Magic Below Paris Complete Series Boxed Set (Books 1 - 8): Trading Into Shadow, Trading Into Darkness, Trading Close to Light, Trading By Firelight, Trading by Shroomlight, plus 3 more

by C. M. Simpson

  Madame Monetti made it to the door, yanking it open and darting through before the raider could reach her. Marsh raced across the room and slid to a stop, bringing her buckler around before striking out with her blade.

  The raider caught her arrival from the corner of his eye and turned, just managing to parry the blade swinging across his body. He glanced back at the door and Marsh struck out again, forcing him back a step before catching his blade in a parry as she rammed her buckler into his chest, knocking him back against the wardrobe. Finding herself too close, Marsh shuffled two hasty steps back and readied her next strike.

  As the raider pushed himself off the wardrobe and back onto his feet, Marsh thrust forward, driving her blade through the center of his body before pulling it back out. Seeing the raider fall, she turned for the door, hurrying to catch up with Madame Monetti. There were three ways out of her office. Who knew which route she’d take?

  To Marsh’s surprise, Madame Monetti hadn’t left the room. She was standing in the center of it, facing a dark-cloaked figure.

  “Take me to—” she began in clear tones of command, but the figure wasn’t listening.

  It took a single swift step for him to cover the distance to Madam Monetti’s side and thrust a dagger through her throat.

  Marsh gave a shout and sprang forward, but the figure stepped away from the dead woman to disappear through a slender slit in the shadows. The gate was so narrow that Marsh hadn’t seen it. She bounded forward, but light flared in a wavery vertical line and her reaching hands found nothing. The assassin was gone, and he’d closed the way behind him.

  Marsh stepped back and cast a quick glance down at the woman she’d tried to save, but it was clear she was dead. That made Marsh’s next decision easy; she pivoted and ran back through the door to see how Roeglin was faring. It didn’t take her long to see he was in trouble.

  His opponent had the shadow mage backed up against a wall. Roeglin’s injured arm hung limply by his side as he parried dagger thrusts and sword swipes, and it was clear he couldn’t hold out much longer. Marsh didn’t bother shouting. She figured the raider had noticed her entry, and, if he hadn’t, it didn’t matter. He was going to die all the same.

  She did not hesitate, but thrust her blade into his back, stepping back to let him fall before lashing out to cut deeply into his neck. The man was dead before he’d made it all the way to the floor, but Marsh was already moving toward Roeglin. He looked at her and gave her a wobbly smile.

  “Help me out of here?”

  The sword faded from his hand, and Marsh released her weapons back to the shadows as she came alongside him. Sliding his good arm over her shoulder, she helped him reach the main office as Captain Guillemot led his squad back in from the third door in the room.

  “You found her, then,” he said, taking in Madame Monetti’s body, and then he noticed Roeglin. “What happened?”

  “There were raiders,” Marsh answered. “I took out one, but an assassin got through and killed Madame Monetti before I could get to her.”

  “Four,” Roeglin said, his voice thready and weak. “She took out four. I just kept them busy.”

  Then he slid sideways, his full weight almost pulling Marsh off her feet. She lowered him to the ground and looked at Guillemot.

  “I need bandages,” she said, and he glanced at his squad.

  Before he could say anything, one of his men shouldered his way to the front and knelt beside Marsh, inspecting the wound and pulling a threaded needle from the large satchel at his waist.

  “Ilias,” he said. “I try to keep them alive. Let me see him.”

  Marsh moved back, helping when she was asked and doing her best to keep out of the medic’s way otherwise.

  “Help me lift him,” she said when he was done and Roeglin’s shoulder was bandaged, but Ilias shook his head.

  “I’ve got my own packhorses for that,” he told her, and Marsh couldn’t help but look past him at the squad.

  He smiled when she frowned, puzzled because she couldn’t see the mules he was referring to.

