by Terah Edun
Summoning strength and courage she didn’t know she had, Mae replied, “I know that saving the children means everything. I’m ready.”
“Good girl,” the foreign mage whispered in her ear and let her go.
Then Rivan cleared his throat.
“As much as we’re all enjoying this little pep talk,” Rivan said drily. “We’ve all got magic swirling in stasis about us. It’d be better if we get going before it combusts and we’re left hollow wrecks.”
Mae focused on the first part of his sentence as she said, “We?” with uncertainty.
Donna Marie shot a frown at Rivan that Mae almost didn’t catch before turning to Mae with a bright smile.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she cooed. “I made a bargain with the Cross Guard leader. The guards he sent along with us also happen to be mages. How lucky for us!”
Mae raised an eyebrow and looked across the table at the two men with impassive faces that she had thought were just hired thugs.
“The spells call for more than three?” Mae asked uncertainly. That wasn’t what she had been told.
“It can hold more than three,” Donna Marie said with a brilliant smile. “And of course with the more mages working alongside me to undo this illness hovering over your family, the faster it can get done.”
That was all Mae needed to hear. She nodded eagerly.
“Okay,” Mae said as Richard was starting to look physically sick to his stomach.
She had no idea what he was so nervous about. He looked like a cat surrounded by a pack of dogs he was so frazzled.
To prove that she was ready, Mae quickly went to the cabinet where she had stashed the remaining supplies and handed them over silently to the closest mage guard. He took the satchel solemnly and began unpacking the goodies onto the platform table.
The foreign woman didn’t wait. She eagerly began separating the supplies and putting them in ceremonial places around the room. She even lit two of the braziers in the room after grabbing ashes from their base. Mae wasn’t sure if the fires that burned cheerfully now were for warmth or effect though.
Either way it didn’t matter, she could tell it was nearly ready when Donna Marie stopped puttering around and looked over her set-up with pride.
“Well, that’s it,” Donna Marie said solemnly as she dusted off her hands and stood. “Mae, if you’ll stand here.”
She indicated a point on the floor outlined by the ashes from the room’s brazier and some of the vegetation Mae had picked up in her quest through the fields.
Stomach in knots Mae followed her command without complaint.
This was what she was here for after all.
After giving her a long look, Richard came to stand on the opposite wall from her. Still within direct eyeshot of her but out of the way now that his part was through. She almost wished he hadn’t come over her way. She was tired of his judgmental looks but she was strangely glad of the company. Of not being alone.
Maybe that was why he had come over.
To give her some comfort even in his doubts.
That dream was dashed like a fallacy when she looked over at him standing alone in a corner as she stood alone in the center of the room and he glared at her.
Not able to let it go, Mae asked him in a short tone, “What?”
“I thought you had your priorities straight is all,” he muttered. “Family first and always.”
Mae stiffened. “Everything I’m doing. Every single thing is in service to my family. Don’t ever question my priorities again.”
He looked away and Mae couldn’t help feeling that in moving forward with this despite the stern objections from her only family present, she was doing it wrong. Although she wished she could convince Richard to stay on her side, she had tried and he wasn’t reachable. So she too looked away.
Mae knew she could stew in his discontent for ages or she could take her hope and certainty and turn it into a strength.
As she tried to put a positive spin on it almost being over, she realized to her surprise that it actually helped. Even though he hadn’t meant it to, Richard’s doubts showed her that she was on a righteous path. That if she didn’t speak this into existence then no one would. So she straightened her shoulders and focused on letting herself relax. She wanted no problems to appear and to let Donna Marie pull back the cage that locked her gifts was the first step in that ritual.
Funnily enough she stood still in the center of a silent room that had been focus of her anguish so long that she didn’t know how to wrap her thoughts around the idea that it would also be the location of what would save her.
It didn’t help that it was hard to visualize an end with her father, stepmother, and the siblings still being gone. Presumably out in the gardens soaking up one more scrap of sunlight and some fresh air before the children were carried inside to this dungeon of horrors where they would lay trapped again surrounded on one side by ineffectual family steeped in prayers and on the other by blood relations who were schemers out to steal their very life forces in secret.
Mae could not let that happen again.
She wouldn’t.
Before she could get herself worked up again the foreign woman walked over to her and blessed her forehead with wet ashes.
Then she began chanting.
There was no lead up to the magic that started to pour out of Donna Marie’s hands.
Maybe she didn’t want to give Mae time to grow nervous or she was already mid-preparation and couldn’t stop but now that it had begun Mae felt some of the stress in her heart ease.
It was finally happening, Mae thought gleefully.
The foreign reached out to grab Mae’s forearms with a soft grip and Mae saw the glow of her form spread like warm honey from Donna Marie’s elbows, down through her arms and out through her hands directly into Mae’s own. The power spread like liquid and crawled up her body like a snake searching for something. Before long, the only thing Mae could see as she looked down was the glow settling over her chest in a large pool. It wasn’t exactly the most reassuring thing to look at. It looked like she was being eaten alive by silver blob.
