by Natalie Grey
“I see.” My voice was noncommittal. “But you escaped.”
“I was set free on a priest’s whim.” His face twisted. “I fed them a story about a sick child and how I had made a pilgrimage for holy water—how it had just been a misunderstanding, a superstitious peasant, and I knew it was wrong, but I wanted to save my son. I told them everything they wanted to hear. I abased myself.” His voice was thick. “And they let me go.”
Now, so many years later, I could hear the lines Eshe had fed him. I was always too proud. She knew I would be taken in by a story of a proud man’s anger.
Then….
Well, I wasn’t sure if I had believed him. But it got under my guard.
“And then?” I took too big a gulp of wine, and felt my hand tremble slightly. This was an old anger, but it came to the surface quickly.
“And then the others told me to let it go,” Terric snarled. “They told me it was why we must build our own world, apart from the humans.” His hand slammed down next to his plate. “I asked them, how are we to do that? How? When the humans overrun everything? And they had no answer for me.” He gave a terrible smile, and now, centuries later, I could see what the act cost him. “But you have an answer.”
Did I trust him yet, that night? I couldn’t tell. I knew my face was serene. I knew that I smiled as I sipped my wine. I had been soothed by this familiar story of wrongs and revenge.
“Eat,” I said smoothly.
He stared at me.
“Eat.” I spread my hands. “What use is all this, if it goes to waste? Eat, drink.”
He was used to deprivation. I saw now that restraint was the cause of his silence. He had learned to go without, for going without made him independent, meant he needed to rely less on humans.
But while sorcerers might learn to disregard hunger of the body, hunger of the soul was another thing entirely, and his resentment at going without was no act. When he ate, it was with a desperate restraint that was almost violent.
I felt the echo of my thoughts then—it was difficult to stay angry when there was food in one’s belly and wine in one’s blood, when there was luxury to be had.
“You did well to escape,” I told him quietly.
He looked over at me silently. Now I knew that his silence was a product of his lies, but then I saw only skepticism.
“When they had me imprisoned, there was a hedgewitch there with me.” I toyed with the embroidery on my sleeve, and heard the raw note in my voice. “Human, no magic to her. They brought her in for giving a poultice to a sick woman. Her crime was that it worked.”
Terric looked away from me.
“They beat her half to death while I watched,” I told him, “and told me I was next. At least she passed quickly—I could use my magic well enough for that.”
In the present, I felt my own surprise. My act of mercy, given to Eshe, had been given before, and to a human, no less.
Terric was trembling now. Whatever he had expected from the Butcher of Venice, it wasn’t this.
“There is no shame in surviving,” I told him brutally. “Whatever you must do, whatever lies you must tell, there is no shame in surviving. Remember that, whatever others may say.”
He looked down at his empty plate. “Should I let go of my anger, then?”
“No.” I smiled at him. “Remember that, too. Remember that they tried to kill you for the way you were born, when you did nothing wrong. Remember it, and do not ever let go of that anger. The moment you do … their weakness wins.”
He stared at me, and there was something in his eyes that I had recognized now: agreement. However unwillingly, he was nurturing the seeds of doubt after only a few minutes in my company.
I woke up in the darkness, the close air of the cave around me and Lawrence’s deep, steady breathing nearby.
No sign of Fordwin.
I got up as quietly as I could, and took a moment to study the outline of Lawrence’s face. His handsome features were relaxed in sleep, deeply innocent despite his protestations to the contrary.
They always were, after all. Only innocents fell in love with someone like me—someone they should realize there was no hope of changing.
At least in the end, they all seemed to realize their mistake.
I shook my head slightly and went to find Fordwin.
I found him sitting out on one of the boulders, a silent shape watching the distant road. He didn’t look over his shoulder, but I knew he had heard me approach.
“The world has changed while I’ve been away.” His voice held an ache. “For so long, it was all the same. Now … I don’t even know what I’m working for.”
I took a seat on a nearby boulder and pulled my knees up, studying the sky rather than the road.
“You didn’t want anything to do with the world, though.” My words seemed disembodied in the darkness. “You volunteered to come search for me, didn’t you? That was always the root of Separatism for you—you didn’t like the way it was going. And when you realized that even building our own hidden world wouldn’t help, you ran away from all of it.”
He turned his head to look at me. I could only see the faint gleam of starlight on those demon-black eyes, but I knew I’d struck a nerve.
“People aren’t so bad, you know.” I lifted my shoulders. “I lived with humans for centuries, remember.”
“And here I thought familiarity bred contempt.” There was a wry humor there. “Not love.”
“Yeah, well, life’s full of surprises.” He was purposefully avoiding the point, and it made me prickly.
There was a silence.
“Where will it stop?” Fordwin asked finally.
I looked over at him without answering. I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant.
“Will he kill just the ones with magic like yours?” Fordwin pressed. He nodded his head toward the darkness of the cave. “Or will he go for those with a talent for metal as well, given that they wield blades? What else will he deem a danger to us all? Will he strike down the druids, who give themselves the forms of bears and panthers?”