  “Jonas,” he said as a stocky young man with a shock of dark hair and even darker eyes made his way out of the group and stooped to lift Roeglin from the ground. He was followed by an equally stocky woman with red hair and brown eyes. Ilias included her with a gesture of his hand. “And this is Lilian. She’ll take over when Jonas needs a break. I believe we have a journey before us.”

  As he said it, he straightened up and looked at Captain Guillemot.

  “Ready when you are, captain.”

  Guillemot spared Marsh a moment as he passed.

  “We’re camping at one of the abandoned farms. We can’t stay here. Couldn’t hold off an attack if we did, and I can’t be sure we got them all. Monsieur Gravine will be sending an escort tomorrow. We’ll meet them on the road.”

  He didn’t say anything else, just led everyone from the Monetti mansion out to the road, stopping briefly to speak to the small squad guarding the junction as he passed. They melted back into the shadows as Guillemot led his squad away, and Marsh was surprised at how well they’d vanished when she looked back.

  She was relieved when Mordan joined her, padding silently out from beneath a stand of calla shrooms. Marsh stayed close to Jonas, her hand resting lightly on the kat’s neck as they walked. She was glad of the big beast’s presence on a road that seemed suddenly empty without Roeglin’s companionship.

  22

  Poisoned by Shadow

  Marsh woke to the sound of hurried, quiet movement, rolling out of the bed she’d been given at the farmhouse on the way to Monsieur Gravine’s mansion. Silently she pulled a sword and buckler from the shadows, then hit the floor in a crouch and scanned the room.

  It was empty, but the corridor outside was not. Strangers passed her door as she cracked it open, and lamplight cast a golden glow in the hall beyond. It was the lamplight that made her relax enough to let her sword and buckler return to the dark, glad no one had seen her, even if the activity had her concerned.

  The strangers were all wearing the uniform of Monsieur Gravine’s Protectors, and she realized they weren’t strangers after all. She’d walked with them the day before, even if she didn’t know their names, and there weren’t that many, only two. Marsh stepped into the hallway behind them as they turned into the room beside hers—the one she’d watched them set Roeglin in before she’d been ordered to rest.

  She hurried to see what was going on and arrived in time to hear the medic speaking.

  “…going to need golden gleams, yellow moss, and lava weed,” he ordered, and Marsh stepped hastily aside as the two Protectors she’d followed hurried out of the room.

  One of them started when he saw her, and the other had her sword half-drawn before she recognized Marsh. Neither of them stopped to apologize, but rushed toward the stairs leading to the ground floor. Marsh waited until they were clear and then stepped into the room.

  Ilias had a basin of hot water beside him and was dipping a cloth into it. He looked up when he caught sight of her and nodded, wringing out the cloth and wiping Roeglin’s shoulder.

  “Raiders use shadow poison on their blades,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

  The man sounded disgusted with himself, but Marsh shook her head.

  “It’s my fault, too. I didn’t know, either—and I didn’t notice.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Ilias dipped the cloth again, rinsing it out before laying it over the wound. Roeglin groaned, and Marsh remembered how she’d felt after being hit by shadow claws.

  “We need Aisha,” she said, wondering if the little girl would be strong enough to deal with the poison on her own.

  Ilias looked at her.

  “She looks too young to be a trained healer.”

  Marsh shook her head.

  “She’s not; she uses magic to heal.”

  Now she had his attention.

  “Magic can heal?”

  “Yes.
” Marsh wished she had scars to show him from her own run-in with a shadow monster, but the magical healing she’d received from both Aisha and Lennie hadn’t left any. Apparently, when a healer thought about how someone should look uninjured, that was pretty much how they ended up…and she hoped Aisha never realized the implications.

  “How?”

  Marsh hung her head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve never tried?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  It was a good question. After all, wasn’t she the one who’d asked why a shadow guard had never tried to fix the things he broke? She stared at Ilias, and he stared back. Roeglin moved restlessly in his sleep, his face flushed, and Ilias gestured toward him.

  “Even a little bit would help.”