“Relax,” coached Donna Marie, only once breaking her chant to help Mae through the process.
She also briefly let her hands drop from Mae’s forearm upon seeing Mae’s determination to see her work clearly and used her hands to tug open Mae’s tunic with her magic, parting the fabric like it was water. It was kind of fun to watch the threads unravel before Mae’s very eyes in a sharp V over her chest until she realized her entire chest was exposed with only a thin band of cloth to protect her.
Donna Marie chuckled, apparently at the panicked expression on her face, and waved her left hand still filled with magic. A silver shimmer settled over Mae’s front in a sort of short dome. It covered her front while still allowing Mae to look straight down at the wonderous glow of Donna Marie’s magic settling over her chest.
When the foreign woman was done, she squeezed Mae’s forearms and Mae smiled weakly back.
That hadn’t been so bad.
As she finished the chant, Donna Marie looked over at the mage guards and nodded. They began working with some materials that Mae could only catch a glimpse of out of the corner of her eye. As she looked into Donna Marie’s eyes with a reassuring smile, Mae wondered what if anything was different. She certainly didn’t feel unlocked.
The dumbfounded look on Richard’s face said otherwise however.
“Look down Mae,” he said in a strangled voice.
She did so and noticed that in the minute she had looked away the brilliant glow which had settled as a blob was no longer there. At first, she stared at what she could see of her chest in incomprehension. When she gasped and looked up at Donna Marie with tears in her eyes and then back down at again as if she couldn’t take her eyes off it, the foreign woman tilted her head up again.
“Would you like to see the full effect?”
“Yes,” Mae said in a strangled tone
.
Donna Marie gave her a mysterious smile and then she stepped back.
With her opposite hand she swirled a finger in the air in the shape of an oval. She traced the same oval in the same spot three times and with each whirl the glow of her magic held in place mid-air began to shine brighter.
When it reached peak intensity the glow of the perimeter of the oval swept toward the center and the light met in a brilliant flash. When Mae blinked to keep from being blinded, she opened her eyes to a silver mirror hovering straight up in front of her.
As she looked ahead, the mirror revealed that her form alit with magic. Glyphs trailed over her chest, down her waist, up her arms, and over her shoulders. Everywhere but her face and below her waist looked to be covered in them. As Mae turned around the glowing script didn’t just extend down her arms and over her stomach it was all along her back as well. Just like the men she had seen the night before.
But instead of her inked tattoos standing out against her paler flesh like black swirling scripts, they now glowed as hot and intensely bright as the stars in the night sky.
Mae turned to Donna Marie with wonder and extraordinary fear in her voice as she choked out, “What did you do?
“If you mean the spread of the tattoos themselves?” Donna Marie asked with an inquiring look.
Mae nodded.
“Then nothing,” Donna Marie said. “Your family hid the majority of the tattoos covering the rest of your body from mage or mundane gaze. I just made them visible.”
“They’re beautiful,” Mae said as she traced the script all along her arms.
“They’re a cage,” Donna Marie immediately spat out in a voice at odds with the benefactor mage she had come to know.
Mae looked up in shock and Donna Marie’s harsh visage immediately transitioned into a kinder look.
With a reassuring smile and a wink she added, “One I will free you from.”
“Right,” Mae said with uncertain awe.
“This is just the beginning,” Donna Marie said with a satisfied look. “Now we’ll complete the second step alongside the casting ritual to remove the illness.”
25
Donna Marie prepared to step away but just as she did, she asked, her voice dripping with amusement, “What is with your cousin? He looks like he’s about to have a heart attack and we haven’t even begun the casting ritual.”
“Just…worried,” Mae muttered to the foreign mage. She couldn’t take her off the glow trailing up and down her arms like the prettiest vines.
Mae didn’t bother to tell her that Richard wasn’t nervous to practice magic, with or without her present, he just didn’t think the ritual itself was going to have safe end goal. She didn’t need to know that. As family they had already worked out their differences and she had won. Richard may have been furious but the code of the Darnes line said that the senior family member present took control as representative.
Mae was surprised he had ceded dominance to her in such a public-facing arena but she had the feeling it was much about covering his own butt with possible deniability than there being any chance he thought Mae could be right.
She shrugged. As long as they were moving forward, she didn’t care.
Then she didn’t have any more time to worry about Richard. Because her parents returned into the room carrying her siblings into the sickroom themselves.
The children were practically young adults now and certainly getting too big to be carted around by a mother and father they would soon outgrow in a few years. But for now Mae saw serenity in both of the adult’s eyes as each held one of the kids.
Serenity that disappeared the moment when her father and stepmother realized they weren’t alone in the room. They both dropped their private content smiles and looked to the small group that had gathered at the back of the sickroom.
“Mae what’s this?” her father asked in concern.
“Yes Mae,” Richard muttered under his breath. “Tell him exactly what’s going on.”
