The room was still and silent, with only the quiet crackling of the hearth fire to mark the fact that time still moved on. Charles held himself still too, holding his breath, watching Jonathan and waiting, not even sure what answer he was hoping for.
Jonathan’s face was unreadable—not hard like Whitby’s, just blank like stone, which was the way he had always been. He won’t say anything, Charles realized, and for some reason this hurt more than even the most vocal damnation ever could.
And then, as if enough water had finally poured over Jonathan’s stone, his face fell, and so did his shoulders, and now it was him opening his hands.
“Is that what you think of me?” he said in tones that matched Charles’s. “You think I could do that to you? You think I could do that to my brother?”
Charles blinked and let out his breath. “I’m not your brother. Not really. Cousin at best.”
Jonathan shook his head. “You are my brother. You have always been my brother.” He lifted his chin, but his eyes were soft and vulnerable and not like Jonathan at all. “You are not worthless. You are an idiot,” he added, putting plenty of heat in the word, but then he softened again. “But you are not worthless. And no. I would never kill you. I never could, not now, and not even if you did bring down the world around our heads.”
“Why?” The word broke from Charles. He was aware, dimly, of other people in the room, but they didn’t matter, not just now. “What good am I?”
“You’re Charles,” Jonathan said, his face going red, his hands tightening in his lap. “You’re my brother. That’s enough.”
“You have a very, very great heart.”
Charles jerked his head up, blinking at Timothy, his words echoing in his head. Timothy was smiling, but he was not flustered and upset like Jonathan. He simply looked soft and patient and…loving.
“You have had such a strange, empty life,” Timothy went on, “and yet you are so very full of life that you create it wherever you go. Even when Smith had you beaten down so far you could barely stand, even then you shone. And you are full of empathy and compassion. You tried to help me when I was just a stranger, giving up hope for yourself to spare me pain. You have done that, in fact, several times. You helped me and helped your brother to escape when you could have been fleeing yourself. When you discovered it was only you who could save Madeline and Jonathan from the demon, at no point did you ask why this had fallen to you or even consider letting them go. Your despair came only when you didn’t think you were good enough to be of use.” Timothy took a few steps forward, putting himself on the other edge of the rug on which Charles was standing. “You ached for my boyhood self, for the plight which had fallen to me, and you ached for what I lost in the gardens. You are love, Charles. You are nothing but light and love.” He smiled crookedly, his eyes dancing as he opened his hands. “Why in the world would any of us consider, for even a moment, destroying someone like you?”
Charles couldn’t look away from Timothy’s face, because the sight of it was even more potent than those words. You are love, his face said. You are love, and I love you, love.
In that moment, with those words and that face before him, Charles believed. He believed in everything.
They all sat there for some time, no one willing to move or speak, though Emily did dab occasionally at her eyes. It was Stephen, however, who finally broke the silence.
“I-I’m sorry to change the subject,” he said, sounding very small. “But…I keep wondering…h-how did I make it through?” He gestured to the fog. “Last night, I should…I should have been… What happened to the men should have—” He cut himself off, then started to look green. “How?”
“You must have arrived before it devised its new strategy,” Madeline said. “You are very lucky.”
“Oh, Goddess.” Stephen sank forward, putting his head between his knees.
Freed from the trance, the others began to stir, but Charles was still looking at Timothy, still reveling, and Timothy was still staring patiently back. And as they stood there like sentries on each end of the worn carpet—the carpet where they had first made love—Charles remembered what Timothy had said to him the night before.
“It is still your mind, your heart, and your soul, Charles Elliott-Perry. You author the space within the darkness.”
Jonathan cleared his throat. “Tell me more about the supplies, Timothy,” he said gruffly. “From where did you find all these things? How long can we last?”
“They are from the ghosts,” Timothy said. His eyes did not leave Charles. “I cannot reveal more, but I can assure you our supplies will not run out.”
“You are love… You are nothing but light and love.”
“I will need to cast,” Madeline said. “If I can meditate, perhaps even cast into the Void, I might be able to see our situation more clearly.”
“You cannot tax yourself,” Jonathan said tightly.
“There is nothing else we can do,” she shot back, “short of waiting here to be consumed and used as a gateway for the demon to roll over the entire world in a mad quest for power.”
“You are love, and I love you, love.”
Charles felt the answer descend upon him, and he was surprised to find he was oddly calm. In fact, he even felt a little free. And for this moment, he felt strong. He did not yet have the strength of heart to believe in himself. But in the mirror of Timothy’s eyes, he did. It was, he discovered, enough.
With his eyes on Timothy, Charles stepped forward. “Use me.” He held out his hands and turned to his sister. “Use my power, Madeline. Use it to try to break through the fog.”
Madeline startled, then shook her head. “No, Charles, it doesn’t work that way. I can’t use your power. Only you can.”
“Then teach me,” Charles said. Funny how, once you took the leap, it was so easy to keep on leaping. “Teach me, Madeline. Make me your Apprentice.”
“An Apprentice cannot have an Apprentice!” she said, sounding appalled.
