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She's All Thaumaturgy

Page 28

by A. K. Caggiano


  She hated him immediately.

  His hair was a shimmering black, tied back in a severe knot, and his skin was thin and white like soaked parchment, the blue-green veins beneath running like tiny rivers through snowy banks. The throne was a too-brilliant white beneath his dark form and against the aura of the krows, but before she could question her memory, she realized it was not the same as her father’s. It was not the same as anyone’s.

  She had forgotten to walk when faced with the skulls stacked atop one another, so inelegant and horrible beneath the usurping duke, but her feet soon remembered when she was shoved from behind. She staggered forward, tripping over the hem of the too-long dress and falling to her knees. When she glanced up again, she finally saw the other elf in the room.

  Elayne felt a smile crack across her face at the familiar woman: her teacher and her aunt. “Melorya,” she heard herself say, breathlessly. “You’re alive?”

  Melorya’s eyes found Elayne’s, the same lavender of her mother’s. They did not blink, but they changed. The woman swallowed and looked away.

  Elayne’s mouth formed the word, but no sound came out, How?

  Alaion stood. Her eyes grew as he came to meet her at the center of the throne room, reaching out a hand.

  She got back to her feet on her own, but Alaion’s hand found hers anyway, and he lifted her fingers to his mouth, pressing his lips to her knuckles. He held her hand—softly—in his own. He still smiled. She still hated him. “Duchess. Welcome home.”

  Elayne jerked her hand back, disgusted. “Where are my friends?”

  Alaion raised a brow and clasped his hands behind his back.

  “I want to see them!” She grit her teeth and stared him down. “Now!”

  The elf finally sighed. “Have I not had my share of children yelling today?”

  She pulled herself up to her full height, which was significantly smaller than the elves before and behind her. “I’m not a child.”

  “Perhaps to humans.” Alaion spoke the word with vitriol, then caught himself. “My apologies.” He squinted, then smiled again. “Your friends are safe.”

  “Show them to me.”

  This time he looked on her again, amused. “You aren’t exactly in a position to be demanding things, duchess. But I’m willing to make arrangements. I am benevolent, after all.”

  “Benevolent?” she choked out, so thrown she could hardly form words. “You—you took—and killed—”

  “Have I not been kind to you?”

  Elayne’s lip quivered. She’d been offered clothes, food, and indeed hadn’t been cut down on sight. The bare minimum. And yet her words came back to the most juvenile thought she had. “You call what you did to my face kind?”

  Alaion held up a finger and tilted his head. “Ah, but I did not do that.” His eyes flitted over his shoulder in Melorya’s direction. “And anyway, it seems you’ve overcome that nastiness.” He moved to touch her face, but she slapped his hand away. His eyes flashed, displeased, then he recovered. “Come with me.”

  With a gesture to Vulras to stay put, he turned toward the thrones, and Elayne had little choice but to follow, but then, she had to admit: she wanted to. Even with the doors shut between her and it, she could feel the nexus’s draw. The wide basin of it, the nothingness below it, the chaotic aether swirling inside; she could feel it all before she saw it, pulling her forward so that her feet barely need comply. But it was not like in the Trizian Wood where the nexus was full of wonder and awe. This pull, she realized as Alaion pushed open the door, this was dread.

  Darkness poured out of the nexus, climbing up the walls of the hallowed room like long vines, shimmering with a wetness she wasn’t sure it actually had. Around the edge, the stones of the floor had been crushed under some unseen weight as if the aether itself had clawed its way out. It was frightening, but not as frightening as the depth within. Like staring into the night sky, the blackness went on forever, clouds of dark-colored masses turning over one another and consuming themselves. Elayne wrapped her arms around herself, but it was too late—all the warmth had gone from her body, and she was frozen staring down into the nexus.

  “You don’t look quite like yourself, duchess.” Alaion’s voice was far off as she knelt beside the nexus, peering in. “Be cleansed.”

