by Natalie Grey
It was cruel, saying this out loud to him, but maybe I should have been cruel from the start.
“The woman you want doesn’t exist,” I told him flatly.
“Are you sure?” He was looking at me with something that seemed to be just as much desire as hatred. “Because it seems like that’s what you are—a different woman now, but one who’s still dangerous. Is it wrong to want you for being that?” He took a step forward. “Would it be so wrong to have someone love you for what you are now?”
I jerked back, turning my head away sharply.
Yes, I wanted to say. That would be wrong.
It wasn’t just wrong, even. It was terrifying. Everything in me wanted to run from that statement.
“I need to….” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. I was shaking. “I need to go.”
“Nicola—”
“Don’t call me that.” My voice was high and wild. “I don’t—I can’t—”
My voice broke off in an undignified squeak of relief when Fordwin came over the top of the hill.
The leopard, who I had not noticed was still lurking somewhere near my feet, vanished with a flick of its tail, and the three sorcerers stared at one another.
“Did I interrupt something?” Fordwin asked cautiously.
“Yes,” Lawrence said, at the same time I gave an emphatic, “No.”
There was an awkward silence.
“Lawrence, could you give us some privacy?”
Lawrence looked down at the ground with a bitter smile. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, okay.”
He disappeared, and Fordwin watched him go.
He didn’t comment on the tension, though, for which I was grateful. He only cleared his throat. “It has occurred to me that I may know where Terric is.”
“Where?” I asked eagerly.
A scrabbling in the rocks behind me caught my attention, but when I looked, nothing was there.
“Where?” I asked Terric again.
“There is a forgotten library,” he said quietly. “Forgotten, left…. The books have been copied, but for want of secrecy, the vault has not been unlocked in many years. That place is swarming with Monarchists.”
“And what makes you think he’d be there?” I frowned and crossed my arms over my chest.
Fordwin smiled. “Because of who started it,” he said. “It was the training grounds of the first Hunters. If you wanted to learn how to find magic and you could not trust the Hunters to aid you … you would go there.” He lifted a shoulder. “And it would explain why I haven’t been able to find him. The place is shielded from scrying.”
It fit. More than that, it was the only lead I had. I nodded.
“I’ll get my things.”
“Wait.” His voice was firm. “No Monarchists are to know of it.”
“I’m … the Monarchist,” I pointed out.
“And not exactly on fantastic terms with the rest of them, as far as I can tell.” He shrugged. “You said you trust me because I hate you. Well, I can see the logic in that … to a point. I will trust you with the location—if you will agree not to tell your puppy and his friends about it.”
There was a silence, filled with the sound of the wind whistling over the mountains.
If I did this, I would be forsaking every ally I had.
But who were the allies I had, really?
That decided me: “All right,” I said finally.
“You’d face Terric alone?”
“I don’t have any other choice, do I? Unless you’re coming.”
Fordwin hesitated, but shook his head. “No. Now is … not the time.”
I gave him a look. There was something there, something that told me he had long ago abandoned the search he was commissioned to undertake, and that he was going after his own purposes now.
But he clearly wasn’t going to explain whatever those were just yet.
“Very well.” I shrugged. “Then, yeah. I’m going alone.”
He paused. “And I’ll tell you one other thing, if you want to know it. I’ll warn you in advance that you might not want to.”
“I do want to.” I’d rather have advance warning before something came out as an unpleasant surprise.
“Very well. I’m fairly sure several of those Monarchists gave him safe passage. They knew where he was, or at least where he’d been—and they didn’t tell you. Make of that what you will.”
All of my guilt vanished. “Well, then.” I gave the brilliant, hard-edged smile I’d once been known for. “Isn’t that just something.”
“What will you do with them, now that you know?” There was genuine curiosity there … and a little bit of worry.
“The one fucking thing I’m good at,” I said bitterly. “Tell them whatever they want to hear, get them to give me all their useful information, and give them nothing in return. Maybe when this is all over, I’ll balance the ledger. Then again … maybe that’s just not possible for me.”
Fordwin looked at me silently and I shrugged again.
“So, for now, I’ll settle for not letting Terric kill a bunch of people,” I told him. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to stop him. That’s all I got.”
“Mm.” Fordwin inclined his head. “Very well, then. I’ll show you the map.”
Chapter 17
Leaving Fordwin’s cave was more awkward than I expected. We had no affection for one another, so there was no reason for a drawn-out goodbye.
On the other hand, if Fordwin was any indication, it was difficult to send your arch-nemesis off to kill your protégé. He paced as we packed, and let us go with a curt nod and no words, but I could feel his gaze boring into us as we made our way up the hill and away from the ley lines.
I wasn’t sure why, but at the top of the hill, I turned back.
I could still see him below, a figure in black, long hair blowing slightly in the wind. I raised my hand, and after a pause he raised his back.
