City of Spells

by Alexandra Christo

  She wasn’t trying to sound ungrateful, but Tavia had been the one to let Nolan escape and it was her fault he’d been able to come back here and hurt people.

  She’d wanted to deal with him herself, like she hadn’t been able to before.

  “I’ll let you kill the next one, if you really want,” Wesley said, like a peace offering. “I didn’t realize you’d become so bloodthirsty.”

  Tavia rolled her eyes. “Just stop talking and start saving people,” she said.

  “Yes,” Bastian said eagerly. “We must help the others.”

  Wesley cast a glance to Saxony’s father and nodded.

  “We’ll help them,” he said. “You stay here and find shelter.”

  Bastian looked offended. “I shall help to protect my people.”

  “You shall get yourself killed trying,” Wesley said, in a blustering mimic of Bastian’s voice. “So stay here and stay alive. If you die, your daughter will blame me. So for my sake, try not to get stabbed or shot.”

  “Or hit by charms,” Tavia added.

  Wesley took his gun back out of the holster, reloading.

  “Come on.” He grabbed Tavia’s hand and she felt that old warmth return. “Let’s play heroes.”

  20

  SAXONY

  In the center of the forest where Saxony’s family and her Kin had made their home for decades was a damn tornado.

  Saxony didn’t know which of their enemies had conjured it, but she hadn’t exactly been given training on how to quell magical storms.

  “Need a hand?” Wesley asked.

  Saxony’s teeth gritted under the strain. “I can’t keep it at bay.”

  Her hands were held up into the air, creating a force field around the beastly thing, but her entire body shook with the power of it.

  Her feet skidded back against the soil as it pushed her away, refusing to bow down to her powers.

  “Where are your Spiritcrafters?” Tavia asked.

  They were the only ones who had dominion over the weather and nature’s spirit, and Tavia was right to think that if one of the Kingpin’s Spiritcrafters had conjured this, then they’d need a Crafter with the same specialty to stop it.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t in the cards right now.

  “People are a little preoccupied,” Saxony said.

  Every person in the camp was fighting for their lives, and for all they knew, every Spiritcrafter on their side had already lost theirs. Some kind of acid charm had rained down from the sky on the other side of camp, and by Saxony’s count, at least two dozen people had died from that magic alone.

  “Then I suppose it’s up to us,” Tavia said.

  Saxony turned away from the tornado to raise an eyebrow at her. “You got a charm in there that can make nature bow to your whim?”

  “No,” Wesley said. “But I just might have something.”

  He stepped beside Saxony and took in a breath, like he was really going to regret this next part.

  “This time I want a thank-you,” he said.

  Saxony wasn’t quite sure what he meant, since she’d definitely thanked him for saving her life that one time, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t helped him out before.

  Sure, she still owed him a life debt, but trust Wesley to be thinking of debts at a time like this.

  Wesley raised his hands in a parallel of Saxony’s and pushed.

  Intuitcrafters didn’t have force fields or control of the weather. They couldn’t bind their enemies or command nature, but it seemed like Wesley didn’t need to. He was a force of nature himself.

  Not that Saxony would ever say something like that to his face.

  As soon as Wesley thrust his arms out, the tornado winced, shuddering backward like it had been slapped. Saxony pushed forward with her own force field and with the weight of both of their magics working together, the beast began to truly tremble.

  Saxony whipped her head over to Wesley and couldn’t help but smile at him, maybe for the first time. There was something about this moment—about them combining their powers—that made her feel at peace, even with a Gods damned tornado at their feet. Wesley’s Crafter magic synced up to hers so easily that it made Saxony wonder if maybe, just maybe, the Many Gods had wanted them to be a team all along.

  Wesley muttered something low and musical under his breath, and Saxony didn’t realize it was a spell until the trees of the forest began to coo in response.

  She had never seen them act that way before.

  They rocked back and forth, over and over, until they created their own kind of power source—a wind tunnel that crashed against the tornado and sent it crouching to the ground.

