screaming? Or just screams?” He was starting to really worry me.

  “You,” he dropped his voice so low I almost couldn’t hear him, and I had a feeling he wasn’t going to repeat it if I asked. “You were screaming. You were dying and so was everyone around you. I couldn’t save you. I couldn’t stop what was happening.” He finally looked up and his green eyes were rimmed in red. “I watched you die.”

  I set down my fork and cup before I dropped them.

  “How did I die?” This was not a conversation I wanted to have first thing in the morning. Actually, I never wanted to have this conversation. No one I knew was into seeing the future or prophecies. But the look in Alric’s eyes made me think there might be some truth involved.

  “I don’t know.” He pushed aside his half-eaten plate and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “I couldn’t see anything. It was something I felt…” He shrugged.

  Like I’d felt terror but overwhelming guilt. “Nothing tangible. Only emotion.”

  “Yes, that’s it exactly.” He pulled back his sleeve to show me the geas mark was still glowing faintly. “I hadn’t slept well to begin with. I showed this to Lorcan and Padraig right before I went to bed. They can’t break it. Even though I didn’t age with our trip back through time, it did. They don’t know anyone who can break a thousand-year-old geas.”

  He rolled his sleeve back down and clearly didn’t want to discuss it, or both of our dreams, anymore. The food I’d eaten was a lump in my stomach as we both sat silently.

  “We have a plan,” Covey called from the sofa area. “Now that you two have finished with timeline games, we can move about without a bubble. Lorcan has a good idea where Reginald would be.”

  Alric and I both pushed away from the table and went back to join them. “Is that who we really want?” Alric asked. “If he’d had the relics I would think he would have taken off. Not to mention, should Lorcan be around his brother?”

  “Reginald is currently in Mackil’s body and will be easier to find,” Lorcan said. “I agree he most likely got caught trying to betray Nivinal and lost my body and the relics for his troubles. Nivinal showed up here looking for the relics, so he probably doesn’t have them back. And from the brief information we’ve been able to find on this body-swapping spell, I’d guess that Reginald’s hopped around so much he must not have much ability to jump left. The spell is hard to create, and weakens with each use. Scholars speculated a limit of just a few jumps.”

  I couldn’t help it, the image of Lorcan bleeding out on the floor of his chamber and Siabiane’s response hit me. I know she made Reginald a ghost to make him suffer more, but it would have been better for all if she had killed him and left him
dead.

  “Not to mention Nivinal is going to be a lot harder to find,” Padraig said. “I checked out the area he vanished from, there was nothing. He wasn’t even there in person, he sent his damn image to hunt us.”

  I shook my head. “He cast a spell on me. I was lifting off and felt the pull to come to him.” The force of it unnerved me. If Lorcan hadn’t held me down I’d be with Nivinal. I had no idea how he was going to get that manticore out of me—but I was sure I didn’t want to find out. The shield spell had worked, but it hadn’t stopped his spell from pulling me.

  “He’s that strong,” Padraig said. “He was the most powerful of us all, except for Siabiane. I know she needed to stay back in the enclave, but I would love for her to be here now.”

  “On that cheery note, we have a plan for finding Reginald. Rather, a plan to get him to come to us.” The look on Covey’s face, and the fact it was directed at me, didn’t bode well.

  “I’m bait,” I said with less annoyance than I would have expected. It made sense really, and the shield from yesterday made me feel a bit more secure. As long as Nivinal wasn’t there. “How do we know a trap won’t get Nivinal? We know he wants the manticore.”

  “I think I have that covered,” Flarinen said from the door. I hadn’t even seen him come in, but I pulled back in surprise at his appearance. For the first time that I’d ever seen, he was not in a form of armor. He looked to be wearing one of Alric’s older outfits, his usual black on black. His sword was in a beat-up scabbard and his hair dirty and pulled back in a ragged tail.

  “He knew who had the dragon, I know he did. I felt someone watching me every time I looked at it, searching for me. I believe he sent the rakasa to us, knowing they’d get the dragon back; his personal plan of action was for you. I’m going to get extremely drunk, make lots of noise, then ride out of town. Lorcan has created a magical dummy that will react like an artifact. It won’t hold up long once he catches me. But it should distract him.”

  “And I’ve set up a spell around Flarinen, Nivinal won’t be able to project to catch him easily. It will take a lot of focus.” Padraig said.

  “So this plan is, get me out there as bait, and hope that Reginald falls for it. And that Nivinal is distracted enough by Flarinen to not notice what we’re doing?” This was way too sketchy to work. But I didn’t know what else we had going. We could now leave Null, but we couldn’t go without those relics.

  “They came here for a reason. We are guessing that Reginald planned to use Makil to escape with the relics and leave Nivinal behind. But they both came here deliberately.”

  Lorcan’s comments ended any belief that Nivinal and Reginald had ended up here by chance. They’d planned on ending up here. “The basilisk and sphinx.”

  Alric nodded. “At least one of those would be connected to here for them to come to Null in the first place. They had the other three. The mythology around all of the relics is scattered, and even more so on these two.”

  “I don’t see how this is going to work. And if we get Reginald, what then? If you’re right and he’s lost the relics, what good is grabbing him?” This felt like we were grasping at straws. Null wasn’t a large town, but we needed something to go on to find the relics. I wasn’t sure Reginald was going to be it.

  “That is true—he did lose them,” Lorcan said. “But I believe that I can dig deep enough into his mind that I can find out when he lost them and to whom.”

  Great. The man whose brother almost killed him, but he didn’t know did it, and who had his body stolen by said brother, was going to try and dive into his head. I looked to Alric. This could go bad and only the two of us knew why.