Charles took another step forward, placing him almost in front of her now. He held out his hands. “Madeline, you said I have power unequal to anything ever known. You said you don’t know how to get us out of this. You are tired, and you need help.” He glanced once more at Timothy. I am love. He reached out to Madeline and took her hand from her lap, forcing her tight fist open. “Let me help you.” He threaded his fingers into hers. “Sister. Let me help you help us.”
She looked up into his face for a long, long time, and he waited, barely breathing, simply looking back. Then she nodded, easing her fingers farther against his hold, letting him swallow her hand almost entirely.
Charles looked up at Timothy, who was smiling, a steady beam of light that lifted Charles high above the abbey, above the fog, and in that moment, in that smile, he knew he truly could do anything.
* * *
“To use your magic, you must open yourself to its power, but you must also ground yourself so that it does not carry you away.”
Charles shifted on his feet and nodded, nudging his mind to not only memorize but also comprehend the statement. He stood with Madeline in a part of the abbey he hadn’t known was even there, in an old solar almost as high up as the turret of the tower. Half its walls were fallen away, and he had worried for the floor when she had said they were to work here, but so far it had proved solid. And he found he liked the lack of a ceiling. It was strange to find it raining but running off Madeline’s dome of magic, but he was beginning to be able to think of it as a great glass window, and it unnerved him less and less all the time.
“I have to ground,” Charles repeated, nodding.
“You ground to one of the elements,” she continued. “Earth, water, wind, or fire.”
Charles brightened. “Yes, I remember now! That’s what they said they were, in the Stone Circle. The gray things said they were the guides or guardians of the elements. Something like that.”
Madeline looked surprised. “You saw the guides? In the
Circle?”
He realized, in all the chaos, he hadn’t been able to tell her this—he’d babbled it to Timothy and Emily, but Madeline had been unconscious, hadn’t she? And now that he was calmer, he found he could remember it more clearly. He told her about waking on the slab, how they had surrounded him and asked him what he was.
Madeline looked alarmed. “They could have killed you. And I left you there alone.”
That sobered him a little, but he was growing accustomed to being “nearly killed.” “They changed their tune when they touched me. They said I was not of the Source, but that I was—” He tried to remember, wrinkling his nose. “Bigger or…maybe older. I forget which. But they changed completely. They said they were there to serve the Lord.” He fidgeted and found it difficult to look at her. “It made me feel strange. I am not a lord.”
Madeline was looking at him with a quiet but intense expression. Charles fidgeted more, afraid of what she was going to say. But instead of speaking, first she motioned to a half-ruined wall, nodding to him as she sat down carefully upon it.
“Sit, Charles,” she said gently. “I want to tell you something.”
He lowered himself to the stones beside her, discharging dust and rubble as he sat. She did not look at him but instead let her gaze fix on an unseen point across the room. She took her time before speaking, just sitting there, gathering her thoughts.
“I told you that I have seen you in visions,” she said at last. “The first was just before you came, and another happened just before I found you on the moor and pushed you into the Stone Circle. There was one more as you leaped into my circle when I was healing Jonathan, but that one is muddier. It was as if you and the vision were briefly one. But what was interesting about these visions, Charles, was that it was you, but you greater. You seemed bigger somehow. You were very strong, and your power radiated like a sun. But you were still yourself.” She smiled. “Still somewhat distracted. Still seeing things in life no one else could ever see, bringing joy into them.”
Madeline reached for Charles’s hand. “You comforted me in a moment when I needed it very much. And you protected me in moments when I was very vulnerable and when there was no other way through.”
Her hand felt soft and good over his. But Charles still felt strange, and he shook his head. “I didn’t do any of that. I-I would have, but I didn’t.”
“No,” she agreed. Then she added, “Not yet.” She smiled when he looked up at her in confusion. “I have thought for some time on it now, and I believe that the vision of you is…” She trailed off. “The Morgan told me once that time was not a line, and not a circle, but a sphere. She said it is a strange creature with more lines inside it than we can ever possibly comprehend. I believe the you in some other point in our time found a way back across those lines and spoke to me and helped me.” She squeezed his hand. “It was you, Charles, all along. It will be you. Whether or not you feel like the Lord of the androghenie, an Old One reborn with the power of them all congealed inside you—you are, Charles. I have seen you use your power. You are very strong and very wise, and your heart is true.” Her smile fell, and she placed her other hand on top of their joined ones. “I am sorry I did not know what my family did to you. I am sorry I was not there to help you through this sooner. I am so sorry I failed you.”
Charles reached out with his free hand and squeezed over the top of the pile they had made of each other’s fists and palms. “No—Madeline, how could you have failed me? You didn’t know.” He paused. “I’m sorry about your father. I’m sorry I ruined your memory of him.”
“It was you that he hurt! You—” She laughed, a strangled sound. “It still seems like a strange, dark dream that he could do such things to you as he did. His son. He wanted one so badly.” She looked away, sad but frustrated too. “It makes no sense. He was fascinated with the androghenie, but he loved them. He would never have wanted to use them in this way. He often walked here with me, in fact, to this ruin and told me of our family’s failure to protect them. How we owed them everything.” She sighed and shook her head.
