‘Can’t you just hide it down here? Seal the door or something?’ Daniel asked. ‘Can’t you just…’
‘So you can tip off Kurt?’ Ellyn snapped. Daniel gave her an affronted look but she rolled her eyes.
‘Destroy it, remove it, do whatever you need to, your highness. But we need to move.’
‘Step outside, all of you,’ the Lord of Thorns said. There was no doubting the tone of voice, or who was speaking. A king in waiting. ‘Close the door.’
Grace couldn’t do that. It felt like abandoning him in there. She was the last to leave. She clung to its edge, holding it ajar, listening to Ellyn and Daniel bickering quietly. She’d have to get to the bottom of that, too. What had Ellyn meant about Kurt? What did the Parrys want with raw magic?
A commodity, maybe. Or worse, a tool. She didn’t want to think of someone like Kurt Parry with that much magic at their command.
Bastien took up his position in the centre of the circular room and slowly spread his arms wide. Grace stared as the air around him seemed to shimmer and tremble. Inside the jars, magic unfurled, drawn to his innate power, flowers reaching for the sun. The door shook beside her and she had to grab hold of it to keep it from slamming.
Inside her that long-suppressed magic shook itself awake again. That thing in her that Bastien recognised and that drew her to him. Like the magic all around them. Yearning for him.
Bastien threw back his head and every jar in the room shattered. Glass sprayed towards him but the magic was faster. It burst from the jars, the soft rose petals of light transforming to a blinding tangle of briars. It struck him like shining thorns, piercing his body in hundreds of places, each blow making him jerk like a fish on a hook. The glass shards hung in the air, glittering in the light. Bastien clenched his teeth, his eyes screwed shut and his fingers splayed wide. A cry wrenched itself from him, a smothered scream, but he didn’t move, his body rigid in agony.
Grace wanted to help him. She desperately needed to, but she didn’t know what to do. He hung there, frozen, like the shards around him as magic burrowed into his skin, sinking down inside him to nest there, like some sort of parasite.
Abruptly, the glass shards dropped from the air, shattering on the tiled floor. And Bastien shuddered for a moment before falling down heavily onto his knees, his shoulders slumped, his head bowed. Broken like every jar in the secret room.
For a moment she didn’t dare move. But the smell alerted her first. Burning, the reek of charred wood.
‘Grace!’ Daniel shouted and the whole force of his lithe body slammed into her. She went down, but he grabbed her, pulling her back from the room.
Her handprint remained behind, a black and smoking imprint, burned into the wood on the outside of the door.
Chapter Twenty
‘I can explain,’ Grace stammered, without the first idea of how she was going to do that. The corridor stretched out endlessly into the dark on either side of them and her handprint was seared into the wooden door, little lines of fire still crawling around the edges. She couldn’t tear her eyes off this damning, undeniable evidence of what she was.
Daniel exchanged a look with Ellyn, a patented this should be good look, and they both frowned at her.
‘We know,’ Daniel said quietly. ‘We’ve always known. Come on, Grace, no one else has known you as long as us apart from Craine and Zavi. No one could do everything you do without some form of magic in them. It isn’t gone, is it? Not entirely. Sometimes it comes out. We know that.’
‘I… what?’ she spluttered, trying to come up with an excuse, an explanation, anything.
‘You really can’t lie to save your life, can you?’ Ellyn said. ‘Seriously, I don’t know how you got away with it for so long. Get up, the two of you.’ And then she looked past them, to Bastien. ‘Is he…? Is he okay?’
That shook some sense back into Grace.
Bastien had dropped to his knees, saturated with more magic than anyone should have been able to bear. Blood royal or not, he’d have to have the control of a god to contain it all. And gods weren’t known for their control. Neither were the Larelwynns, if truth be told.
The backlash had made her betray her secrets to her oldest friends. The fact they’d already known didn’t help. The black handprint still smoked on the wood of the door.
What if he went hollow? What if they lost him altogether and unleashed a monster like the Hollow King on the city?
She scrambled back into the room and over to his side, almost afraid to touch him.