  She didn’t know what he meant, but she had the sudden desire to touch the rim of the void. And so she did.

  Elayne screamed as her hands hit the edge of the nexus, but her voice caught when she saw what it did. With a quickness, a shadow seeped into her fingertips and swarmed her hands and arms and through her veins, flushing them with frozen, black blood and holding her fast to the rim. The veins climbed up over her chest, and she could feel the coldness on her neck and her face. Drawn taught over her skull, her skin contorted painfully as the glamour dissolved, dripping down her forehead, her cheeks, her chin.

  She took in ragged breaths as it went on, climbing upward, tearing downward. She had none of the control she thought she might when she’d first desired to touch the basin. All she could do was struggle against the aether that wanted to consume her wholly, to make her over, to give her more of what she already had and feared. Elayne did not want to be more powerful, she did not want to pull the life out of anything, and she used every last bit of energy to rip herself away from it until finally she could wrench her hands free.

  At once it stopped, the flooding of aether, the dark power that had sickened her. She desperately wiped at her face to stop whatever was happening to it. But there was nothing that came off, no peeling skin, no dripping blood, not even the old boils that had plagued her for years. The swollen pain of a cursed face had not returned, but the stiff mask of the glamour too had gone. This was something else. This was nothing.

  She turned, Alaion crouching at her side and inspecting her, and saw her own reflection in the metal of his breastplate. She looked like him—pale, run through with dark, wispy veins—but also like…herself.

  Elayne scrambled to her feet, stepping back from him and the nexus. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” He got to his feet slowly. “You did that.”

  She looked down at her hands, the shadowy darkness there receding. Had she?

  “It’s in your blood, just as it was your mother’s. And you have the power to do so much more with the crystal.”

  Elayne’s eyes grew wide. Even without the thaumat stone she—or the nexus—had done this.

  Alaion whistled sharply into the hallowed room. The sound rose up through the height of the tower, and Elayne followed it with her eyes to see the windows at its very top. A tiny shadow flitted through, a bird coming at his call, but then it descended sharply toward them, and it grew. A raven, or, no, a hawk? It was too big, its skin without feathers, a snout in place of a beak.

  The dragon landed on Alaion’s arm, leathery wings outstretched, scaled tail curling, and its jaws opening to caw at them. Elayne did not have to be told this was what it was—a single story was enough to know when one saw one—but they were things of legend, monsters so fantastical they were quite possibly imagined. Fairy tales.

  The jaws snapped at her, and she pulled her hand back. Elayne had been reaching for it without realizing.

  “Now, Forsyth, be polite. This is Heulux’s mistress.”

  Elayne felt a cold sickness at his words.

  “They’re not all dead,” she whispered. Then she cocked her head. “It’s sort of small, though, isn’t it?”

  Alaion glanced at her darkly, and Forsyth mimicked him. “They were not always. Like flying citadels they once were. Other creatures too, long dead, the stuff of myths. They ruled this land along with the elves before humans.” He looked down into the nexus. “You could do it all, right the wrongs of the humans and return our people to our former glory.” Alaion raised his arm, and Forsyth took to the sky. Elayne felt the wind off his wings as he flew up through the tower of the hallowed room and disappeared into the shadows.

  She took
another step back. “How?”

  “Return the magic to those it was meant for. Cleanse the nexus of this corruption—”

  “You did this!”—she threw a hand out at the basin—“Why don’t you fix it?”

  “I did not corrupt the nexus!” he shouted, closing the space between them in a single step. “The humans with their selfishness and desire for more and more power corrupted it. They took it for themselves, causing the downfall of the great beasts, and the elves are slowly going with them!”

  She tried to step away, but the wall came up behind her. She pressed into it, Alaion bearing down on her, his face inches from her own.

  “I have tried to fix the slow extermination the humans have wrought on our people, but I—” He gripped a tight fist before her face, baring his teeth, struggling to admit it. “I do not quite have the power, duchess. I tried, valiantly, but things did not go to plan. But you—you and your blood—will finally cleanse this place, and you will pull the aether away from the humans and return it to the elves.”