  Wesley’s smile was like a weapon and Saxony couldn’t take her eyes off of him, not least because Wesley was glowing. Not in a weird flowery way that made Saxony’s bones shudder to consider—he was very literally glowing.

  The staves that crisscrossed up Wesley’s arms, in between the slits of his tattoos, were alight, and shining, silver swirls that looked like stars trailed up his dark skin and toward his neck, mingling with the lines of the city he had tattooed over himself.

  The storm didn’t stand a chance against them both.

  The tornado wilted under their magic, Saxony’s force field and the weight of power Wesley was funneling, the two of them like an oddly perfect magical duo.

  Crafters were always best when casting as a team; that was why they made Kins, after all.

  “We need to press just a little harder,” Saxony said. “I can feel it dying.”

  “Way ahead of you.”

  Wesley thrust his hands out farther and thick black fire pooled from his fingertips, slowly at first, like shadows retreating from the dawn, but then it sprung to life and reached for the tornado.

  It was like hands, burning and scratching and clawing.

  Fire ready to devour the storm whole.

  The base of the tornado turned to soot and the wind screamed, but the fire didn’t cease. It flowed from Wesley’s hands, such a pure and familiar black that Saxony almost lost her concentration.

  She had seen fire like that before.

  Just once, as a child.

  The sight of it nearly brought her to her knees, seeing those flames in reality when she’d spent years only ever seeing them in her nightmares. Her heart thumped loudly and she tried to shut the memories out.

  The last time she had seen her mother and her baby brother, before those flames swallowed them whole.

  Saxony squeezed her fists together, her concentration on the tornado wavering. Though thankfully it didn’t matter, because under the flames it had crumbled to dust.

  The fire slithered quickly back to Wesley’s fingers like an obedient servant.

  “Where did you learn that?” Saxony asked him. “Who taught you that?”

  Wesley only smirked back at her, blissfully unaware. “I don’t know,” he said. “Guess I’m just full of tricks.”

  Tavia stepped beside Wesley and let out a whistle to echo the one he had given her earlier. “Nice moves,” she said. “Looks like you’ve got a taste for being the hero.”

  Wesley’s smile was unrivaled. “It’s pretty easy.” He picked up her knife from the ground and handed it back to her. “We should do it more often.”

  Tavia twisted the knife in her hands, grinning like the world owed her one. “Nah,” she said. “Sounds boring.”

  Saxony caught her breath back, shaking her head as the shock of seeing that fire again started to subside, only to be replaced with a new ache. Seeing Tavia and Wesley together like that reminded her of Karam. Of the other half of her, that was out there somewhere. Saxony had half-expected Karam to show up in the height of battle, frowning at how easily the rest of them were ambushed, before saving everyone.

  But she hadn’t.

  Karam was still gone and there was no sign she’d be back anytime soon.

  “You really did it,” her amja said, marveling at the scene. “You both saved us.”
/>   Amja stared between Saxony and Wesley, like together they were a marvel, or an oddity, and then she scanned the staves up Wesley’s arms—as though she were translating the language of magic that marked him—and smiled, warmer than any smile she’d given Saxony since they’d come back.

  Around them the battle settled, and though Saxony didn’t want to begin counting the bodies, it looked like they had won. They were diminished, but not defeated, and that was all that mattered.

  The Kingpin had tried to stamp them out like ants, but he had failed.

  They’d make sure he kept failing.

  21

  SAXONY

  While everyone else was getting ready to leave the Uncharted Forest, Saxony was getting ready for something far more important.

  The rest of the camp packed what they could, gathering supplies as they prepared to head to Wesley’s safe house. He’d said that it belonged to the old underboss of Creije, who had ruled the city before Wesley took the reins. According to Wesley, he had a few scattered throughout Uskhanya, just in case. It seemed the last thing underbosses did was trust people, and so they were going to flee to the small estate, on the edge of the ivy towns, just big enough to house their army.