For a moment, I felt that there was someone in the world who understood me perfectly despite everything. Fordwin and I agreed on almost nothing … but we disagreed in the same way. We had both watched a thousand years of this world pass, we were both wary of a society that hated us for no reason we could control,
But we were never going to be a pair who poured our hearts out to one another, or who even walked the same path. I dropped my hand and nodded, and turned away without a word to continue on my way,
Lawrence and I practically fell into the domhan fior this time. I had no patience for wrangling with it, and it seemed that maybe that had been the secret the whole time—not letting myself fuss over it the way I had on our first trip.
That didn’t exactly put me in a better mood.
Nevertheless, the place itself seemed to put me in a better mood. I found that creating it, falling into it, felt like walking downhill in a strange way. Despite being a magical working, it was almost easy.
It was a surprising place. I had felt, bitterly, that perhaps rock and bare sky was all I could summon because of my peculiar brand of magic, but a few days of this place proved to me that the life I found there was far from anomalous.
Sometimes we walked along ribbons of rock with moss and grasses poking up from between them. Other times, clusters of pink flowers bloomed in profusion, or a riot of colors came from low, dense shrubs. We spent one day under soft grey clouds that occasionally drifted lower to envelop us in something that was as much mist as rain.
Lawrence didn’t speak much, for which I was grateful—beyond giving me a general direction to aim for, in order to get to the new hideout. Once or twice, I wondered if his break from the cell had been an act—if Harry had sent him to keep an eye on me, and warp me to their cause.
It would be the smart thing to do, from someone who had known me in my heyday.
To be honest, though, if it was a ploy, even I could not have said why it failed.
Personal growth, maybe. The idea was just depressing enough to cause a bitter lau
ghing fit that I tried to cover with a cough when Lawrence looked over at me curiously. I shook my head, but the sound seemed to have awakened him from his reverie.
“So he told you where Terric is?” he asked finally.
I had the urge to grab him by the throat and demand to know if he’d been in on the lies, but I only kept walking.
“He has guesses,” I said noncommittally.
Lawrence took the hint and shut up.
That was good.
I just hoped he wasn’t thinking too hard, because he wasn’t going to like what was coming. And he’d have figured it out if he was thinking much at all, really.
The truth was, we didn’t need to go back to the Monarchists—or at least, I didn’t. I could have sent Lawrence on his merry way and headed off in the direction specified on Fordwin’s map. I could probably have gotten around the traps that surrounded their hideouts.
But I wanted answers. I was running out of patience with people who lied to my face with a smile.
No matter how nice they had been to me once.
Hawks circled above us on the final leg of the journey, and I saw hares and foxes sometimes, running in the distance. Once there was a wolf, proud and fluffy. What it found to live on in this wilderness, I couldn’t be sure—but this was the domhan fior, it didn’t have to abide by the rules of the real world.
I wasn’t fantastic at navigating between the worlds, however. Maybe that was a different lesson, one Daiman hadn’t gotten the chance to teach me. Therefore, the last day was an infuriating process of trial and error, popping in and out of the real world to check our location and recalibrate our direction.
“We’re close,” Lawrence said finally.
I looked around. We had emerged into the forest, and though none of this place looked familiar to me, Lawrence seemed to know where he was going. He set off decisively into the dappled sunlight, and I hurried to catch up.
His anger seemed to have drained away, the closer we got, and I looked over at him.
“Do you regret leaving?” I was curious.
“No.” He didn’t look at me, but he said the word emphatically. “I said I would go to keep you safe, and you’re safe.”
“Thank you.” It seemed graceless to point out that I hadn’t needed him.
At least he’d been there, in any case.
We didn’t have to walk for long amongst the trees and the shadows before Tamar and Harry appeared.
“You’re back,” Harry said.
“I am.” I hoisted the pack on my shoulders. “And it was a successful journey. We’re all one step closer to not getting killed by a mad sorcerer, isn’t that great?”
Harry had the sense to keep his mouth shut, but I saw a wary look appear in his eyes.
“Of course,” I continued, “we’d have had a better shot at getting there if you’d told me you knew where he might be in the first place.”
Tamar went still, and Lawrence did a double take between me and Harry.
So he hadn’t known. Interesting.
Harry considered me. “We didn’t know if we could trust you,” he said. There was no guilt in his tone at all.
“No?” My voice was bitter. “So you decided to trust Terric before me?”
“Not exactly.” He looked around himself as the others melted out of the trees nearby. All of them were wary. All of them were expecting this to go south.
And I was fucking tempted to let it go that way.
I held onto my temper, though. For now.
“Then what, exactly, did you do?” I took care over every word.
Harry’s gaze flickered. His eyes, under the bushy white brows, had seen enough in this to be wary. “If you know where he is, why ask?”
“Because I’m an ice-cold bitch who is done fucking around,” I told him bluntly. “I am trying to save the fucking world and I had to get Terric’s location from someone who hates me instead of someone who should have been trying to help me. I am pissed. The man you decided to help instead of me is out there trying to find and kill anyone with powers he doesn’t like, and you figured he was a better bet than me.”
“We didn’t know—” Harry began.
