Taliesin Ascendant (The Children and the Blood)

by Megan Joel Peterson

  “Only to meet. Not to stay.”

  She stared after him as he left the room. Brow furrowing suspiciously, she followed. Striding ahead of her, Cornelius turned at the hall and continued farther into the building, barely pausing to see if she was coming. Winding through the corridors, he emerged onto the walkway overlooking the cots of the wounded.

  Biting her lip, she glanced to the sleeping wizards, not wanting to wake them with the questions bubbling up inside. Hurrying after Cornelius to the end of the walkway, she slipped through the door after him and then sped up, trying to catch him as he climbed the stairs.

  “What’s going on, Cornelius?” she asked as they left the stairwell. The hallway was empty and each of the office doors lining the corridor was shut. Exit signs lit either end, casting a red glow along the length of the dusty linoleum floor. “Is this about the deal Darius made?”

  He stopped, but didn’t turn around. A humorless look crossed her face.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said dryly. At his silence, she continued. “So what? No one can even try to see if Carter wasn’t crazy? Is that it?”

  Cornelius looked back at her. She raised an eyebrow.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  He started down the hallway again.

  “Then what?” she called.

  Turning the corner, he kept going.

  “Cornelius!”

  Scowling, she jogged after him. By a door like any other, he paused, pulling a ring of keys from his pocket.

  “What?” she asked again.

  With a key in the lock, he paused. “No good will come of this, highness,” he said quietly. At her expression, he cut in before she could speak. “Darius is kind to you. Listening because you are queen and because he does not want to alienate you moments after you walked in the door. But he doesn’t believe. None of them believe. You ask me if it’s so hard to simply show that Josiah wasn’t insane? I wonder that you think I wouldn’t have tried that before.”

  He moved to unlock the door and she reached over, putting a hand to the bolt. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Cornelius closed his eyes. “He was my cousin, highness. And nearly a brother, for all that. Of course I tried to prove he wasn’t insane, even after the council dismissed him with barely a word.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I went into the city with him, despite the war, despite the fact people were being killed in the streets. I spent hours searching with him, following every person he said glowed, even testing them by tossing a bit of magic their way. I did everything I could, short of attacking them outright.” He shook his head. “And nothing happened. They saw Josiah. Gave him strange looks for staring at them so hard. And then they moved on. They never even noticed I was there.”

  “They were pretending,” she said.

  “Josiah swore they were,” he agreed. “Each time one of them walked off, or came up and asked him what the problem was, he was emphatic that they were only preserving their cover. But it went on all day, your highness, and it never changed. He became more and more agitated, wanted me to believe him despite the evidence of my own eyes, but… it never changed.”

  She hesitated. “And so what did you do then?”

  “What could I do? Lie to the council? Tell them I witnessed something I had not, just so they’d send even more wizards in search of enemies that didn’t exist? People were dying, your majesty. Families, children… I could not let the forces we needed to fight the real war go off on some fairytale mission just to please Josiah.”

  Cornelius fell silent.

  She dropped her hand from the lock. “It wasn’t,” she said flatly.

  “It always has been,” he replied. “Josiah was a good man, your majesty. A loyalist to the monarchy and a respected leader to his people. But when the council refused to believe him – when I refused to believe him – he abandoned one in failed service to the other, and so destroyed them both.

  “My cousin is known as a murderer, your highness, and most of the wizards here are fairly certain the world is better off with him dead. He left a trail of bodies eight years long, each one of which he swore was justified. But you try telling that to the friends and families of his victims, all of whom see him as a madman and will never believe their loved ones could do the things he claimed. His delusions ruined him, Ashe. Him, and every one of his people who bought into them.” Cornelius paused. “I do not want to see them ruin you and the legacy of the Merlin’s Children as well.”

  She shook her head. “I know what I saw, Cornelius. And what I felt. The man who murdered my dad used magic. I know; I took it from him. I killed him with it.”

  At the last, he glanced over, and discomfort hit her at the alarm in his expression.

  “Brogan looked human,” she insisted, pushing past the feeling. “They all did.”

  For a long moment, he said nothing. And then he closed his eyes. “Taliesin has many tricks, your highness.”

  “It wasn’t Taliesin!”

  “Are you sure?”

  Without another word, he turned away, sending a thread of magic into the lock as he twisted the key. Pushing open the door, he headed into the darkened room beyond.

  She stared after him. Despite the ostensible question, nothing but cold certainty had been in his tone, cemented by years of resigning himself to belief in Carter’s supposed insanity.

  And he couldn’t let it change.

  Watching Cornelius, she followed him inside. In the dim light coming from the hall, she could see a filing cabinet near the door. Reaching behind it, Cornelius flipped an unseen switch and, with a garish flicker, utility lights overhead buzzed to life.