“That’s why you haven’t turned me away,” I guessed. “You’re afraid of what he might do. You think, if he hasn’t come to you—he’s planning something worse than even you would condone.”
“I stand by what I told him,” Fordwin said instantly. “Even if a thousand like you were destroyed, even if a million were killed in the cradle, it would be worth it to avert what you did.”
“You know….” I felt my fingers tighten on my knees. “I would have agreed with you, not too long ago.”
He fell silent. Clearly, he hadn’t expected this.
“It was Daiman—the Hunter,” I corrected myself carefully, “who made me think otherwise. If you had seen his guilt at bringing children to die, you’d doubt your words, too.”
“A Hunter doubts us?” Fordwin’s voice was scornful.
“It can’t be much of a surprise, given that you hid the truth from them.” My voice was like acid. “Or was that really all Terric’s idea?”
Fordwin blinked. “It was Terric’s idea.” His voice was worried. “Always the lies with that one,” he said, half to himself. “He never trusted anyone, once he got back from his time with you.”
And it all snapped into place.
“You think I can help you figure out his plan … because you think I’m the one who planted it there.” I shook my head. “Of course. I’m getting stupid. I should have seen it.”
“Well, you did,” Fordwin said fiercely. His too-black eyes were narrowed. “He was different when he came back.”
“I’m not arguing with you, if you’ll notice.” I spoke evenly.
There was the distant sound of wheels on gravel, and a car made its way along the distant road. The lights were off, and I wondered briefly who it was and what they were doing. Humans, I had learned, were no less cunning in their schemes than sorcerers. Was it drugs they were smuggling? Or people?
I reache
d out at that, and touched the mind of the driver. Only one life in that car.
I’d let them go, then.
“You’d think what happened wouldn’t be such a mystery, wouldn’t you?” I asked finally. My voice was distant. “He did the job … almost. But I know he didn’t, and I know what he turned into. You’d think I’d be able to put the pieces together.”
Fordwin was silent.
I slid off the boulder and turned back to the cave. I was too weary for this, too tired of trying to remember and failing. Too tired of staring at shadows and waiting for them to make shapes.
“Just tell me where he is when you figure it out,” I said wearily. “I’ll take care of the rest. It’s what I’m good at, isn’t it?”
“Why are you trusting me?” Fordwin’s voice called me back.
My answer was given easily: “Because you hate me.”
“And here I thought you were at least moderately sensible.”
“Look.” I crossed my arms. “Everyone who’s ever said they loved me has betrayed me. Isn’t that true? Maybe it’s time to start working with the people who hate my guts. And if not … at least it’ll be a new mistake, and not the same old one.”
I left before he could answer, and spent a very long time in the darkness of the cave with my fingers wrapped around a mug of cooling tea.
Where was Terric? And what in the name of gods and demons had I turned him into, all those years ago? What whisper had planted the seed that now drove him?
If only I could remember.
Chapter 16
Dawn found me in the wilds of the Caucasus, a lone figure in the strange grey light of early morning. Whatever animals lived there, they kept their distance.
So did Fordwin and Lawrence.
Over the weeks since Daiman had first begun to teach me the druids’ trance, it had become easier to sense life. Far easier than reaching the domhan fior, at any rate.
So I started with that.
As dawn turned the sky from deep blue to white and pale gold, I walked with my eyes half-closed and my senses reaching out. There was the high, sweet sound of the flowers, mingling with a dry rustling and creaking of grass—it put me in mind of a bamboo forest, though I wasn’t sure when I’d seen one of those.
Whatever the case, it seemed to be a happy memory.
I had to reach further to hear the lichen. It was so old and strange in its life-force that it was easy to miss entirely, even when I was looking for it. It had a slow wariness about it, manifestly untroubled by any immediate events around it, but curious about the strange, quicksilver life in the rest of us.
I liked lichen, I decided. It didn’t care about politics.
I was not surprised to find mice and shrews and voles around me, each with their own curious flutter-beat of blood and energy, but the wealth of spiders was a little unnerving. With them came frogs, somehow carrying the beat of waters both rushing and deep in the sound of their life force.
Somewhere nearby, a leopard hunted. I found it was difficult to be scared of such a beast when I could see its heart and its mind. It was a thing of beauty, tangled and sleek all at once, fur rippling, and I found myself scaling the hills to find it.
It turned its head to look at me when I came over the ridge, and I settled down to watch it. I knew there was a smile playing around my lips, and also that it would not have the first idea what a smile was.
So I tried to speak to it as a druid would. I looked into its slit-pupiled eyes and gave it all of me: my curiosity, my admiration for it, my yearning to be something simpler than what I was. I gave it my craving for power and my exultation in my magic—for those were my claws and my teeth, and I thought it might understand.
I gave it the ache in my chest, too, for what that was worth. Who was I to say that a leopard might not understand heartbreak?
It tilted its head as it walked toward me, tail lashing cautiously. Its brown eyes were very warm, and it occurred to me that this was how I might die.
I remembered the first rabbit I had tried to kill as a druid, and tensed.
