My arms burst into flame. Fire raced up my chest, covered my face, my field of vision. I shook with power, stronger than any I’d ever tried to channel. It clawed up my throat like a diamond-sharp scream, begging release.
I fell to my knees and howled at the sky.
A bolt of magic—a bolt of visible, brilliant magic—shot into the clouds with strobe-bright intensity. The eye of the storm boiled. It began fraying first into snatches of indeterminate color, and then into vibrant shades of blue.
Afternoon sunshine poured down. Shadows ripped wide.
The draug—creatures of night—burst into fire. They screeched and attempted to fall back to the building, but the survivors fell on them and hacked them to pieces.
It was over in a moment.
ENDGAME
By the time I dropped to the ground next to Max, the power had left me. I was shaking and exhausted and feeling very, very mortal.
I pressed my hands over the fast flow of blood. He’d lost so much already; my knee slipped sideways in a pool of it.
“Max,” I said hoarsely, wiping at the pink froth at the corner of his lips. When I looked up, everyone was standing around me. “Where’s the healing kit Max brought?” I demanded in a panicky voice.
“Look for it,” Addam said, grabbing Geoff by the neck and throwing him toward the pile of dead men. “Look!” Addam himself went down on both knees and began rifling through the corpses.
Brand crouched on Max’s other side. He was covered in blood, and one of his legs was splayed out. He held out a hand to me. Cupped in his palm was my mass sigil.
“What happened?” he asked me in a whisper. “What was that?”
I angled my eyes toward the sky. Gray clouds were drifting back into the hole I’d torn, but the sun was still bright. What had I done?
“I don’t know,” I said softly.
“Whatever it was, it worked. Are you okay?”
I didn’t want to talk about that. I didn’t know what any of it meant. I felt a . . . a hollowness inside me, like I’d emptied something that wasn’t ever meant to be emptied.
Max coughed. The foam on his lips deepened to scarlet. His eyes opened. “Did I do good?” he gasped.
“Save your energy, Max,” I said. He grimaced when I pressed my hand tighter over his wounds, his life pumping through my fingers.
“But I did good?” he asked.
“You did great,” I said. “You were so brave.”
“And stupid,” Brand added. “So stupid.”
“Oh,” Max breathed. He smiled. “What Rune said.”
His face screwed up in a spasm of pain, and he tried to swallow a scream. I shouted, “Find that fucking kit!”
“It’s here,” Ciaran said from my left. He passed the kit to Addam, who went to Max’s other side. Addam banged it open against the orange patio stone, spilling bandages, wards, ointments, and the small gold caduceus we’d saved from earlier.
“It should be keyed to me as well as our chiromancer. I should be able to use it,” Addam said. There was a frisson of magic, and the spell surrounded Addam’s hands like sunbaked rocks.
I tore open the first few buttons of Max’s shirt with my free hand. Addam put his hands along Max’s neck. Through the smear of blood, I watched sunburn spread from Addam’s touch. The ragged skin went shiny and began to inch closed. Patches of it peeled away in sodden, red curls.
Addam leaned back and rifled through the kit. He picked out two flat stones and laid one on Max’s forehead, and one on his chest. Max didn’t like that at all, but I held down his hand when he tried to swat them away. His eyes grew heavy.
“Pain wards,” Addam said. “Rune, he . . . There is much blood loss. We need more healing spells.”
Patio doors banged open. My hand was half a heartbeat from grabbing at the mass sigil Brand held when I recognized McAllister. The majordomo, along with three other servants, hurried onto the patio with armfuls of towels and bandages. Another two men carried a table with the legs broken off. It took me a second to realize they planned to use it as a makeshift stretcher.
I watched as McAllister realized that the only one who needed carrying was Max. All of his people were dead. All of them. All of the staff who had stood with us. It was a delicate work of guilt, to be admired later in obsessive detail.
