by Natalie Grey
I didn’t look back. He did feel guilty, I could tell.
“And what she interfered with….” He sighed. “The Monarchists would never tell you the truth about the horrors magic once visited on this world—about the horrors they’re preparing to unleash again. There are more lives at stake than just Sarah’s and yours. You must be trained to use your powers, and you must know the history of magic.”
Monarchists. There was that term again. I considered asking what a Monarchist was, and then decided that would be too clear a sign that something was wrong with me. The Acadamh, after all, was something on his side of whatever war this was, but the Monarchists were theoretically on mine. I should know about them.
“Right.” I decided I’d pushed him enough for now. I shrugged and held out my wrists with their vines. “Am I going to learn to do this? Or that sleep thing you did to me?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “No.”
“Why not?” I had thought it was a perfectly reasonable question.
“You’re a sorceress.” He spoke like he was explaining something to a five year old. “Not a druid.”
“You’re looking at me like I know the difference.” So much for charming him, but he really was being annoying.
He gave me a look at that, and sighed. Then he frowned again. It really was endearing, what that look did to his face, but I told myself not to be ridiculous. He was clearly the very last person I should be mooning over.
“You really don’t know the difference?” he asked me. “This isn’t you … playing dumb? You don’t know anything about the Acadamh, or training?”
“I really don’t.” I hoped I hadn’t just given away something too big.
He chewed his lip while he thought, and turned the meat skewers again. The scent was making me light-headed with hunger, but he clearly didn’t care much about the food in front of him. I took a deep breath and tried to stay focused.
“Your magic is innate,” he said finally. “I was just a normal human, I had to train as a druid to get these powers. But you were born being able to … what is it you do?”
“Huh?” I tore my gaze away from the meat.
He looked at the bindings, just looked at them, and they unraveled. He handed me one of the skewers. “Careful, it’s hot.”
I didn’t care. I snatched it out of his hands and tore into it, burning my tongue and throat and gulping it down anyway. When I looked up, daring him to comment on my manners, he simply handed me the other skewer.
I’d really prefer it if he weren’t being so nice. I reminded myself that taking that handcuffs off after abducting me wasn’t really a favor, even if it seemed to be. I shouldn’t be giving him any credit for it. I tried to keep my voice cold. “So what did you want to know?
“What’s your specialty?” When I said nothing, he prompted me: “Fire, wind, lightning? Metals?”
“I have literally no idea what you mean.” I picked the last pieces of meat off the skewer and looked around for more. When was the last time I had eaten?
“What kind of magic do you do?” he asked. His tone was forcedly patient.
I used the same tone right back at him, crossing my arms. “I’ve never done magic,” I informed him.
“You—you’re sure?” That seemed to totally blindside him. “You don’t remember ever doing … anything?”
“The first thing I remember is being chased through the forest by you.” I realized how weak that sounded. “So, I guess, maybe. But I swear to you, if I have, I don’t know how and I don’t remember.” I gave up trying to hide the fact that I was missing my memory. “And I also swear I’m telling the truth, that’s the first thing I remember. Other than my name.”
“Nicky.” He said my name quietly.
I looked away. I didn’t like him saying it.
There was a long pause.
“I’m sorry if I scared you,” he said finally, “but right now, you’re dangerous, and you were being used by dangerous people. You need to go to the Acadamh.”
“How am I dangerous? Who was I hurting?”
“You’ve just told me you wouldn’t know if you had been hurting anyone,” he pointed out. “More to the point, you do have magic, and right now, we have to assume that you don’t know how to control it. You also don’t know the true history of magic.” He cut off my question. “Which you have to know, to understand why it’s so important that you do control your magic. The Monarchists would use you in a war that would destroy innocent lives.”
This seemed like a fairly circular argument to me, but I had zero illusions about my ability to escape right now. I was tired, I was still hungry, and I didn’t have any idea where we were.
I decided to get everything out of him that I could. The more I let him talk, I reasoned, the more he’d get off his guard.
“Okay. So tell me about the history of magic.” I looped my arms around my knees.
“They’ll tell you there,” he said firmly. “Do you need more food?”
“No.” I did, but more than that, I needed to know what was going on. “You really can’t tell me anything?”
He hesitated for a moment, stirring the fire with a stick. He came to kneel down in front of me and reached to lay his palms on my temples.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he murmured.
Now! something in me screamed. Kill him now and run! What it was that kept me rooted to the spot, I wasn’t sure. For one thing, I still didn’t have a clue how to use the magic everyone was so sure I had. For another, he smelled vaguely like pine and sweat and something warm….
Or maybe it was his magic. Sure. I’d put it down to that.
“What are you doing?” My voice sounded weird.
“Looking into your mind.” His eyes were focused on mine, but he didn’t seem to see me at all. “Not far, don’t worry.”
I expected to feel something, maybe fingers prying through my mind, maybe my memories rushing back. I had just enough time to be panicked about that idea before I realized it wasn’t happening. The world fell away, and I heard the rustling of trees. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine myself in a world of dappled sunlight and ripening berries, leaves lit green above and birds singing sweetly from the branches above me.
