by Anna Holmes
“I…knew that.” She swaps my hands and spreads my fingers, hunting for the scars in the webbing made by the very poorly placed awl. She winces when she finds them. “Did you feel it?”
“No, and if you can believe it, I was more worried about the figurehead. So Father comes in to find that I’ve accidentally decapitated this wooden mermaid who even without a head is taller than I was—I was maybe twelve at the time—and he just looks at the head rolling around on the floor and me sprawled on my backside in the wood shavings and bleeding and says, ‘Well, son, woodworking isn’t for everyone. There's always the magic to fall back on.’”
“Really? You've got a tool poked through your hand and that’s….”
I chuckle. “You’ve met him. He isn’t one for bluster.”
“One wonders where you get it, then,” she teases.
I try to laugh again, but it sounds more like someone’s slid the table into my gut. “That’s entirely my mother. The magic and the bluster.”
My eyes catch on the blue edges of the webbing cradled in her hand, the faint traces of her light showing through. The light seems to shift, blur the edges of my vision like fog. I tilt my head, squint, try to focus.
All at once, the core of me seems to drop away, like plunging into water. The white tablecloth, the red candle, the wax dripping, pooling. If it stains, I’ll be in for it. Again, Alain, she snaps, her voice everywhere and nowhere.
I can’t. I can’t light it anymore. There isn’t any more magic left in my tiny body.
There is always more magic, she snarls. She reaches out and grabs my arm. The blood within it tingles, slow at first, then faster, faster, too fast. Hot, sharp pain as the flame bursts to life between my fingers.
Her hand, still clutched around my small wrist, both so very, very blue.
“Alain?”
I blink hard. Caelin is gripping my hand, smoke curling from my fingertips. Her eyes dart over me. I don’t even need to look. I know. Blue. “Sorry,” I get out.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine.” It’s not very convincing.
She watches me a moment longer, then pulls her chair around the table to sit at my side. I pick my head up to look at her. Caelin holds the side of my face in her hand, attempting a smile. “Talk to me,” she exhorts.
I push out a breath and try to gather my thoughts and my energy at the same time. It’s about as successful as trying to grab fistfuls of fog. My chest stays tight and my face warm with something. Irrational anger, embarrassment that I did better magic when I was eleven, the memory of the flame, irritation at not knowing what the something is. Caelin tilts her head questioningly, and I release my bunched up shoulders, and with them words I didn’t know I was holding onto. “I’m just—worried that this is how it’s going to be from here on.” She starts to shake her head, and I head her off, a lump rising in my throat. “Caelin, there’s something you should know. About my family.”
Immediately, she's leaning forward again, not eagerly, but urgently. What I did manage of my dinner tosses around my stomach a little. “What is it?” she prompts gently.
It’s not a story I want to tell. I have so many others about my clumsy self, or my father’s dry wit, or Elle’s many accomplishments. I stare at the shade of my hand once more where it rests next to my fork, try to find some of those big words she likes pointing out. Even little ones would do. “I don’t want to spoil this evening,” I say at last.
She reaches around the dishes to grasp my still-warm hand, tracing the line of the webbing that spreads between my thumb and my palm. “You are very talented, love, but I don’t think even you could pull that off. Tell me.”
I nod slowly and try to take in air and push out the words I’ve been trying not to say to myself all day. “Elle has—”
The curtain is yanked open and our until now very private, safe little corner of the restaurant is filled with a booming voice. “There you are,” Prince Tightpants nearly bellows. My head sinks forward of its own accord, my fingers grasping Caelin’s possibly a little too tightly. He’s still here? Daryon whacks me in the back hard enough to jostle the table with my sternum. “Oh, you do not have to bow to me, friend. I am only stopping by.”
Caelin’s other hand wraps around my wrist. “Prince Daryon, if you’ll excuse us, we were in the middle of a private conversation.”
“Oh, my apologies,” he says, pulling the curtain behind him. “There, that’s better, yes?”
