Golden Apple, The

by Diener, Michelle

  “You saw for yourself, he’s sensitive to the objects wild magic creates, he finds them easily. As for asking questions, he has his reasons, and they are nothing to do with you.” Kayla reached out a hand and picked up a ring lying on the shelf in front of her. The square-cut gem glinting on the heavy gold band was purple, holding an inner light.

  “Don’t touch.” Ylana’s voice was a whip crack, and with a gasp, Kayla let the ring clatter to the floor.

  She lifted her gaze to Ylana. “Why are you collecting everything you can? Store-housing all the magic objects of the Forest?”

  “Every piece I collect is a piece they cannot have.”

  Kayla heard the weariness in the witch’s voice. Wondered how long Ylana had been racing about as Jisuel, collecting every item she could find.

  “It’s important the sorcerers don’t have these things?” She had to force the question out, for wasn’t she there to steal one of Ylana’s hard-won treasures for a sorcerer?

  “There is something brewing. A clash of sorcerers. They are so powerful now they rub up against each other, irritating each other. Wanting to show each other just how powerful they are. Every piece in my collection would give them some advantage. And at no cost.”

  “No cost?” She understood so little.

  Ylana took a spoon off the table, bent and fumbled under a chair. She straightened, the spoon handle through the band of the ring Kayla had dropped. She carried it like a dead rat back to its shelf.

  “Every spell they cast costs something. They are creating magic and its creation comes at a price. It leaches their energy, weakens them. But wild magic has already been created. It already exists, so there is no further price to pay for it. It uses itself up, not the other way around. The cost is nothing but a weakening of the thing itself, until at last it cannot be used again.” Ylana watched her as she spoke, and Kayla had the sense she was being measured and weighed.

  She took a deep breath. “And the magic you use? There is no price for using that?”

  “Earth magic? The sorcerers dismiss earth magic, because it cannot create things not found in nature. But they have forgotten how powerful it is.” Ylana smiled. “And they are afraid of it because the price for using it is that the user is bound more tightly to it, is forced deeper and deeper into a guardianship of nature. Something that would not suit them. Not at all. But you should know this.”

  “I have never used earth magic.” She met Ylana’s gaze at last.

  “You’re a witch, even untutored you would have called it without thinking.” Ylana lifted her arm and pulled her sleeve up. In the half-light of the room, Kayla had to lean forward to see.

  From Ylana’s wrist, up past her elbow, was an intricate pattern of leaves and flowers, birds and squirrels, a swirling, entwined rope of fecund nature.

  “Pull up your sleeve.”

  There was nothing there, but Kayla obliged, exposing her inner-wrist. She remembered how Eric had done the same when he’d grabbed her on the stairs in his dungeon.

  Now she understood what he had been looking for. His talk of extraordinary control or total ineptitude.

  As she pushed up the fine cotton of her sleeve, she wondered whether her father knew the price of earth magic. It might explain why she knew nothing of her heritage. A princess’s duty was to the kingdom. There could be no devotion stronger than that. Certainly not the kind of symbiosis Ylana was talking about with earth magic.

  Could he have found a way to stop her calling it? A way to deny her nature? And what of her mother? If Eric was right, she had been a witch, too.

  Surely an ill-fit with being the queen of Gaynor.

  She held out her arm. There were no leaves, no tattoo to mark her use of earth magic, but there was something. She frowned, leaned closer, and Ylana reached out and grabbed her wrist, yanked it to the candle on the table.

  There in the yellow light, clear as Ylana’s leaves, were three tiny circles.

  Ylana pressed down on one circle. “When you drew power to you, to make me apologize.” She pressed the other. “And when you chased me off from your tryst with De’Villier, just now. I don’t know the third.” She released Kayla’s arm.

  Kayla lifted her wrist closer to her face, rubbed a thumb over the marks. “Chased you?” As she looked up, Ylana’s features altered, formed the pointed ears, the sharp features of a squirrel, and in a blink, she was herself again.