  But before then, Saxony needed answers.

  She needed the truth from the people she had never expected to lie to her in the first place.

  “Saxony,” Amja said. She placed a pair of boots into a bag. “Are you ready to go?”

  “I need to talk to you first.”

  Her father shook his head. “Saxony, you must pack your things. The others are waiting. Wesley said—”

  “Wesley is what I want to talk to you about.”

  Amja kept her eyes focused on the bag and slowly placed a vest inside. “Oh?”

  Oh.

  It was the smallest word, but it made the biggest difference. It said a thousand things and the one that stuck with Saxony most was that it said her amja had been lying to her about something.

  “The magic that Wesley conjured to deal with the tornado was familiar,” Saxony said. She squeezed her fists together to try and keep her voice steady. “I’ve seen it before.”

  They were the same flames that had killed her mother and her baby brother. The memory was like a shard of glass in her eye as it replayed over and over, the same nightmare Saxony had for years, only now she could see it when she was awake, too.

  The black embers devouring her family. It had been over a decade since Saxony had seen that magic. In all of her years, she had never known anything like it again. Until now.

  “I know you recognized it too,” Saxony said. “I saw the way you looked at Wesley afterward.”

  Amja sat back onto the bed. “What are you asking us?”

  “For the truth,” Saxony said. “What happened to my mother and Malik? What is that magic?”

  Saxony couldn’t figure out the look on Amja’s face, but at the very least she was looking at her, unlike her father, who stared at the ground and nothing else.

  “You’re keeping something from me,” Saxony said. “And I won’t just ignore it. I’m tired of lies and secrets.”

  Amja nodded.

  Her father swallowed.

  The silence that gathered around them was strange, and made Saxony almost want to turn and walk away from the conversation, since it clearly wasn’t going to lead to anything good.

  Nobody started a conversation with silence if it was going to be good.

  What if Wesley was somehow connected to her family’s death?

  There would be no going back from that.

  “Your mother was a Spiritcrafter,” Bastian said. “And she suffered for it every day.”

  He took Saxony’s hands in his and they were so large that she almost felt like a child again as he knelt in front of her.

  “Like you, Vea was powerful,” he said. “And sometimes the ghosts of the world were all too real. Their memories would haunt her and stay for weeks at a time. They were violent and desperate, and she couldn’t shut them out. It wasn’t a tap she could turn on and off, but a river that flowed endlessly into her mind. She could never drown out the noise of their sorrow.”

  Saxony’s hands shook in her father’s grip.

  Weren’t the living supposed to immortalize the dead in overly happy memories? When people were gone, they were supposed to be thought of as invincible and without flaws, as those who were left behind rewrote their histories wherever necessary. So every memory Saxony had of her mother was of a warrior, unfathomable in her grace and unbreakable in her spirit. Try as she did to think back, Saxony couldn’t recall a single moment of her mother’s tears, or when her smile faltered and her hugs weren’t warm and long.

  Through the eyes of a child, Vea Akintola had been perfect, and even though Saxony couldn’t have known otherwise—even though her mother had clearly hidden it from her for a reason, because it wasn’t a child’s responsibility to know such things—Saxony felt guilty for it.

  “She’d disappear for weeks,” Bastian said. “And once, when you were very young, she was gone for months. The forest gave people peace, but for her the quiet meant that the dead screamed louder. She always fled to cities, where the noise could overthrow them, and I also think her heart craved the adventure.”

  “She loved you very much,” Amja said.

  She looked to Bastian with a smile, warmer than Saxony had ever seen them share. They enjoyed antagonizing each other like it was a sport, but the tender way Amja looked at her father now told Saxony that she loved him as a son. That perhaps he wasn’t her blood, but he was still her family.

  “What happened?” Saxony asked.

  Amja’s sigh was deep. “Though Vea loved your father, his spirit was tied to the trees and hers to the wind. When she came back after those long months, she came back pregnant.”

