by Natalie Grey
Instead, it felt like there was a lot of the world I was simply blind to, moving like gigantic waves beyond my field of vision.
It was terrifying.
The only plus side was, it was far more terrifying than any serpent could be. I looked around us, to the sunlight and the wind and the beasts, and drew in a deep breath. Life surrounded me, in the deep pulse of the heart of the world.
I could do this.
I didn’t waste time answering. I let life itself pool in one upturned palm, and I strode down the hill to do battle with the beast.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The serpent came out of nowhere so fast that the air whistled around it. Its jaws opened, scenting life. The razor sharp edges of its teeth glittered in the light of the sun.
But it was only fast if you couldn’t feel its distortion in the world, not only the absence of life, but death itself. I could feel the poison that had nearly killed me.
And I knew what poison would kill it.
I threw the life magic like a bolt and it swerved away with a mechanical hiss of dislike. It knew this power now, and it had enough sense to fear it. It wasn’t going to let me kill it without a fight. Its body fell out of the way like a train going off the tracks—but of course, that wouldn’t stop it for long.
It swayed, more cautious now, its body waving like a snake’s might, but in the air. The head craned to look at me. It seemed to be sizing me up like a schoolyard bully might.
I held up my hand and had the pleasure of seeing it draw back with a hiss.
“Well, come on,” I taunted it. “Are you some big, fearsome beast, or aren’t you? Should I be scared, or not?”
It hissed petulantly at me and pulled its head back again. It didn’t like being taunted.
“What are you, even?” I was circling it slowly. Tripping over a tuft of grass was hardly going to be good for either my pride or my aim. “Are you built of nothing, or were you a lamprey that just got way too big for its britches? You look kind of like a lamprey.”
It shrieked at me. Whatever it had been once, it was offended by the comparison.
I was still grinning when Philip’s shout carried to me on the wind: “Nicky, down!”
I made the mistake of looking before I dropped. The truth was, I didn’t trust Philip just yet.
And as a consequence of taking that split second, I nearly took another serpent’s razor-mouth directly to the torso. I barely stumbled out of the way as the second serpent raced past me in the wind. I had been so consumed with my first opponent that I hadn’t stopped to look for a second.
They had no intentions of letting me rest, either. As soon as I was down, the first tried to pounce. I rolled out of the way just in time and slapped a hand down on its side, holding on with grim determination as it tried to extract its head from the ground and keep its body away from the life I was pouring into it.
The second was there, arrowing toward me, and I let go and dived sideways. I watched both of them slither away and hang, tails waving gently as they looked me up and down.
I had just enough time to wonder if these were golems of some sort, stupidly guarding the hall beyond all reason, before they proved definitively that they were intelligent.
They went for Philip and Bronach.
I threw a bolt of magic, and then another, but they were too quick, and they knew they had the upper hand.
Cursing everyone and everything, particularly myself, I headed after them with a fury. I had more power, but it wasn’t going to do anything unless I hit them with it. So how in hell was I planning to do that?
It was when they turned, taunting me wordlessly just like I had taunted them, that the idea came to me. I fashioned a net out of the power I held and gilded it with sunlight and threw it.
They tried to move too fast. One hit the other and they jerked back apart, but it was too late. The net settled over them like gossamer … and burned down into their bodies like molten metal.
The scream seemed to go on forever.
When it was over, I made myself walk amongst the remains. A shattered piece of jaw gleamed in the sunlight, and melted panels of the serpents’ skin lay on the ground, twisted and arched. I could see the scorched lines where my net had melted into their flesh.
One of the pieces was still crackling with electricity, though. That hadn’t been me.
I looked up to where Philip and Bronach were emerging cautiously from the shelter of the trees. A ball of lightning hung above Philip’s palm, and I took a moment to consider how unlikely a storm mage he was. He was all brightness and summer in his coloring, order and style in his manner. There was no hint, when one looked at him, of the wildness of a storm.
And yet he did magic as naturally as he breathed.
He came to stand beside me and stare down at them.
“Nasty piece of work,” he said finally. “I wonder what they were.”
“Human.” Bronach had her cloak drawn tightly around her despite the clear day, and she was staring down at the beasts as if they were her own family, ripped from her and turned into monsters. Her revulsion was so deep that it shook me. “They were human once,” she repeated.
She took one last look and set off for the hall with a determined stride, and with a brief look at one another, Philip and I hurried to catch up. When she halted, we did so as well. She stood so close that she could reach out to touch the time-frozen flames, but we weren’t quite so brave yet.
She looked over her shoulder at me. “You must draw time around yourself like a cloak,” she said. “Around all of us, for we will need to walk inside my spell and not be touched by it.”
I considered this. Time, I had seen, was something entirely beyond my human understanding—and yet, so was sunshine, so was death. I had drawn those to me without understanding the whole of them.
I reached out my hand, aware that time was everywhere and nowhere, but still needing the gesture to call it to myself. For a moment, I thought I felt it swirl around my fingers and I staggered.