It would be, if he were on the other side of it, but his buffoonish grin indicates telling him so is absolutely pointless. Caelin sets her jaw and looks at the ceiling for the briefest of moments before turning back to him. “Perhaps we can speak tomorrow.”
“See, that is the problem,” he says. “I am coming to speak with you every day this week and every day, it’s another time, I am busy, and our conversation is much delayed.” He beams at her expectantly. “You see my problem, yes?”
Ordinarily, I’d keep my mouth shut. It’s the smart thing to do. Maybe it’s the reddish tinge to Caelin’s glow or the adrenaline of our own much delayed conversation, but whatever the case, I turn and use the inch of height I have on him. “I barely see her, Your Worship. So I’m sure you can understand that this is best saved for another time.”
He claps me on the shoulder. “Thank you for understanding.”
I should have seen that coming. Caelin bursts out, “You cannot possibly be this thick. I cannot accept. I will not be marrying you. My answer is no. Do I make myself understood?”
“Yes,” he answers. She stares at him a moment, but he doesn’t budge, doesn’t stop smiling. “Now about my proposal—“
A large, distant boom obscures whatever inanity was about to come out of his mouth. At first, I think I’ve knocked the table again, but from the swinging of the lamp above us and the gasps of the other restaurant guests it seems that it’s something larger than that. Caelin looks at me abruptly and mouths, you?
Not me.
The instant I finish telling her so, a sound sears at my eardrums. It’s familiar, and at the same time completely alien. Like the humming of a fingertip run over a glass, but a thousandfold until the overtones mesh into something like the edge of a knife. I try to clamp my hands over my ears, but it does nothing to muffle the sound. Caelin grasps my arm and says something urgently. I try to answer her aloud, in my head—neither works.
All at once, the sound dies away, leaving me with nothing for an instant, and slowly the noise of the restaurant filters back in. “What’s happened?” Caelin asks.
“Someone just released a massive amount of magical energy close by,” I breathe out, grasping the edge of my chair for a moment as though I need to make sure it’s real and I’m not just floating here.
The table vibrates with a new sound, but this one everyone can hear. The warning bell rings out sharply in groups of three. A threat in the city, but not at the castle. Caelin stands abruptly, her hand already on the hilt of her sword. I grab her wrist. “Are you—?”
She nods once and fishes a purse of gold from her pouch and leaves it on the table. “Get yourself somewhere safe,” she says.
I push myself out of the chair. “I’m coming with you. A magical threat is an approved action. Even Bannon would agree.”
There isn’t time to argue, so Caelin glances at me appraisingly a moment, then takes up my hand and rushes through the restaurant, grabbing her cloak on the way out. “Can you tell where it came from?”
“I can if I—" I shut my eyes for a moment and try to listen for the residual energy. It’s hard—instead of the blast loud enough for me to hear even without focusing, it’s dissipated into little wisps that dart through the atmosphere over the tops of the buildings and around again, like the city is encased in a dome. I try to shut out the chorus of crystalline shrieks for a moment and focus on the silence in between. That should be the origin point. “East,” I tell her. “A little southeast.”
Her mouth sets in a line.
“Airship port.”
As mad as it seems, I try to listen to the port. Not that nonmagical buildings give off any resonance, but if the initial blare of magic originated there, much of the screeching rushing around should still be concentrated there. As she takes us further, the shrieking only grows to the point where I can no longer listen to it. “I think you’re right,” I tell her.
A few more rows of tall plaster and stone buildings and we come to the base of the massive hill that’s home to the port. People flee the vicinity, a swollen, raging river of humanity pouring through the narrow, winding cobbled streets toward the city at large. Caelin and I and a fair number of blue-clad guards are the ones running towards it. She whistles loudly over the commotion of the escaping people and beckons with a sweeping arm, and the guards immediately begin picking their way over to her. Every so often she pauses to lift someone to their feet or guide them to a clearer path, but once she has the bulk of the guards collected to her, she directs them straight ahead.
