by Terah Edun
His tone changed as he continued with an almost-plea, “We’re on your side!”
“I wouldn’t exactly call threats and coercion being on my side,” Mae cried out.
“I’ve never threatened you,” Rivan replied harshly.
“You will,” she yelled out without thinking.
“Not if you trust me,” Rivan snapped in a voice as he rushed over to her with flashing eyes.
She leaned back from his glaring presence but she didn’t back down either. As if he could bully her into submission.
As if, Mae thought dismissively.
“I didn’t have a choice from the start,” Mae shot back, feeling troubled as to where this conversation was going. “You and Donna Marie are the only capable people I could find on short notice who could get this mage triangle to work.”
“That’s all this is?” he asked. “A plot of convenience?”
“Yes,” Mae readily replied back as her heart pounded. “I needed you. You needed me. Nothing else, nothing more. We’re not friends, we’re not family, we’re just particularly unlucky that fortune forced us together.”
“For the better of your blood,” Rivan noted icily.
Mae nodded hesitantly, unsure exactly if he was talking about the same thing as she was.
But he seemed to drop it and sighing with relief, so did she.
For the time being they were mages working together in secret and hoping fortune favored the bold.
17
For a moment Rivan stared at her and he was still.
His eyes searched hers like he was unconvinced and if he stared long enough, she would be to.
The trouble was Mae was already rocking on a shelf of self-doubt and voicing any such concerns aloud would simply send her mountain crumbling. So she firmly pinned her lips together and refused to reveal anything at all.
Finally Rivan said slowly, “If that’s what you want to keep telling yourself, sure.”
“That is what I know,” Mae said firmly nostrils flaring.
Even if she had her doubts her foundation in her family was unshakeable. It had to be to get past this. To confront the evil she saw rooted in the core, expose it to the Council of Elders, and then help her family heal and move on was of paramount importance to her. She couldn’t do any of those things if she thought the core of the family that she depended on, that she could never doubt, were in fact part of the problem.
Everyone needs someone to believe in, Mae told herself quietly. My father is mine.
As her eyes swept up and she felt some of the tension inside of her ease at that quiet affirmation, something else changed. Something outside of her control. For a moment it was like the heat in the room flared. Out of nowhere the temperature increased and she was sweating buckets.
“What was that?” Mae asked as she looked around spooked, not quite sure what was happening.
The heat kept rising and Mae began fanning her face with her hands as she breathed heavily looking around for the source. The door out to the gardens was still open but that wouldn’t explain this sudden rise in heat inside. It wasn’t even midday when the temperatures were hottest.
“Do you feel that?” Mae asked in complaint as she turned around and around in the room like a crazy person. But no matter where she looked, she didn’t see anything that made sense as a source. Even reaching out with the back of her hand to test touch the platform, the medicine cabinet, and the platform-bracketing nightstands showed no accompanying rise in heat. The wood of all three was certainly cool to the touch. Mae began to sweat profusely as she shook her tunic to generate some air currents. In the space of a minute she was sweltering so hard that she was ready to strip and dive into the nearest lake which wasn’t really an option right now.
Maybe the bathhouse later? She mused to herself in fantasy. She knew she already was covered in filth. To add a stench from the sweat was just asking a young woman to endure too much.
Speaking of endurance Mae looked over at Rivan to see just how uncomfortable he was in comparison. She felt like she was standing the middle of a swamp instead of what should have been a cool castle room on the lowest floor. Oddly enough Rivan didn’t look the least bit affected. He wasn’t even glistening with sweat.
“Did you feel that?” Mae asked again, feeling sillier by the minute but it was getting hotter by the second. She couldn’t discount the uncomfortable sweltering heat all around them and neither he could. Not if he was the least little bit sane.
After hearing her repeat herself he didn’t try to disregard what she’d seen and felt. He actually validated her feelings.
“Of course I felt that,” he said with smug satisfaction.
Mae stopped trying to wipe the sweat off her brow and looked over her shoulder with narrowed eyes.
He sounds like he approves, she thought to herself in absolute disbelief.
Looking over at him she could believe he did and what’s more, this was his idea of a practical mage joke to punish her which only riled her up more instead of curbing her stubbornness.
“So, what now? you think that just because I don’t agree with you that you can bully me!” Mae accused with fire in her eyes.
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Why would you think I have anything to do with this?”
“Oh I don’t know; it could be the fact that you’re a mage and it feels like an inferno in here with no fire present?” Mae said drily as sweat dripped into her eyes and she seriously thought about making a break for the garden. The only thing that delayed her movement was the faint worry that it would be even more miserable outside.
Rivan snorted. “Doesn’t sound like you’ve learned anything this past week in my opinion.”
“I can see and feel just fine,” Mae said steamed. “And what I feel is a heatwave in this small room. I don’t know what I could learn from that though.”
“Then I’d say you have a problem because you’re practically blind,” he sneered in her face.