‘Bastien?’ she whispered. His eyes were closed and he was still as stone, as if afraid to move in case he shattered. ‘Bastien, we have to go.’
He opened his eyes and they were filled with golden light. She felt, rather than saw, them focus on her.
‘Grace?’ His voice was distant, faint. Like the voice of a dreamer. He remembered her. Thank the divinities he still remembered her. ‘You are… the most beautiful thing in my life.’
She sucked in a breath and stared at him, not able to reply. No one had ever said anything like that to her. Never. Either his life was desolate or… or he saw her in a way far different from anyone else. She couldn’t doubt that he meant it. But that he said it out loud, now, terrified her.
‘Are you hurt?’ she asked. ‘Are you in pain?’
He shook his head absentmindedly. ‘It isn’t safe here. She’ll know. She’ll feel it.’
‘Who?’
He frowned again, searching for the name, and Grace felt a mounting horror. ‘I… I don’t…’ he said.
She pressed her hands to his shoulders, trying to ground him, to make him focus. ‘It’s okay, Bastien. Take a moment. Remember.’
He nodded, his hands wrapping around hers. The effort on his face was palpable.
The words came out in a rush of relief. ‘Celeste. She always knows. And if she knows, so will Miranda, and the queen. There’s more, Grace… so much more…’
So much more… she didn’t like the sound of that. ‘What?’ she asked. ‘What else?’
Light began to spill from his eyes like tears, the way the power had seeped out of Kai before he died. Damn it, this wasn’t good. Even Bastien couldn’t manage this for long. It would eat him up, hollow him out and then… then they’d see the Hollow King again. She knew it.
‘There’s more. The next room… I can feel them now… they’re in there.’
More magic jars? No… it would destroy him.
‘You’ve done enough. Come on now. Come with me. Let’s get out of here.’
He winced, baring his teeth in a grimace. ‘I can’t leave them. Marius would… he’d never forgive me. And it will help. It will help me. I have to do this, Grace. I have to. It’s all my fault…’
She helped him to his feet and they staggered out into the corridor again, Daniel and Ellyn trying to help. The next door was as nondescript as the last.
It hid something so much worse.
Bastien passed his hand over the lock and it didn’t so much unlock as melt in the wood, dripping molten metal onto the stone floor. Daniel kicked the door open and the three of them stood there behind the magic-drenched prince, mouths gaping as beyond it they saw row upon row of cot-like beds, most of them occupied by a sleeping figure. Not just sleeping. They lay so still, stretched out on their backs, open eyes staring at the rugged stone ceiling, like so many corpses. Each one wore a simple leather collar. The sigils set in them glowed softly, as did the glass jars each one held, cradled in limp hands against their chests, illuminating the room like so many fireflies.
‘Oh divinities,’ Ellyn whispered. ‘What is this place?’
Grace knew what she was looking at. She knew it without checking, without counting the number – which was far greater than she had thought – without looking at their faces or searching for the likes of Alyss, or any of the ones absent from the Academy.
‘What… what happened here?’ she asked.
‘They’re the ones missing, aren’t th
ey?’ Daniel said in as cold a voice as she had ever heard him use. ‘The ones doing homage who didn’t get home? Did you do this to them? Did you…?’
Bastien tilted his head to one side as if studying him. Like a cat looking at its prey. His eyes, transformed from the black of night to glowing gold gave him the aura of something divine and, as the elders were so fond of saying, the divine isn’t something that understands humans as anything more than tools or playthings. What were these people then?
‘They are tethered, their magic going elsewhere, feeding others.’ Bastien’s voice reverberated with the magic in him, and the anger and grief behind it. It sounded like at any moment it would shatter. Or he would.
The Royal Guards, Grace realised. The ones manning the borders, and the naval ships. And the nobles who were in the queen’s favour. The ones that served Aurelie. Divinities, what was she doing? But how could Aurelie do something like this? Kidnap people perhaps, command them to the palace in Bastien’s name, sure. But this? Just lock them away and hope no one noticed?
But someone had noticed. She had.
‘Bastien?’ she whispered.
