Cast in Balefire: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Mage Craft Series Book 4)

by SM Reine

  Yeah, he wanted to break free.

  Benjamin didn’t have to do anything to escape. Marion pulled back and frowned at him, a line creasing between her eyebrows, lips bowed in equal parts confusion and disapproval. “You’re not him,” she said.

  “What?” he asked. “I’m not who?”

  “Forget it. I’m sorry.”

  Marion swept out of the courtyard, leaving Benjamin standing confused beside the memorial at the heart of her castle. Wintersong was waiting. He shut the door without even glancing in Benjamin’s direction.

  And he was alone.

  “What the hell just happened?” Benjamin asked the empty space.

  Benjamin returned to the sanctuary with bare minutes of audio interview to transcribe and a gross, I-need-a-shower kind of feeling.

  Marion had kissed him. He hadn’t liked it.

  Apparently neither had she.

  You’re not him, she’d said.

  Benjamin hadn’t been in a girls-are-weird phase since middle school, but he felt its triumphant return creeping up on him.

  He didn’t know what to do with any of his gross feelings, so he decided to get to work. Benjamin settled in the public green at the center of the cottages with his laptop.

  The sanctuary was designed to feel like one big home rather than many independent ones, discouraging solitary behavior. The shifter inhabitants leaned into it. A dozen pack members had organized themselves into two teams to play softball, which resulted in a lot of home-run balls disappearing into the lake a mile away.

  Benjamin took his laptop under a shady tree, out of the line of fire, and sat on the ground.

  He stared at the blinking cursor for ages without typing.

  You’re not him.

  Benjamin was far from experienced in matters of love, but growing up in a tight-knit community meant he’d seen a lot of weird stuff going down. He could smell that kind of weirdness for miles. It was hovering around Marion right now.

  You’re not him.

  “She thinks I’m an avatar of Seth,” Benjamin said, staring blankly at his laptop screen. “I’m not an avatar of anything. But she wanted me to be. And she wanted to kiss me.”

  “Why are you speaking to your computer?” Sinead McGrath dropped to the grass beside him. She wore tattered jeans and a tank top, displaying the pale marks of her vitiligo and every tattoo that twisted between them.

  “I’m going crazy, Sin,” Benjamin said. “That’s why.”

  A loud crack. Cheers.

  Another softball whizzed over the tree line and vanished in the direction of the lake.

  “Did you know that Rylie is looking for you?” Sinead asked.

  Mom did always like to see him when he came back from trips. He usually liked to see her too. But she’d been asking way too many questions about Marion lately, and now some of those answers might be “Marion kissed me.” What would he tell Rylie?

  Benjamin closed the lid of his laptop and let it slide off the tops of his thighs. “Can we pretend you haven’t found me yet?”

  “Already done.” Sinead took his laptop. She lifted it to her ear and went silent for a moment. “Seems like all my wards are still in place, so the magic must have worked?”

  “I took the tablet, not the laptop. And the wards were fine, but I still didn’t get good content. Not your fault. Mine.”

  “Because you’re going crazy?”

  “Basically,” Benjamin said. “You know what’s weird? I actually want to write this book.”

  “Well yeah, you wrote the proposal. I don’t know why you’d do that if you didn’t want to write the book.”

  Because I wanted an excuse to talk to Marion, which is a less exciting prospect now that I’ve had her mouth on my face-region. Now stop thinking about her mouth. “I’m not sure I have the ability to pull off the book’s subject matter. The sidhe are more intense than I expected.”

  Sinead snorted. “Intense? The faeries who are, like, professional orgy-organizers are intense? I am shocked. Shocked, I say!”

  “Their new queen’s intense,” he said.

  “We already knew that about Marion too.” The witch had been at odds with the mage when they’d both attended the academy, to the point they’d nearly burned down half the forest throwing magical tantrums.

  A woman walked perpendicular to the tide of softball players. They stopped playing at the sight of her. One of them bowed, but it must have been a joke, because his friend elbowed him in the gut for it.