  Elayne was shaking. “You think I can do all of that?”

  “You can and you will. Or,”—he tugged at his armor, straightening—“You will give me the crystal, and I will do it for you.”

  “I don’t…I don’t have it,” she told him breathlessly.

  “Don’t you?” He turned back to the nexus. “Then I suppose it is up to you alone.”

  She watched him go to the doors. “And if I refuse?”

  He turned back to her, smiling wickedly. “You won’t.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The luckiest creature in all of Maw is widely disputed. Two camps of thought exist: one believes that the luckiest creatures are humans due to their ability to adapt, overcome, and spread so wide. The other believes that Heuluxies are the luckiest as they have gone completely extinct. Both agree that, of all the creatures in all of Maw, kobolds are solidly the third luckiest. They both also agree that elves don’t even make the list.

  - from The Chronicling of Zaynthua, Various Authors, pub 1299 PA

  Frederick slammed his hand against the bars for what was likely the hundredth time. There was nothing special about them, but there was nothing special about him either, in here, and so he had no way out. He had felt it the moment they’d gotten off the boat, a weight dragging him back out to sea. The elven guards had taken his sword, of course, but worse he couldn’t manifest any aether. Even when he woke on the healer’s table in Havencourt he hadn’t felt so useless.

  There was a moan from across the hall. Neoma was laying on a cot inside a cell there, her hand falling off her chest and dangling just above the floor. Heulux had hit her the hardest, and she had collapsed all at once when they were separated from Elayne just inside the castle and taken underground. The guards had argued about what to do with her—she was an elf, after all—but when someone pointed out she was likely Trizian, they decided a separate cell from the humans was good enough. Neoma moaned again, and muttered, “Gramps…lost him.”

  Frederick tried to shush her when he heard footsteps at the end of the hall. She sounded mad, at least, and hoped they would assume she was just rambling and not realize an elven spirit trapped in a pipe bottle was cavorting off in the city slung to the back of a child-sized kobold.

  Neoma fell silent again, and Frederick hung his head, leaning up against the stone wall at the side of the cell. His mind was clouded, his body tired, but he had to do something. He stared at the wall, his vision blurring as he tried to focus on the aether that he knew had to be all around him. He ran a finger through the air. Nothing. He shook his head and tried again. Again, there was nothing. “Come on.” He grit his teeth and tried once more.

  Then he saw a glint of something from the corner of his eye. Rosalind had taken up in the back corner of the cell where it was darkest, but there had been a flicker of light there. Then he heard her whispering, something she wasn’t typically very good at, but he couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. Again, there was a flash and more whispers. Rosalind was no mage, this he knew, but that—that was magic!

  “Ro,” he hissed from the side of his mouth, trying to look up the hall for guards. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” she said in a low voice. “Probably.”

  When the hall remained free of elves, he strode over to her. “Was that magic?”

  “I can’t do magic,” she said quickly, sitting back against the wall and looking up at him. Her features were mostly shadowed, but he could see she was grinning in the dark.

  “Well, whatever you say.” He could have imagined it, he realized, and crouched down beside her with a hand on the wall to steady himself. “So what do we do?”

  “You mean, like, a plan?” Rosalind shrugged. “El’s the smart one.”

  “El isn’t here right now,” he said to her slowly, but his heart quickened at the concession. He had no idea where she was. Or what was happening to her. “We have to do something. We have to figure a way out of here, find her, and—”

  Rosalind’s hand touched his. She squeezed it. “She brought us here,” she said, her voice strangely level. “She knows what she’s doing. We have to trust her.”

  Frederick couldn’t argue with the look in her eyes though everything in him screamed that she was wrong. He had to do something. He got to his feet and went back to the bars, pacing. Once more he saw the flash and heard her voice, low and hurried. Rosalind never spoke like that, but then she’d never been in this situation before.