Very clever. It’s easier to fight against the current with a larger group than individually. Even panicked, the mob veers away from us. Caelin looks over at me and shouts, “Are you holding?”
“Well enough,” I call back. My leg is screaming, but I can ignore it if I focus on not getting trampled.
“We’re going to go a little faster.” She pulls me along, and it’s hard to reconcile this grip with the soft one that zigzagged me through the streets of the Upper Town just an hour ago. She aims her shoulders at the gaps between the guards, and soon we’re at the head of the stampede of blue. “Which way?” she asks.
It doesn’t take much concentration to figure it out. Now that we’re closer, the sound has turned into a buzz that infiltrates my limbs and pulls as though on the strings of a puppet. I pull her on now, clenching my teeth against the shot each step sends through the whole of my leg. We pass through the gate and begin to join with the guards on regular duty here, all of whom seem a little dizzy and bewildered. Of course. “Cryst release,” I call out to Caelin.
“Are we safe?”
I take a listen. The screams of the energy have begun to fade. Either it's being contained, or the energy has dissipated in the air. “We should be.”
She heaves out a breath. “Should. I love that word.”
I fling out a hand and the port doors open in front of us. It seems wrong, utterly devoid of people. This is the largest port in the country, and I don't know that I've ever seen it without anyone even sweeping up in the back. "Cryst," she murmurs. “That’d be….”
“The maintenance bay.”
One of the guards jogging at my side indicates a hall much smaller than the wide, high-ceilinged main thoroughfares, and Caelin makes sure to edge us to the very front of the pack as we approach the door. Despite her best efforts, the guard darts on ahead. “Ma’am, I cannot advise that you go first.”
Her face reddens and I can feel the argument coming on, but I shrug with one shoulder, and she decompresses slowly and allows a few more guards armed with crossbows ahead of us. They pause, listen, and then a pair of them kick in the door and we rush into the bay two by two.
Caelin keeps her hold on me tight even as she maneuvers her sword from its sheath, and thank gods she does, because she sees the bolt coming before I do and yanks me out of the way. She carries on forward and I look back. Where the point of the arrow bounced off the metal-lined wall, a dark scorch mark forms, sparks cascading to the floor. “The devils was that?” she asks, squinting into the fog ahead.
We’re close enough now that I can just make out the blue flickers in the mist. The flames that when introduced to anything aside from their magical containers consume everything. My throat tightens. “Guess.”
She growls under her breath. “They cannot have weaponized those! We destroyed them!”
A volley of bolts flies into the space between us and the barrier of fog. Fires flare in and out of existence, leaving the metal of the floor red-hot where they landed and swallowing up the bolts. Caelin reaches her arm out, grabs my elbow, and hauls my lame side up and over a molten spot, ducking another arrow. I reach out and grab up a fistful of air, then fling it aside. Most of the fog goes with it, laying our attackers bare.
When I saw the flashes of the conflagrations in the mist, I knew what was coming next. I didn't want to, tried to find another reason someone might have access to those distinctive flames that were meant to have been eradicated. But it could hardly be anything else.
Their creator stands twenty feet in front of me, beaming. “Hello, darling,” says Jori.
She’s at the fore of several shadowy figures in the midst of this roiling fog—actually steam pouring out of the large black airship in the back of the bay. They’re all of them clad in those green wool coats—some of them spattered with dried blood, others torn. Hers has been soaked through on the shoulder, and I feel my chest compress, my heart thrash, my mind slipping back to the end of the war, the long, slow fall.
Only at the end of the vision now, it’s Caelin on the ground, eyes glassy, hand limp in mine.
I bear down hard on my leg, the sting of it forcing me to be here, now. That last image—I’m here to prevent it from ever happening again, first and foremost. Jori cocks her head. “What, no kiss?”
The crossbow-armed men draw closer, aiming threateningly at the chests of the guards, who hover anxiously around Caelin. She’s stock still, her ungloved hand growing colder in mine by the second. At long last, I realize that the uneasy silence is for me. Jori dips her chin forward, prompting. “No,” I answer plainly.