‘It’s my fault. I should never have told them… I shouldn’t have…’ He pressed his hands to either side of his head, his face crumpling up in despair.
Some of them had been here for weeks…
This was what Simona had told him back in the king’s chamber. He hadn’t known. Grace was sure of that. Or at least, she wanted to believe that. The Bastien she knew would never have gone along with this.
She pressed her hand to his back, right between his shoulder blades. He was trembling, rage and pain undoing him. Slowly she circled him, trying not to look at the rows of sleeping bodies. She focused on him, and gently, carefully, took his hands in hers and pulled them away from his face. ‘Can you stop it? Can you set them free?’
At that moment, a voice rang out across the room, full of outrage and officious fury. ‘What are you doing here?’ And she knew it. Knew it at once. It explained far more than Bastien ever could. ‘You can’t be in here.’
Merlyn Hale stood at the doorway, still dressed as a healer in spite of all the new evidence of his true vocation, rows of empty jars in a trolley in front of him. Restocking or something horribly mundane like that. Changing over the vessels storing stolen magic. Checking the connections perhaps. Making sure none of them burned out. Like it was a normal part of his day.
Oh, he had studied the mageborn all right. He’d studied them, and dissected them, and experimented on them. He’d ushered them away from Bastien and down here. And now he was their keeper.
And if they did burn out, if the syphon killed them and left them dead and drained, those terrible burns on their hands, what then? Dump them in an alleyway in some dead-end part of the city perhaps?
Grace turned, knives in her hands ready to throw. But she didn’t get the chance.
Bastien turned at the same moment and the blood drained from Hale’s thin face. ‘Your… your highness…’
He moved to slam the door but Bastien was quicker. The heavy oak ripped off the frame and then shattered into splinters that hung in the air like arrows poised to fire, all pointing at his assistant.
‘Hale,’ he whispered, and the voice hardly sounded like his. It reverberated with magic, and untold anger. It barely sounded human. ‘What is the meaning of this?’
‘Your highness, I… I was only… I had orders. And the work… You understand… the research…’
The splinters hummed in fury. Bastien scowled and Grace remembered why others feared him so much, why even she had at first. And why, perhaps, she still should. ‘The research…’ he murmured. ‘You kept them. You locked them up here.’
Hale staggered back, terrified, and turned as if to run, but in that moment the splinters released, thousands of them, great and small. They sliced through the air and struck him everywhere, throwing him back against the wall behind with a sickening crunch. He slid down, leaving a smear of blood behind him.
‘There isn’t time,’ Bastien said, his voice like ice, echoing strangely with his power. ‘Or I’d have made it last longer.’
He took a step forward and his knees almost gave way. Grace caught him, holding him up. ‘Bastien, are you…’
For a moment he didn’t know her. She saw his confusion all over his face as the light spilled down his face like tears.
‘They agreed,’ he murmured. ‘But not to this. It was one day. Homage is just one day. That was the pact, the agreement. All those years ago. One day, to come to me, and kneel, and swear service. To secure their power and keep them safe. That was all. Not… this…’
Grace didn’t know what to say to that. There was agreement and agreement, wasn’t there? It was hard to disagree when surrounded by armed guards or facing the most notorious man in the kingdom, second only to the king himself and the one most likely to succeed him on the throne.
Except he wasn’t now, was he? No matter what Simona said. They wouldn’t be running if there was any chance Bastien could actually become king. Did he know that? Did he realise? Or with all that power winnowing through him and this nightmare in front of him, did he even care?
She followed him as he walked forward, reaching the first cot and laying his hands on either side of the young man’s head.
‘What are you doing?’ Grace asked. She could feel the air moving, the tingle of magic scraping over her skin. Without a word, Bastien reached out and touched her hand. It was the briefest contact before he turned to the next bed and mirrored the same action.
Grace blinked. The world around her shifted and blurred. And then she could see threads of light, everywhere, like a spider web, each one grounded in one of the sleepers. It vanished into their chests, right into the solar plexus. Except for the man Bastien had already touched, and the one he held now. The thread unravelled as she watched, uncoiling and releasing him.