  He shook his head and tried to connect with the aether again.

  ***

  Alaion’s definition of free reign was not the same as Elayne’s. His involved a krow at Elayne’s back and a pit in her stomach at all times. It had been two days, and she had wandered through the places the krow would allow her which turned out to be only bleak and superficial. There were silent, head-down servants skittering around now and then, some even human, and elven guards posted at every entry, but she was surprised the rest of the place was so empty. Her parents always had visitors, but then, of course, there was the border. And probably the fact that Alaion was running out of elven residents to invite.

  The castle was full of more mirrors than she remembered, and she constantly caught glimpses of herself. She was better at thinking when she walked, but she often found herself lingering before looking glasses, her stream of consciousness petering out without her realizing. Her face, it was nice, she thought, even under the greying complexion and blue veins the nexus had given her. She hadn’t seen it in so long, and it had matured, but it was her own. It felt right. And in some ways, the veins even felt right too. When she traced her fingers over them and felt the cold, she wondered if they belonged somehow.

  Because, after all, she belonged here, didn’t she? It had been so long since she had belonged anywhere, she wasn’t sure she remembered the feeling properly, but when she left her room, she didn’t first prepare with deep breaths and a speech to herself about just doing it, and when she walked the halls of Heulux Castle, she didn’t scurry around like a mouse, hoping to not bump into another courtier, and when she passed a mirror, like this very one, she didn’t turn immediately away anymore. She looked into it.

  And maybe, if she squinted just right, she could see her mother looking back at her in the reflection. Had she looked like this too, pallid and dark-veined? Her mother, who had chosen this, who had allowed Alaion to do these things. Gramps had never been forthcoming, so it must have been true, she thought, tracing her reflection for the tenth time that day in the main hall. Gramps, she thought, trapped in a bottle. All of her friends. Trapped.

  Elayne gasped—what was wrong with her? She backed away from the mirror and turned, stepping around the krow to see the opposite wall and the curtain there. That was a portrait before, she remembered, and she reached up to tug the cover away from the gilded frame.

  Cressyda Orraigh stared down at her from the wall, dressed in a silver rivaled only by her hair, her eyes the perfec
t shade of lavender. She turned again, running right into the krow.

  “Move!” she shouted, wiping at her body where it had touched her, but it simply stared back. “I said, move,” she growled.

  “They’re not good listeners.”

  Melorya.

  Elayne stepped around the krow to see her. She wondered if she had imagined her, not coming upon her once since she had seen her in the throne room days earlier, but there she stood, no longer a figment.

  “You!” Elayne ran toward her.

  Melorya put up her hands. “El, wait.”

  Elayne did not wait. She strode up to the woman and pulled her fist back, but a hand caught her wrist before she could swing. With little effort, the krow held her there, suspended in the hall. Angry heat began to fill her up.

  Melorya glanced at the portrait over her head. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”

  Elayne froze, but her blood did not run cold. The elven woman gestured to the krow, and it released her.

  Melorya looked not an hour older than she had ten years ago, tall, silver-haired, with tiny-features and the same lavender eyes of her sister. She had the book—the one she always kept secreted away—held against her chest, its cover a thick, dark leather with runes cut in that Elayne had never been able to read.

  The elf narrowed her eyes at the krow. “Leave us,” she instructed. It did not move. She sighed and opened the book. With a nervous look at the krow, then to Elayne, Melorya began to read from the pages. It was strange to hear those words—that language—again. She could have never recalled it on her own, but hearing it now was like it had never left her. The words were quiet and fast, and the hall felt cold and empty, and then a moment later, it was.

  “Where did he go?”

  “We don’t have much time.” Melorya grabbed her arm, snapping the book shut and pulling her down the hall. As they walked, the elf spoke, “Your mother was brave, but stupid. She wanted to make amends with Alaion for jilting him, and she thought she could convince him to stop his campaign against the humans.”

 

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