by Lucia Ashta
The final words slipped from her lips.
Chapter 8
No spell of this magnitude was complete before all four elements were woven into it. Especially one that imbued life required a balance of all four of them.
Mordecai and Albacus raced toward their sister. If they managed to intervene before she called on the fourth element, there was a chance they might halt the damage she’d done.
But the chance was small and their steps too slow to stop the inevitable.
“Oliana,” her brothers shouted, all usual concern for calling attention to their magic in front of non-magical folk evaporated. Seconds counted, and the understanding of how very much they counted threatened to still their frantic hearts.
“Please,” Mordecai pleaded, his one word carrying across the inlet. “Don’t say another word. Please.” His voice broke, thick with tears he hoped she wouldn’t make him shed.
Her lips moved without her conscious direction.
Air, without ye there is no life, there is only death.
Ye are the breath of life,
with us so long as we live,
and when ye leave, the moment of death.
“Dear God, no, Oliana.” Albacus reached the tangible force field of magic, which encased Oliana and Damien, a moment before Mordecai.
Even though the brothers anticipated what might happen, they ran toward their sister anyway, with a speed and tenacity intended to break any kind of magic.
The bubble met them like a stone wall. They fell hard, onto their bottoms. Immediately they were scrambling to get back up.
“We need to get our parents,” Mordecai said.
“Oh God. I don’t think there’s time,” Albacus said. “But we have to try. You go.”
“I’m not leaving her. You go.”
“I’m not leaving her either.”
The reality was that both brothers realized that if they went to get their parents, they wouldn’t return in time to stop Oliana. Already, she’d done more than even their parents might be able to reverse. And even if they didn’t want to think of it like this, a part of them registered it. If they went to get their parents, Oliana might die in their absence.
And neither of them could bear the thought.
“Oliana, listen to me carefully,” Albacus said across the invisible barrier that kept him from pulling his sister into his safe grasp. Every nerve in his body twitched with the need to take her to safety. Yet the invisible kept him from it.
They’d known it all along. Just because one didn’t see something with his eyes, didn’t mean it was any less powerful. The tangible, visible world was more of an illusion than the unseen, which shaped and fashioned what we believed we saw with our eyes, what we touched with our skin.
“Do not say another word, not even one.” Albacus’ voice was laced with urgency.
The smith arrived at the edge of the bubble that encapsulated the blanket that held his son’s body. “What in hell’s name is going on?” He sounded angry and confused, as if Oliana were desecrating Damien’s body.
Oliana wondered for an instant if she was. Despite her intentions, the incantation was funneling the imbalanced, the unnatural into Damien’s still body. Was that a desecration? Had she condemned the boy she loved to the worst fate?
Had she done that to herself?
Henrietta drew up next to her father, out of breath. “Leave them be, Da. There’s nothing you can do to stop her if they can’t.”
He whirled on the daughter, whose eyes shown with a wisdom and understanding he’d never realized she had. “What do ya mean?”
Her voice was as accepting as her eyes—some fates were inevitable, and she seemed to realize what when none of the others present were willing to. “Don’t ya see, Da? She’s a witch. They’re wizards. There’s nothing for us to do.”
The smith whirled on Oliana, then Albacus and Mordecai, but he was beyond their awareness. The brothers wouldn’t spare a thought to anything that wouldn’t stop their sister, and Oliana was in a world all her own, of her own making, the victim of her own naïveté. If her brothers couldn’t reach her, the smith certainly wouldn’t.
“Stop this… whatever you’re doin,’ right now.” His words were furious and useless.
“Leave them, Da,” Henrietta said.
“Like hell I will.” He marched over to Mordecai, who was closest. “Stop her right now, ya hear me?”
Mordecai didn’t answer. Instead, he attempted to reach his sister again. “Oliana, please, you can’t do this. You don’t realize what it’s going to do to you.”
The smith stepped right in front of Mordecai and shook him. “Ya stop her right this second, ya hear me? Whatever she’s doin,’ I won’t let her do it to my son. It’s unnatural, all of this.”
Mordecai finally looked at him. The foreboding in his deep blue eyes making the smith take a step back. “It is unnatural. And you need to get out of our way right now and let us try to stop her before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what? What’s she doin’ to him?”
“It’s not him I’m worried about.”
“Well it’s what I’m worried about. He’s my son!”
“She’s trying to bring him back to life,” Mordecai said, his words sounding as dead as Damien.
The smith stumbled backward, straight into the force field behind him. He startled when it shocked him, and he bounced forward as if trying to escape the claws of death. “But that’s not… possible,” he said, but suddenly he didn’t sound so sure.
“Nothing’s truly impossible,” Mordecai said.
“But everything comes with a price,” Albacus said.
“Come on, Da,” Henrietta said, pulling him back. “Let them do what they can.”
This time, he didn’t complain. “You knew about this? That Damien was with… someone like her?”
“I suspected.”
“And you let him?”
She released her hold on her father and simply said, “Some things are just meant to be. Their love was. Who was I to intervene?”
