Algardis Series Boxed Set

by Terah Edun

  Good energy only went so far, and with each day, the twins grew paler—which was why Mae was ignoring the shaming looks her sister was giving her and pouring all her energy into her search. Even as Richard’s snores in the corners grew louder and she had the feeling that the sun was rising in the morning sky. Of course, the room they were in had no windows, so she couldn’t prove it.

  But it felt like time was slowly ticking by as she grew more and more desperate to save those two lives when nothing else would or could. Before she could give up, Mae felt a firm kick on her booted foot.

  She jumped, slightly startled, but refused to give Ember the respect of speaking face to face. Without looking up, Mae snapped, “Kind of busy here.”

  A deeper voice than the one she was expecting answered, “Seems you’ve been at it all night and into the morning, then.”

  Mae bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from saying something that wouldn’t do any of them any good.

  Instead, she looked up with weary eyes to take in Richard.

  “While you slept the night away, I’ve been diligently searching for the incantations,” Mae said, too tired to filter her response.

  “And have you found anything?” a bored Ember asked.

  When Mae spied Ember out of the corner of her eye, she was astonished to note her sister had a half-knitted sweater in her lap and was starting on the sleeves. Had Mae really been in her own world for that long?

  As if to answer her unasked question, Richard reached out and placed his hand atop the grimoire. “You’ve been at this for two nights running now. It’s time—”

  But she never got the chance to learn what it was time for. Because his hand, splayed across the pages, began to glow with a bright yellow flare. As Mae watched, it felt like her heart stopped. But instead of disappearing, the glowing only grew brighter.

  “Something’s happening!” Mae cried out in absolute shock.

  She sat up so fast that she almost dislodged the book from her lap, but instead she scrambled to keep a hold of it while she watched Richard’s body react to the pages in a way she had never seen before.

  The glow grew brighter, and with it…Mae’s amazement.

  “What now?” Richard asked in an unsteady voice.

  “Now, let’s see if it’ll respond to you,” Mae said in a voice so light that it was as if she was trying to not breathe. She didn’t want to disturb whatever was happening.

  “How?” he asked—for the first time in long while his voice was humble.

  Mae shrugged. “See if the text can open up to the incantation we need?”

  “You still believe your cure is there?” Ember asked aghast.

  Mae shot her ironic look.

  “Considering this—don’t you? Maybe I just wasn’t the person to find it first,” she said.

  Ignoring their banter, Richard furrowed his brow and began to page through the grimoire. He kept manually turning and turning the pages with nothing happening but the glow in his hand continued.

  After a few tense minutes Ember said, “Try thinking of the casting you need to initiate.”

  Mae looked over at her and blinked.

  “What made you think of that?” she asked suspiciously.

  Ember shrugged and looked away as she muttered, “Just a thought.”

  Still they weren’t have as much luck the other way.

  Mae nodded at Richard as she gripped the book tightly. It was her find after all and anything dealing with the grimoire had to go through her was how Mae saw it.

  Obediently Richard seemed to furrow his brow and actually take a second to focus.

  “Okay,” he said as he closed his eyes.

  It wasn’t even seconds later that the pages started fluttering of their own volition.

  They were slapping his hand as each leaf rose up and fell back under its weight.

  “Move your hand,” Mae said eagerly. “Just up a little bit.”

  He did and with the barrier of his flesh gone, the pages began to slowly ease towards the opposition side. Before all their eyes they watched as the book searched within its records at his mental command.

  Before long, Richard was cursing and shaking. “I’m not doing anything else, I swear it.”

  “I don’t think you need to,” Mae said, both envious and amazed.

  It was wondrous to behold as he lifted his hand, and below Richard’s glowing palm, the text began to flutter. Subtly at first, and then it was like a wind hit the grimoire. Mae sucked in a sharp breath as she watched this magic happen. Each page flitted by so fast that she didn’t have time to read the words, going faster and faster, until, abruptly, the grimoire stopped moving of its own accord and fell open to a pair of pages.

  “It’s real?” Mae said. She had believed, of course, but to see her hopes come to fruition was something else entirely.

  Even Ember had decided that this was worth getting up for. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  They were all looking down at an incantation with the title Recuperation Cure-all for all those aggrieved by the Wasting sickness.

  Just reading that brought moisture to Mae’s eyes. It took a few moments to somewhat sink in that she could cure her siblings now, but when it did, Mae just kept repeating the same words over and over again, louder each time. “It’s real, it’s real, it’s real!”

  She got so loud at one point that both Richard and Ember attempted to hush her and stop the hysterics. The only way they got her to shut up, though, was by warning that others would soon be by to see what the commotion was about and ruin Mae’s little secret.

  When she had settled down, Richard coughed and said, “It looks to be what you said it would be.”

  Every eye in the room was currently devouring that page. Mae was looking for the ingredients needed to cast the incantation. To her surprise, not much was called for. The burning of white ash mixed with equal amounts of the common dill weed, and—most interesting of all—the combined power of three mages, two male and one female, to burn the blight out of its victims.

