by Natalie Grey
“Oh, God.” I buried my face in the downy feathers at the back of Daiman’s neck and tried not to be violently ill. This was too much, it was all too much.
We made it almost to the top of the next big hill before Daiman had to land. At first, I thought he was flying lower to avoid detection, but from the slowing beat of his wings, it was clear that he was exhausted.
“Daiman!” I pitched my voice at what I was pretty sure was an ear. “Daiman, you have to land!”
The bird’s head shook stubbornly, but it wasn’t long before he was struggling too much to stay aloft. One of us, after all, didn’t have hollow bones. He only barely managed to hit the ground without crashing into it, and I went rolling away over sharp rocks and what seemed to be a truly unfair amount of brambles.
“…Ow.” I tried to keep my voice low.
“Nicky.” He had transformed back, and he was trying to make his way to me, but he was too exhausted to stand. “Are you all right?”
“Yup.” I pushed myself up, trying not to wince too openly, and stood before I gave myself time to think about how it would hurt. I had learned, over the past few days, that this was the best way to keep going. The moment you started to fear future pain, you were crippled by it.
I went to kneel down at Daiman’s side, hesitating before laying a hand on one sweat-soaked shoulder. After everything that had just happened, it seemed like I might be the last person Daiman wanted to be touching him. But, like the issue of my missing memories, my mind skittered away from the idea of what I had learned only a few minutes ago. Right now, this moment with the breeze and the rocks and Daiman utterly exhausted, seemed about as much as I could handle. I focused on the details: the hair at the back of his neck was dark, plastered to his skin, and his chest was heaving.
“Are you all right?” I asked quietly. I had seen him perform stunningly large spells without so much as blinking. Seeing him like this worried me.
“I’ll be fine.” He managed something sort of like a smile, and managed to sit all the way up. For a moment, we were just two people who were exhausted for some reason that didn’t matter, and I had asked a nice question. And then Daiman ruined it by being logical: “We need to keep moving.”
“We….” My voice trailed away. Thinking about that meant thinking about what had just happened. When you were running, the only thing on your mind was what you were running from. I bowed my head.
I was so tired.
“It’s not safe to go back,” Daiman said simply. His voice said that he saw my exhaustion—saw it, and was warning me not to give in.
The certainty in his voice was like a blow. It didn’t matter, all of a sudden, how sure I had been that Terric wanted me dead—now I wanted to be wrong.
“But you could talk to him,” I said desperately. “And the Coimeail.”
“No.” His brown eyes were bleak. “For anyone else, I might have had a chance of convincing them, but you—” He broke off. “And I helped you,” he added. He sounded lost.
He had. He had helped me escape. He’d thrown his lot in with me, and I didn’t want to think about that. It was too huge—and I didn’t want to be wondering if he regretted it.
“You could go back,” I told him. I looked away so I couldn’t see the expression on his face, and cast around for some sort of answer. “Tell them … you knew Philip wanted me, and you had to get me out of there so there was no possibility of that. And I, ah … I hurt you and escaped. It could work.”
But it couldn’t work, and we both knew it.
Unless….
“Or you could bring me back.” Just like I’d pushed myself up without thinking, I made myself forge ahead with the words. I didn’t let myself think about what they meant. “To face—them.”
That, at last, seemed to galvanize him. He didn’t say anything, but he pushed himself up against a tree trunk and jerked his head to the valley beyond. He didn’t say anything, and when I saw the look on his face, I didn’t want to talk, either. Now I knew what it looked like when someone had every single pillar of their world knocked out from under them, and it wasn’t pretty.
We walked under a canopy of leaves that was lit bright green, filtering dappled sunlight down on us that shifted with the whisper of the breeze. We walked with cheerful birdsong in our ears, and I had time to examine this false forest Daiman evidently created wherever he went, a hidden path through the world. It was beautiful. It wasn’t any different from a real forest, I realized. I saw beetles and, once, the bones of a squirrel mixed with the leaves.
I was just seeing the forest the way he did, I decided, the light between all of it. I saw the forest as a place of life, even though it encompassed death. I looked over at him when I realized that, wanting to say something … but words seemed inadequate, and he still looked lost.
I gave him the only thing I could give: the pretense that he was alone in this place that comforted him.
To distract myself, I wondered if we were walking through cities or across highways, and sometimes I thought I caught a glimpse of the world as it truly was.
The glimpses became more frequent over the course of the day, and I noticed that we weren’t moving nearly as fast as we had on our approach to the Acadamh. At the top of the hills, the view flickered madly, hills dropping down ahead of us, light glinting off skyscrapers that were there and then not there, roads blinking into existence as they wound through trees that shifted and grew and shrank.
“We’re far enough away now,” I said finally. My voice rasped in my throat. We hadn’t talked all day, and neither had we stopped for food or water.
Daiman was leaning against a tree, clearly fighting to stay upright, but he shook his head. Whatever was driving him, he couldn’t bring himself to stop. It was clear that he’d keep going until he dropped. It was also clear that wasn’t going to be very long.