  Gray surrounded them. From the gray walls to the gray carpet, and all across the gray utility table in the center of the room, the color dominated the space. Above the filing cabinets lining the walls, metal shelves stretched to the ceiling. Each level was stacked high with papers, folders and cheap plastic binders that provided the only deviation from the monochrome of the room, though even they were faded with age. More files spilled across the table, coating the metal surface in chaotically scattered piles. On the only wall devoid of shelving, a narrow window shared space with an enormous corkboard, the latter of which was speckled with thumbtacks and almost completely obscured by further layers of paper.

  “What is this place?” she asked guardedly, looking around.

  “Your father called it the library.”

  She glanced over at him.

  “It’s everything we have on Merlin, the spell, and our history.”

  Her eyebrows twitched up in surprise, and her gaze returned to the piles of paper, suddenly seeing them as a whole lot smaller than before. “This…”

  “Used to be much greater, yes,” he said, reading the tone. “As was everything else. We had so much more than a factory once, your highness. But in war, everything is a target. Monuments and places of beauty most of all.

  “Taliesin killed our historians,” he continued. “They attacked our archives in the first days of the war and destroyed everything and everyone in sight. This was all we could salvage. Notes. Photocopies. Reproductions from family collections.”

  He looked around with a wry expression. “It’s ironic, really. Considering they need this information just as much as we do. Yet they still attempted to destroy it. One wonders if they even knew what they were burning.”

  She studied him for a moment and then came farther into the room. No organization separated the mess atop the table, but after a heartbeat, she paused. Familiar handwriting crowded the margins of nearly every page.

  “He intended to come back after his visit to you,” Cornelius said quietly. “He asked us not to touch anything until then.”

  Ashe’s gaze traced the letters, the words. Fragments of sentences drifted past, nonsensical.

  “He was in the middle of something?” she asked distantly.

  A hint of old irony touched Cornelius’ tone. “He always wa
s.”

  She glanced up.

  “Your father didn’t share much,” he explained. “Especially in the past few years. His research was circular as much as anything, and new discoveries often only led to further questions he had not yet considered. In the end, I think he’d begun to despair of sharing information, simply because it raised our hopes and then so often went nowhere.”

  Cornelius paused. “I do not know where he’d gotten to before he died.”

  Her gaze tracked across the shelves, taking in the books and binders that so alternately appeared overwhelming and yet not sufficient at all. “But… what am I supposed to do?”

  “Read. Study. Use what you know of your gifts to find the answers to Merlin’s spell.” He glanced down at the table. “Follow the breadcrumbs your father left to fulfill your part of the bargain Darius made.”

  “But I don’t even–” She caught herself, reluctant to admit any weakness to him. The binders and notes stared back at her, and she suppressed a scowl, knowing she had to continue.

  “I don’t know anything about magic, Cornelius.”

  He paused. “I know.” At her expression, he held up a hand. “But not everyone here does. And it is not important. You will.”

  She watched him cautiously.

  “Your father wanted to shelter you,” Cornelius said. “To keep you from needing to become the kind of wizard he had to be. But…” a grimace surfaced briefly, “the world is what it is. And that is not possible anymore. Thus, anything of magic we know, I will teach you. Anything I can do to assist you, it will be done. I swear.”

  She looked back at the papers, saying nothing. She didn’t want to bring up Carter again. It wouldn’t help and the conversation wouldn’t go any differently than it had five minutes before.

  And at the moment, it wasn’t the point.

  A vague sense of helplessness pressed down on her as she brushed her fingertips across the papers. “I’m just not sure I–”

  “Ashe,” he interrupted quietly.

  She glanced over at him.

  “What you saw today. The attack. Your people need this. More than they need you bandaging wounds, more than your presence or support. They need you to fix this. You are the only one who can.”

  She shifted uncomfortably. “But where do I start?”

  His gaze went to the aging desk chair at the head of the table. “How about here?”

  Hesitating a moment, she circled the table and then sank into the creaking chair. The scattered paper before her seemed to stretch out infinitely.

  “Read what you can tonight,” Cornelius said. “And then get some sleep. We will start in earnest tomorrow morning.”

  He crossed to the door and then paused, looking back at her. “You can do this, your highness.”

  The door shut. Silence echoed in the room.

  She closed her eyes. Study. Read books while others did the only thing that really mattered to her. It was infuriating. And yet, if it meant the Blood were destroyed, people like the dying kids today were spared, and Carter was proved sane at the same time…

  Ashe sighed. She’d always liked to read.

  Grimacing, she opened her eyes. Scanning the sea of papers before her, she selected a small stack at random. Placing it atop the piles in front of her, she drew a tired breath and then set herself to piecing together the clues her father had left behind.

  Chapter Six

  “You aren’t concentrating!” Cornelius snapped from his post by the wall of the massive storage building.

  Gritting her teeth, Ashe extinguished the fire around her hands. “I’m trying,” she growled.

  “Try harder,” he retorted. “That last attack would have hurt you if the guard hadn’t pulled it in time.”

  Furious, she turned away, swiping the sweat from her eyes and resisting the urge to strike out at the infernal man. Around her, dozens of makeshift targets smoldered, victims of her offensive training.

