by Cait Spivey
All this was taught to young witches when they began their training. They were all led to believe that those shapeshifters who survived went into hiding or eventually died, since they hadn’t been heard from in over one thousand years—as far as most were concerned. Olivia watched the wolf stalk around the glen, slowly shrinking, and recalled the night Lisyne had visited her all those years ago. But those few hours were no clearer in Olivia’s memory than a dream she might have once had.
When she’d seen those hunters on the floor of her hall, she’d wondered at first if they were a message from Lisyne, one of her odd gifts. Would the wolf be offended to know Olivia thought her given to such displays? Doubtful.
Lisyne stretched, groaned, and began to change. Her hair retracted, bones rearranged. The whole process was grotesque and fascinating, and Olivia couldn’t help but stare. Despite the complexities of the magic at work, the transformation was very brief and took no more than a few seconds. As Lisyne was changing, Olivia observed currents of hot air surrounding her and wondered at their purpose. It became apparent when the change was complete and the heated air became clothing which fitted itself to Lisyne’s body.
The Great Wolf stood now in her favored female human form, which had been reproduced hundreds of times over in temples all over Arido. She was tall and muscled, with short, spiky grey hair the color of her fur. Her eyes remained gold and almond shaped. Her face was clear and bright like the edge of a sword, and showed only a hint of wear despite the fact that Lisyne was over four thousand years old.
She turned and looked down at Aradia, who was still lying on the ground, and gestured toward where Olivia sat. Both Aradia and Morgana moved over to their sister, and Olivia took their hands as they approached. Lisyne walked toward them and stood with her arms crossed, staring at them with stern eyes.
“Fiona is dead,” she accused.
The words knocked the air out of Olivia’s chest like a physical blow, and she gasped for breath. Aradia cried out and covered her mouth with her hands. Morgana punched and splintered a fallen log.
One sister dead.
“I’m pleased that you all seem so upset,” Lisyne sneered at them. “It’s almost as if you had no inkling of Fiona’s situation.”
“We didn’t, Lisyne, please—” Aradia began.
“Liar!” growled Lisyne. “Remind them, Olivia.”
“The record. We received a copy of the record made when Fiona re-sealed the gate,” Olivia said quietly.
“When?” Lisyne prompted.
“Two days ago,” Olivia said.
“And what was on the bottom of the record?” Lisyne asked.
“A . . . a message from Fiona’s record-keeper.” Her voice trembled. “Lisyne, please, I was on my way to Morgana and Aradia when Seryne—”
“I know, you fool!” Lisyne shouted. “It was about time! But it was too little, too late, Olivia. All of you.”
She came forward and looked each sister in the eye in turn, mere inches from their faces. The Kavanagh sisters were powerful witches, but they each quailed before Lisyne. There was nothing else they could do—she was the power of nature itself, five times their age and five times their strength.
“Guarding the barrier between the world of life and the world under the mountain was the single most important charge I gave to the witches when I trained the first of your kind,” Lisyne said. “But Lirona forgot—no, I cannot say she forgot, because she never knew. I told her of the thing that we bound under the mountain, but it is difficult to understand what you have not seen. Fiona . . . Fiona understood.”
She fell into silence and looked into the woods, lost in thought and reverie.
“What is it, Lisyne? The thing under the mountain?” Morgana asked.
Lisyne’s gaze snapped back and she stared at Morgana.
“It is the opposite of nature. It is death. It is chaos. It is antithetical to our existence,” Lisyne said. “My people trapped it under the mountain when I was young, in a time almost beyond memory. My greatest fear has always been that it will escape, with so few of us left to bind it again. Fiona feared this too. I had hoped that she would come to you all, and that you would place a new seal together . . .”
She trailed off again, but only briefly, and then turned to look at the sisters again. She seemed to grow as she glared down at them. “But you ignored her, you ignored your charge, and it is because of you that she is dead!”