“Don’t get lost in it!” Bronach said urgently. “Don’t step into the river, it will take you away. Draw it up like water in a bucket.”
Like a cloak … like water in a bucket. It wasn’t like that to me. It was a second skin, it was starshine drifting from the milky way. I tried to call eternity without touching it, and felt it come to me in a rush of expansiveness. It settled into my lungs and on my hair, and I was just wondering if I’d managed this, when Bronach gave a small aha.
I looked, and jumped. It was as if I could see every moment of the hall’s passage through time. I saw the first stones set and, so far in the future that I could not give the time in years, an overgrown field with only the hint of a hall.
All that mattered was my own time. And in my own time, the hall lay in blackened ash and bones bleached and charred by turns. That was what would happen when the hall was unfrozen—time would elapse all in a moment, with no chance for the abominations to stand in our way.
And no chance for anyone else.
I ignored Bronach and Philip as I ducked through the fires and into the hall itself.
Before I ended this, I was going to say goodbye. Daiman might never see me, or know I was there. He was, by now, long dead already. But I would regret, forever, not seeing his face one last time.
Bronach said nothing as she came after me, and she must have shot Philip quite a look, because he didn’t say a single word, either.
I saw Daiman at once, but I took my time getting to him. Bodies littered the floor under the half-destroyed roof. I swallowed. Some had injuries as if from weapons, and some had been killed by bolts of magic—but others looked as if the life had been sucked from them.
Human sacrifice. Bronach had not lied about that part, at least.
I walked past Morgana. She was still standing, but blood was running from one ruined eye—whether it was swollen shut or actually put out was a mystery I had no particular desire to solve—and power hung in a shimmerin
g arc between her fingertips and her target.
When I followed the line of it, though, there was nothing at all there.
Strange.
I took the chance to look at her, and found Bronach staring as well. Her words came back to me: I am not Morgana. Far from it.
They had known each other once, then, and been no great friends, if I were to judge. I let my eyes drift over Morgana’s face one last time, and then turned away, leaving Bronach to her own goodbyes.
I tried to say goodbye to them all, to everyone fighting in the hall. The truth was, I knew none of these people’s names, but I could see more about them in this moment than I might have learned if I had known them for years.
I passed a young man with skin nearly the color of ebony. With the time shimmering around me, I could see him growing up in a tiny, cold town with steep cliffs and snow all around. The New World, perhaps? I had never been, but I had heard tales of how wild it was, how the rock could be red and the winters so cold they took the breath from your lungs. He used all of that wildness now, this man, and in his last moments, his thoughts were of the family he had left behind many years ago.
Another, a woman whose dark skin and freckled nose, brown eyes and curly hair spoke of a family that hailed from many places in the world, was frozen in the act of raising both her palms. Was she summoning wind, I wondered, or water? She had seen things in this life that were familiar to me, burning cities and bloody bodies, but the places I saw in her memory were nowhere I had seen before. She had come far, a small child walking on bare feet and eating berries, and she had been taught in a temple that looked down on terraced rice fields.
By the time I came to Daiman, I was crying. It was impossible to see these lives and not cry. The world was vaster than I knew, and I could see the lives every druid here had left behind: husbands and wives they might have married, children they might have had, wars they might have fought in or homes they might have built.
Even Daiman…. I reached out to brush his frozen face with my fingers. Seeing him was like a knife in the heart. He faced the same way as Morgana, and in his eyes there was a look I had never seen before in my life: pure hatred. The power welling up in his hands was that of molten rock and shifting earth.
Whoever had done this, it had been a greater betrayal than Daiman could stomach. He had been in the act of stepping away from his human self when the hall was frozen in time. Like Bronach said … to be a druid was to be other-than-human.
And he had left behind lives that would never be, now. I saw him on a farm with men who could only be his brothers and sons, grey in his hair. I saw him with his firstborn grandchild, a little girl who had his eyes and—I knew, somehow—his wife’s smile. I stared at her, at how perfect she was, and felt my heart break.
I saw us, in another timeline, chasing after a child of our own. How, I did not know—I had never known a magic user to have children of their own body, but I knew beyond a doubt what I was seeing. Her hair flowed out behind her as she ran and I was running to catch up, laughing.
We would have had a child. My hand clenched on his cheek and I felt the tears break over my lash line and trace down my cheeks.
A druid must always choose the path that makes the world more whole, instead of more broken.
Beyond this hall lay billions of lives, each as beautiful as the ones inside it, each leading to so many possibilities.
“Goodbye, Daiman.” I tried to smile, even though he couldn’t see me. “I hope there’s more than this life waiting for you. I hope….” I bowed my head, my hand warm on his cheek. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I didn’t know what I hoped for. “I hope it’s worth it,” I finished.
I thought, at first, that the sound of footsteps was Bronach, or Philip. I thought that they, too, were walking between the frozen figures and trying to make sense of the scene inside. When Bronach gave a sudden hiss, however, I knew it was not them.
My head jerked up and I found myself staring into a pair of dark brown eyes, a figure unbowed by centuries and clutching a staff.