“Stay with Max, please?” I asked Brand. After he nodded and handed me my mass sigil, I stood and stretched, and walked through pins and needles over to Geoffrey. I pocketed the mass sigil and transmuted my sabre from a gladius to a dirk.
Geoffrey saw me coming. “Rune,” he said when I was in earshot. “What did you do? Did you—” Geoff glanced around us. “Did you use weather magic?”
I hadn’t. I didn’t know why I was so sure, but I was, and fuck him for complaining about the way his miserable life was saved.
I stared at him without comment until he began to fidget. Then I said, “This is what you’re going to do. You’re going to run back to the sanctum. McAllister will have someone retrieve all of your sigils. You will fill no less than four of them with healing spells, and when that’s done, you will run to wherever Max is, and you will make sure he survives.”
“But . . . but the sanctum has been breached.”
“I don’t care. It’s still a sanctum.”
“It’s breached. Anything could get at me!”
“I,” I whispered, “don’t,” and pressed my face right into his, “care!”
He surprised me by pressing back and hissing, “I’m not you! Do you think I’m not aware of that? Do you think I’m not aware how useless I am in a fight? How much longer do I need to apologize that I’m not as good at killing things as you are?”
“Oh, take another step along that high ground. Go ahead. One more step.”
“I’m not doing it! The sanctum has been breached; it’s suicide!” He pointed a finger into my chest.
I grabbed the finger in an overhanded grip, twisted it around, and stabbed my sabre through the center of his palm. The heated blade slid through bone and tendon with only a small, jerking resistance. When Geoffrey started to scream, I grabbed his jaw in my free hand and shoved him backward. He windmilled four or five steps before losing his footing. As soon as he hit the ground, I pinned him with my knee, and waited until he stopped screaming.
When I had all of his attention, I yanked my sabre blade loose. More screaming. I didn’t have to wait long this time for him to subside to a dog-whistle whine.
“If I find out you used a healing spell on yourself before everyone else is healed,” I told him, “I won’t just kill you, I’ll kill you slowly.”
I got off him. He scrambled to his feet and ran toward the patio doors.
Addam, with a shocked expression, tripped over a dead body on his way over to me. I held up a hand to stop him, because I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone else yet. I stared down and focused on my breathing.
A mottled, gray face stared back. One of the recarnates. A photograph had slipped out of the dead man’s pockets. I bent, picked it up, saw a gap-toothed girl. On the back of the picture were a couple misspelled words written in crayon, the sort of thing a kid might slip into a coffin.
My decision came quickly. I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding.
I wondered what it said about the life that Brand and I led, that of all the emotions we shared through our bond, it was this relief that made Brand’s face go pale with fright.
“Rune!” he shouted, limping over. “We need to go. We’ve got to get behind a barricade. It’s been almost an hour since you set the defense perimeter.”
“I know,” I said. “I can feel it fading.”
“But you’ll have to help me upstairs. Okay? My leg won’t hold. You can bandage it for me.”
I reached up, wiped at the blood on his cheeks, and said, “Nice try.”
“Rune . . .”
“You know I need to go out there.”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”
“I have a loaded mass sigil. I have Exodus. It’s the best plan.”
“That’s not a plan; it’s the absence of options. No.”
“If I’m alone—if I don’t need to control myself, if I can just let the magic flow—I’ll have a chance. I can surprise them where they’re gathered, before the barrier fails. I’ll have a chance to save us all. It’s not a suicide gambit, Brand—I may be able to save us all.”
“Don’t ask this of me,” Brand said, and his voice cracked. “Don’t ask me to stay behind again.”
The faint crows’ feet next to his eyes were twitching. My fingers were still lightly pressed against his bloody cheeks. I said, “This is my story . . .”
“Rune,” he whispered.
“And it’s barely begun.”
I was close enough that when he bowed his head, his forehead rested against mine. After a few seconds of hard breathing, he said, “What spell did you put in the mass sigil?”
“Guess.”
He opened his eyes and tried to smile. “I guess I’d like to see Ashton’s fat fucking face when the Day King heads his way with a mass sigil filled with Fire.”