Charles wanted to comfort her, but he didn’t know what to say. He thought of what she had said about that other Charles, and he tried to reach for that part of him, to comfort her again, but it was like grasping air. He might become that Charles, but he was not there yet.
She withdrew her hands and wiped her fingers at her eyes. “We don’t have time for this,” she said, scolding herself. “I need to teach you, and we need to find the way to help you use what you have.” She rose, nodding to the center of the room. Charles followed her there.
“I cannot teach you magic in a day or even a week,” she said, “but I can teach you the principles. I can arm you with theory. It is no more than most of us receive to start. You can build your entire magic practice from the theory; once the Apprentice vows are taken, the mentor is there largely as a shepherd. You might not need me at all if I give you the right keys. And the most basic tenet of all is that of movement.”
She motioned to a large pile of crumbled wall off to the side of the room. It was very large, half as tall as Charles was and twice as wide.
“Move that,” she said. “Set that rock over against the wall on the other side.”
Charles balked. “What?”
“Move the rock,” she said again. “You have the power inside you to shift the entire abbey. In point of fact, every living creature does, but in you, the power to do so is already awake. You have but to reach for it.”
“I’ve no idea how to shift that rock,” he insisted, “short of hiring a sextet of burly men.” Though even as he said this, he felt magic burning at his fingers. He looked again at the rock. He just had to move it. For a second, it felt possible. Then the feeling vanished again.
Madeline picked up a small stone at her feet and tossed it lightly away. “I moved this rock with my hand. It was very simple, but in fact I used great force. I used my body, coordinating my mind and muscles and vision and balance to bend, take it up, then shift enough force into my hand to send it away. I used my body to move the rock: that was the force I employed for the task. ‘Magic’ is, in fact, simply another force. You have that force inside you.”
This will never work, Charles thought, but even as the thought formed, others crept up on top of it. “I think—I think I could vanish it,” he said quietly, even though another part of his mind was insisting he couldn’t. “But I don’t know that I could move it.”
“Nothing can be ‘vanished,’” Madeline said. “Nothing can be simply destroyed—not death, not fire, not anything. Nothing can disappear into nowhere.”
Charles thought for a moment. “I could put it in the Void, couldn’t I? That’s a type of nowhere.”
“Not without consequence. Everything that goes into the Void must come out again. Everything there fights its way here. If you put a pile of rock into the Void, it will come back, but as what? And when? And what else do you bring back with it, attaching to this rock? Does this rock have a memory of who has touched it? Some witches say it does. So do you send part of the androghenie who placed it or the soldier who tore it down?”
Charles’s head was starting to hurt. “So don’t send things into the Void.”
“Only if you pull them back out again and if you keep track of where you put it. But this is very advanced magic, Charles. Do not try it yet, for it is more difficult than you think.”
He nodded, but he thought it was much easier than she made it out to be. He could see it in his mind, and he realized, in fact, that he had done it when he had taken Madeline and Jonathan there from the lake. He had thought it was all the guides, but then he remembered the black and his hand. He felt dizzy. I did that. Not the guides. They carried me, but I did it…
He realized Madeline was watching him. Charles stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared hard at the rock. He just had to move it. He just had to move it from this place to that place. He just had to move it, to move it, to move—
He blinked, then smiled, then laughed. “I did it!” he cried, unable to believe it, and yet the rock that had been in the center of the room was now, as if it had always been there, on the other side of the room. “I did it!” he cried again and turned to Madeline. But she was staring at him strangely, and he faltered. “What have I done?”
“You didn’t even cast,” she whispered. “It should have floated, but… How?”
Charles paused. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. Apologetically. He looked at the rock again, trying to remember.
“You shifted it into the Void,” she said.
Charles blanched. She’d told him not to do that. “I’m sorry, I—”
She shook her head and held up a hand. She looked both wary and impressed. “You sent it into the Void and then out again.” Madeline exhaled a long breath. “With no guide, no cast, and no anchor. You are a wonder, Charles.” She ran a hand through her hair and surveyed the room. “But you must stop failing to ground. It will be your death, especially if you are flirting with the Void.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, feeling stupid.
“Don’t be sorry. But listen.” She reached for his hands, taking them both in hers. “When you cast a spell, you must think always both of your body and your mind. Your body is your house, the temple that keeps you safe. Your mind is the power, but it is dust in the Void without your body, no matter how concentrated it is. That is why everything wants to come out of the Void. That is why there are so many layers between it and us. We are only real when we are in our bodies. And yet our bodies limit us. We are great in the Void, but real in our bodies. Remember your body. Always remember your body.”
Charles felt very lost. He had no idea what she was talking about, and he was starting to panic. Then he remembered being in the Void with the guides. “He grounds to earth,” they had said.
“I want you to try to cast,” Madeline said. “I want you to ground yourself and try to send your mind onto the Plane. Do not go to the Void. One step beyond your body and no more. Reach for the guides. If they came to you in the Void, they will come to you now.”
The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil Page 39