The Second Sister (The Amendyr Series)

by Magdon, Rae D.

  Belle's mood was terrible the next few days, far worse than mine, and she often made sharp comments, criticizing herself for being so powerless against Luciana. I reminded her that she was not powerless, only concerned for my safety, but I worried that my words did not penetrate her mind. Her conscience was driving her mad.

  “I have thought about giving up my inheritance,” she informed me during one of our stolen whisper-kissing conversations in an empty room. Seeing her had lightened my spirits, but I could tell how horrible she felt.

  “You mean you want to leave?” I leaned on one of the walls to take some weight off my sore feet. Luciana had asked me to wear the wooden shoes the day before, and Belle cleaned and massaged my feet that night. Of course, that gentle, healing touch had escalated into something far more intimate. I flushed at the memory, trying to ignore the heat flooding over my skin.

  “I would take you with me,” she said. I breathed deeply, relieved. “I just thought that Luciana might leave us alone if I left her the Baxstresse fortune. The money would make finding you seem less important.”

  “It wouldn't matter. She would assume you were plotting against her if you left and she would spare no expense to find us both.”

  “Not if we hid.”

  I sighed, recalling how many times I had thought of the same argument myself. “Do you want to spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders for her? That's hardly a life at all.”

  Belle moved her hand to her slick forehead, pushing back her hair. The thick summer heat still lingered around Baxstresse, even though it was well into the middle of autumn. It permeated even the inside of the stone manor, and we were all dehydrated and tired. The two of us were quiet for a long time and we both listened to make sure we were alone, each with our own thoughts.

  “I would rather live peacefully in poverty with you than in luxury with Luciana hovering over us,” she said after a time, taking my hand. She placed a gentle kiss on my knuckles, and I glanced toward the door, afraid that someone would see us. “It's all right, sweet girl, no one saw us.” Still holding my hand in hers, she glanced down at my feet, which were wrapped underneath the protection of my shoes. “How are you feeling?”

  I could not help smiling at Belle, touched by her concern. “Better. My feet are mostly calloused now. I have gotten used to the pain, but I'm worried she will try something worse next time.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Belle's eyes clouded, and I felt her hand grip my fingers tight enough to drain the blood from them. “I promise to protect you from her.” Looking at Belle's face, the twisted set of her mouth and the moistness of her eyes; I had to take her in my arms, not caring who saw us.

  “I love you,” I said, stroking Belle's white face with my knuckles, our bodies pressed close.

  “I have let her hurt the woman I love for too long. You could have been killed falling off that ladder. I will never let anything like that happen to you.” I knew my lover was lost in herself, and I did not try to bring her back. I just held her for the few moments I was allowed, wishing desperately that things were different, but overjoyed that I had Belle.

  ***

  I saw even less of Luciana during the following week, and my world seemed brighter. She did not come to the kitchen to torment me or abuse Cate. None of us saw her except at mealtimes, and even then, she looked strangely pale. Some of the magical glow about her had disappeared.

  When I finally saw her alone, the circumstances were so strange that I thought I had imagined them until I saw the proof of the encounter on my hand. I noticed her walking into the kitchen just as I was going out, having washed the last of the plates and silverware. I froze in the doorway, almost knocking into her, knowing that Luciana only visited the kitchen to play her sick games. I looked at her hands, expecting to see the wooden shoes. One was held loose at her side, but the other clasped an object I could not see.

  Keeping my expression guarded, I looked at her face, lips parted in surprise. Luciana looked back at me in a daze, her eyes wide and filmed over. Her skin was a strange purple color, enflamed and bruised looking. I could feel heat coming off her body from several feet away. Clear beads of sweat clung to her forehead, streaming down her neck and into the collar of her dress.

  I stepped closer to her, and burning energy slid over my skin like scalding water, making me take in a sharp breath. I suddenly realized what was causing the intense heat—magic. I had never felt so much magic! It was thousands of times more powerful than the pleasant flush of warmth I felt when I talked to Jessith or the horses. This magical energy was uncontrollable, leaking out of Luciana and on to me.