  “I have never heard of anyone calling wild magic. Or having it answer the call.” Ylana reached out for her arm again, but Kayla held it against her chest, her fist clenched.

  “Perhaps I didn’t know any better.”

  Ylana let out a surprised laugh. “Perhaps. There is more than a bit of truth in that.”

  “Is there a way…A way my father or mother could have bespelled me so that I did not call earth magic? To keep me from becoming more connected to it than my duty to Gaynor?”

  Ylana looked at her in horror. “Who would do such a thing? Which side is your magic from?”

  Kayla recalled Eric’s words. “My mother, and my father’s mother.”

  “Both sides.” Ylana began to move around her, looking at her from all angles. “That is the one thing they couldn’t hide. You were too strong, it shines out of you, and they are lucky the wrong people didn’t see…” She reached out and yanked a hair from Kayla’s head. Threw it on the candle’s flame. It flared up in a bright green spark.

  “Oh, yes. You are bespelled. And if that spell is to prevent you from calling earth magic, it has been done by a witch more powerful than I.” She laughed. “Your grandmother, perhaps? But what she didn’t take into account was that because you are so strong, you have always been calling magic. Calling it, and calling it, and never having an answer. And when you stepped into the Great Forest you were calling it still.”

  “And wild magic answered the call.”

  Ylana laughed again. “It came to you, hungry for a connection.”

  “I wonder if I can call it now.” Kayla held both hands in front of her, flexed her fingers. “How do you call earth magic?”

  “You think of it, hidden in everything around you, and you think of what you want to do.”

  Had she done that when she’d called wild magic before? She remembered her anger, both times she’d called wild magic today. When had she called it a third time?

  She suddenly recalled walking along the path, thinking of Rane, of kissing him, of breaking down the walls between them. Recalled how they had fallen into each others arms, the wild magic just behind them. It had embraced her like a lover, afterward. Bathed her in its light, as if delighted to have a companion at last.

  Could it be that she had really done that? Broken down the barriers between them?

  She blushed. Rubbed her wrist again. “Do witches take lovers?”

  Ylana looked startled. “Perhaps, in the beginning. But I’ve told you, the price of earth magic is being bound to it. It becomes everything, in the end. Family, lover, friend. There is no room for anything else.”

  She did not think she would be happy in a life that had no room for anything but her calling. “I would not like that.”

  “There is no like or dislike.” Ylana dismissed her words with a wave of her hand. “But your parents have certainly stunted you. Changed you in a way that is contrary to the code.” She tapped her lips with tiny, wrinkled fingers. “I will have to change that.”

  There was something calculating in her eyes, and Kayla had the sense she meant to do what she thought right, whether Kayla agreed with it or not.

  With a deep breath she pictured wild magic, the purple green of it, spinning in the air, and then she imagined Ylana, standing beside her kitchen table. Imagined her frozen, her power contained.

  She looked at her fingers, and felt a tingle down her spine at the flickers of purple-green light at their tips.

  She raised them to show to Ylana, felt a connection to some unlimited supply of power.

  “You have called
it again,” Ylana’s voice was excited, wondering, and Kayla felt guilt slam into her, hard as a body blow, and her connection to the magic wavered.

  She closed her eyes, and considered her options, but she could see no way around what she planned to do. She opened herself up again.

  “Now,” she whispered, and wild magic shot from her hands, coalesced around Ylana.

  She waited, tensed for a retaliation. Waited for Ylana to break the bonds, to snap free and strike back.

  There was silence.

  Ylana stared at her, conscious, furious, but absolutely still.

  Kayla lifted a beseeching hand. “I am sorry.” She turned her arm and saw a fourth circle at the base of her wrist, dark against the luminous white of her skin. She turned to the shelves. “I am here to steal from you.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  A whisper of power slithered over the back of Rane’s neck, and he spun round, sure he’d find a ball of wild magic behind him.

  There was nothing.