Stabbing a finger in his chest she started to shout, “What is that supposed to…”
But she never finished because for the first time he looked actually effected. Though not the way she was. Rivan slipped back from her touch and looked down in disbelief. He saw the same charred fabric that she did as he quickly lifted his head and gave her an incredulous look.
Though that transitioned in an entirely different expression when he realized what had happened. Mae was looking straight down at his front and saw flesh turned bright red, still angry at being burned before the skin puckered and scarred with new growth.
“I.. I don’t know what just happened,” Mae stammered.
“That burning spark from flames!” Rivan crowed in absolute delight.
Mae shifted. She didn’t see any specific flames but she couldn’t deny the result was quite literally a burn mark on his chest.
Trying to latch onto any explanation that seemed reasonable, she started to ask, “Did you do it? I mean…”
Her words trailed away as Rivan cut her off with a sarcastic snort as he replied, “Did I what? Did I burn myself?”
“Well,” Mae said uncertainly as she looked around the room empty of anyone else but the two of them. “It wasn’t a shade and if it wasn’t you, there had to be an initiation source of some kind. Yet I don’t see one.”
“Funny that,” Rivan said with all the wit he possessed. “I think the initiator is right in front of us and to be clear, I did not do this to myself.”
“Well then what was it?” she asked stumped.
Rivan tilted his head to the side and eyed as if she was the queerest thing he had seen in a long time.
“What?” Mae finally snapped.
“Your people are the strangest I’ve ever encountered. They’ll have the answer right in front of them and do their utmost to deny it could be the answer,” Rivan finally mused to her.
“If you’ve got an explanation for the burn, I’m all ears,” Mae said to him with annoyance. “But I’m not interes
ted in being patronized to.”
He gnashed his teeth together as if extremely frustrated and she jumped back at bit but she was too slow as he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her forward in irritation.
“Look Maeryn Darnes,” he snapped. “Just look. All the answers you seek are right there.”
His grip was so strong that she couldn’t shake it as he reached with his other hand to pull the edges of the hole now in his clothes aside and she saw not just scorch marks on the fabric but a confirmed burn growing redder by the second on his skin. She winced and tried to look away but something even more curious caught her attention.
Inside the burn mark that she could see through the fabric, the mark was curiously the exact size and shape of her fingertip.
Mae’s jaw dropped in amazement.
“It can’t be,” she barely breathed out.
“It is,” he said with pointed glee. “That is your powers making its presence known.”
For the moment she wasn’t frantic, she was strangely calm as she examined the hole and tried to see what he saw, the way he saw it. It was little bit like voluntarily taking a trip into a mad bin but she would do it if this got her answers…and he’d let her go.
Why are all these foreigners so weird? Mae thought to herself as she kept fanning her forehead with her free hand, trying to cool herself down. I know magic is amazing and all, but not everything is related to its presence.
“Why would my supposed powers flash me with a heat wave?” Mae snapped at him in irritation fed up with this trick or whatever it was. “It doesn’t make sense anyway. You two keep insisting that my gifts are locked behind the tattoo collar’s casting and yet somehow I have magic that’s just appearing out of nowhere in random times?”
Rivan hissed under his breath and let her go. Only to start pacing in front of her as he carded his fingers through his own hair.
“How do I explain aural property theories to someone who doesn’t even understand the basics of magical foundations?” he groaned aloud as he looked up into the sky for invisible answers.
Mae crossed her now free arms in annoyance.
“Why don’t you start with the small words?” she said as she held her forefingers together in a pincer shape to emphasis the size she meant. “I learn pretty fast I assure you.”
He lowered his head and looked at her out of the corner of his eye.
“Alright,” he said with a long-suffering sigh. Apparently missing the huge amount of sarcasm laced liberally in her words.
Still Mae didn’t stop him. Despite his arrogance she was interested in learning and despite her aversion of the two tutors who had dropped into her lap, at least Donna Marie and Rivan treated her as capable unlike the magical instructors who had devoted days of time to her male relatives and none to her or Ember or countless other girls located in the greater holding.
Holding his hands apart this time, Rivan approached her with eagerness on his face.
“Every person has a sort of bright magical energy about them,” he said. “If you have perceptive properties in your skills, you’ll be able to see it. The energy sticks close to the body in a cloud-like formation.”
“The glow,” Mae whispered to herself.
“What was that?” Rivan asked sharply.
“Nothing!” Mae quickly said. “I was just thinking aloud.”
She didn’t want him to make fun of her for using the wrong term and she certainly didn’t want him to think she was going to lap up whatever he threw at her without checking it first. She’d look into the glow she’d been witnessing in occasional insistences on her own time.
Slowly Mae asked, “So seeing this cloud means what? Even if I have magic and that’s a big if, only powerful mages can just transfer energy without casting an incantation.”
“That is usually the case but the aura about each mage can become charged with the manifestation of the physical properties of their gift,” Rivan explained. “What most mages call their inherent gift.”
That actually sounded familiar, although she didn’t tell him that. She had been paying attention carefully when speaking to Donna Marie after all.