  Rylie Gresham smiled at everyone as she passed, like a ray of sunshine shooting across the green.

  Benjamin scrambled to his feet. “Mom!”

  “There you are. You had me worried.” She embraced him, and even though she was shorter than Benjamin, it was like being momentarily toddler-sized again. He was safe within the ring of the Alpha’s arms. Romulus snuggled against the belly of the she-wolf. “How were the Middle Worlds?”

  “Oh, fine, just fine. Everything’s normal. How are you?”

  “I’ve been in meetings every waking moment. That means it’s normal here too, I guess.” She certainly looked like she’d been in constant meetings. Dark rims had formed under her eyes, and her hair was braided like Gran’s when she was working the ranch.

  “Who are you meeting with?” Benjamin asked.

  “Oh, everyone.” She waved off the question like it was nothing.

  The lack of specificity captured his attention. Rylie treated Benjamin like her apprentice Alpha even though he’d never be any such thing. She always got into specifics about her work.

  If she wasn’t getting into specifics, that meant secrets.

  “I need a break. Tell me all about what you’ve been up to.” Rylie sat on the ground beside Sinead.

  He reluctantly sat back down too. “Just…interviews. Nothing big.” Nothing like randomly kissing half-angel queens.

  “Did you see Marion?”

  “Yup,” he said. And I definitely didn’t lock lips with her.

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Stuff.” He shrugged. “How she’s adjusting to the Winter Court.”

  “How is she adjusting?”

  Considering that she’d kissed him not long after her wedding to some other guy, Benjamin thought she was adjusting poorly.

  He might have been fixated on that whole kissing thing.

  “Marion’s doing well as can be expected with all of the craziness involved in changing leadership.”

  “I’ve heard she’s been attacked multiple times by naiads,” Rylie said. “Have they figured out where they’re coming from?”

  He didn’t have to lie about knowing nothing about that one. “We didn’t talk assassinations. Are people really trying to kill Marion?” Maybe she’d snapped from the stress of the attempted murders.

  “They usually are.” She patted Benjamin’s hand. “Marion’s been fending off attacks her entire life. She’ll be fine. It would be best to pin down where the naiads are coming from in order to cut them off, though. They’re warmer-weather sidhe who don’t belong in the Winter Court.”

  “How warm?” Benjamin asked. “Summer Court warm?”

  Rylie gave him a look that saw a little too much. “Do you think that the Summer Court is a likely source of assassins?”

  “Ugh, Mom, I don’t know. You’re not the only one who’s tired. I’ve been jumping between worlds, and that’s way harder than a few teleconferences.”

  “It would be,” she agreed. “Sinead, do you have anything for him?”

  The witch looked startled to be addressed by the Alpha. She’d spent the conversation to that point picking at her nail polish. “He needs a few hours of sleep, not magic.”

  “Then make sure you don’t keep him from sleeping. You’ve got things to take care of at the academy.” Rylie stood, dusting off her skirt. “Will you look me up once you’ve rested, Benjy? I want to talk about the Middle Worlds in more detail.”

  It wasn’t like he could tell his mother
no. She was the leader of the preternatural world, after all. “Yeah, sure.”

  She kissed the top of his head and left.

  Benjamin scratched his chin as he watched his mother walk away. He’d been trying to grow a beard but he still only had patchy stubble. Between his sparse facial hair and his mother publicly kissing him, he was not feeling nearly adult enough to be dealing with this much crap.

  He waited a few seconds after he could no longer see Rylie to make sure she was truly out of earshot. Then he turned to Sinead again. “Could you get me to Dilmun?”

  “Theoretically, if I thought that you had good reason to go through me instead of official travel channels, I could get you to Dilmun,” Sinead said. “I’m legitimately, no-sarcasm shocked that Rylie’s golden baby boy wants to sneak through non-official channels. Why?”

  He wasn’t sure. Of all the odd places that Benjamin had visited, often at his mother’s side, Dilmun wouldn’t be the oddest. And it was already well known that Benjamin was shadowing Marion. Rylie would let him go if he asked.