“Ya might have spared him! How can ya say that?”
“No, Da. He died because a horse kicked him in the head. It was an accident. It was his time and death came for him, just as it will for all of us. Nothing I could’ve said would’ve stopped death from coming.”
“But this…” The smith had never struggled so hard to find words. “He wasn’t meant for this.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Some things are just meant to be, and some things are too big for us to stop.”
“Silence,” Albacus ground out. “We need to focus.”
This time, the smith obeyed. Wide-eyed with shock, he watched, hugging himself with his brawny arms and calloused hands.
“Oliana,” Albacus tried again.
But when she spoke, he wished she hadn’t, and he ran at the bubble of solid magic again.
Chapter 9
Albacus fell onto the ground while Mordecai stepped back and pushed his arms out to the side, hands facing Oliana and Damien, legs spread apart, grounded on the earth.
When Oliana spoke, so did Mordecai. He had no spell memorized to counter hers. He hadn’t studied dark magic, which they defined as any kind of magic that dealt in the imbalance of the elements, of anything unnatural. But that wouldn’t stop him from trying to come up with something—anything—that might reverse the momentum of what their sister had created.
He ignored every impulse within him that tried to tell him it was already too late, that he’d realized what his intuition had been trying to communicate all along when he was powerless to intervene. It was all so plain now, everything Oliana had done this day that led up to this moment, to this action. They should have suspected she’d try something like this. The signs that pointed the way toward this outcome had been there all along, since Oliana was a toddler learning to walk even when the governesses said she was too young and tried to discourage it.
Oliana set her eyes on a goal, and s
he did whatever it took to achieve it. He and Albacus should have known she wouldn’t let Damien die, even if death was something beyond human intervention.
But Oliana had never seen herself as an ordinary human or an ordinary anything. She burned strong and bright, like a star that gave it all she had until the only natural course of energy was to burn out.
She was on a course of self-destruction, and even she was powerless to reverse what she’d set into motion.
The cursed words dripped from her lips and no amount of wishing could stuff them back in.
Breathe my breath into Damien.
Give him renewed life.
Albacus blasted his personal power at the bubble that kept him from his sister while Mordecai set to mumbling words with a chance of countering her spell as fast as he came up with them.
The bubble, nearly crystalline looking now, shook and trembled, but held.
Mordecai said, “Blood of my blood, sister of my heart, I intervene in the spell Oliana, my sister, has cast.”
Albacus funneled his magic into his hands another time, preparing for another blast. Mordecai rummaged his brains for the next words to the spell he was weaving, risks of experimentation be damned.
But Oliana continued with her own terrible, deadly words.
Weave my air into his lungs,
make us not one, but a pair.
It took great effort of will, but Oliana managed to turn her head away from the book. She sought out her brothers with wide, terrified eyes. She felt as if she were fighting physical restraints, but she succeeded in swiveling her body toward her brothers.
But it didn’t matter. Her eyes had already scanned the spell. Her mind pushed the words to the tip of her tongue.
With this breath, I conclude this spell,
the elements of life all present.
“Oliana, no!” Albacus screamed with a power he’d never used before, but it didn’t matter.
Mordecai’s eyes flew to the open blade next to the spell book. His stomach plummeted somewhere around his boots when he noticed the red tint to the pocketknife that could only mean one thing. “Oh no,” he whispered, patting his pockets frantically. “Albacus, give me a blade.”
Albacus noticed what Mordecai had. “Oh dear God, no. No, no, no, no,” he chanted, all the while running his hand over his clothing.
Mordecai snapped his eyes at the smith. “A blade? Do you have a blade?”
The smith pulled one out of his pocket and crossed the short distance to Mordecai at a run.
“Albacus,” Mordecai said, but his brother already knew. He waited for the blade with an open, extended palm.
Oliana’s lips moved, even though the torment of her eyes fought them.
I give of myself so that he may take,
so that death might wait, his body not break.
Mordecai sliced at Albacus’ hand without care and then did the same with his own. Blood magic was the most powerful kind. The magician imbued not only her energy in the spell, but also her physical essence. It amplified any spell, and tied a fragment of the witch to the spell so long as it remained. This bond linked the witch to the spell until the spell was countered, and even then, sometimes a link remained, tenuous, but there.
If the brothers had any chance of countering Oliana’s blood magic, they needed their own. They didn’t have to confer to agree that combining their blood might amplify whatever spell Mordecai was working. Mordecai dropped the blade to the ground without care and pressed his bloodied palm against Albacus.’ The cuts were deep enough that there was abundant blood to mix and drip onto the earth. Palms clasped, the brothers squeezed, and a steady flow of their united blood soaked into the ground.
Mordecai said whatever words came to mind. They were out of time for thoughtfulness and caution. “Blood of my veins, blood of my brother, the same blood that flows in our sister, we offer our magic to the earth.”
Meanwhile, Oliana said,
I am him, and he is me,
our lives forever bound.
Her voice was already more lifeless than it had ever been.