“So you survived,” Taliesen said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I didn’t understand, but I didn’t need to. I had long ago learned to follow my instinct and let my mind catch up later, and my instinct told me that Taliesen was the enemy. Why else did Morgana and Daiman direct their attention toward someone who was no longer there? Why else did Daiman look so betrayed?
Pure death shot from my hands and Taliesen ducked away. The bolt hit the wall and froze there amongst the warped time.
“You,” I called through the hall. I could hear him moving, and I circled toward the sound. The frozen faces around me flickered through time, and I tried not to see them. They were statues, they were possibilities. Nothing more.
“Is it such a surprise?” Once, his voice had rolled through the hall elegantly. Now, the roof was half gone. He sounded mortal.
“You sent me to die,” I said dangerously. If he thought I wasn’t going to fight tooth and nail, he was sorely mistaken.
Where the hell was he? And where were Bronach and Philip?
Great. I had already lost Philip.
“You had no place here!” His voice echoed back eerily. “Your kind are nothing but freaks, mutants who can see one part of the web of power and are blind to the rest. A druid could be more powerful than any of you, and yet you think to rule the world, you think an innate grasp of power makes you better than us!”
“I don’t think that!” I called back. “If you wanted to kill me based on that guess—”
“It’s not a guess.” He had made it to the dais, and he was on the throne before the next bolt of power left my hands. It hit a strange shield and he smiled. “I’m safe here. Every Chief Druid has added their own protections to the throne.” He looked out over the crowd assembled. “None of them were ever going to hurt me.”
I looked back. Almost all of the druids were facing the dais, I realized now. Daiman and Morgana were among them.
I wasn’t so sure about Taliesen’s claim—but then, it wasn’t really important. All that mattered was finding the weakness in the spells. I felt over them in my mind, looking for their source, each touch leeching the power away.
His eyes narrowed at me. “And it isn’t a guess. We met, at the Conclave. You wouldn’t remember, of course. I heard that your memories had been hidden. But I asked Eshe about you later. I know what you are.”
“And what is that?” I gave him an even stare.
“Someone who wants the whole world to bow to her.” He settled back in his chair with a sneer. “Predictable. Boring. Easy to defeat.”
“And yet….” I raised an eyebrow. “I’m still alive.”
He didn’t like that. His sneer died. “So you came back.” His fingers tapped on the arm of his chair. “Why?”
“To free them.” I waved at the statues. Let him think that was my aim. Let him think I would rush to save them. He would try to use it against me, and find out too late that I was willing to sacrifice more than he would dream.
“You can’t. They are held by magic stronger than you comprehend.” He sounded smug.
I shrugged. He wasn’t wrong. “Indeed. And I suppose you just like looking at them? That’s why you’re still here?”
He settled back one the throne then, and I knew the answer.
I crowed with laughter. “You can’t undo the spell, either, can you? A druid could be more powerful than me … but you’re just as stuck as I am. You’re here because all of your plan is here, and you need to find a way to release it. You just don’t know how.”
His eyes narrowed. Taliesen, I gathered, had a lot of pride caught up in being the most powerful druid there was.
“Be very careful, abomination,” he said quietly. “You try my patience. I was content to let other forces deal with you before, but you will force my hand if you continue to be a nuisance.”
“An abomination? Me?” I crossed my arms. “When you were the one tr
ying to invoke powers through human sacrifice?”
For the first time, I saw surprise skitter across his features. “How did you know about that?”
“Me,” Bronach said calmly. She stepped out from behind one of the frozen druids.
Philip, of course, was still missing. I tried not to look around for him too obviously.
“You?” Taliesen stared at her in confusion. “Who are you?”
Well, that was interesting. I stared at him, then back to Bronach. She, to my surprise, was smiling.
“So it was you,” she said quietly. “I should have known it would be you. All of it. And you made up that ridiculous story, too, didn’t you? Nimue and the cave?”
Taliesen went very still. “No.” He breathed the word. “You cannot be—”
“Did you really think I was gone?” Bronach asked him. “Gone for good?” She looked around at the hall. “You did, didn’t you, you fool? And so you set off my trap.” She gestured to me. “Shall we have it out, then, Taliesen? This fight has been a long time coming between us, and I have found quite the protégé … while yours, I believe, were guarding this hall until we killed them.”
Taliesen gave a quick look toward the door of the hall. “They were weak. I should have sacrificed them with the rest.”
“Yes, well.” Bronach gave a sunny smile. “You didn’t, did you? Funny. If you had, maybe you’d have had enough power to break my spell. As it is … you don’t.”
Taliesen looked back at her, his face set in a snarl. And then he gave the most terrible smile I had ever seen. He raised one hand, almost idly.
The bodies on the floor stirred and rose.
“Oh, hell no,” I muttered. Zombies? They had to be fucking kidding me.
“And since you picked a champion,” Taliesen said idly, “I think I’ll do the same.”
He turned his head to look across the room, and when I followed his gaze, my heart sank.
He was looking at Philip.
“Him,” Taliesen said.