Jori smiles broadly again. To the untrained eye, this could pass for at least an insincere smile. To me and anyone else who’s spent a length of time with her, it’s a death threat, and when it’s trained on you, you have seconds. So I only take one.
I call the metal from the floor up around her feet and slide it forward. She wheels her arms for a moment and dislodges herself with only the slightest huff of surprise and a gust of hot air. The metal curls away from her boots, glowing as though it’s just spent some time in a blacksmith’s forge. She settles to the ground just behind the new crater. I’ll admit it, she says in my head, setting her eyes on Caelin. I didn’t expect that.
I position myself squarely between the both of them just as the shooting starts again and the guards rush forward. Caelin lets go of my hand, and my fingers desperately reach out in the space hers just occupied, even as I pull together some magic to slow the fighters in place. Jori’s ready, of course, but even so it takes her a few precious seconds to shrug off the effects. Don’t engage her, I plead with Caelin.
She catches my eye for a brief moment, and I swallow hard. In the end, she takes up her sword in both hands and charges straight around Jori to take on two of the crossbowmen behind her. They step back, holding the crossbows insecurely against their chests—depending on the fearsomeness of their weaponry more than their skill with it. The other green-clad fighters level their weapons and begin firing.
Jori unsticks at last and whirls on Caelin. I give another tug and a shove at the air around her, but she dodges, using my own magic to propel herself. That was always her strongest suit—adapting, shifting to meet predictable facets. I sag forward. Let her be, I say, plaintive, giving another feeble mental tug. It’s me you’re after, isn’t it? Come get me.
Is this what’s come of you in Resurgent bondage? Begging? Jori asks, pulling herself free of the weak push to advance on Caelin again with lightning ready in her hand. Disappointing, Alain.
This is what I was waiting for. A bolt flies nearby, and I redirect it neatly so that its path cuts between Caelin and Jori, only inches away from the latter. It works—she rolls backwards to get out of the path of the bolt and the resultant burst of flame against the floor. Now I move forward and salvage a little of that fire before it burns out, slicing off bits of the flame’s edges and flinging them at her like darts. It’s quick enough that she doesn’t have time to start casting and
has to roll to her stomach to crawl away. There are a good few fighters in both green and blue between us and Caelin now, and I can breathe again.
Jori flips her overgrown short hair from her face and snarls. She claws at the air, and with a creak and a groan, a pipe dislodges from the wall and comes flying for me. I dismiss it with a blast of air, and it falls behind me. In that moment, she’s scrambled to throw herself inside of the now emptied cryst containment bin. Clever. If she gets the stone and iron clamshell shut, magic can’t penetrate it, and whatever’s in it won’t degrade. She could be casting a spell to bring down this whole building when she climbs out again.
So I suggest she cast something else. Not something useful. She’ll be expecting that. It’s easy enough to find her mind amongst everyone else’s—in the muddle of fear and determination that’s this battle, hers alone radiates fury. I tell her exactly what to do with that fury, and before she can realize that the idea wasn’t hers, she inhales deeply and screams, the sort of rage-filled scream that takes all of her being to discharge. I clamp my jaw to shut out the pain of my leg and run to stand perfectly square with the opening of the bin before she can completely shut me out. “Very nice,” she rasps between pitched breaths. “I was beginning to worry you’d lost it.”
“Get up,” I tell her.
“You have lost it,” she laughs. “You should kill me now.”
“Get up.”
“Oh, that’s right. Your mistress frowns on killing Legion folk, doesn’t she. How sad for her, since the only way she walks out of here is if I’m dead.”
I can’t upend the bin, lined as it is with the alchemical protectants that should be keeping the cryst isolated. As to where it’s gone, I see a pair of men in Legion jackets trundling back to the airship and dragging a sack along the ground. A sack? They really think they’re going to keep that much volatile energy in a sack and try to fly it away? I’d let them go and explode themselves while they’re at it, but all that magic would saturate the cloud layer and poison the whole city with the next snowfall, going gods know where.