  Marsh sighed, trapped by her own thoughts—and haunted by the Master of Beast’s revelation: “Not everyone can do every kind of magic.” She’d already found it was true for her and charging the glows. Ilias nudged her.

  “It’s okay if you can’t.”

  Marsh shook her head.

  “It’s not that. It’s just that I don’t know if I can.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  And there he was, pushing her. Marsh scowled. He was also right. She hated it when the folk giving her a shove were right. Hated letting them down even more.

  “No doubts…”

  It was more a whisper than anything else, but Marsh heard it echoing through her mind.

  “Won’t work…with doubt.”

  They both turned toward the bed. Roeglin’s eyes were glowing with faint wisps of white, and sweat sheened his forehead. As they watched, the white faded and his eyes drifted closed.

  “Try…” was barely a sound, but Marsh heard it clearly in her head.

  Ilias looked at her, and Marsh drew a deep breath and let it slowly out.

  “Let’s do this thing,” she said, injecting as much confidence into her voice as she could. “You want ta give it a whirl?”

  “Me?”

  “Sure, why not? You’ve never done magic before?”

  “Never thought to try.”

  “It’s easy, like opening a gate. Someone once told me that everyone had the ability.”

  “But how?”

  “Take a deep breath, understand that you can, and let the magic know what you need it to do.”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  Marsh gave him a feral grin and used his own words against him.

  “You won’t know until you try.”

  There’s my girl.

  It worried her that this time she only heard Roeglin’s voice in her head, and even then, it still sounded thready, but the pride she heard there… The absolute confidence…

  She turned to Ilias.

  “We can do this,” she told him, and together, they looked at the wound.

  For a moment Marsh thought she might be imagining things, because it looked much worse than it had when she’d watch Ilias bathe it a few moments ago. The medic caught her look.

  “Shadow poison,” he said. “Once it takes hold, it’s very difficult to defeat.”

  There was something she hadn’t needed to know before trying a brand-new kind of magic.

  Quit stalling!

  For a man as sick as he was, Roeglin was awfully chatty. Fine.

  Marsh made herself take a good close look at the deep slice the raider had made in his shoulder.

  “We need to pull the poison out of that, right?”

  “Oui.”

  “I’ll start with that. It comes from the shadows, and I can talk to the shadows, so this part I should be able to do.”

  “And what do I do?”

  Marsh thought about what Aisha and Lennie had both said.

  “You know how that should look when it’s healthy. Picture that in your mind and ask the magic to fix it.”

  “Just like that?”

  Marsh thought about scolding him but figured he didn’t need to know that his doubt could stop him. Instead, she gave him a nod. When she replied, she offered him absolute confidence.

  “Oui—just like that. Ready?”

  “Oui.”

  Ilias looked down at the wound, but Marsh was already reaching into the shadows. If she was honest with herself, she didn’t have a clue what shadow poison might look like, but it was killing Roeglin, which meant…

  She had to be the biggest idiot in all the Deeps!

  Dropping the shadow threads, she pulled on the magic that helped her sense the life around her, but this time she focused it on Roeglin’s life force. She didn’t just want to see if it was there; she already knew that. She wanted to see…

  Marsh hesitated. What did she want to see? She felt the magic waver in her grasp and scrambled for an answer, wishing she had someone to guide her. But she didn’t, and Roeglin needed her, so… What was it she needed to see?

  The poison. And how did seeing a life force help with that? Ha! Because the poison weakened it, nibbled at the edges, and she’d know what to ask the shadows to help her find. She’d also know when she had a grasp on it because she’d be able to see it when it left the wound.

  Finding her focus was easy when she knew what to look for. Looking at a life force this way was different than just finding out if one was there. It was more…intricate, like looking at a map of the caverns—and the poison was everywhere.

  There were thin tendrils of it spreading out from Roeglin’s shoulder down into his chest and up into his head. It was a wonder he could talk to her. Marsh concentrated, feeling the rush of power as she reached for the shadow she could see within the poison. Shadow, right?