Which meant it was up to me to get him to do so. With many choice internal words about the ridiculousness of proud men, I sat myself down on the ground and nodded to a patch of leaves nearby. “Well, you can do whatever you want, but I’m not going any farther until I’ve rested.”
I closed my eyes so as not to see his protest, and after a moment I heard him slide down to the ground in defeat. I could hear his breath drawing into his lungs with a wheeze, and breathed deeply to avoid opening my eyes and reading him a lecture on working himself to death.
Neither of us spoke until night fell and the moon had just broken the trees. I had decided to let him speak first, and he’d been too locked in his own misery to do so until then.
“Everyone knew but me,” he said finally.
I was careful not to look at him. This, something told me, was the sort of confession that didn’t want to be acknowledged. It just needed to be spoken.
“It was right there,” he continued helplessly. “What Terric was doing. It was obvious. I was the only one who didn’t know. And that was just because I didn’t want to believe it.”
I broke. The self-blame in his voice was too much. “So you believed him. What does it—”
“People died,” he said flatly. “That’s why it matters.”
“Is that so bad?” The question dropped into the silence before I could stop myself.
His head jerked around, and I saw it all: the fear of who I was, what I had been—what I might be. The terrible fear of what he had enabled with Terric, and the way he wondered if he’d made the same mistake with me.
Something crumbled inside me and I looked away, fighting not to cry.
“I don’t mean it that way.” I spat the words over my shoulder at him. “I mean it exactly the opposite way: Terric made sure there wasn’t … another one of me. Maybe it doesn’t sound great when you talk about killing children, maybe in some black and white sense that’s wrong, but if someone had killed me when I was five years old, fifty million people wouldn’t have died in the plague I made.”
“Nicky—”
“No.” Saying it made it real, and I had to
make it real. I stood up. “So I saved a fucking rabbit. So I tried to save Sarah. That doesn’t wipe anything away. I have more lives to the red in my ledger than I can ever make up. You’re wondering what to do now? Well, I’ll make it easy for you: take me back, let them kill me for what I did, and keep being what you were. There was a good reason for everything Terric did.”
He said nothing, looking down at his hands for so long in the fading light that I had time to feel the anger bleed away and be replaced with fear. Then the anger came roaring back.
“What are we waiting for?”
He sank his mouth into one hand, clearly considering my question.
“You should get some rest,” he said finally.
“Are you going to tell me what you’re thinking?”
He turned to look at me at last, and I could see the confusion plainly in his eyes. “I don’t know what I’m thinking,” he said simply. He considered for a moment. “I won’t kill you in your sleep.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. I opened my mouth to say that if I was going to my death, I’d really prefer we start back now and get it all over with, and then I remembered that mass murderers didn’t really get to call the shots. I probably, I thought miserably, deserved every moment of fear I got.
I lay down on the ground, facing away from him, and stared into the underbrush sleeplessly.
“We’ll talk more in the morning.” His voice was so quiet that I didn’t think he meant me to hear.
I hunched my shoulders and said nothing. All I could pray for now was that sleep would claim me soon, so I didn’t have to think about this.
If I had known what was coming as soon as I closed my eyes, I wouldn’t have prayed so fervently for it.
16
It turns out that a veil across your memories is only so much good once you know the shape of what you were forgetting. When I was just Nicky, a girl who didn’t even know what her name was short for, the memories stayed hidden. Now that I knew I was Nicola, though….
When I was awake, I could turn my thoughts away, but sleep has a way of showing us the things we’re afraid of.
I saw jail cells, and my own wrist in manacles, and I knew the absolute terror of being powerless. I saw fire and heard screams, and I wanted to look away, but these were memories—and I had looked then, and I had to look now. I saw people die, people I loved, and I knew the absolute fury of being unable to help them.
I saw Philip, too, handsome and laughing, and I felt a flush of remembered desire when he stood by my side. I could sense myself trying to move, but I hadn’t moved then and I couldn’t move now. I couldn’t hear the words he whispered in my ear anymore, but I remembered the satisfaction, the sense that everything was coming together. It was a dark satisfaction. It was revenge, and I was lost in it, trying to beat my way out of the dream before the satisfaction seeped into my bones and I began to crave it once more.
At least I had enough sense to be scared of it.
I woke to weak sunlight and Daiman shaking me, and now that I could move, I yanked myself away from him out of instinct. It took a few panicked moments to realize where I was—and that he wasn’t Philip. My shirt was soaked with sweat and I brought my knees up to rest my head on them.
“Bad dream?” he asked me finally.
“Yeah.” Close enough. I wiped a sweat-soaked curl of black hair off my brow and pulled my ponytail out to make a new one. I’d kill for a bath.
And a whole new life, really.
“Well, we have to get moving.” Daiman looked around himself instinctively, as if the forest had ears. “I’m not the only Hunter who’s a druid—the forest will only keep us safe for so long.”
“So it isn’t really real. I wondered.” I looked around at the hastily-shrinking moss-bed that had sprung up beneath me while I slept.