Mordecai spoke faster than ever before. “Earth element, we offer our blood and ask that you intervene in the spell our sister is casting. Her intentions are pure, her heart filled with love, but she knows not what she does. Do not make her pay the price for her ignorance.”
Earth, fire, water, air,
spark life into his body.
Mordecai was frantic, his words slurring in their haste. “If anyone must pay a price, let it be us. But do not let her bring this boy back to life!”
But his words, though imbued with the best of intentions, arrived too late.
And Oliana’s words arrived too soon.
I pay the cost of life.
Chapter 10
Albacus yanked his hand free of Mordecai’s, blasted magic so strong from his hands it emitted as a visible light, and charged at the solid wall of magic Oliana’s spell constructed. Like a ram, he lowered his head and planned to break through it with brute force.
But he slipped through the rapidly dissolving remnants of Oliana’s spell like a knife through warm butter. He skidded to a stop to avoid crashing into Oliana and the boy’s body, stumbled on his robes, and fell at the edge of the blanket.
“Air, fire, water, and earth reverse—” Mordecai broke off in mid-speech when he noticed his brother on the ground next to Oliana’s limp, dead-looking body, folded in on itself the second the last word of the spell left her lips. Mordecai crumpled to the earth right where he stood, his legs too shaky to hold him upright.
Neither brother moved for a prolonged moment of stasis, which allowed shock and terror to catch up with them and made their breath come in irregular rhythms.
Mordecai and Albacus understood why the bubble of magic that surrounded Oliana and Damien disintegrated.
Oliana’s spell was complete, and no amount of her brothers’ blood or their desperate pleas or hastily constructed counter spells could do a thing to change what she’d done.
The brothers finally shared a look that contained more horror, anguish, and grief than their matching blue eyes ever had. They drew in twin ragged breaths and leapt into motion, pushing away the fear that anything they did would be an exercise in futility.
But that wouldn’t stop them from trying. They wouldn’t give up. Accepting what their minds and decades of magical study told them would only lead to defeat.
Oliana might have been too stubborn to give up on nearly anything she wanted in life, but Albacus and Mordecai were far more stubborn where it concerned their baby sister.
They wouldn’t let her go. They wouldn’t allow her to do what she’d already done. They couldn’t, dammit.
“Henrietta,” Albacus said, “you know where Irele Castle is?”
“I do.”
“Go get our parents. Tell them it’s urgent. Please, go as fast as you can.”
“I will,” she said, but they were the soft-spoken words of someone who realized her actions would make no difference.
“Go. Run.”
“Take one of our horses,” Mordecai added.
She nodded, gathered her skirts in her hands, and took off toward the river, where the horses wandered. But no matter how fast she ran, or how fast the horse did, she already anticipated what the result would be. It didn’t take a deep understanding of magic to see what happened.
With a dashing hope that their parents would still be able to reverse what they hadn’t, the brothers scrambled over to Oliana’s body. Albacus got to her first and reached a hesitant hand to her arm. He hovered his hand above the skin of her wrist then finally brought it down to touch her.
He jerked his hand back as if her skin were on fire. He stared at his sister’s unmoving face with wide, empty eyes.
“No, no, no, no.” Mordecai went to shake her shoulders, as if she were merely asleep, but his fingers slipped through an inch of what should have been solid flesh. He withdrew his hands as if singed.
<
br /> “What is it?” the smith asked.
When the brothers didn’t answer, he persisted. “Why does she look dead? I thought she was trying to… revive my son or whatever it is she was doing?”
Mordecai retreated to kneel next to Oliana, and Albacus sat and huddled his arms around his knees. Neither brother could look away from the pale, graceful face that had always held so much mischief and enthusiasm for whatever her fascination of the moment happened to be.
Until now, when her fascination had turned to a love she couldn’t have. Now that face was too still, and her grace accentuating what looked more like an alabaster statue with each passing second.
“Explain, please,” the smith said. He was a tormented father who’d just lost his son, and who was now trying to make sense of something beyond his understanding of the world. In this region, if magic was accepted as real, it usually was only to fear it and any who practiced its arts.
Finally, Albacus responded to the begging pleas of a grieving man. After all, he’d lost someone he loved as well. But Albacus’ gaze never wavered from his sister’s face. “Oliana is a witch.”
The smith released an unintended gasp at hearing the fearsome words said aloud. Albacus didn’t react. He’d protected his sister all her life from this admission, from the misunderstanding and ignorance of the villagers that surrounded them. Being a witch was dangerous. Those that didn’t understand would clamor for her death.
Only she was already dead—not exactly, but enough like it that an admission of who and what she really was no longer endangered her.
And Damien’s family had already seen too much to protect Mordecai and him from the admission. None of it mattered now. “Oliana performed a spell intended to bring Damien back to life.”
“And did it work?” The smith’s voice was filled with an unusual combination of awe and fright.
“It did. Just not the way she thought it would.”
“So Damien’s alive?”
“Not yet, but I suspect he soon will be.”
The smith spun to look at his son, trailing every one of his features, searching for any sign of movement.