The sisters cowered, but Morgana set her jaw and stood up.
“Lisyne, it’s not like Fiona was the only one who was struggling! We’ve all had disasters to deal with—” she said.
“Oh, I know! I’ve been watching.” Lisyne grew, towering over them. Her nails began to elongate into claws. Behind her, Tirosyne and Seryne stood and growled. “But you are all fools!” she continued. “What do you think the source of your problems was? The oceans, the blights, the storms, the hounds? Idiots. They came from the only place evil has ever come, that festering pit of darkness into which we threw the destroyer! It is the earth’s greatest malady!”
“How were we to have known?” Aradia cried.
Lisyne shrank back down to her customary size, which was somehow more menacing than the giant version of her that had just been bearing down on them. She walked over and crouched in front of Aradia.
“When was the last time you saw or spoke to Fiona?” Lisyne asked, almost sweetly.
Olivia remembered calling Fiona when the hounds appeared in her forest. Her skin and hair had been completely white, her lips stained black, her eyes dark. Her face had been hollow and lined. She had looked dead, and Olivia remembered the pang of guilt she’d felt. It had been the first time she’d seen Fiona in twenty-five years, since Desmond was born. That was the last time all the sisters were together.
“Lisyne, please,” Aradia begged, weeping.
Lisyne seized Aradia by the jaw and pulled her forward.
“That’s how you would have known,” Lisyne whispered. “By communicating with your baby sister.”
She released Aradia, who fell back against the stump, whimpering. Olivia reached down and rubbed her sister’s shoulder.
“What can we do now, Lisyne?” Olivia asked.
Lisyne did not look at her immediately, her amber eyes fixed on some point through the trees, her nostrils flaring. But at last, the shapeshifter’s shoulders relaxed, and she faced Olivia. Her expression was neutral, though her eyes burned. Olivia inhaled shallowly. Lisyne in the flesh was so changeable, one moment calm, one moment raging, the next manic. Magic drew itself defensively into Olivia’s chest, for what if this was the calm before the storm of another strike?
The wolf looked into the distance again. “Now? Now we must go and seal the creature once more,” Lisyne said.
Chapter Twenty
Alanine Maravilla did a backbend over the arm of her chair, staring at the wall upside-down, hair skimming the rug. “What if we put each of the coils into a lavender soak?”
“Alanine. These are coils of dead magical energy. We’re not going to revive them with a bleeding lavender soak.”
“But we’ve tried everything else!”
“Shut up. I need to think.”
Arginine Maravilla sat at her desk and scowled at the book of spells and rituals open before her. Her twin sister was right. They had tried everything, but the dormant energy they’d gathered refused to respond to any approach. Crystals and herbs did nothing to infuse it with life. Chants hadn’t sparked it, symbols hadn’t channeled it. They couldn’t even release it from the braided silken scarves in which it was bound. The witches’ fury increased with each failure. This energy was their last hope. It was for this that they had been banished from Sitosen.
Their former sisters were in denial, but the twins knew the truth. Like any earthly resource, magic would eventually run out. It was recycled, but with each cycle that energy became less potent, a little more worthless. Though they were punished for it, the twins wanted to do good for their f
ellow witches. They were the only ones who understood that the power would disappear, and they were the only ones attempting to do anything about it. Olivia herself had been irritatingly complacent, thinking it would be centuries before magic expired, refusing to listen to Arginine and Alanine’s explanations.
It was Olivia’s fault, all of it. They would never have needed to steal Neria’s Shield if she had listened; if she had supported them when they wanted to call a conference of the clans, to put the efforts of all toward solving this problem. By rights, the twins should never have had to attempt black magic on their own. They should have been permitted to work with their Thiymen sisters. But now, they were banished, and any witch who so much as spoke to them would suffer the same fate. None would help them now.
“You were my captains,” Olivia had said. “You were second only to me in the coven, and I lorded no privileges over you. Why was it not enough?”