“So every mage has an inherent gift tied to their aura?” Mae guessed.
“Not always,” Rivan admitted. “Only the powerful ones who don’t have to rely on casting incantations from scripts.”
“I suppose you have one then?” Mae asked dryly.
“And Donna Marie,” Rivan added without a shred of humbleness.
Mae narrowed her eyes. “Donna Marie?”
“Yes, the woman who is at the center all this?” he said while acting puzzled. “A little taller than you? Cracks funny jokes.”
Mae rolled her eyes as her mouth went dry.
“I was just having a conversation with her,” she said while not playing his game. “Funny your theory about my aura and lectures on it came right after I had a substantive talk about it with a woman with one in this very room.”
“What’s your point?” he asked.
“My point is that you’re a freaking eavesdropper!” she exclaimed. “You were listening in when she pulled that aura bit. Is this some sort of game for the two of you? Some hilarious plan to get me to roll over on my family because it amuses the foreigners to mess with the poor, provincial girl who doesn’t know the difference between being a mage and a nobody?”
Rivan’s expression changed then.
He went from open but a bit exasperated to wholly cold in seconds as an unsettling wave of magic descended between them then that Mae had never felt before it. It was like coming up against a barrier that she couldn’t see but most certainly could feel. It was electric and sharp, with the faintest brush against her skin that whispered of pain as sharp lightning-like prickles lit up her skin and goose bumps stood up all along her forearms.
As fear rolled through her as Mae wondered with wide for the first what Rivan’s inherent gift was.
Because whatever that inherent gift happened to be, it felt like it would blast through her and send her body into a void before it was through.
18
Mae might have been despondent at the moment but she really, really didn’t want to be swept out into the darkness of a void like so much trash. She tried to speak but the wave of power that had crested over her had rendered her mute. Every movement, even the slightest twitch of her fingers, brought more pain.
The only thing she could do was plead silently at Rivan with her eyes.
Please, please, let me go, Mae prayed.
She didn’t know if he heard her words or more likely read her expression for what it was, desperation. But the suffocating bank of charged energy flowing over her body began to dissipate. As it died down, she felt it rolling off her skin with little shocks that lingered like kisses that wanted to be more.
Mae shivered in revulsion.
The very air felt alive and like it wanted to eat her.
When it was gone, she couldn’t help taking a heavy breath and covering her mouth with her hand to stop herself from crying out in relief.
It only took seconds and Rivan never even blinked the whole time until it was through. As he pulled back his gift, because she was sure it was his, his expression changed to morose regret. Even a bit of fear seemed to cross his face, though she had the feeling that was more about her turning from him than a reaction to his own display.
Mae however was feeling more upset than she was anything else.
“What was that?” Mae demanded with horror in her voice.
Rivan balled his hands into fist and looked away.
Through a tightly clenched mouth he said, “Nothing.”
“Nothing, nothing?” Mae cried out.
“I don’t know, maybe it was a passing casting by one of the male members of your family,” he muttered unconvincingly.
Mae scoffed. “Don’t be a fool, I grew up around these people remember? That power came from inside this room and honestly it was more I’ve ever felt before from a
nyone.”
He shrugged. “You live in the middle of nowhere. I’m not surprised.”
“You’re also not denying it was you,” Mae pointed out, not in the least swayed by his attempt to insult her background and change the subject.
Rivan glared at her.
“Would you let me if I tried?” he demanded.
“Not a chance,” Mae said as she rubbed her hands up and down her arms. She was trying to soothe her irritated flesh. Because right now it felt as sore as the day she’d landed in a clump of stinging nettles and spent all the evening picking the spiny hollow hairs out of her arms and legs.
Not willing to be cowed Mae asked quietly, “What are you?”
He turned and glared at her as he snapped with a hint of brutishness, “I’m a mage.”
“No,” Mae said. “According to you I’m a mage. Whatever that was…that wasn’t what I am, what I feel like.”
He shook his head wearily. “You have no idea what you are. You have no idea who you are.”
Mae stuck out her lip.
“That’s not true,” she immediately said with a mulish look. “I’m a Darnes.”
He gave a small laugh. “And what is that? A bloodline stuck in its ways. That hides its craft for half its descendants at best and sucks it out of them at worst?”
Mae winced at that description. He was a little too close on the mark with her suspicions for her to be comfortable. Seeing her hurt, he did look sympathetic as he reached out a hand to touch her, presumably in comfort.
But Mae accidentally flinched away. Mae wasn’t sure if he saw that.
Or maybe it was he finally recognized her pale face awash with fear because he dropped his hand so quickly that she didn’t have time to cover her mistake.
“Never mind,” Rivan muttered while hiding his eyes.
Shame wasn’t a good look on him, and Mae felt for all the world like she was the monster when he briefly glanced up and she got a full look at the pained expression that was on his face. But she couldn’t get over what she’d felt. She didn’t have much to compare it to but he’d dropped his shield around her often enough for her to know that there was something different about him. Something she didn’t understand.