Mae felt her words hitch in her throat. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this! Her father wasn’t supposed to be present and neither was her stepmother, not when she looked like a glowing candle with her tattoos lit up brighter than the morning sun for all to see.
The first thing her parents demanded as they got closer and after setting her siblings down on the platform where they usually took their rest was, what she had done with her chest? Mae realized her fabric was permanently torn apart and she was only covered by Donna Marie’s silver sight shield. Which is what had caught her parents’ eyes presumably.
They couldn’t see her chest but they could see the rest of her body and they knew something was up before even being told about the situation. Still Mae squared her shoulders and gamely focused on convincing them of a plan she could barely sell herself on.
Mae’s mouth was dry as she started to speak. She didn’t know what else to do but dive into it. There was no other choice.
Walking up to her father quietly as she could, she tried not to quiver in misery as she told him what she’d been up to. From the moment she had stolen the grimoire from her grandmother’s private collection to the seconds before when she’d allowed Donna Marie to strip the casting that her family had long ago instituted which kept her powers locked down. It wasn’t out of fear that she was miserable though, it was being seen as less than the person who he thought she was. Being seen as a liar, a cheat, a betrayer.
When her father said nothing, just stood there with open devastation written on his face Mae switched to a new tack. Anything to get him to look at her with less hurt in his eyes.
Tears in her eyes as she tried to get him to see the good in what she did, Mae said “What would you have done? We’ve been waiting for years for a cure! No cure is coming.”
“So you went behind our backs?” her stepmother asked in a shocked voice a little off to her right.
It was the wrong thing to say and the wrong time. Mae felt like a wounded animal on display and being stripped bare before everyone’s eyes. She lashed out without thinking, hoping to inflict pain and honestly hoping everyone else would just go away.
“I didn’t ask you!” Mae cried out as she whirled around and yelled at her stepmother.
Pained silence descended over the room. Mae even caught a disappointed look flicker over Rivan’s face as she recognized what she said.
Holding out a hand, Mae dropped to her knees and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
Fortunately her stepmother was a forgiving type of woman.
Because she didn’t turn away from Mae, although she didn’t take her hand either.
Sympathy pooled in her stepmother’s eyes as she clearly tried to understand what Mae was going through.
Her father however was less forgiving.
With stone in his voice, he looked down at her as he took her stepmother’s hand in his own and said, “You’re never to speak to her out of turn like that again. She raised you as much as I. We both question your judgement here.”
“I know papa,” Mae muttered miserably as she shrunk in on herself as she fiddled with her loose sleeves like a child and wondered when this torture would be over.
Fortunately Richard elected to speak up at that moment.
Mae was grateful if only because it provided a distraction from her abject humiliation.
“I think that you’ve managed to intervene in a fortunate time,” Richard said brown-nosing for all he was worth. “We haven’t done anything that’s irreversible. We just need our own family mages to step in and correct this.”
Mae swallowed deeply. It was a bitter pill to accept but it was true. She hadn’t actually accomplished anything and the gifts unlocked by one mage could be re-locked in a collective ritual by others.
Her father didn’t answer Richard.
Instead he looked down at his second oldest daughter with distress on his face.
But his voice when he spoke was firm.
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“Maeryn Darnes you will lead us into the chamber of the Council of Elders and you will come clean about everything that has happened,” her father said without a drop of sympathy.
“Yes father,” Mae muttered miserably. She knew there was no chance now of the ritual being completed and the only thing she had to look forward to was what inhumane punishment the Council would inflict on her for this indiscretion. She’d never done anything so severe that she’d had to be sentenced by them before.
They only dealt with the worst crimes.
Her stepmother said faintly, “Husband…if she goes before the council with this, they’ll crucify her.”
“Maybe she deserves it,” Mae heard Richard mutter and she flinched so hard she might as well have been cut to the bone.
No one among her family corrected him for saying what they were all thinking.
“She’ll have to take what they hand down,” her father said while brooking no argument. “We can’t save her from this.”
Her stepmother was silent and when Mae looked up at her from where she knelt on the floor, she saw heartbreak in her stepmother’s eyes. It made her feel even more like a miserable turd for saying what she had to the woman who had raised her with so much love her life.
“I understand I must be punished,” Mae said quietly while speaking to both her parents. “I just wanted you to know that I was trying to give my siblings a chance.”
At her words almost everyone turned to look at the silent and still children in question that were lying on the cold platforms. Unmoving, unhearing, unspeaking as usual. Mae didn’t even know if they had such a thing as spirits who hovered in the room but if they did Mae would like to think her siblings were looking down on her kindly for making such a valiant effort to look after them.
It hurt all the more to know that they still remained in the land of the living for now but they would be shades before much time had passed.
Her father cleared his throat. “Nevertheless you were wrong and that is the end of this discussion for today. Now get up and take your proper place.”
His orders were clear. She was to stop talking immediately and let him get the rest of this sorted. Mae did as he bid, even lowering her head in an attempt to not draw more attention to herself.