  The wound connected the shadows in Roeglin’s blood to the shadows in the room. Marsh wondered what it would be like to wield a blade of poisoned shadow, to call all that deadliness to her hand. What would it be like to have it protect her instead of threatening those she loved?

  If she could pull the shadows to her hand…

  Marsh focused, her heart thundering as she called the shadow poison out of Roeglin’s body. She held her hand out, watching through a blend of shadow and life as the dark threads inside the shadow mage wove their way out of his head and away from his heart until they made it back to his shoulder, then flowed through the air to her hand.

  She remembered one very important thing at that moment.

  Shadow poison was a poison, and it harmed on contact!

  “Merde!” she whispered as the darkness she had called coalesced into a short, thick-bladed dagger. She realized she couldn’t release it to the shadows around her or it would harm anyone who came into the room.

  She should have just left it to pool. It was poison, right? It came out as a liquid, a sticky substance. She could just wipe it off. Looking around the room, she saw nothing she could use, except for the clean blanket on Roeglin’s bed. Marsh hesitated. Who knew what it would do to the blanket?

  The skin on her palm started to burn, and Marsh decided the blanket was a better place for it than her flesh. She leaned over and dropped the blade on the bed, dismissing the shadows she had called from the room and commanding the shadowed poison to find a home among the blanket’s threads.

  All of it, she insisted when some of it wanted to cling to her hand. All.

  It left, settling onto the blanket, which was whisked away as soon as the last of the residue had flowed from her palm. She could still feel the burn of it and she felt mildly ill, but it didn’t matter. The poison was gone, and Roeglin breathed easier. Beside the bed, Ilias sat, staring at his own hands and looking at the clean, whole skin on the shadow mage’s shoulder.

  “How did you know?” he asked, catching Marsh’s eye.

  “Know what?”

  “That I could do that?”

  Marsh gave him a long look, thinking about how to reply. In the end, she decided to go with the truth.

  “I didn’t.”

  Ilias’ jaw dropped. “You didn’t?”


  “No, but I knew the stories, and I hoped, because you’re a medic for a reason, right? You chose it, didn’t you?”

  Ilias nodded.

  “I always wanted to heal.”

  “So, a big part of the magic seems to be that the person wants to wield it. The other part is that they have a need to.” She indicated Roeglin, who now slept, the sweat drying on his face and his color returning to normal. “Tell me, could you have saved him without it?”

  Ilias’ face reddened, and he looked down at the floor.

  “No,” he admitted. “Never have been able to save anyone poisoned by the beasts. First time I’ve ever seen it delivered by a blade, though.”

  Anger burned through Marsh, and she sat on the end of the bed. Before she could say anything, Ilias spoke again.

  “How did you do it?”

  Marsh explained what she’d done with the shadows; how she’d sensed the life force and then read it, and how she’d called the poison out of the wound.

  “It’s not shadow, you know?” he said when she’d finished, and Marsh felt her skin go pale.

  “Not even a little bit?”

  Her voice sounded plaintive even to her, and a small smile curved the medic’s lips.

  “No, but if that’s what you needed so you could see it and pull it out of there, I’m glad you did.”

  “Not shadow?” Marsh’s voice shook. “Then what is it?”

  Ilias shrugged.

  “You’ll have to ask one of the rock mages,” he said, “or an apothecary; someone who knows medicines and poisons.” He paused. “I’ll do it the next time I talk to one of mine.”

  Marsh was glad she was sitting on the edge of the bed because she didn’t think her legs could hold her. What had she done?

  “Found another kind of magic.” Roeglin’s voice was weak, but amusement lurked in its depths. “And then blended it with shadow magic to make it work. Tell me, how do you feel?”

  Marsh looked at him, puzzled as to why he would ask—and he repeated the question.

  “How do you feel?”

  It took Marsh a moment to realize that she didn’t feel as fatigued as she usually did. She felt more alive and awake than ever.