Like when she’d let it explode and burn the people who’d tried to hurt her? No, there was a vast difference between the two scenarios. The magic no longer cried out that she use it, no longer pressed itself against her control, ready to break free into a flood. She had exploded and they’d settled into a truce. Still, it wasn’t one she wanted to jeopardize.
Oh, this was silly. Here she was with someone who knew how to use magic and who, unlike Nadin, had confidence in her use of it. If Adren needed to break this enchantment, she now found herself in the ideal circumstances to learn how. Might as well make use of them.
This time, when Adren lifted her hand, she didn’t hold so tightly to the magic. It waited at her fingertip, swirling in readiness to act at her direction. By increments, she released more of it until her whole hand could feel it dance along her skin, fire without the burning. As she brought it in contact with the blue, she let it stick, let it stay suspended in the air while she swept her arm down and bid it to unbind, to break, to…
Another hand swept down, another hand and another magic. No, not another magic. A sword.
This was wrong, all wrong. Her own magic sparked, catalyzed in a blaze. She cut off the flow at once, but the sword was still on its path towards her, like it always was.
Next Adren knew, she was on the ground and her forehead throbbed with fading pain. She would have been worried about what happened right after doing the magic and right before opening her eyes if it weren’t for the fact that most of it had faded from memory. Even the unicorn gave her no hint of how severe the attack had been. Loram stood over her, hands on her hips and eyebrows raised.
“Could you do that again, without unconsciousness after? You would be sure to end the enchantment in such a manner.”
“That would work?” Adren had thought she would have to be as precise as Loram had.
“Aye, it would. And magnificently. Know you not how stopping magic works?” Loram held out a hand and helped Adren to her feet.
“Your magic must interfere with its purpose, and be strong enough to overpower it.”
“And how do you use the least magic to that end?”
The least magic? Adren knew how magic worked, but not how to use it efficiently. She hadn’t considered there was a strategy to that.
“Are we still hidden in your illusion?”
“Not for lack of trying on your magic’s part. What you released attempted to break the illusion, and it took quite the dance to keep it from doing so. But do not think I will let you avoid my question so easily.”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you had no one to teach you? I learned this as a child! What of those fairies you claim to have lived with?”
It would be a little hard to teach someone how to use magic when you don’t know they have it and they can’t access it. Just a little. That said, it wasn’t necessary for Adren to get into her whole history.
“There was no opportunity for it.”
“So, you’ve used your magic so little you can hardly direct it, and you’ve never been told how you might use it to your advantage, am I correct?”
“Yes.” Put like that, Adren sounded like a dunce. Which she probably was, from Loram’s perspective. All this time among humans and their ignorance of much to do with magic, having none of their own, had made Adren arrogant. Yet another reason why she needed to return home. The fairies there would smack sense back into her, just as Loram was now.
“Well, there’s not time for a lesson now. Mayhap after our prison break, at which point I shall have to lecture you about things I found dull as a child, but which you shall find useful now. Until then, can you do with your magic what you did just now? Without falling over?”
“I could try.”
So she did. Several times, most without resulting in an attack—although many that almost undid Loram’s illusion again—and with Loram giving pointers each time for how to keep from losing control and setting on fire everything around her in the prison that would burn. Which was certainly useful.
“What if Adren’s taking this long because she’s run into trouble?” Nadin sat bolt upright. “What if she doesn’t know I’m here? What if she can’t get through the barrier? Oh, hell, what if she’s in danger and needs my help?” He jumped off the cot, a much more vigorous action than necessary considering how low to the ground it was. “What if she’s had one of those attacks again and she’s stuck out there in the forest waiting for me? After all, she said she’d wait, and…” He made a face. “Oh, who am I kidding? Adren wouldn’t wait that long. Which is worse, because she could be in the middle of town, and the unicorn could come for her, which means someone would see it, and then they’d try to get it and it wouldn’t be able to do anything for Adren and all I’d be doing is talking to myself about how horrible prison is.”
“Are you ever going to shut up?” one of the guards yelled in at him. “Your muttering is driving me crazy.”
Nadin did shut up for a while. Until his eyes widened.
“Has she ever had an attack that ended on its own?” He paled. Magic danced at the edge of his fingertips, but he shook his head. “I can’t.”
On the other side of the door, one of the guards had discovered the other had been hiding extra cards. The argument that ensued revealed that both had indeed been cheating, and ended in an agreement to play the game right. For the sake of honour.
By the end of it, Nadin sat with his head in his hands.
“I’m sorry, Adren.”
Inside the prison, Adren followed the faint streak of light as it sped along the corridors. Loram had enacted a tiny spell, a harmless enough spell that the barrier would let it through. Illusion wouldn’t count, so the light was real light, and it had to move like real light and look like real light, as well as be faint enough that none of the guards would take any special notice of it. Adren marvelled at how Loram could do something so precise so easily.