In the present, Arginine remembered their last day at Sitosen Castle and muttered, “Because there is no such thing as enough.”
“What?” Alanine asked.
Arginine looked up. “Nothing. Have you found that bonding spell yet?”
“You mean the one written in runes we can’t read?”
“Yes, that one.”
Alanine rolled her eyes at her twin and went back to the bookshelf. What seemed like a breakthrough was looking more and more like a dead end.
In one of their experiments, they’d opened a tear in the curtain between life and death, and they’d discovered that dead energy wasn’t dead at all. It was simply energy displaced from the living world. Magical energy wasn’t recycled one hundred percent; the percentage that was sloughed off as waste bonded in the underworld and became whole again. In many ways, it was more potent, more concentrated than living magic. Since that discovery, Arginine and Alanine had worked to understand it, traveling back and forth across the barrier, thrilled by the possibilities.
They’d worked as quickly as they could over the past month to gather and store as much energy as possible, binding the magic to cloth which was then tightly braided and twisted. Dozens of these long coils were stored in their tower. All the twins needed to do was find the best way to make the energy workable again. The only problem was that it resisted use. The energy almost seemed to work against them; its presence had a negative effect on the twins’ ability to summon magic, canceling out the active or living energy.
Alanine was anxious. They could be arrested by the clans and brought in front of the jury before their research was complete. It was only a matter of time before the Thiymen Guard noticed their tears; books were a poor substitute for the real training given to the witches of the Black Clan in matters of warding and sealing. Without something conclusive to show the clans, their punishment would be much more severe this time around.
The sisters argued often about their position. To leave Del would appear suspicious, but going into hiding would give them more time to complete their experiments and hopefully furnish them with the evidence which would justify their actions to the clans. Arginine, however, no longer thought a successful proof would be enough to restore their station and solve the energy problem. The Kavanaghs would continue resisting the truth of finite magic, as they had initially, until it was too late.
The only way to save Arido was to destroy the Kavanagh sisters. The extra power in the coils would give the twins the strength to defeat the four most powerful witches in the country . . . if they could only use it.
“This would be so much easier if we could draw the energy out of the coils,” Arginine said.
“I think the cloth is the only thing keeping it stable on this plane,” Alanine replied. “It’s not supposed to be here.”
“Stabilizers. Yes. Of course.” Arginine flipped through her book to a different section.
“Arginine—”
Arginine ignored her sister. “Something to ground it, keep it from wheeling free. Aha!”
Alanine looked over Arginine’s shoulder and grimaced. “That’s never going to work.”
“Of course it will. Besides, it’s the one thing we haven’t tried yet.”
“But the dragon has to be willing. We can’t force it to use its magic.”
“Look, Alanine, it’s simple.” She pointed to the book. “The dragon absorbs the energy and then releases it again, pure and ready to use, back into the world. A living refinery for dead magic.”
Alanine raised her eyebrows. “If it’s really that simple, why can’t we do it ourselves?”
Arginine scowled. “Because we don’t have magical fire in our bowels.” She jabbed her finger onto the page. “This is dead magic, Alanine. Dragons are magical vultures. They can eat the dead magic. They digest it, clean it up. If they choose to, they can expel the living magic. It’s like they vomit it up. And then it’s out in the world and good to use. All we have to do is bind it up again as it’s spat out.”
Alanine crossed her arms. “You’re forgetting two important things, Arginine. First, the Purvaja dragons aren’t true dragons, so we don’t even know if they have this ability. Second, we can’t just ask them to help us. The Dragon Queen keeps abreast of clan news. She’s sure to know who we are. Never mind their rabid loyalty to Fiona. She’d want to get approval for the experiment, and then we’d be finished.”
Arginine frowned. She paced around her desk, winding her long blonde hair around her fist. “What if we offered to break the curse?”
“Petra’s curse?”