  Luciana lurched forwards, letting out a hoarse cry as she nearly fell on top of me. I managed to push her weight away, letting her collapse onto the floor. Something bright spilled out of her hand, skittering a few feet from her side. The heat coming from Luciana vanished, and she lay twitching on the floor, shocks rolling through her body.

  I bent down to see what she had dropped and caught a glimpse of a silver chain. The three-ringed pendant was familiar. I reached out a hand to pick it up, but the links burned my fingers as soon as I touched it, and I dropped the chain again. I stared at my palm, which was starting to turn an angry red color, completely shocked. Like a thousand tiny sparks searing holes through my skin, the magic burrowed into the flesh of my hand, humming in my bones. Using the material of my dress to cover the fingers of my other hand, I reached for the chain again, but Luciana was faster. She managed to roll over and grab the chain before I could grasp it.

  “Mine!” She clutched the burning metal to her chest, seemingly immune to the heat. “You will not have it.” She heaved herself to her feet and ran off like the hounds of hell were at her heels, leaving me alone to pour cool water over my blistered hand, trying to make sense of what I had just witnessed.

  ***

  “She did what?”

  “Ran out of the room and left me standing there,” I repeated. Belladonna's expression was disbelieving. This time, she had been the one expecting to make love, but I had started talking before she could confuse me with kisses. It had been hard to resist the sight of her stripping out of her dressing gown. The obvious longing in her eyes when she saw me made my heart pound in my head, but the frightening scene with Luciana in the kitchen was still fresh in my mind and my fear overpowered my arousal. My impression of Luciana had changed completely. She was not just cruel, she was insane.

  “Let me see your hand again.” I heard the concern in Belle’s voice, and I wanted to reach out and smooth the worried wrinkle between her eyebrows with my thumb, but I let her take my hand in both of hers and turn it over. I shivered, gritting my teeth as she peeled the dressing away from the raw skin of my palm. “You say the chain did this? The chain that Luciana took from my mother?”

  “Yes.” Repeating the story did not make me angry. I could scarcely believe it myself, and I could not expect poor Belle to take it all in right away. “What I don't understand is: where was the magic coming from? Luciana or the chain? Luciana felt fevered, but her skin did not burn like the chain when she fell on me.”

  “I have never heard of an ordinary object burning someone or creating its own inherent magic. Usually, someone has to channel power through it, like a magic mirror.”

  “Well, this object was far from ordinary.” I tried to pull my hand out of Belladonna's grip, but she brought it to her lips and brushed an impossibly light kiss over the skin. It should have hurt, but strangely, the pain seemed to ease.

  “How do you know that what you felt was magic?” Belle asked, staring at me curiously. “It's not like you have any experience with it. Neither of us are Ariada...”

  For some reason, the word did not seem dirty coming from Belle’s lips. I blushed fiercely, not knowing how to explain my secret, but feeling compelled to share it with her. I had already shared my heart and body with Belladonna, and it seemed wrong to keep things back from her.

  Surprisingly, Belle guesse
d before I could tell her. “You are Ariada, aren't you?”

  I felt my breath leave my chest. Tears flooded my eyes and I blinked to keep them back. “Would you hate me if I was? Would you reject me?”

  “No,” Belle insisted. “You think I care that you are Ariada? I could never reject you! But why did you keep it a secret?”

  I pressed my lips together, unsure how to answer. “I didn't want you to stop loving me.”

  “You didn't trust me.” Belle's voice was flat and devoid of emotion, and it made my heart tear. She was right. I had not trusted her. Her pained expression made sense.

  I stepped forward, taking Belle's wrist in my uninjured hand. She stiffened at the touch, still hurt. “I know it's a little late, Belle, but I want to tell you. I am Ariada. I can talk to animals. That is my gift.”

  She smiled at me weakly, the fresh pain between us beginning to recede. “You can talk to animals,” she said, testing the idea. There was no fear or disgust in her face or her voice, only leftover sadness and perhaps a spark of curiosity.