  But Benjamin didn’t want her to know.

  “How long will it take to set up a travel spell of that magnitude?” he asked.

  “How long do you have?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Then that’s how long it’ll take.” Sinead laughed. “But yes, I can get you anywhere you want. And Rylie won’t smell a thing coming.”

  16

  Ariane announced that she was leaving the Winter Court that same day.

  When she dropped that particular bomb, Marion was in her rooms after meeting with Benjamin, trembling on the edge of her bed. “You’re leaving now?”

  “That’s what I said, my sweet. Adàn wants more than a few hours of my attention. Who am I to deny him?” Ariane gave a carefree shrug, unbothered by the idea of leaving Marion alone in Niflheimr.

  There was nothing to bother Ariane, mother of God and her second, less successful daughter who’d only accomplished becoming Queen of the Unseelie.

  Marion choked on the words: But I need you.

  She couldn’t sit there after kissing Benjamin—kissing Benjamin, and feeling absolutely nothing except that she was a giant idiot—and have nobody to discuss it with except her moronic handmaidens. She would wither away in her own humiliation.

  And what of the approaching affirmation? The glowing diadem? Ariane had promised to help.

  Too many feelings lashed within, eagerly seeking an outlet.

  “Very well,” Marion said without a hint of emotion. “What of Onoskelis’s labors?”

  “They’ll find their way to you as it comes time,” Ariane said.

  “And you? Have you given up access to records of Elise’s life?”

  “I can’t have them until you finish, so you can trust I won’t wait as many months to find you again. I’ll leave the dearth of my potions with you—feel free to avail yourself of whatever looks appealing, with the exception we discussed before. I’m sure we’ll see one another sooner rather than later.”

  Ariane pecked Marion on either cheek and left.

  Niflheimr’s population dropped by a count of one—a number so insignificant that she shouldn’t have noticed the difference in the palace’s vast halls drenched in the orgiastic splendor of the sidhe.

  Aoife came to her that night, a few minutes after Ymir had slipped away from his latest visit for snacks.

  “Wintersong is right,” she said with forceful reluctance. “The courts are bleeding into each other, and it’s not just the Winter and Autumn Courts. The Nadir Steppe is getting hotter.” That was a region on the north end of the plane, bordering the Summer Court.

  Marion supposed she was meant to care about that news. But it wasn’t really news, was it? Such magic was a reflection of her marriage, and everyone knew Marion and Konig didn’t love each other. They were only waiting for confirmation when her diadem didn’t glow a second time.

  “All right,” Marion said.

  Aoife stared at her expectantly. “Is that it?”

  “What else would you want of me?”

  “A plan to fix it,” she said. “Anything actionable!”

  “You’ll have to ask my king,” Marion said dully. “I’ve better things to do than lowering my mind to the tug-of-war over sidhe borders.” Indeed, at the moment she was getting a foot massage from Saoirse, the only one of the handmaidens she could tolerate at the moment.

  “Do you think I want to be here?” Aoife asked. “Do you think that any of us want to be here? Maddisyn’s mother is dying, and instead of being by her side, she’s following you around as you cheat on our king with an unending line of men!”

  The accusations of cheating were so old that they glanced off of Marion. “Maddisyn’s mother is dying? What is she doing here?”

  “Konig’s giving her mother special access to Antonietta.” That was the royal healer in the Autumn Court. “How can she feel anything but obligated to obey him when his good will keeps her mom from constant pain?”

  “He wouldn’t hold medical care hostage.” Marion could say that much with confidence. As irritating as she found his constant talk of family, Konig was genuine about how attached he was to the other sidhe. He wouldn’t let them suffer.

  “It’s a serious power imbalance,” Aoife said. “He can’t ask anyone to do anything. Every word that comes out of his mouth is a command—except the words he speaks to you.”

  She had no idea. Sharp as she was, Aoife was as enamored with the narrative where Konig was victim as much as any other sidhe.