He was distracted by that. His mouth quirked. “What’s real?” he asked. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
“I mean … part of the real world.”
“Which one is the real world?”
I gave him a look. “The other one.”
“Just because you can’t always see this one doesn’t mean it isn’t part of the real world.” His amusement was palpable, and he shook his head as he laughed silently to himself.
“What?” It came out harsher than I’d intended.
“It’s just, sorcerers are very … they only tend to believe what they can see and feel on their own.” He shrugged.
“How else are you supposed to live?”
“Listen for the things you haven’t noticed before?” He lifted a shoulder. “Remember, I wasn’t born with this. I had to learn to see these places.”
As much as it irked me to hear him talk down about me and my pragmatism, the conversation had distracted me enough to relax a bit. My heartrate was back down in a normal range, and, like a true dream, the images were fading enough that I could pretend they weren’t real. In a few more hours, I figured, I’d probably be able to convince myself of that.
What I’d do the next time I had to sleep, I wasn’t quite sure.
“Look, this is … ah….” Daiman blew out a breath. He was pacing, shoulders tight.
“What?” I reached out to take a skewer of meat—he’d clearly been out hunting before I woke up—and blew on it to cool it.
“Do you have any allies we could take shelter with?” He crouched down next to the fire and stared determinedly at the flames instead of me.
I stared blankly at him. “Are you crazy?”
“No!” He did look at me then. “I don’t know what to do. We’re being hunted, that much I know. Terric’s not likely to forgive this, and if he came out on top of that fight with Julius, you know he won’t have told anyone the truth about what happened.”
“Philip,” I murmured.
“What?”
“Not Julius. Philip.”
“Well, who is that?” He shook his head.
“I’m … not sure.” I lifted my shoulders helplessly. “Which makes it pretty irrelevant, I guess. He was one of my allies back in the day. That’s all I know.” This gave me ammunition, however. “And that’s the sort of person my allies were, so you see why it would be a bad idea to get involved with them again. Aren’t they the ones trying to restart the whole Black Death thing?”
“Yeah, which you might be able to talk them out of doing.”
I froze mid-bite. That was a good point.
It was also a terrifying point, and a moment later, my scared mind came up with a reason why. I swallowed a bite of food I hadn’t really tasted. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t remember much about them, and I don’t have any power. It would be too easy for us to get in over our heads.” I realized a second later that I’d assumed he was in this with me, and stumbled over my words trying to fix it. “Not that you’re necessarily—well, I mean—it would be even easier for me to get in over my head alone.”
“And I’m pretty well-known,” Daiman said wryly. “It’ll be enough of a chore to try to convince them that you’ve come back on their side, without trying to convince them that I’ve changed my stripes.”
I gave him a wry look. It should have come off as a humble brag, those words, but I remembered the fact that Sarah had recognized him without ever having met him.
“Why are you so well-known?”
To my surprise, he didn’t answer at once. He seemed almost nervous.
“I’m one of the only druids who joined the Acadamh,” he said finally. “I’m a good Hunter. I’m very good. I can find … most people. Right at the start, I didn’t track down many new sorcerers, I tracked down … your old allies. Nicola’s old allies.” The correction was awkward, too much of a distinction. “I’ve trained a few other druids to be hunters, but most druids prefer to stay out of everything. After the Assembly, and after Nicola—you—they didn’t want anything to do with the sorcerers. Terric didn’t care as long as they didn’t interfere, but it was a fine line. I felt like …
I had to be the best at what I was, to earn his goodwill for the rest of the druids.” He closed his eyes. “I wish I hadn’t.”
So Daiman Bradach was the scourge of the Monarchists, an enemy with powers they didn’t know how to fight, a man they knew as someone who came and killed without mercy.
The fact that we might be on a slightly more even moral footing than I’d previously thought, was less comforting than I expected it to be.
“Okay, so they hate you.” There wasn’t really a need to say anything more. “And you know Terric better than I do, I guess, so I’ll take your word for it that he’s on a warpath. So where the hell do we go from here?”
“Somewhere we can undo the block on your magic,” Daiman said bluntly. “And your memories. And I can’t do either of those things, so we have to make a choice between the Separatists or the—”
“No.” I cut him off. “No way.”
“I can’t think of anyone else we’ve got.” He talked to me like I was a child. “The druids can’t help you. They could hide you, but they … probably wouldn’t, between Terric not liking that, and who you are.”
“No, I mean—I’m not unblocking my magic.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He looked over at me. “You need your magic.”
“No. No, I don’t, and neither does the world. How’s everything been since I went away, huh? No more magical plagues.”
“Sure, just naturally-occurring ones, a few major wars, some nukes, genocide….” He crossed his arms. “You think you were the only evil in the whole world?”
“I was certainly someone the world didn’t need.”
“And now you’re someone the world does need,” Daiman shot back.
“Why? Why does it need me? Can’t someone else deal with Terric? And, if Terric didn’t win, Philip? Training me, letting it be known that I’m back, is only going to make the Monarchists bolder. There are going to be people who want me back, who want to use my powers for that plan. I’m not going to let that happen.”