  “That’s impossible,” Mae said.

  “What is?” Richard asked.

  Just as he did, he began to pull back his hand and close his fist. That was the wrong thing to do. The text on the page immediately began to jumble and fade simultaneously.

  “What is going on?” Mae said. “Stop it!”

  She was half talking to him and half talking to the grimoire.

  Of course, neither was really listening to her, and the incantation was disappearing before her eyes. Frustrated, Mae pawed at the grimoire, but nothing worked. She looked at Richard, who grimaced, but lowered his hand back to the page. The text returned, and so did the lines Mae desperately needed to make this work.

  She knew that this grimoire had decided their destinies were intertwined. She needed Richard to see this through. Ember less so, but Mae had the feeling the thing would start self-combusting if her sister left the room, which meant they were all in this together.

  With very different parts to play.

  17

  “We need to figure out how this works,” Ember said.

  Typical Ember—going from wonder to immediate analytical processing, Mae thought.

  For Mae, however, this wasn’t a puzzle to disentangle and rebuild—it was instead a mystery with far-reaching consequences. What did it mean that Richard had been able to make the grimoire activate and not her? Seeing him unlock its treasures with just a casual touch drove her to distraction. Especially after she had spent so long working through this grimoire herself.

  Ember said thoughtfully, “Notice the words disappeared as well as the ingredients?”

  “Yes,” Mae said, turning her head slightly to give her sister at least her partial attention. That was when something went wrong. Mae had been going over the incantation in her head just as a precaution in case they couldn’t get it back after several tries when she realized she’d been reciting nonsense the whole time.

  “What in th
e world?” Mae muttered.

  Ember looked at her. “What?”

  Mae’s suspicion kicked up as she flicked her eyes anywhere but at the pages, and still nothing was forthcoming, and she had memorized entire sheets of music before. Some slight scribbles were nothing for her usual recall abilities.

  Deciding to take a page out of Ember’s preferred handbook, Mae tested the theory. “Does anyone remember what the words of the incantation say without looking down?”

  Ember, for once, didn’t question her. She was silent for a moment, and Mae saw thoughts fly swiftly through her head, her eyes moving back and forth fast, and her mouth opening to speak before abruptly closing with a cl-i-ck.

  “Oh,” said Ember with round eyes.

  “Yes, oh,” Mae said icily.

  There was only one other person to question. Mae poked Richard in the side.

  He grunted and looked down at her. “What?”

  “Recite the incantation.”

  As he looked down, Mae snapped her fingers just above the grimoire.

  He blinked and looked back up at her with angry eyes. “So I forgot a few words. I’m not a trained bear.”

  “That’s not the point,” Mae said. “None of us can without looking directly at it.”

  Richard didn’t look impressed. “So?”

  “So, this is part of the tome’s defensive systems,” Ember said. She even stepped forward to prevent Mae from erupting at him.

  Just because it was a fight she wouldn’t win didn’t mean Mae wouldn’t start it. Her sister knew that and still often took her side, or even let her argue her rage out. Someone else wouldn’t give Mae that courtesy.

  “But why?” Richard asked, looking back down at the text that had riveted them all.

  “Because of the power that the—” Ember started.

  “So help me god, if you say dark magic, I’ll scream,” Mae muttered.

  Ember ignored her. “—magic will bring down upon us. It’s preventing us from remembering the necessary lines of the casting without having a proper mage who can unlock the grimoire present.”

  Richard looked blankly at them for a moment.

  “That’d be me,” he said finally.

  “Yes, that would be you,” Ember said.

  Mae sighed and rubbed her head. The idiocy of having to rely on him. He didn’t believe like she did, that there was a cure. None of them did. But here they were, and there was nothing they could do about it.

  As the glow around his hand continued undimmed, Mae had to face reality, that he was the key to unlocking its secrets and not her. She was tempted to pull another cousin into the room to test her theory, but exposing someone else to her foolhardy plan would not only result in another individual who could be punished for illegal casting, but also add a fourth person who knew all her plans as well as she did. That was a third person too many in Mae’s estimation—any one of them could potentially reveal her secrets to the elders before she had a chance to hatch her plan.

  So, she put the idea aside. At least partially so.

  “Ember,” she said. “Come over here.”

  Her sister didn’t move. She kept pacing like a nervous bird while she stared at the revealed incantation as if it was a curse instead of a blessing, a cure that would finally do away with an illness that had haunted generations of their family and taken so many souls.

  “What is wrong with you?” Mae said. “I have an idea, if you’d just move over this way.”

  “No,” Ember said.

  “Why not?” Mae said, exasperated.

  “That is dark magic, and I want no part in it,” Ember insisted when she finally stopped pacing long enough to say something.