‘Where… where am I?’ The voice was groggy, exhausted. She turned to find the first man starting to sit up. He looked around, his expression bewildered.
Ellyn was first to him, professional instincts taking over. ‘Take it easy. We’re here to help.’
He stared at her and then reached his hand up to his throat, where the collar still hugged him, the light in the sigil fading.
‘My… my Lord Prince?’ said someone else, the second man, a bit older and thicker-set, his accent showing his rural background.
Bastien moved on, and all the while those who awoke gazed at him groggily, waiting for a response while he continued to work, cutting off the threads tethering them to whoever was benefitting from their magic. At the same time Grace could feel him shoring up their powers, whatever they might be, anchoring them deep inside each mageborn, and strengthening them, draining himself of all the stored magic a little at a time. The jars they held were abandoned on the cots, empty again. Grace wished she had time to smash every single one.
By the time he reached the last mageborn, he had lost that glow, the golden hues fading until he was just Bastien again. His shoulders sagged a little and he hung his head. Exhausted, drained. Grace pressed her hand to his back again and a surge of warmth spread through her. He straightened and looked directly at her for the first time since he had flooded his body with stolen magic.
He tried to smile but it didn’t extend beyond the corners of his mouth. The weight of sorrow in his eyes flooded her and she pressed her hand more firmly against him, hoping it would give him some small comfort. He was listening to something, something she couldn’t hear.
‘Take a moment,’ she told him.
‘We don’t have a moment,’ he replied. ‘Do we?’
He was right. Damn it he was right. From far above them, reverberating through the stone, rebounding down the stairwells and the tunnels, the sound came of the palace bells ringing. All the bells, every one, ringing out the life of a king, ringing for his death, ringing in the reign of a new monarch.
Grace hesitated for only a
moment. Then she dropped to her knees. With a rush of sound, she realised the others did likewise and Bastien stood in front of them. He had never looked so lost.
‘Please, don’t,’ he whispered, his voice suddenly hoarse.
‘Divinities be with the king,’ said Ellyn, in a firm, loud voice and the others took up the cry. ‘Long may he reign.’
‘I can’t. You know I can’t. We have to leave.’ He seized Grace by the shoulders and drew her back up to her feet. ‘We have to get them out of here, and quickly.’
‘We have to get you to safety,’ she told him but he shook his head.
‘There is nowhere safe. The mageborn, that’s what’s important. These people. We have to get them clear of the palace and out of the city, or they are never getting out.’
‘Bastien, if you take the throne, if you stand against her—’
He touched the warrant hanging around her neck, a cautious, glancing brush of his fingers. ‘She’ll find a way to control me. She’ll wipe out everything there is of me and start again. I won’t even know it. It’s too much of a risk, Grace. Too much of a liability. With that, or with you, with something else. They’ll never stop. Not with the power I can offer them. No, Simona was right, Marius was right. If they can control me, they can control all the mageborn. That’s how it works, Lucien Larelwynn’s pact. She won’t just be content to rule as a queen. Her ambition goes beyond that now. Hers and Miranda’s… We have to run.’
He was panicking. She knew he was. The problem was, she believed him. His affinity with the other mageborn, their devotion to him… it was dangerous.
‘And your people?’ Daniel asked. His voice came out harder than Grace had ever heard it sound. ‘The others. Who aren’t mageborn. What about them?’
‘My people…’ and he sighed. The struggle marred his face for a moment and then he pulled that mask over him again. ‘Will have to follow us. Or endure. Or escape as the mageborn have. Or… if your brother is anything to go by, Officer Parry, find a way to profit. There are free mageborn out there, beyond our borders. Larks, I believe is the term. That’s what they call them when they flee Rathlynn, isn’t it? When you load them on ships and help them get away from collars and vassalage and days of homage?’ Daniel flinched back and went silent. He eyed the Lord of Thorns more carefully. ‘I am no threat, Daniel. You can see that. We want the same thing. Come now, if we are to make it to the Academy, we must leave.’
Mageborn: An absolutely gripping fantasy novel (The Hollow King Book 1) Page 26