“You can’t be serious,” Addam said loudly.
Brand and I turned as one. Addam was standing there. His expression was red and getting redder.
“You cannot go out there alone,” he said.
“Addam, I have a mass sigil filled with Fire magic. And I have something else—a spell I call Exodus. It’s stored in a sigil that I’ve been charging and recharging for years. Trust me, I’ve got aces up my sleeve.”
“And you think you need to do it alone? This plan makes you happy?”
“It’s not crazy enough by half to make him happy,” Brand said.
“I am a scion, too,” Addam insisted. “These are my people, my duty. You will not go alone. I forbid it.”
In a way, it was the perfect thing to say—because there was no better way to get Brand rallied behind me than to question my competency. Sure enough, he bristled. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Who do you think he is? Didn’t you know what his father was like—what kind of ability Rune has inherited? Those aren’t just shoes to fill, it’s the whole fucking shoe factory. Don’t you ever doubt whether he can do what he says.”
“But—” Addam said. His eyes watered with frustration. “I feel . . . I should . . . I should help. I feel very useless.”
“The support group meets on Tuesdays,” Brand said.
“You’re not useless,” I told Addam. “And, like you said, these are your people. Get them somewhere safe. I can hold off the worst, but you’ll need to be ready for whatever gets through. And stop writing my damned eulogy—this isn’t a grand gesture. I’m coming back.”
The barrier. I felt it flutter like a torn sheet. It was weakening fast. If I didn’t move, I’d lose the element of surprise entirely.
“I need to go. Help Brand upstairs?” I asked Addam.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Brand said when Addam offered a shoulder.
“Just,” I said, and waved at Brand, “wipe him off and superglue everything shut.”
“I can take care of myself,” Brand said through a scowl.
“More than anyone I’ve ever met.” The barrier was now buckling. “I need to go. Hurry, Brand. Get everyone inside, I’ll give you as much of a head start as I can.”
His worry crested into a single flare of panic, and then all emotion flattened into his cool sense of professionalism. Brand gave me a sharp nod, turned, and barked orders to McAllister and his men. Nearby, Ciaran gave me his own nod and grabbed one end of Max’s makeshift stretcher to help carry it.
“Hero,” Addam whispered shakily.
“Not like that,” I said. “Not like a good-bye.”
Addam’s eyes glittered with emotion. He bent forward and kissed me. I’d already forgotten how warm his lips were. Were other people’s lips so warm?
He turned and went to help the others.
In under a minute, I was alone on the patio.
There is a trick to lying to Brand.
Although the Companion bond isn’t telepathic, Brand is very good at gauging my sincerity. He knows when I’m not being honest. So the trick is to not think about anything except the certainty that I’m telling the right lie. That way, what he senses is only the truth that I have decided I’m going to lie and tell him that it will be okay.
I was scared as hell. My heart wasn’t just pounding; it stabbed at my ribs like it was picking a fight. I was alone, and wading into a battle I wasn’t sure I could win.
Had my father ever done this? He was older than New Atlantis— he’d been born in a much more violent time and place, when spell-casters settled differences with small armies. How often had he carried this sort of responsibility on his shoulders? The odds seemed so precious and unreal. It didn’t matter how good you were—eventually everyone zigged when he should have zagged. How did you recover from a mistake, no matter how slight, when an army was piled around you?
With a grimace, I shut down those thoughts. Doubt would only crack my determination. The people who’d died today deserved better than that. The people who were still alive inside the mansion deserved better than that. Every second I wasted increased the chance that Brand would face a mob on a slashed leg. That Addam would face a mob with empty sigils. That Max would bleed out before Geoffrey got to him with healing spells.
I experienced a moment of total clarity. The adrenaline before a fight. The world became drawn in dagger definition.
In front of me was a high, white-stone wall topped with metal spikes in a fleur-de-lis pattern. A swinging wooden gate, two stories tall and carved with dulled, dead runes, separated the compound from the Westlands.