  “Some of them have very interesting things to say. Jessith in particular is always...” I paused, trying to searching for an adjective worthy of my friend, “opinionated.”

  Belle raised her eyebrows, and her tight posture relaxed. “I should think a cat would be. Is Rucifee entertaining as well?”

  I groaned. “You have no idea.”

  Satisfied with my apology, Belle took me into her arms again. “Of course, now that I know that you can talk to animals, I will pester you and ask what they are saying every time we see one.”

  The idea actually appealed to me. It would be a pleasant change to share my gift instead of being secretive about it. “Well, right now, Ellie says she would very much like to kiss you.” My eyes lingered on Belladonna's lips as I spoke.

  Tipping my chin up with two fingers, Belle pressed gentle kisses to the freckles on my cheeks and the corners of my lips before finding my mouth. Several moments later, while both of us breathed heavily, she said, “Belle says that was a good idea.”

  Relieved that Belle and I were back on good terms, I hurried to show her how appreciated her acceptance was. Thoughts of Luciana were put aside for the rest of the night.

  My sleep was not peaceful. I was trapped in a dream, the kind where you know you are dreaming, but cannot escape.

  I was standing before Luciana, but she was frozen in time, her shoulders as stiff and lifeless as her face. I touched her skin and it was cold. My eyes were drawn to the chain that hung around her throat. The pendant was on it.

  The three circles pulsed and rippled, growing larger until they were the size of my fist, my head, my entire body. Soon, the gigantic pendant dwarfed me, leaving me to stare up at it helplessly. Luciana had disappeared behind it. If she was still there, I could not see her. The flat surfaces of the pendant's metal rings grew dull until they were almost black, and I saw—or thought I saw—movement inside them.

  With horror and disgust, I realized what the pendant looked like. It was a huge, bulbous eye, staring ghoulishly at me through the thin metal. I stumbled back, wanting to run far away from this horrible thing. A strange voice, so old that its layers sounded like many voices tied together, spoke through the eye. “I am awake. I see you.”

  When I stopped screaming, Belle was holding onto me. Both of us were crouched down on the cold floorstones, and the sheets were tangled about our legs. Somehow, I had fallen off the bed. “Ellie?” she whispered frantically, stroking my hair and rocking me like a child. “Ellie, what is it?”

  It was a long time before I gathered enough courage to tell her about the dream, and an even longer time before either of us fell back asleep. When we did, my sleep was dreamless.

  CHAPTER 6

  “YOU KNOW, IF YOU have a question, the most sensible place to look for an answer is in the library.”

  Belle and I had stolen a few moments together on the second floor, next to the tapestry of King Faron of Amendyr on a wild boar hunt. Running with him were several wild-looking creatures, each more fantastical in appearance than the last. “Sometimes I wonder if you love that library more than me,” I complained. The only thing larger than the Baxstresse library was Belle's admiration for it. Occasionally, I found Belle's fascination with the place wearisome, but I could not help being enamored with it, too. So much of my relationship with Belle had been formed there. The companionable hours we had spent reading together by the fire, the secret moments I had stolen with Belle's diary, the first kiss we had shared, which had led to so many more firsts.

  “Only a little. You have to admit that it knows more than we will in ten lifetimes.”

  “And does nothing with that knowledge but collect dust, which I am usually the one cleaning. Do you know how often Sarah and I are in there, keeping things in order?” Truly, I did not mind cleaning the library, although I did have a tendency to blush when I passed the fireplace. Sarah had even asked me if the heat was making me feel unwell a few times.

  “Still, it's worth looking, don't you think? There must be a book about magic and burning chains on one of those shelves.” I turned away from Belle, whose flushed face was capturing a little too much of my attention, and glanced sideways at the tapestry. One woman—at least, she had the face, shoulders, and breasts of a woman—was piercing the side of the boar with her spear. Where her ribcage ended, a huge, bulbous black body was set over eight spider's legs.

