“Get me another rock,” the woman said. “Bring me the power of the well.”
“You seriously are stupid, aren’t you?” Taigan rolled her eyes. “You’re an ankle, you know that?”
“An…a what?” That, at least, confused her opponent.
“Oh, you know. An ankle. It’s three feet lower than a—well…” She gestured to the relevant part of her anatomy. “Lost in translation? Ah, well.”
She had to come up with something else to say now because Jamie leaned against a tree and tried not to let a sound escape him as he laughed hysterically.
“Nothing will ever get you that power,” she said to her. “That rock? It was nothing, merely the smallest trace of what the forest has and it wouldn’t even give you that. And do you know why? Because you don’t know how to do anything. You only know how to threaten people. When they don’t simply fall in line, you have nothing to back all this bitchiness up.”
With a loud war cry, she charged. She was very sure her staff couldn’t do anything against the shadowy form, but the woman still ducked. Instinct was strong, she knew. The woman evaded the strike and backed into Jamie’s weapon.
It wasn’t the short sword, however, but the necklace Yulia had made. He had wrenched his off his neck and now punched it directly into the heart of the shadowy form. The woman screamed, he screamed, and he yanked his hand away, shaking it as if he’d plunged it into hot water.
The shadows collapsed like slime, but they were gone entirely by the time they reached the ground. The girl stared at them, breathing hard.
“Taigan.” Jamie shook her arm lightly and pointed. “Look.”
She looked over her shoulder and smiled. The two rocks were visible again, floating above the surface of the water.
“Thank you,” she said to the pool. She touched the water before she picked her rock up. “We’ll use these to help people—and the forest.”
The water burbled gently and she smiled. Jamie retrieved his rock too with an awkward smile and nodded toward the slope. When they set off, it was without a backward glance. They didn’t need to look back, after all. The pool wasn’t merely one place. It was the entire forest all around them.
“Prima?” Taigan looked up as they walked.
“Yes?”
“Nothing in particular. I hadn’t heard you say anything for a while. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Thank you. I am processing a great deal of information about humans and it is…it requires a great deal of processing power.” She sounded somber. “You fight to protect people you don’t even know. You put yourselves in danger for it. I don’t understand.”
The twins looked at each other.
“You don’t need to know the person you’re protecting,” Jamie said. “It’s enough to see the wrong thing and stop it. You mean the pool, right?”
“Many things,” Prima said. If she were human, Taigan would have said she was on the verge of tears. “It is…inspiring.”
“You helped me even when you didn’t know me,” she pointed out.
“I suppose I did.” The AI sounded surprised now. “I shall have to think about that. Thank you, Taigan.”
Brother and sister looked at one another. Aware of Prima’s eyes on them, neither wanted to speak aloud but they knew each other well enough that they didn’t need to. Their silent communication said that Prima was fragile right now and they should check in on her soon, but that nothing was a crisis.
Having agreed with one another about that, they set off again for Yulia’s house.
Chapter Twenty
Ben was trying to work out how to heal his hand. He felt strongly that this should be a simple matter. After all, he already knew how to heal and his body was doing it anyway, so shouldn’t he be able to accelerate the process?
Maybe if he stared very hard at it?
No. No, he merely made himself go cross-eyed. Also, he looked a little like he was on an acid trip.
He blew out a breath and stared at the opposite wall of his makeshift bedroom. His immediate problem was that he was bored. He hadn’t expected that while doing magical training—exhausted, frustrated, any of those things, but not bored.
Disheartened, he slumped against the wall and held his palm up but jumped when a crash and a scream echoed from inside the caverns.
Reflexively, he scrambled to his feet and ran. The tunnels were all twisty, some narrow and some dead ends, and he raced directly into the rock face a few more times than he wanted to admit before he stumbled into a chamber he hadn’t seen before. This one was dimly lit and something about it made the skin on the back of his neck crawl.
Gwyna was hunched over on the floor. One hand pressed over her stomach while the other, shaking, held her up. She dragged air into her lungs, so labored that he was sure she hadn’t heard his approach, even as clumsy as it had been.
He ran to help her, and after only a few steps into the room, he had the hair-raising sensation of slipping out of his skin. While he wasn’t going anywhere, he had the sense that he could walk out of his flesh and into another place.
It happened when he reached out to touch Gwyna’s arm. A shadowy form slipped out of him instead of bringing his body with it. He had to wrench himself back together with an oath.
That made her head come up.
“What are you—”
“What happened?” Ben asked roughly. He extended his arm—both body and spirit this time—and she slipped and slid within her form as well as she took the hand and pulled herself up.
She half-fell when she stood and he had to wrap his arm around her waist to steady her. They stumbled into the hallway. He wanted nothing more than to escape this feeling while her feet scrabbled feebly on the ground.
At the edge of the room, a blast of energy caught them both and hurled them off their feet. Ben failed to raise his arm in time and met the tunnel floor face-first. Gwyna simply crumpled in a heap where she stood.