Through the gate’s slats, I caught glimpses of motion.
I reached out with my willpower and brought down the defense barrier.
No time to waste.
A fresh breeze tugged at my hair as I pulled the clay disc from my pocket. Swallowing spit, I circled my thumb a few times above its worn surface, and pressed down.
The Fire spell, magnified by the power of a mass sigil, rose up around me.
It smothered me in wave after wave of energy, whipping dirt and brittle leaves off the ground in a circling wind. My skin flushed red; the blood in my shirt collar heated to body temperature.
I started laughing. It wasn’t stopping—the euphoric release of the spell wasn’t stopping. It continued to build and boil. My ears were muffled by a sound, like the whump of a helicopter’s blades.
This. This is what it meant to be Arcana. Using the mass sigil for a defense spell had been an awesome exercise in power. But using a mass sigil for offensive magic was the difference between being witness to, and the cause of, awe.
As the Fire continued to crescendo, I raised my hand and blasted the massive gate off its hinges. Past its enormous, somersaulting slats, a hundred dead men teemed in regimented rows across the outer lawns.
Charred corpses—draug, maybe, fried by the sunlight—grave-marked each line.
The dead men turned toward me. The ones with guns dropped to their knees. Bullets flowered into orange petals as they hit the heat shield that I raised with a flick of my finger.
I stalked toward them. They stretched at least a city block in either direction. There was no sight of Ashton. No sign of a command tent or post. Too spread out. Mass sigil or no—Exodus or no—I didn’t have the range to level them all in a single blast.
I gathered the heat shield as loose armor, and sprinted at them.
Camera-flashes of bullets flared across my vision as I plowed into the first ranks, denting their neat formation. I let a fraction of my Fire pulse away from me, turning the nearest recarnates into torches. The other recarnates came at me, pulling knives and short blades from their waistbands. I ran to the left and pulled the mob tighter. Every few yards, I made a soft pivot, threading the recarnates in a loose S.
Greasy hair. Scars an
d pre-mortem burns. Funeral makeup, plain service daggers, tactical black camo. Their hatred and presence engulfed me. I used only enough magic to clear a path and deflect damage.
The lawn dipped into a gully. I fell face-forward onto a dead man’s mud-stained boots. The boots, and the dead man, caught fire as my heat shield consumed it. The flames spread in a chain reaction. By the time I reined in the hungry magic, I was in a forest of flailing, screeching arms.
I scrambled up and ran left, went a few yards, hooked back toward the right. Any time I saw a break in the crowd, I ran for it, hoping to get a clearer view of the field, to see if I’d pulled enough of the army toward myself.
On my left, recarnates had trampled each other into a mound. I expanded my heat shield to force a path between it and me, and got a running start. I took huge, staggering steps up the pile of bodies, and flung myself forward.
As I crested the heads of the tallest of the dead men, I saw at least fifty nearby recarnates trying to tear toward the center of the circle I’d made.
I held my arms wide and let the Fire have its way.
The magic exploded. I became an inferno, a nuclear reaction. I became a sheet of unending flame.
The pressure of released souls sang against my face as they rose upward.
I had never experienced this much power. It was almost too much. I . . .
“I am,” I said, or laughed, or screamed. “I am Arcana. I will be Arcana.”
In seconds, it became impossible to make out one recarnate from another. They were simply flames cut into the shapes of men, pulling each other down in a frenzied bid to escape.
The last of the mass sigil’s Fire died in a curtain of silence. Here and there a body part twitched. The smell of cooked, rotten flesh was nauseating. I was surrounded by blackness. Blackened grass, blackened bodies, blackened clouds of ash.
My clothes were in tatters—in shredded, crisp strips. As I stumbled backward, my shirt fell from my chest.
I turned in a slow circle to see if I’d succeeded.
The nearest recarnate was a football field away. But they were there. On either side of me. Dozens, still, on either side.
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