“Yes! We could free them. Make it so they don’t have to be dragons.”
“What if they want to remain dragons? Do the words ‘rabid loyalty’ mean nothing to you?”
“It was just a thought, Alanine,” Arginine snapped. “Let’s go to the Vale. I’m tired of staring at these useless books.”
Alanine had no argument on that count. The twins strapped on their traveling belts and drew spells of invisibility around themselves, as they always did when moving through the city. There were hordes of people in the streets, which never happened in the First Neighborhood, and only on festival days in the Second. The sisters grasped hands, and together they poured magic into their legs, then leapt onto the rooftops. Unseen, they jumped from roof to roof all the way out of the city, toward the dark green swath of forest to the east.
Empress jumped down from the fountain and scurried along back to the palace. The people in the plaza watched her go, their faces tight and drawn with apprehension. Empress was so sincere and gentle and pretty, and they wanted to believe her. They wanted to know that their loved ones wouldn’t suffer the consciousness of being buried in tiny spaces. This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen, and everyone was scared. But Empress seemed so sure.
A large-bellied man with a tangled grey beard scowled as he tromped around the plaza. He didn’t have any dead to concern himself with, but that didn’t stop him from carving out a stake for himself in the conversation. He was not a very politically savvy man, and he knew jack-all about the girl-child who was their empress now. But he’d heard someone at some Third Neighborhood tavern say witches were ruining the country and undermining all of Arido’s core values. He wasn’t sure what those values were, exactly, but now seemed like a good time to bring up how the witches were to blame.
“This is all the witches’ fault,” he said gruffly to the nearest person. “I wager they be watching us now in their scry-glasses, laughin’ at how scared we are.”
The woman shrank away from his voice—and his smell—looking at him warily and raising an arm in a half-formed gesture of defense.
“You don’t know that,” she said. “Empress said they’re missing.”
“So?”
“Could be they’re hurt.”
“Bah! They’re witches, nothing can hurt them!”
“You’d be surprised,” said another voice.
The arguers turned in the direction of the words and immediately dipped their heads when they saw who it was. The woman w
ho addressed them was extremely petite, with white skin and long blonde hair bound up in a multitude of messy braids wound around her head. She wore breeches, tunic, and jerkin, and stood with her feet spread wide and her hands on her hips. Her dark brown eyes caught the light and gave her a quick, clever look. Behind her was a loosely arranged column of similarly-dressed men and women.
“Ho, Bridget,” said the large-bellied man.
“Ho, Bridget,” people murmured all around them.
Bridget waved their address away and walked right up to the big-bearded man who’d started the argument.
“Listen here, Groff,” she said in his ear. “Forget about them witches for now. They don’t matter. Whatever’s going on, they ain’t here. But we are, and the corpses are, and Empress has given us instructions. You’d all do best to follow those instructions, you hear?” She gestured to the group of men and women she’d brought with her. “And we here’re going to make sure everythin’ run smooth. Now carry on. Bring your dead. We’ll carry them into the green.”
People nodded and went back to their dead. Bridget pointed to her tall, sandy-haired second-in-command and waved him closer.
“Aye, Bridget?” he asked.
“Orran. You know what to do,” she said. She seized his wrist and looked him in the eye. “Make sure they be careful. They’ll be right under the guardsmen’s noses.”
He grinned. “Course they’ll be careful. You don’t think they could bear disappointing you, do you?”
She smirked back and shoved him off. Still laughing, he gathered their thieves and took them to the entrance to the palace green, where they handily unburdened the mourners of their corpses and the corpses of their burial gems. Bridget hung back at the plaza entrance, chewing on a piece of jerky. People from all walks of life, dead people with treasures they didn’t need, everyone too preoccupied to notice a few small children—it was a pickpocket’s dream, something to cheer them up. The adults would take the corpses, the kids would get the mourners, and the Thieves’ Guild of Del would have themselves a feast that night.