As abruptly as the sensation had wrapped itself around me, it disappeared. Daiman’s hands were gone, and he was staring at me in consternation.
“How do you feel?” he asked me carefully.
I answered before I thought to be flippant. “Fine,” I said honestly. “You didn’t hurt me, don’t worry.”
I tried to suppress a sigh. I was supposed to be charming him, not the other way around. For his part, he seemed entirely consumed with whatever he had seen—and I wanted to know what that was.
“Why did you look?”
“I wanted to know how much you remembered.” He looked worried. “And how your magic was blocked—why I haven’t seen it yet. I wanted to see if I could get a sense of your past.”
“And?”
“I can’t,” he said bluntly.
“You can’t?” A wave of irrational panic hit me. What if I had no past? What if—
Frankly, I didn’t even know what I was afraid of. It was like not having a name, I decided. Everyone had names, and everyone had a past. It just felt wrong not to have one.
“It’s in there.” His voice broke through the panic. “But whoever hid it used a spell I can’t just push aside. Actually, they used more than one.” He shook his head. “If I tried to force it, I might damage your mind. I’ll let the sorcerers at the Acadamh handle it.”
I swallowed hard. “Why would someone do that to me?”
“The only thing I can think of….” He shook his head. “It’s not important. Can you walk? We should get moving.”
I let him help me up. “Thanks. And thanks for the food.” I looked down, and what I saw made my eyes go round. The mossy, fairytale clearing was gone. In its place was hard-packed dirt strewn with leaves, indistinguishabl
e from any other patch of ground in the forest. “Wow.”
He was smiling. “No need to sleep on dirt. And we’ll catch more food on the way. I didn’t realize you were that hungry.” He gave me a half smile that made my stomach turn over. And then, like dumping ice water down my spine, he gave me a knowing look. “By the way—I’ll save you the trouble of coming up with a plan for getting away from me. I’ve got a tracker on you now, and whoever put a lock on your powers, it’s still there. You’re not getting anywhere.”
He’d save me the trouble, or he’d save himself the trouble? I looked down so he wouldn’t see the sudden flash of defiance in my eyes. I’d been starting to warm up to him, and I was glad that he’d reminded me what he was: a Hunter.
A jailor.
Well, like hell was I just going to follow him meekly into a prison cell. If he thought he’d caught me for good, he had another thing coming.
3
No matter what Sarah seemed to think, I couldn’t defeat Daiman with magic—not yet, anyway. Maybe she meant for me to wait until my training had begun, but I had the sense that, magic or not, it was going to be easier to escape on the road than it would be from the Acadamh.
That meant I needed information, and fast. I didn’t know how much time I had until we would be there.
Dawn broke as we walked, and I watched Daiman out of the corner of my eye, trying to find any amulets or magic wands I might steal to rob him of his powers. He didn’t seem to have any, and staring at the movement of his muscles under his clothes was doing more harm than good to my powers of concentration.
So I watched everything else, instead, and I noticed a strange thing. From the way landmarks seemed to grow closer far too quickly and we never encountered a road, much less a town, I had the unsettling feeling that Daiman was taking us through some not-quite-real world where the earth folded beneath our feet to bring us farther, faster.
Once I realized that, I began to notice things flickering in the corners of my vision: glimpses of roofs over the tops of the trees, roads half-glimpsed in the greenery, the sound of voices mixed among the trill of the birds, and once, the gleaming bulk of an office building.
My mind seemed not to want to know about this other world, just like it didn’t want to know about my missing memory, and so I had to cling to each flicker in reality with sheer stubbornness. I forced myself to picture the things I had seen, no matter how much my mind tried to slide away from those thoughts.
It seemed to work. Once, I stumbled over a cracked paving stone. Another time, I saw my reflection in a shop window that was immediately gone.
I wondered, suddenly unsettled, if anyone in the real world saw me flicker into existence and then back out of it. Then again, perhaps their minds were just as uninclined to acknowledge that as mine was.
Daiman was polite to me, and so I was polite to him … barely. I figured that the success of my escape attempt rested largely on lulling him into a false sense of security—which meant not being too smug about my impending flight, but also not too polite and sweet. Daiman knew I didn’t like being here. He just had to think that I also wasn’t going to try to escape.
It was hard to tell if he was worried about that or not. Perhaps he figured that between his warnings and his alternate universe, I was pretty well trapped.
I dedicated the day to seeing if I could make the flickers appear on my own. Quickly looking toward my peripheral vision didn’t seem to work, nor did walking with my eyes half-closed—and I nearly got brained by a tree branch trying that.
I noticed that the forest right around us seemed to be the fairyland, and the trees a few meters out seemed more normal. Staring at those patches of forest didn’t seem to give me any more success, but it did give me an idea.
I began to lag behind Daiman, first a few steps, and then a few more. Sometimes I caught up with him. Sometimes I would call out to him that I was stopping. I let myself wander a little bit off to the side as well. I always kept myself in sight, meeting his gaze openly when he looked over to check if I was still there. I forced myself to take my time, but it cost what little patience I had. Every step was taking me closer to the prison.