Of course, Adren held on to her invisibility while following it, but only as a precaution. Loram had created an illusion outside the barrier of all the fairies attacking at once, plus a dragon. A tiny one, because Loram was one fairy and it was already a large illusion, but a dragon nonetheless. It really was too bad Adren couldn’t spare a glance to see it herself, so she’d had to content herself with the stupefied expression of one of the guards as she stole his keys.
He’d had a lot of keys. Adren hoped it wouldn’t take her too long to find the right one before unlocking Nadin’s door.
The streak of light entered the captain’s office. As soon as Adren closed the door and let go of her invisibility, the light sped up a stack of papers leaning against the wall and then out to a spot a couple of handspans away. It bloomed around the enchantment before disappearing to leave behind an even fainter trace of blue just above Adren’s eye level. She took a breath. Let it out.
You can do this, Adren.
As she let the magic begin to flow around her fingers, her throat tightened and anxiety passed through the connection to the unicorn. It responded in kind, at greater intensity. Saints. Not now. Calm, she had to be calm.
Adren kept her breath slow and even as she put her hand on the blue trace and let her magic flow out and dismantle the enchantment. Hopefully. Not being able to see magic made this all a little more difficult than it really should have been. How did humans do it? For that matter, how did anyone other than fairies do it?
The unicorn, unconvinced by her tenuous calm, sent back spurts of greater and greater worry. Adren wanted to stop, but she couldn’t. When the blue trace was gone, the enchantment would be, too, and stopping meant starting all over again, meant Loram wouldn’t be able to hold her illusion long enough and the guards would come back.
Hold on, Adren, hold on.
The unicorn started moving towards Adren. It wouldn’t be nearby anytime soon, which helped, but there was half a town it would have to get through first, which didn’t. She tried to steady herself, and almost had it when she sl
ipped on the magic and a streak of it shot through her like lightning—and her heart would not stop pounding. A memory rose from the dark place in her mind as it did, and she fumbled to stop it before it left her body to wreak havoc.
“You can do this, Adren. Hold on. Hold on.”
She couldn’t tell where the voice came from. It floated around the memory’s picture as if it wanted to belong, as if it might have belonged.
A little girl with a unicorn. The girl frowned, leaned forward, then something happened and she laughed. Behind them, a man dressed in black sat by a fire and smiled. He looked familiar, but Adren couldn’t place him. This bothered her even as the memory faded and the only pieces her magic could catch and hold were the girl and the fire. And the peace. Because there had been peace when the girl laughed. Peace and release.
In the air of the prison room, the blue trace disappeared. Beyond the town, the unicorn left off its approach.
Adren stopped the flow of her magic to the sound of a dragon roaring. A small roar for a dragon, but a roar nonetheless. She grinned, made herself invisible, and left the room.
The roar shook Nadin’s cell. He perked up and went to look out the window. Of course, at that moment, there was no one outside the window. Some time before, another guard had run in, talking about some kind of attack. The cards had been summarily abandoned.
Outside the prison, fairy magic flashed, no longer impeded by the barrier. The window didn’t give a good angle for viewing what this magic did, but Nadin stayed at it, craning his neck this way and that and squinting. He was so preoccupied that he almost didn’t turn around at the jangle of keys at his cell door.
Almost.
But not quite.
“Adren?” Nadin peeked out at her from between the bars of his cell.
Who else would it be? She waved at him to be quiet and kept trying keys. Didn’t fit… didn’t fit… didn’t fit… her chest ached… didn’t fit…
“I won’t be able to keep them convinced for much longer.” Loram came into sight and waved at Nadin. His mouth dropped open.
“What’s going on?” Nadin asked.
“Shopping,” Adren snapped.
“For you!” Loram giggled. Both Adren and Nadin raised an eyebrow at her. She crossed her arms. “Oh, I see. I’m not allowed to be funny.”
“That wasn’t funny,” Adren remarked, turning back to the keys. How about this one? It slid into the lock and, when she turned it, the lock opened with a click. Using her lock-picking tools would have been faster than this. Next time something like this happened, she’d have to remember them. Rescuing Nadin would be so much easier with them handy.
Except she wouldn’t have to rescue him anymore.
Ignoring the odd twist in her stomach, Adren opened the door and checked to make sure none of the guards had come back inside. Or she would have if not for Nadin banging into her as he rushed out, knocking loose her grasp on her invisibility.
“What are you doing?” she seethed, turning herself invisible as soon as she got her breath back.
“It was the fairy—”
“Got it!” cried Loram from inside the cell. She held a… hand? A fake hand, from the looks of it as she carried it out, and a disturbingly realistic one at that.
“Do I want to know?” Adren asked.
Loram grinned. “Mayhap not.”
Fairies.
“So…” said Nadin. “How are we getting out?”
Adren pointed with her thumb and Loram set an illusion to keep them all unseen. With a sigh of relief, Adren let go of her invisibility.
“You have no idea how much I wish you were around in the last town,” she told Loram.
They left the prison with far more ease than anyone who wasn’t supposed to be in a prison in the first place should ever leave it. They passed by the guards and, for a laugh, Loram made it so Adren couldn’t see the illusion they faced and the two of them chuckled as the guards fought nothing.