  Alric was looking better than he had when he first came downstairs, but there was a haunted look in his eyes. Mostly when he was facing me. I didn’t like that at all.

  “I think that’s going to be a problem. We really don’t know that much about how Reginald became a ghost, nor what could trigger a body jump,” he sounded so reasonable even I almost believed him. “We can try the plan since we don’t have much else, but I think Padraig needs to be the one who pries into Reginald’s head. Since he already took Lorcan once, the risk would be greater.”

  “I have to agree with Alric. Even after two months of research, we have no information about Reginald’s original change. If we had that we might be able to stop his body hopping and send him where he belongs.” Padraig had one of his books out and patted it for emphasis.

  Crap. I was sure that both Alric and I had the same look. If the others weren’t caught up in their own issues they would have noticed. “Wouldn’t you need the actual spell caster who did it to change anything?” I asked. After all, Siabiane wasn’t anywhere near here. Maybe we wouldn’t have to tell Lorcan the truth.

  “I don’t think so. I’ve found documentation, very very old, from hundreds of years before the battle with the Dark. It won’t work with most spells, but the strain this type of spell leaves on both the caster and the victim is such that it could be possible to unravel it. Providing the spell caster is known to the person trying to take it apart. You need to know how that person thinks, and you couldn’t do that with a stranger.”

  “And you two know something,” Covey said. She’d been debating small points with Kelm, but had been paying more attention to the rest of us than I thought,

  Alric and I both started to speak at the same time, but I stopped and nodded for him to talk. “We have to tell them. I have no idea what it will do to the spell, but they need to know before we go after the bastard. I can tell them if you want,” he said.

  I took a deep breath. I’d been the one who fought to save Lorcan. That wasn’t essential to getting to the spell that created Reginald as a ghost, but it was going to have to be part of the tale. “I’ll do it.” I briefly told them of the attack on the queen, and us needing to leave the palace immediately. There were no questions when I got to finding Lorcan. “Reginald waited until Siabiane was in the room, then slit Lorcan’s throat.” Just saying it made me want to throw up.

  Lorcan went white, but he wasn’t as shocked as I’d thought he’d be.

  “Siabiane thought you were dead—she was in shock and not thinking right. She blasted Reginald apart, but instead of letting it go, she put a spell on his spirit to stay.” I knew Siabiane wouldn’t be happy about me telling him, but I had no choice.

  “So she saved me afterwards?” Lorcan rubbed the glamoured mark on his neck absently.

  “No. The faeries and I did that.” I shrugged. “I have no idea how or what they did, but they focused my spell of healing and saved your life.”

  Lorcan nodded silently then got up and hugged me. “Thank you. It wasn’t only them, it was also you. That explains, in part, why I felt so comfortable around you and the faeries when you arrived. I assume Siabiane put a forget spell on me?”

  “And Reginald. Plus one over the city once we’d crossed into this time, so she would have forgotten as well,” Alric said.

  Lorcan let me go and nodded. “I would never have guessed it was him, and no one seemed to know who attacked me or saved me. I was found a few hours later, and moved to a safe place. But the attack from the Dark had begun and the city was beginning to slide into chaos.”

  “Does this information help? We know who cast the spell, and the main reason we didn’t want Lorcan digging in Reginald’s head is out in the open now.” I really hoped it helped. Even though Lorcan hadn’t looked as surprised as I’d expected, there was a tightness around his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

  “Yes and no.” Padraig had been silent during all of this, and was sober now. “Knowing Siabiane was behind it helps, but she’s so strong that undoing it will be difficult. And the news you gave us means that we will be emotionally compromised when we attempt to change the spell. Emotions and spells aren’t a good combination and she was obviously not in a good emotional state when she cast the spell.”

  Someone threw a bunch of rocks at the front door at th
at moment. Or that’s what it sounded like to me. Flarinen in his Alric-wanna-be outfit was closest to the door. He held up one hand for silence, then drew his sword and slowly opened the door.

  I shook my head. Rocks? But Flarinen took everything seriously, and since his fall from grace that hadn’t changed.

  He’d only gotten the door open a tiny bit when a mass of faeries hit the door almost hard enough to knock him on his ass. He recovered before that happened, but it was close.

  The original three were not in the bunch, and a few others were missing as well. Most noticeably Bunky and the gargoyle. I spotted two of Garbage’s sidekicks, Penqow and Dingle Bottom, and waved them to me.

  “Where are the others, what’s wrong?” None of the faeries looked injured but they also looked confused and rarely ran around without their leader.

  Penqow came forward. “Is with man. He grab them. Send here.”

  “Someone grabbed the others? A bad man?” Had Nivinal decided to grab the girls hoping to get me?

  Dingle Bottom shook her head. “Is got wrong. Man. Took. Them. We come here.” She was so proud of herself as she spun in a little circle I didn’t have the heart to say she made no sense. Well, almost.

  “Do any of you know where the rest of the faeries, Bunky, and the gargoyle are?” I raised my voice as the faeries were now chittering to themselves as they flew around the room.

  “This way.” Penqow motioned to all of them, and they all swarmed me and lifted me up.

  There were only about fifteen or sixteen of them, and they shouldn’t be able to do this.

  “Watch out for the ceiling!” I yelled too late and they bounced me off of it, before hastily lowering me.

  “Told you not show now.” Dingle Bottom rubbed the top of my head.

  “Need there now,” Penqow said. “No choice.”

  The other faeries all chattered in agreement and started flying me out the door.

  The idea of flying was lovely. If you were one of those odd poets who stayed on hilltops and thought about birds and things. In reality, if flying was fifteen faeries lifting you up and through a door—flying was not lovely.