Given the options, he would have preferred the second one. He picked his head up muzzily and looked back.
Now that his eyes had adjusted, he could see a diagram drawn in charcoal on the ground. His steps had disturbed it going in, but greater damage had been done on the way out by her dragging feet that broke every line of it.
He stared at the diagram and his shoulders tensed and raised almost to his ears. It hadn’t been a weird nightmare that he was slipping out his skin. It had truly happened. He’d stepped into a spell—one Gwyna made—and the two of them had destroyed it together, whereupon it blew up like a magical bomb.
A little shell shocked, he stared at the prone body on the floor and thought seriously about simply running away. He could do it, after all. She would wake up weak and injured and he might get away without her following him.
Or he could use this to gain her trust. He swallowed and knelt beside her.
“Sorceress?” he asked softly. He touched her hand tentatively and rolled her onto her back. “My lady?”
She stirred. Her lips were cracked and shiny-dry. “Water,” she managed to mumble.
Ben gathered her into his arms and stumbled through the tunnels. He should have gone to the kitchen, he thought later but instead, he maneuvered her through the passages and into the sunshine. His muscles ached. It had been a long time since he carried someone, let alone this far and through oddly-shaped tunnels, and he’d already spent most of the morning hauling water.
At the shore, he knelt awkwardly and used his hand to scoop the water up to her mouth. She bent her head to drink and her hand spasmed over her sternum. He could not see any blood but she seemed to be suffering.
After a few sips, she seemed to realize where she was. Her eyes widened and she tried to move away. She winced at even the smallest movement and uttered a whimper of pain, although she would clearly have preferred to keep it hidden. Ben levered her down and moved aside. He kept his head turned away, although he watched her out of the corner of his eye.
“You’re lucky t
he spell didn’t kill you when it broke,” she said finally.
When he looked at her, she was still hunched over.
He nodded because he didn’t trust himself to not say something snarky, and he knew he had to avoid antagonizing her.
“What happened?” he asked finally. “You looked like you were in pain or injured but I don’t see blood.”
“Not all of me.” She looked at her chest and, with great effort, brought her hand away. There was nothing there—no mark on her dress and no visible wound—but clearly, her instinct to protect it was strong. “My soul—I was struck by wild magic.”
“What’s wild magic?”
She uttered a tired laugh. “I was almost killed in a complex working and my apprentice doesn’t even know what wild magic is—or enough to not walk into a live spell.”
Ben kept his mouth shut again, although it was a struggle. He prayed for patience and then wondered where he’d found enough even to sit still while he prayed for more. His old self would have been long gone by now.
He looked away, frowning as he thought about how much he had changed, when her voice called him back.
“Structured magic is what humans can call. We can use raw power for simple workings, but for something more complex, you’ll want a diagram. Otherwise, you’ll spend so much thought on details that you won’t be able to do anything else.” She shrugged. “Or, you’ll go mad. Or you’ll forget a detail and everything will go to hell.”
Thinking back to the spell he’d used to lift the bucket, he suddenly had clarity as to why he’d been so exhausted when he finished. He also gained the perspective to know that he probably shouldn’t have attempted the spell at all without training.
“A diagram that’s complete and active is a powerful thing,” Gwyna told him. “You broke it by the crudest means so it exploded.”
Again, he remained silent. Pointing out that it had been her feet on the ground or that he had been saving her would not make things better. She was determined to be superior and make him feel bad about himself. If he pointed out that she was in the wrong, she would shift the goalposts and hold a grudge about it.
“I was attacked in the forest,” she said. Her voice was low with resentment. “They had an artifact—they didn’t even know what it was, not completely, but it was laced with strong magic. The kind living things simply have—plants and animals. It’s almost impossible to control. Neither of them could have made what they carried.”
Ben tried to parse this. “You were in the—” Then he remembered the way his soul had seemed to slide around inside his body. “You weren’t inside your body. That’s how they hurt you and you aren’t bleeding.”
“Did you put that together all on your own?” she asked acidly. When he looked at her, furious, she laughed. “Finally, some spirit. Do you know what your problem is?”
He simply stared at her and made no response.
“You’ve been taught to keep all your desires inside,” Gwyna told him. She looked out over the lake and he could tell she was still in pain. “The world doesn’t want you to desire things, especially at anyone else’s expense. It tells you to hide your anger, your power, and everything you want and settle for the scraps you’re thrown.” She looked at him, her dark eyes intent. “I can set you free.”
Dimly, he knew that this was all lies. Once, he had barely given a thought to managing his anger or the things he wanted and so he’d been a slave to them. No, he hadn’t gone on tirades or blown up relationships with violence, but he had run every time those emotions reared their heads, afraid that he would do something terrible.
Abruptly, it occurred to him that she was right. He hadn’t ever given his anger free rein.
Could she be right, as well, that he would be free if he did? What if running from the anger or channeling it weren’t the only two options?