  Saxony’s lips parted, but she couldn’t find the breath to gasp or the words to demand it was a lie.

  “That baby was Malik,” Amja said.

  Saxony didn’t know what to say to that, and though she thought that she should have been sad or even angry with her mother, the first thought that came to her mind was: That’s why Father doesn’t like to hear Malik’s name. Not because his son died, but because he never had a son to begin with.

  She knew it was a horrible thought, because as far she remembered, Bastian had always been kind to her brother. He’d always played with him and hugged him, and never liked to scold him even when he was being a little brat. Still, she couldn’t help but think it.

  “You know Malik was destined for greatness,” Amja said. “He was supposed to be our Liege, but there was a darkness inside of him.”

  “A darkness,” Saxony repeated. “He was just a baby.”

  “And we couldn’t wait to see the man he would grow into,” Amja said. “But then an Intuitcrafter saw in a vision that he would bring about war and death if he was raised by magic.”

  Saxony didn’t think laughing was the appropriate reaction, but how else was she supposed to handle the sincerity with which her amja spoke? A vision, one in thousands, had scared her that much?

  “It can’t be worse than the war and death we’re facing now,” Saxony said. “It was just one Crafter’s vision.”

  “I thought the same, until another saw it,” Amja said. “Both of them saw that future and only that future. It wasn’t just one in a hundred scenarios, Saxony. It was the only future they saw, in a hundred different ways. And so we made a choice.”

  Saxony shot up.

  She wasn’t prepared to hear this.

  She wasn’t ready to know what they had done.

  And yet—

  “Did you kill him?” she asked.

  “Many Gods, no,” Bastian said. “He was a child, Saxony.”

  “But we knew we had to do something,” Amja said. “And so we decided to hide his powers and send him far away. We swore the two Intuitcrafters to secrecy and they carried it to their graves.”

  Saxony’
s breath didn’t just catch, but disappeared altogether.

  “You used death magic to hide him,” she said in a whisper. “A blood spell.”

  The darkest of all Crafter magic was the kind that required a sacrifice.

  It was outlawed among every Kin in the four realms. It could hide a Crafter’s magic from everyone, including themselves, but performing something so ungodly came with a price: a curse over the entire Kin that would never end.

  Saxony’s mother hadn’t just died in a fire. She had sacrificed her life to hide Malik from the world. Saxony thought back to that black flame, burning through the tree house. How her mother didn’t try to run and she didn’t scream; she just let it take her. Saxony always thought she’d remembered that part wrong, but she hadn’t.

  She thought about how that same black fire that had destroyed her family had poured from Wesley’s fingers when they were attacked.

  How the trees in this beloved forest had sung when Wesley appeared and rustled their leaves in joy whenever he made a joke, like they were laughing alongside him.

  How his staves were such a bright silver against his dark skin, just like hers. Just like the rest of her Kin.

  “Many Gods,” Saxony said.

  It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.

  “Wesley?” she asked.

  Amja and her father didn’t need to nod for Saxony to know she was right.

  That was how he was able to perform a spell at the consort’s headquarters all those months ago in Creije. How he was able to take on Arjun, a Crafter who had trained his whole life, without breaking a sweat. How he’d nearly killed Ashwood.

  Malik was a magical prodigy after all.

  “I would have tried to find another way if I knew what Vea was planning,” Bastian said. “But I think she knew it was the only choice.”

  “I don’t understand,” Saxony said. “You sent Malik—”

  She paused.

  She couldn’t say Wesley’s name.

  “You sent him to Creije?”

  “It wasn’t a magical mecca then,” Amja said. “It was just a dreamer’s paradise, and the Intuitcrafters said that of all the futures they saw, the ones that had Malik in Creije felt the most hopeful. They said being there would grow his heart. We had allies there who we knew and trusted. The Lieges of the Creijen Kin took him in.”