But it worked. The further I got, the more flickers I saw. I returned to Daiman’s side, having to bite my lips to keep from smiling broadly. The first chance I got, I would run.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked me courteously.
I blinked. I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that question. Yes, aside from the kidnapping thing seemed both the only honest way to answer, and also a bit too rude.
“I’m tired,” I said finally. “And hungry.”
“We’ll stop for the day soon.” He studied the sky. We had been walking for a long time, but there were still a few hours of light left. “Do you think you can go a little further?”
I tried not let my leap of joy show on my face. Stopping for the day meant we wouldn’t be arriving tonight.
I shrugged to show my acquiescence. Not rude … quite. But a reminder that I wasn’t keen on following him.
For a moment, I thought he would say something else. He was staring at me with a troubled expression, and I could see the way he wanted to say something more—an admonishment? Reassurance? Whatever it was, he only closed his mouth on the words and set off again.
Was my worry getting under his skin, or was he just angry that the captured Monarchist wasn’t falling all over herself to convert? It was hard to know.
He made another camp for us about an hour later, and this time, I got to see it grow. From the pretty, storybook forest he already seemed to summon effortlessly, two beds of moss curled their way into being.
I knelt down to watch them grow, fascinated. I had never paid much attention to moss. The soft cushion I had slept on was really hundreds upon hundreds of tiny capsules with wispy tops, each capsule swelling and turning a bright green. I found myself smiling as I watched it grow, and when I put out my fingers to brush over it lightly, snowbells sprang up where my fingers passed, gorgeous under the dappled shadows.
I laughed delightedly—and then looked up to see Daiman smiling down at me.
“Snowbells,” I told him.
“I saw how you liked them,” he explained. “They like growing here.”
My own smile died. He had made those snowbells to make me smile, and I didn’t like it. No amount of pretty flowers was going to make me a willing slave.
I looked away sharply and sat down on the cushion, rubbing at my shoulders and pulling my boots off. I wasn’t going to be charmed by him or his magic. I wasn’t going to let him build a connection between us. He was trying to do the same thing to me that I was trying to do to him—lull me into a false sense of security.
I wasn’t going to fall for it.
“I’ll … go get us some dinner.” What his face looked like, I wasn’t sure—I was damned if I was going to look at him—but his voice was subdued.
He didn’t make a cage, but I knew he was watching me. I drew my knees up to my chest, rested my chin on them, and tried to keep from wiggling my toes in the moss. It was exceedingly soft, but I couldn’t let my guard down.
We ate in silence when he returned. He made a fire from scratch—apparently fire wasn’t a phenomenon he could summon from nothing—and cleaned the rabbits he’d caught. There wasn’t so much as a mark on the bodies before he used his knife to gut them, and I wondered just how he’d managed it.
He caught me looking. “Druids don’t hunt quite the way other people do,” he said quietly.
“What, you transform into a panther and scare them to death?”
The idea seemed to amuse and annoy him in equal measure. “No.”
We ate in silence, and I settled down on the moss even though the light was still fading. I didn’t want him to talk. I didn’t want him to try to explain any of this to me, and I didn’t want to catch myself enjoying the world he’d built up around us. I just wanted him to go to sleep so I could escape.
It took
forever for night to fall and Daiman to fall asleep. For a long time, he sat and stared into the fire. He didn’t fidget or look bored. He seemed to be accustomed to being alone. I wondered what he was thinking about and told myself it wasn’t important. Once, he caught me looking at him and I looked away, trying not to blush. I was watching him because he was my enemy, not because….
Well, not for any other reasons.
He did, eventually, go to sleep. He lay down and I listened to his breathing go slow and even.
Which was when I realized I needed to kill him.
My eyes flew open in the darkness and I felt a jolt of adrenaline course through me. Why the hell had I not realized this before? If I just ran, and he really did have a magical tracker on me, my attempt was doomed from the start. I should kill him. It was the reasonable thing to do. After all, he was a killer. I knew that. He was a killer, and he was bringing me to a prison, and while I might not have my magic … you didn’t need magic to kill someone. Non-magical humans had been proving that one for years.
I forced myself to sit up quietly. I was actually shaking, which I hated. I rubbed at my temples and tried to think. How did you kill someone? I didn’t have a knife. He did, but it was in his boot, and I didn’t think I knew how to pick pockets. I didn’t have a gun.
A rock. I remembered a tumble of them under the edge of a nearby boulder and eased myself up.
My feet seemed to be carrying me all on their own, which was good, because I was really not sure I could do this. Hopefully my hands would also cooperate. I felt around in the dark and slowly withdrew a rock that seemed hefty. It had some sharp edges, too, which was … good.
Right?
I edged back into the camp and took the time to study Daiman’s chest. It was still rising and falling slowly.
He was a killer, I told myself. He was a Hunter, and a very good one, apparently. Sarah, who had never met him before, had known him on sight. She’d told me that we were never going to outrun him. Therefore, it stood to reason that I could not outrun him on my own, and from there, that I had to kill him unless I wanted to be captured again.