Nadin didn’t share their delight. He kept sneaking glances at Loram, fidgeting every time he did. Adren wanted to tell him to calm down. Loram wasn’t a human, after all. That, and paranoia didn’t suit him.
Chapter Five
Nadin may have stared at Loram on the way to the fairy mound, but he soon directed his attention at the tunnels. The illusion protecting the path to them—ghostly trees that feigned to block the way of travellers—as well as the wall of mist that guarded the entrance had made him quiet, shy almost. But it was the tunnels that made him silent, made his eyes go round.
To the eyes of one who could see through illusion, the walls were stone, carved all over with intricate artwork and writing unlike anything humans had ever made. It curled around the shapes of animals, people, fairies. It wove in and around scenes with beings both familiar and strange. Whether it told history or myth or both could not be ascertained without knowing how to read the script itself, but it clearly told something. Something important enough to be hidden.
The other fairies that passed them by in the tunnels also gave him pause. They also slowed at the sight of him, gave him a real look, unlike the disinterested kind from strangers who pass each other in the street. He saw them and they saw him and it obviously unsettled many of the fairies, what they saw.
Inside the throne room, the illusions gave way to reality. The thrones were indeed formed from the roots of trees, the walls covered with more of these, but in between, in an almost playful dance with these roots, the carvings and writings continued their story. Or stories?
The creatures depicted in these were stranger still. Some were dark and terrible, with eyes like stars. Others were bright and beautiful, winged and like fire. Werewolves and other partly human forms stood among them and away from them, their actions often hidden by the roots that had reached down through the room and into deeper earth. It wasn’t clear what they did to or with the humans and magical beings that stood, numerous beyond measure, among them.
And then the fairy monarchs spoke.
Adren wanted to drag Nadin along through the tunnels when they’d entered into the fairy mound. He kept stopping at the oddest moments, captivated by nothing on the walls, by the fairies around them. If he wasn’t human—which became less likely with each passing moment— didn’t he know what fairy mounds were like? Had he never seen a fairy before? It would explain why he knew so little of magic and how it worked. If he had fairy blood, it must have come from his grandparents—great-grandparents at most, or else she doubted he’d have the abilities he did. The more human added to the mix, the weaker the magic became. Unless another magical creature decided to tamper.
Still, she found his wonder embarrassing. Did he really have to stare so much? Even in the throne room, where she might understand his reaction, his attention went to all the least impressive parts of the room.
Of course, he might be seeing more than she could. But why? They had roots coming down from the ceiling, in the saints’ names! Fairies liked to make reality more glamorous, not the other way around.
As they entered the throne room, Loram was allowed to go with them before the dais. The fairies in the room watched every step of their approach. Even Loram became subject to unreadable expressions that made Adren want to shiver.
On the thrones sat the king and queen, accompanied again by Iraem.
“We see your attempt has been successful,” said the queen to Adren. And then, to Loram: “What of yours?”
Loram held up the fake hand. Now it was Adren’s turn to stare.
“Well done. And we thank you, Adren, for your most excellent gift.” The queen appraised Nadin. He sputtered something vaguely questionlike towards Adren, but the queen ignored this. “As for our end of the bargain…”
Utter silence fell around Adren. Utter silence and utter blackness, as though walls had risen from the floor around her. Before her stood Iraem, still and silent as the middle of winter.
From the floor beneath Adren’s feet, magic snaked its way up and around her an
kles. It laid itself along her legs, growing like a vine. She tried to move out from its power, but it had bound her feet and she couldn’t lift them.
No matter. She had magic, too.
As the fairy spell continued to work its slow way up her body, Adren let the fire within her leak through her skin. She wasn’t sure exactly how to let it combat the spell, so she brought it in contact with the fairy magic and hoped it would do something on its own. Considering how it had saved her from the potion maker’s spell in Watorej, she had no doubt it would be able to protect her again without much direction.
Her magic and the fairy magic met like wood sparking into flames. Adren’s magic ate away at the subtle spell around her, forming an ever-widening circle where she was free from its influence. She gave Iraem a fierce grin. Iraem lifted her head a fraction, the barest hint of a sly smile touching the edges of her lips.
Adren’s grin dropped.
Until that moment, Adren had thought it a game and nothing more. But what she saw in Iraem’s eyes gave her a different testimony. Iraem didn’t see her as an equal. Didn’t see her as an ally. Iraem was the hunter who had eased her prey into her trap and now had only to stop it from struggling. To her, it was a game. And not the kind Adren would ever want to lose.
The moment the illusion fell around Adren, several fairies attacked Nadin. Fairies have slight frames, slighter enough than humans that they could never defeat one in a purely physical struggle, and they knew it. While Nadin may have been able to fight off one or two of them, five were too many. He tried to fight them, but their collective strength held him down. Even his magic only caught them by surprise. The others around them suppressed his attacks before he had done more than bruise his attackers.
“I like this one,” the king said to the queen. “He could be of use.”
“Not too much use, I hope,” remarked the queen.
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