  And suddenly, from within the cottage, there was silence. The murmur of conversation between Kayla and Ylana had been too soft for him to hear the words, but now there was no sound at all.

  Rane turned back to the shutters and pressed himself hard against them, his eye up against the narrow crack. He could see Ylana, still standing by the table, and Kayla, staring at a shelf. Her hand reached out, hesitated, and then grasped whatever it was she had found.

  Rane was thrown back, landing hard on the ground.

  As he looked up, the roof came off the cottage, an explosion of purple light blowing it straight up.

  Rane scrambled to his feet and saw the purple light was encased, contained, by a filigree of purple green. A net of wild magic.

  As suddenly as it had erupted, the light cut off, and the roof came down, thatch falling like golden rain all about him.

  He ran for the door, his heart stuttering in his chest, but before he could reach it, it slammed open. Kayla stepped out, her hair wild, her eyes huge in her face. There was a small bundle in her hand, held away from her.

  “Are you all right?” He wanted to touch her, reassure himself she was safe, but she held up a shaking hand to stop him, looked over her shoulder, and he saw Ylana still standing at the table. With the roof gone, she was bathed in the full light of late afternoon, her face set in a strangely animated expression of fury.

  “This is the gem.” Kayla lifted the wrapped stone, but did not offer it to him. He reached forward for it anyway and she jerked it back. “Don’t touch. Not with your bare hands. I don’t know how I…” She looked down at her fingers. “I used wild magic instinctively, forced the power up, instead of out.” She spoke slowly. “If you had been the one to take it, you’d be dead.”

  Rane took the rag bundle from her hand, carefully drew aside the corners, and peered at the huge lavender gem within. “Eric doesn’t know how dangerous it is, or he’d have warned us.” He covered it over again, dropped it carefully into his pouch. “It does him no good if we’re dead.”

  “Perhaps he won’t be as fast as I was. Perhaps he’ll kill himself with it.” She spoke as if detached from herself, still shocked. Then she twisted her arm, lifted it, and he saw a tiny pattern at the base of her wrist, five balls set in an upward spiral.

  “What is that?” He caught her hand and drew it towards him, ran a thumb over the pattern, his finger gliding over the velvet smoothness of her skin.

  “The wild magic.” Her other hand covered his, stilled his fingers. “Every time I call it, it marks me.”

  He bit back the denial that sprang within him. The thought of the magic branding her was like the scrape of an axe-head across stone, tearing at him.

  He slipped his arms around her. Before he could bend his head, take her mouth, she lifted a finger to his lips.

  “It has done something else.” Her eyes searched his, as if she were unsure how to tell him.

  “What?” His whole body tensed. There was no enemy to fight but he could not help the surge of adrenalin that ran through him.

  “When I contained the power of the gem, when I sent it through the roof…” She looked down at her wrist again. “It broke the enchantment.” She looked up with wide eyes. “I’m free.”

  * * *

  Kayla’s freedom was a good thing. A very good thing.

  It gave him the first sense of ease he’d had since he’d snatched the golden apple from the air.

  Rane lit the pile of wood he’d gathered in Ylana’s clearing, and it leapt into flame. He stood, tipped back his head and watched the sky turn from deep indigo to black. The stars were bright, close enough to touch and yet infinitely out of reach. They put him in his place.

  His gaze moved lower, rested on Ylana’s roof, now as good as new. He hadn’t looked, but there would be another circle on Kayla’s inner wrist.

  “I should release her.” Kayla stepped out of the dark, a few logs from Ylana’s store under her arms, and followed his gaze to the house.

  “You release her, and everything is for nothing.” He turned his back on the cottage, and sank down on his haunches beside the fire. “Do not expect her to understand why we did it.”

  “I think you may find that she would understand. That she could be a great help to us.”

  Rane lifted his head. “I know her. Dealt with her for years. She won’t forgive me for this, no matter what she thinks of you. Please don’t do it. Soren’s life is at stake and I don’t want to risk it.”