  Marion’s throat burned with the effort it took not to set the record straight.

  “Aoife,” Saoirse said admonishingly. “Please.”

  “‘Aoife, please,’” the other handmaiden mocked. “Don’t you dare use that tone with me! You’re only here because you’re hoping to be picked up as a squire for the Raven Knights, and Konig’s dangling it over your head like a carrot!”

  At least that was a flavor of motivation Marion could sympathize with.

  That argument was interrupted by news of another attack. Naiads assailing their ocean-facing walls as the ice thawed meant it was bedtime, because that was so often when they came. The witching hour was marked by having dead sidhe carted away from her walls.

  Just as she’d never expected to miss her mother, she hadn’t expected to be eager to get to the Ethereal Levant. It had been too long since Marion hadn’t been under assault from sidhe energy in every damned moment of the day. At least for one day, she wouldn’t have to watch the naiads dying, their souls heading to a darkened pit where Marion half-wished she could have followed.

  The constant tidal flow of sidhe power that had seemed pleasant, even pleasurable, when Konig first took her to the Autumn Court was now torture. As the hours crawled, it became harder to tune anything out.

  Onoskelis’s next labor didn’t come.

  Benjamin didn’t visit—and who could blame him for that?

  Marion went to court.

  Naiads assailed the ocean-facing walls of Niflheimr, barely repelled by her band of Raven Knights.

  She slept.

  Repeat.

  Life felt increasingly surreal as her anxious days wound on. She substituted studying magic for sleep. Marion buried herself in notes about the gris-gris, turning that twisted vine in her hand for hours on end.

  She finished the gris-gris shortly before her trip to Dilmun. Marion’s mind had gone so hazy from exhaustion that she didn’t realize it was done at first. She kept turning the band in her hands, seeking more runes to shove into its core. There was nothing left to do. It was complete.

  Marion set it on her desk. Magic had turned it black and shriveled over time, and now it looked like a wrist-sized loop of barbed wire. It was dotted with crystalline rubies that had grown over the course of weeks.

  “Now what?” Marion asked herself.

  Her nighttime studies of magic had revealed more forgotten spells. Marion could now make three different kinds of
lightning, perform glamours that made her look like she’d spent hours in a makeup artist’s chair, and project her image a hundred meters away.

  She had no idea what the gris-gris would do.

  Marion closed it between her two hands, trapped between her palms as though in prayer. She lay back in her bed and closed her eyes and hoped for answers.

  She especially hoped that those answers would mean an end to days and nights of such ennui.

  Instead of answers, she found sleep.

  When she woke up the next day, she attended court, and then dinner, and then returned home for bed.

  Just like every other day.

  Only Ymir’s presence provided brief moments of color. In the space of weeks, his height had exploded until he could meet Marion eye-to-eye, which was unexpectedly adorable. Size aside, he still looked every inch the child.

  He was no longer satisfied by one or two chocolate bars at every visit. She had to have Three Musketeers delivered by the case.

  “Does nobody else feed you?” Marion asked fondly, reaching up to ruffle the frost giant’s hair. He was wearing clothes borrowed from the Raven Knights, but it wouldn’t be long before he grew out of those, too.

  “There’s food,” Ymir said. “It’s not good.”

  “What do frost giants typically eat? Your family came from the Wilds, didn’t they? I don’t believe there are any chocolate trees there.”

  Ymir scowled, peeling open another candy bar like a banana. “We eat fish and stuff. There’s a river.”

  “So you have to dig through the ice to eat?”

  “The river’s not frozen,” he said. “It’s on the Spring Court side of the Veil. You just have to reach through and hope a fish swims through your fingers.”

  Marion had heard that the Wilds connected the forests of all four courts, but it hadn’t occurred to her that one might be able to simply reach from one plane into the other. “What does the Veil look like?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Can you see it? I mean to say, is it a visible barrier?”

  “I guess,” he said.

  Trying to extract information from a child, even one as tall as Ymir, was a practice in frustration.