But the leopard only nudged me gently, its cool, wet nose meeting mine.
Everything was going to be okay, it told me. It passed me its story, the hunt across sunbaked rocks and amidst whistling winds, the view from mountaintops, and things I could not name but that felt so familiar that I almost felt I could sink into its skin.
And then its head whipped to the side, ears turned for a noise from behind me.
I stood as Lawrence made his way into sight, and stopped dead at the sight of me next to the leopard.
The leopard growled, and its growl became a hiss when the runeblade appeared in Lawrence’s hand.
“Put it away.” My voice was abrupt, but I didn’t care. I knelt back by the leopard. “It won’t hurt me. We’re just going to scare away the game if we make a ruckus.”
We already had, the leopard said grumpily. For two days. It was hungry now.
I considered this, and then I reached out to lay my hand on its warm flank. I closed my eyes and reached into my blood, to the swirl of energy that was life, and I felt the deficit of it in the beast.
It was so easy to let the energy flow out of me. It wanted to equalize, after all. Once I broke the barriers that kept it inside me, it rushed into the leopard with the force of a mountain stream—
I came to with the leopard licking my face worriedly, and Lawrence trying to shoo it away.
It ignored him.
I opened my eyes to stare at it, and was hit with its blunt thought that my experiment had been monumentally stupid.
“I know,” I muttered. “I’m sorry.”
I pushed myself up with a groan. Everything hurt—everything.
“What did you do?” Lawrence asked worriedly.
“It was hungry,” I explained. “I told you, we’ve been scaring off the game. So I gave it some energy.”
He was silent, I guessed, not from a dearth of thoughts, but instead from an overabundance of them.
“You can do that?” he asked finally.
“Blood magic.” I considered trying to get up, and the mere thought of it made my head spin. “I just … there’s not much chance to practice it. I’m not very good at it anymore. If I ever was.”
Lawrence settled down nearby, with an unpleasant look at the leopard. “It’s not going to kill me, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said honestly.
“…Right.” He shook his head as if to clear it, and his brown eyes met mine. “Well, if you’re out of energy, could you take some of mine?”
The cat growled.
“I could,” I said repressively. “But given my present control issues, it probably isn’t a great idea.”
“You didn’t kill Philip when you did it,” Lawrence pointed out.
“And I don’t exactly know how to recreate that scenario,” I snapped.
I looked away, rubbing at my forehead. I was more prickly than I should be, but Lawrence’s words only served to remind me of my failure to kill Philip.
And, by extension, my fight with Daiman.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. “I wasn’t overly concerned with Philip’s wellbeing when I did that spell,” I explained carefully. “The last thing you’d want is for me to repeat it on you.”
The wooziness got the better of me and I dropped my head forward onto my knees.
“But you wouldn’t hurt me,” Lawrence insisted. There was the sound of him scrambling across the rocks nearby. “I know you wouldn’t.” I could feel the heat of him at my side as he awkwardly laid his wrist under my fingertips. “Just take a little,” he said desperately. “Just what you need.”
My fingers tightened on his wrist and I fought the urge to take all of it, suck the life out of him, take everything he was offering now and everything he’d offered before. However long it had been since someone had placed their life in my hands like this, I remembered the rush of it.
“Just a little.” The w
ords were intoxicating, softly spoken. “It’s my blood, and I’m offering it to you. It’s not wrong to take something that’s offered.”
I took it. Swaying even as I sat, dizzy with exhaustion, I took what he wanted to give me.
But I made myself go slowly. I kept my power on a leash. The second I let it start to control me, I knew this was all over.
I closed my eyes to see his life force. The image of the leopard was flickering madly at the corners of my vision, but I forced myself to ignore it. I drew the tiniest part of Lawrence’s life force from the blood near his wrist, and it spread through me with liquid warmth.
My lips parted.
I needed more. Again, I drew forth the tiniest dram of his energy, and this time, the trembling in my muscles stopped.
I opened my eyes to see his face in front of mine, his lips very close.
I could see it in my mind’s eye—a young, strong body, him whispering to me to take his life force as our skin was pressed together, my nails raking his chest, his teeth on me. The look in his eyes was as good as shouting the words into my mind. I knew everything he wanted, and it would be so easy to give it to him.
And when I was done … well, I’d walk away. He’d cry, but not for long—and if he did, it wasn’t my problem, was it?
I just didn’t want that anymore. I shoved myself back and stood, brushing dirt off the back of legs rather than look at him.
Unfortunately, he didn’t want to let it go.
“Why?” His voice was raw. “Why do you keep pushing me away? It wouldn’t have to mean anything.”
“Then why do you want it so much?” I looked up at him.
“Because … because….” He looked around, at a loss for words.
“I’ll make this easy for you.” I smiled bitterly. “You don’t want me. You want something halfway between the woman I am and Nicola Beaumont. You want to be the one at my side when I take control of the magical world. You want to tell everyone how I’m different now, how I’d never hurt anyone—but you like the danger, you like the fact that you’re not sure if that’s true.”