  Mae looked to Richard to see if he had any interest in intervening in this conversation. But he had closed his eyes and was humming while standing stock-still in the middle of the room. If Mae didn’t know any better, she could have sworn he was trying to tune them out. Which meant no help from his quarter. That was just fine. She had just thought that the only person with any real magical training in this room would have wanted their voice heard, but not this time. Though Mae couldn’t exactly blame him—it wasn’t like she’d actually listened the last time he’d spoken up.

  Ember apparently took her silence as assent, because she said, “It’s how it’s always been Mae—you know that and I know that, so if you mess with—”

  “There’s dark magic and there’s magic we don’t understand,” Mae said. “Now that Richard has revealed certain secrets of the grimoire …I think we should reserve judgment.”

  A sharp cackle emerged from Ember as the aforementioned relative kept right on ignoring the two of them as if they all stood on separate islands—mute, deaf, and blind to one another.

  “Reserve judgment until what?” Ember snapped. “Until we unleash it and it devours us all, you mean.”

  “Of course not,” Mae said. “But I at least think studying the actual incantation is worth a minute or two, which I am trying to do.”

  Mae realized then that she was whining, so she abruptly shut her trap.

  “You have no earthly idea what it is you’ve come across,” Ember said. “So, don’t try to persuade me that you know better than me, Maeryn Darnes. We stand staring at the same text, reading the same words.”

  “If that is so, then you should realize that this is the closest we’ve come to a cure since our great-great-uncle thought he could make an ague tonic out of pine resin from the local forest,” Mae said heatedly. “And you as well I know that his ‘cure’ only prolongs the inevitable. This is a miracle in comparison.”

  “It’s not a miracle, it’s a curse,” Ember said, staring at the text warily.

  Her judgment was clear, but Mae was nothing if not determined to change Ember’s mind, however she could.

  “No, it’s not,” Mae insisted. “And if you would stop being a nincompoop, you would see that.”

  Emotion rippled on Richard’s face for the first time in a long while, as if Mae’s personal insult had triggered something in him that the rest of the argument hadn’t.

  He stopped whistling and said, “Now, there’s no call for all of that.”

  Mae laughed, actually laughed, as she turned toward him. “Now you want to speak up? Go back to being a neutral island, you lump.”

  She whipped back toward her sister. Mae wasn’t worried about Richard’s response. He had made it clear he wanted as little as possible to do with real-world implications, aside from placing his hand where it was not wanted.

  The most passive job out of all of us, it seems, Mae thought. Just like a man.

  Still, she was smart enough not to say it out loud. Even her stubborn cousin had his limits. Besides, it was Ember who had gotten the most indignant out of the three of them.

  “I am not the idiot you think I am,” Ember said.

  “Then why, for once, can’t you just do things my way?” Mae asked.

  “Because your way is in complete disregard of the rules that prohibit parties just such as this from forming.”

  “Rules are meant to be broken!” Mae said, throwing her hands up in frustration.

  Ember gave a laugh and shook her head. “I’ll never get through to you.”

  “Likewise,” Mae responded. “But I’m not the one insisting something as innocent as white ash mixed with dill weed is going to conjure some mythical destruction.”

  “Oh, and what about the mages needed to invoke the incantation? The woman? Who ever heard of a female working complex magic?”

  “That is precisely what I’m trying to test out,” Mae said. “And you know as well as I do that there are stories of female mages in the past. Just because it was a work of a woman doesn’t mean it is dark.”

  “I know no such thing,” Ember said. “What I do know is what is taught, what has been taught to us our whole lives, is that our sex is not the one who does good with magic. We do not protect our holding, we do not invigorate the harvest, and we certainly do not
conjure cures.”

  “Then what do we do?” Mae asked. “Because I’d sure like to know.”

  Ember swallowed deeply. “We support those who do.”

  “What if that’s not enough for me?” Mae practically screamed.

  Richard apparently thought they had gone a step too far. He waved a hand. “It may be breaking into early morning, but someone will eventually hear you and come investigate.”

  “That’s exactly what Ember wants,” Mae said.

  “No,” Ember said. “I want you to think about what it could mean if you try to invoke an incantation, a dark one, no less, with individuals of unknown powers.”

  Mae laughed. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  Ember was silent as if waiting for her to continue, and Mae obliged.

  “If this makes it possible to save Samuel and Rachel’s lives?” Mae said. “I would risk it many times over.”

  And she meant it.

  “Maybe if we could just…ignore…future activities for a moment and focus on what we know,” Richard said. “There’s an incantation, and we can decide to use it or not, but if we do not, it’s perhaps best to bury this book back in the library and forget we ever had it.”

  “No one asked you for your opinion,” Mae said. She didn’t even like the suggestion of putting the grimoire back where it belonged.

  “Seeing as I’m the only one in this room who can active this particular objective,” Richard said icily, “I think you’d better realize where your bread is buttered.”

  Mae rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t discount his logic.

  He still didn’t move, though, so at the very least, his curiosity about the material was outweighing his aggressive desire to leave and forget it all. Even Ember, who seemed opposed to everything about the plan, wouldn’t forget the grimoire. It was lodged into the psyche of every person in the room.