  Four weeks had passed since she’d come to the Merlin hideout on the edge of Croftsburg, and each moment had been nearly as unproductive as possible in regards to anything she cared to be doing. For starters, there had been the trouble with locating the cripples. No one had expected to find any in the city itself, of course; so many wizards in the area had long since driven the cripples far from Croftsburg. But days upon days had gone by, and for each message Darius sent to every wizard within a thousand miles, he’d received nothing remotely helpful in reply. Most hadn’t seen a cripple in years. A trio of Merlin in southern Indiana finally found a few hiding in an abandoned barn, but the wizards had barely had time to ask for help on behalf of their queen before the cripples had taken off running. No matter what the wizards said, they couldn’t stop them fleeing, and their attempts to follow had been met with guns.

  Nothing had changed since.

  And meanwhile, the fruitless search was taking its toll. Already infinitesimal, the council’s patience for ‘her’ Blood wizards was dwindling rapidly toward nonexistence. Of them all, only Darius maintained any determination to do as she’d asked, though lately even he’d begun to look concerned. Her attempts to initiate discussions of her going out to help had been resounding failures, however. They’d made a deal. And she was needed here.

  So the days crept by. In the morning, she studied her father’s files, pouring through years of handwritten notes and cross-references. In short order, she’d discovered that when Cornelius said the library consisted of remnants, he’d made the understatement of the century. Even her father’s journals lamented the lack of information he’d constantly encountered. Pages ended in midsentence, with the next page nowhere to be found, and countless records mentioned other books no one could remember seeing.

  It was maddening.

  By early afternoon, Cornelius rescued her from the stacks of notebooks, though only to deliver her to their training area and then drive her till she thought she’d scream. Initially, it hadn’t been so bad. Basic defensive techniques, baby steps, and talk of how magic worked dominated their time. But soon, he’d started her on offensive tactics, insisting she learn to accomplish by design what she’d thus far pulled off only by instinct. Hours of maneuvering through physically and magically demanding obstacle courses followed, as well as entire sessions spent trying to bind more than one wizard simultaneously. The guards were her guinea pigs, and their avowed trust in her ability to unbind them once finished was only occasionally belied by the hints of anxiety she saw in their eyes.

  She’d struggled at the start, trying to remember how she’d taken Brogan’s magic away. The whole night was a blur, and recreating what she’d done meant revisiting memories she’d rather forget. But slowly, it came back to her, and now Cornelius steadily worked more and more wizard attackers into their sessions, expecting her to bind them without fail every single time.

  It was good training, she supposed. But it helped nothing toward the spell. No matter how hard she pushed herself or what she read, taking magic from multiple wizards at the exact same time remained beyond her reach. She could bind one, and then another and another, and keep them all bound till she wanted to let them go, or even take the magic of one and use it against another, but simultaneous binding required more strength than she knew how to find.

  And that was the problem really, though she hadn’t discussed it with Cornelius. Strong she might be – likely stronger than most of the wizards here, if her father’s notes on her general family history were any indication – but even for her there remained a point she couldn’t exceed.

  She’d discovered it soon after they started their lessons. At the beginning, the practice had been so liberating. Their training building was a massive concrete-walled space with only a semblance of a roof to worry about, and for their part, the guards and Cornelius were so accustomed to defending against magical assaults that, for the first time, she could let the fire go and trust that everyone would be okay. But as the intensity of their practice escalated, things changed. One moment,
she’d been pushing herself harder and harder, trying desperately to snare the magic of two wizards at once, and the next she’d been on her knees, gasping as her magic faltered at the edge of a great cavernous gulf in her mind.

  In the days that followed, she’d taken to calling it the black hole, though ‘abyss’ would have been equally fitting. Like a cliff at the end of the world, the void demarcated the nonnegotiable point beyond which her magic absolutely could not go.

  From her father’s journals, she’d pieced together information, learning what she could of the ‘limit’ he occasionally described. The human body only possessed so much capacity for magic, he wrote, beyond which the mind would simply break. Most wizards never came close to this, but with her family’s history of strength, for them the situation was not the same. At the start of the war, he’d tried to push beyond it for the sake of the spell, but the attempts left him unconscious for days and frightened the council into thinking he’d been permanently incapacitated. Eventually, when months of trying left the limit unchanged, he’d given up and clung to the hope that strength alone had not been the sole factor in what Merlin had done.

  She’d danced close to the edge since reading his words, but never pushed past it. Sooner or later, she knew she probably would, but until her skill with magic improved, she wasn’t sure it would go particularly well. At best, she’d be knocked unconscious. At worst, she’d be a vegetable.

  And thus, she kept training. No matter how infuriating Cornelius could be.

  “Go again,” he called. At his command, the guards scattered to search for hiding places. Scorch marks covered the maze of cinder-block barricades and showed in multilayered swaths across the walls. Of the fabric and hay dummies, only piles of smoldering ash remained.

  “No flames this time,” he told her. “Only force. Stop resorting to pyromachy just because it makes you the most comfortable.”

  She scowled and then turned away to give the guards a chance to hide.

  “Go!”

  Sometimes, the hours among the books almost seemed appealing.