“You would have known if you’d taken the time to figure any of this out,” I snapped. “You could have asked me for answers instead of assuming … hell, what did you even assume?”
“You came with a Hunter,” Harry said flatly. “And we were supposed to trust you after that?”
“More than you were supposed to trust Terric!”
“He was under Philip’s protection!” Harry yelled back.
My eyebrows shot up.
“Or, at least, Philip didn’t want any Monarchists to interfere.” Harry’s lip curled. “So we didn’t. We could have—it’s not like he was actually hiding himself all that well.”
I looked away. My thoughts were racing, and only one emerged clearly: “Why go with what Philip wanted?”
“While he had our people?” Harry demanded. “We were already on his list, and we were in hiding. Any party we sent, he could have had tracked back to us. And why? Just to get a shot at killing Terric Delanet? He’s already lost everything, and anyway, you tried and failed, so what could any of us do?”
“You could have told me you knew where he was,” I said quietly.
“You came with a Hunter,” he repeated.
“And then I sent the Hunter away. And that Hunter had been someone who went against the Acadamh for me. And either of us could have told you that the Separatists are turning against one another.”
No one answered, and I felt the anger build in my blood until I wanted to scream.
I couldn’t let that go in the form of magic. I knew that somewhere, dimly. I felt my hand lash sideways into the unforgiving bulk of a tree. My skin split, pain burst along my arm, and the distraction did its work.
“You hoped you were going to win your man back with good behavior, didn’t you?” I asked bitterly. “You were so damned upset about Darcy, but were you doing anything different? You picked the person you thought would hurt you more, and you bent the knee to him. You were hoping to tell him that you’d sent me off to get killed by Fordwin, didn’t you?”
Harry let his breath out unsteadily. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like?” I looked at him and felt only despair.
“We can trust no one,” Harry told me flatly. “D’you understand that? Do you understand what it’s like?”
I started laughing. “Do I understand not being able to trust anyone? Did you seriously just ask me that?”
“You’re Nicola Beaumont,” he said quietly. There was as much love there as hatred, all muddled together. I was still the woman with no magic who had lived with them, shared life with them—and I was something more, a terrible bad luck omen that could destroy anything else in its path.
Not to mention, that small matter of the plague. Harry clearly had no idea what to think of it all.
“There are those who would help you, there always have been,” he told me. “But for us … there is no one. The Acadamh sends its Hunters and there’s no one to save us from them. Philip stopped protecting us long ago. He only cares for what you started, not for the rest of us. And for not helping him … the punishment is death. So now we have no one but ourselves, and as Darcy showed, even our own can’t be trusted.”
There was despair in his eyes as well, and I could find nothing to say to him.
“So, tell me,” he said. “When you came here with your talk of Hunters turning tail but still searching for our young ones, and Terric at odds with his Acadamh, and you at odds with Philip—would you have thrown your lot in with anyone, or would you have done what we did, and let the trouble pass by?”
I sank my face into my hands. I didn’t want to care about this. I didn’t want to understand. Understanding it was making my heart break.
It had been so much easier not to give a damn about anyone else’s troubles.
“But
….” I picked my head up and stared at the sky, trying to collect my thoughts. When I looked back, I felt the familiar rush of trying to persuade—and a deep weariness that this seemed to be the only thing I knew how to do. “You can’t run from what Terric’s doing. Not if he succeeds. Hiding yourself away from the troubles of the world may save you for a time, but not forever. Terric needs to be stopped.”
There was laughter, dark and pleased, and the group shrank away from something behind me.
I looked over my shoulder, though I didn’t need to. I knew that laugh.
“Hello, Philip.”
“Still the revolutionary.” He was smiling. “You know, I almost think I enjoy having you for an enemy more than I did having you as an ally. Why, you don’t even really feel threatened yet, and still you’re a thorn in my side. What could you manage if you did think this was life or death? I wonder.”
There was a strange thump and I turned in time to see a man slump to the ground in front of Philip. Blood was running from a wound on his forehead, and there was hardly a patch of skin I could see that wasn’t bruised. Behind me, Harry cried out.
“Jo?” I whispered.
I started forward, and met a barrier that was agony to touch. Yanking my hand away, I glared at Philip through the shimmer of his magical shield.
“All right. Game’s over.” I might not be threatened, but I was beyond pissed. “Tell me what the fuck you want.”
Chapter 18
Philip didn’t smile, not really, but his face took on a sleek, satisfied look.
“Everybody leave.” He didn’t look at them as he said it. His eyes were fixed on mine, a clear blue that was startlingly out of place in this forest.
Everything about him was jarring to see here. This was a man for castles, not dirty caves. He was a man that looked, above all, refined. His handsomeness was clean cut in the extreme, from the wavy blond hair to the blue eyes and the perfect features.
And here he stood, with a bleeding man at his feet.
The Monarchists wavered before obeying his order, but what real choice did they have? This was between me and Philip, with Jo caught in the middle—and every second was clearly a second that Jo got closer to death.