  If they truly existed, the Liarre lived on the other side of the continent next to the sea. Since Amendyr rested between Seria and their kingdom, no one I knew had ever seen them. Many Serians claimed they were not real. I never had cause to think about them for longer than a passing moment, and I did not know if they actually existed. I was certain that Belle would know. There were supposed to be many tribes of them—spiders, wild dogs and cats, horses, and even giant lizards.

  “…can find it, I am sure.”

  I blinked, drawn from my thoughts by Belle's comment. “The place is hopelessly scrambled for the most part. If you want to dig through all of those books to find what you want, feel free. No one ever said that I needed to categorize the books. Dusting them takes long enough.”

  Belle's forehead lifted and she looked almost reproachful as she stared down the line of her nose at me. “I know where everything is in that library. It's perfectly easy to find what I'm looking for.”

  I almost choked on the laughter that spilled from my mouth. “What? No! Be serious...the place is in shambles. Admit it.”

  “Never.”

  “Go and look for our mysterious burning chain, then, and show me when you find it.”

  “Fine, I will. And when I do, you'll owe me a kiss.”

  I should have known better than to issue Belle a challenge. Three and a half hours later she was shoving a very thick book with the title Elementary Majicks under my nose, somehow managing to wave the heavy thing in my face. “There! Right there, the second paragraph...”

  This is what I read:

  One of the most difficult objects of power to create, a focus object, more commonly known as a sorcerer's chain, was once considered a standard magical tool for Ariada in the Kingdom of Amendyr, less than half a century before the Serian explorers put an end to most magical development in the eastern half of the continent. A focus object allowed magic to be infused within the object of the caster's choice—usually a thick chain, orb, or ring. This magic could then be recalled instantly at a later time, usually during a duel, without directly draining the magician's energy.

  The amount of magic within a focus object depends upon the endurance and experience of the Ariada that has created it. Theoretically, a focus object can be used by anyone with magical ability, although they might easily lose control of someone else's magical energy, particularly if they are inexperienced. However, in reality, almost all focus objects were enchanted with a familiarity spell, allowing them to recognize the original caster and rendering them useless to anyone else. Upon touching a
focus object, any living being is able to sense the magical energy, often feeling a strange vibration or slight warmth caused by the agitated state of the contained magic. If unused for a long period of time, perhaps over the span of several years, the magic will gradually leave the focus object and return to the earth, leaving the chosen item in its former state.

  Chains remained the most popular form for focus objects until the High Ariada fell after the death of Kamen Thyr, because of their light weight and concealable size, while rings fell out of fashion, as they were easier to misplace and harder to properly fit to the magician's specific finger size...

  “Slight warmth?” My voice cracked as I looked up from the book. “My hand is still blistered from touching that thing. Whatever Luciana's got her claws around must have the magic of ten Ariada in it.”

  Belle's expression turned thoughtful as she examined the page I had read. “Maybe whoever it belonged to was a very powerful sorcerer?”

  I shook my head, dismissing the notion immediately. “No human could be that powerful. Besides, this book is talking about sorcerer's chains, or focus objects, or whatever they are, in the past tense. I've read about the High Ariada before, but didn't they exist centuries ago?”

  “About half a century before the Serians came. Amendyr was left weak without them. That is why Seria gobbled up half the continent so easily before the Amendyrri Ariada that were left held them at the Forest Pass.”

  “What about the eye I saw? It must be a part of the chain. Was it just a dream, or was it magic?” Belle looked slightly overwhelmed by all of my questions, but I continued anyway. “Why has this chain suddenly appeared now? If it is so old, why hasn't the magic gone out of it? Why is it so strong? And how did the vile thing get into your great grandmother's hands?”

  Belle took the book from my hands, closing it and tucking it under her arm. “I don't know, Ellie. Maybe this book will tell me more. It refers to other texts in many of the chapters, and I might spend some time reading those as well. I want to find out as much as possible about this chain before Luciana discovers a way to use it against us.”