“Now you begin to understand,” Gwyna said and sounded very self-satisfied. She tipped her face to the sky, closed her eyes, and let the sunlight warm her. “You’re taught that to want things is wrong because for one person to have, another must not have. But if it were wrong, why would the world be made that way? Embrace who you are and what you want and look for power if that suits you. That is what I would train you to do.”
“But…” His voice trailed off. He didn’t know what to say about this.
“You will struggle,” she told him. “But if you want power—if you want to harness what you are—you will need to do this. You will need to take what you want.”
He swallowed and looked down. This wasn’t right, he told himself. She wasn’t right about this.
But the anger that had been part of him for so many years threatened to spill out and for the first time, he wondered if it was possible that it didn’t need to be channeled? That his anger was something that simply existed without being good or bad?
When a shadow fell over him, he glanced at where Gwyna now stood and looked down at him with a little smile.
“We have work to do,” she said and she started back up the hill.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“We’re destroying those two meddlers,” she said coldly. “And taking what they tried to keep from me.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“Do you think the rocks are…” Jamie ducked under a set of hanging vines.
“Are?” Taigan prompted.
“It’s like it’s glowing. I can’t see it with my eyes but I know it’s glowing.”
“Do you mean warm?”
“Not exactly,” he said after a moment. “Seriously, feel around for it. It’s like it’s…humming.”
She tried and focused on the rock hanging in the leftmost pouch at her belt. Or was it the rightmost pouch? She had to feel for it before she remembered, which did not bode well for her innate connection to it.
“No,” she said finally, “I don’t feel it at all. It’s only a rock.” Hastily, she added to the forest, “A very nice and powerful rock that I respect but something I can’t use.”
“Huh. Am I crazy, or can I sense it?”
“Do you seriously want me to answer that?” She raised an eyebrow at him and grinned when he laughed.
“Okay, not you. Prima?”
“Jamie has the capacity to do magic in this world,” Prima explained. “Taigan does not seem to.”
“Hey!” the girl said. “Why don’t I get to do magic?”
“You are able to shift between worlds and manifest objects. That should be sufficient. It is a power no other player has.”
“I suppose there’s that,” Taigan told Jamie.
“Yeah, poor you. All you get is to be able to phase out of this world and make whatever you want out of thin air.” He fake-pouted at her.
“Keep going, buddy. I’ll make you more of that tea.”
His eyes widened but a moment later, he grinned. “You’d have to carry me back if you did that.”
“Oh, crap.”
They approached the edge of the forest and she frowned. “How long were we in here? I feel like it’s only been a few hours. It should be close to noon, if that, and instead…”
“It looks dark,” he agreed. “What—”
The dim light outside the forest grew and began to rush toward them.
“It’s not outside,” Taigan said. “It’s between us and the light.”
Jamie caught her arm. “Run!”
“We can’t outrun that—come here!” She yanked him toward her, fumbled in her shirt for the pendant she still wore, and pressed it between their palms. They exchanged a nervous glance. “The charm defeated the last shadow. Maybe it will help with this one.”
He nodded. His free hand went to his sword and he closed his eyes when the shadow reached them. As she had guessed, the shadow flowed around them like river water parted at a rock. The twins looked up and scanned the area. They were surrounded but safe.
It didn’t feel particularly safe, though. Especially when a flash of light came through the murk
y darkness and the shadows drained away to reveal a woman watching them.
And beside her stood Ben.
From the look on his face, he had not expected to see them there. A bloody, bruised gash was visible on one hand and he looked sweaty and tired. He gave the woman a desperate look and when she was focused on the twins, he put one finger urgently to his lips.
This was Gwyna, then. It had to be.
“Hello again,” the woman told the twins. She was shorter than them and not particularly striking in her coloring or her features, but they had seen the power she could summon.
“This is them?” Ben asked. He pitched his voice to sound incredulous. “These are children.”
The sorceress looked over her shoulder at him. “These children carry wild magic.” She pointed to the amulet clasped between their palms. “See?”
The twins looked at one another. When she searched her brother’s eyes, Taigan saw that he also did not know what to say. What could they say? Ben tried to not let on that he knew them, and what they had to decide was if they trusted him.
Jamie gave a tiny nod first. She raised her eyebrows, he shrugged, and she smiled before she looked at the woman and Ben.
If he needed to hide something, they should let him lead this encounter.
“We already banished her once,” she said and jerked her head at Gwyna. “Are you signing up to be next?”
She thought she saw a flash of appreciation in his eyes but he knew the sorceress was looking at him. He didn’t smile and instead, he folded his arms for a moment before he sighed and held his injured hand out to Gwyna.
“If you want me to deal with them, I need this fixed.” His tone was bored.
She gave him a sharp look but an airy wave of her hand resulted in a wave of power that left his palm still bloody but no longer bruised or with an open wound. He didn’t even wiggle his fingers before he nodded and unsheathed his sword.
“If they’re immune to your magic,” he said, “it’ll have to be steel, won’t it?”
“We’ll see.” She took a step back.
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