  “All right.” There was a heaviness to her response, and she set the logs down carefully, crouched beside him. “I don’t know if she feels hunger, or stiffness, the way I’ve left her. I do know she is very angry.”

  “Yes.” There was nothing more to say. They could not release the witch. Not without risk of their lives. He truly believed that.

  “We are forced to steal for Eric. To give him something he should not have. That he will use against us when he has it.” Kayla knelt closer to the fire, lifted her hands to its warmth. “I’ve been forced to enchant someone as he enchanted us. Forced to go against everything I believe is right.”

  She looked fierce, strong. Beautiful. The flames behind her leapt as high and hot as his desire and he reached across and took her hands. “We’ll find a way to bring Eric down.”

  The light of the fire caught her gray eyes, and they flashed silver. She drew their entwined hands to her lips, kissed his knuckles. Her hair fell as she bent her head, brushing his arms and making him shiver. “We must rescue Soren first. We can’t do anything until he is safe.”

  The way she spoke, as if there was no question they would do it together, made it impossible for him to reply. He drew her to him.

  The kiss he gave her was slow and gentle. The kind of kiss a man gives his lover when they have no hurry, nothing pressing to do but lie with each other and explore. He shut out the enchantment, the pounding need to run. Shut out everything but her.

  He lifted her so she straddled his lap, ran his hands from her shoulders up her throat and buried them deep in her hair. He put his lips to her neck, just below her ear and breathed deep.

  When he pulled back, she was watching him, eyes glittering in the firelight.

  She said nothing, her hands going down to the hem of her shirt. As she lifted it over her head, as he slid trembling hands over her, he knew there was only one thing he could do, now she was free of the enchantment. Only one way to keep her safe and protect her as he had not been able to do until now.

  Face Eric alone.

  Chapter Twenty

  Kayla woke up cold.

  Struggling with her blanket, she rose on an elbow and pushed her hair out of her eyes. Looked around the clearing.

  Rane was gone.

  She had a stomach-dropping feeling he wasn’t getting wood, or fetching water from the stream that ran behind Ylana’s cottage. The silence was too perfect.

  He had left her.

  She rose to a crouch, and saw a large, flat river s
tone propped against her saddlebag. He’d written on it with a piece of charcoal from the fire.

  Stay hidden. Wait for me.

  Since the start of their journey, he’d protected her. Put his life in danger for her. She should not be surprised he’d done it again.

  But she was. Surprised and hurt. And angry.

  No, furious.

  She wondered when he’d made his decision. While they crouched together by the fire, while he kissed her, while they rocked and thrust, limbs entwined, naked in the flickering flame-light?

  Even though she knew he wanted her safe, she felt betrayed. They had been a team. That’s what she’d thought. He would never have got the gem without her. She would never have made it to Ylana’s without him.

  She pushed the stone aside, dug into her pack, and her fingers closed around the smooth, cool surface of the golden apple. A prickle ran up her fingers and she let it go.

  He had left it with her.

  It mollified her, a little. She’d believed he would come back, but the apple was proof.

  She closed her bag, her skin still tingling, and stood. Looked at Ylana’s cottage.

  Did she dare release the witch now Rane was gone? And if Ylana, with her three hundred years’ experience, got the better of her? And took the apple?

  She couldn’t risk it. Her eyes slid away from the house, her stomach fluttering and her skin clammy with guilt and self-recrimination. She turned away, back to the camp, and wondered what to do next.

  She felt cut adrift, with no enchantment clinging to her, directing her feet and her thoughts. And she felt gloriously free.

  There was a faint snap of a twig, just in front of her and she stilled. The leaves of a bush rustled.

  She looked around for a weapon, and then remembered she had one at her fingertips.

  Waited…waited.

  A black streak of muscle and fur leapt, and she raised her hands, the air dancing purple and green, before she realized who it was.

  “Sooty.”

  The cat raced around her, mad with glee, kittenish on a terrifying scale. Then she rolled on her back, and Kayla knelt beside her, rubbed her under her chin.