by Bill Hiatt
“What is he up to?” I asked.
“There’s something in that saddlebag,” replied Magnus. “Something wickedly powerful. Our friend must have made a little stop in the Valley of Lost Things before we pulled him back. If he gets to whatever he found, we need to make sure everybody is protected.”
I’d been too distracted to notice, but once Magnus drew my attention to it, the power radiating from the saddlebag was hard to miss.
Michael, whom I had a hard time not thinking of as Tal Twelve, was using his somewhat smaller size to dart between the big guys and reach out for Atlante. Unfortunately, the hippogriff managed to rake its claws across his back. Michael screamed and went down, the back of his shirt torn and now red with blood.
I knew he would heal. I knew he wasn’t going to die. However, there was something about seeing a kid getting his flesh shredded that sent my logic down in flames and put something more primal in command. The fact that the kid was in some ways me didn’t help. For a few seconds I was out of control.
Drawing White Hilt, I sent a blast of flames at the hippogriff. I knew he was an animal showing loyalty to his master. I knew restraining him would have been better if we could do it. In that moment I just didn’t care.
The hippogriff dodged my first blast, but the distraction gave Khalid a chance to fly in and carry Michael to safety. Eva ran over to check the wounds, reminding me for a second that we had no idea whether Nurse Florence, who would usually have been the first one to run to the fallen, was alive or dead.
I couldn’t think about that right now. All I could think about was whether I wanted my hippogriff crispy or extra crispy.
It took me a few seconds to realize Gordy was shaking me.
“Tal! Stop using fire. You’re going to burn one of us at the rate you’re going.”
I shook him off but then heard Magnus shouting essentially the same thing in my head.
What was wrong with me? I figured if Magnus was in better control of himself than I was, something had to be wrong. I made myself lower White Hilt before Gordy’s warning came true.
In all the chaos, Atlante had reached the hippogriff and managed to grab the saddlebag just long enough to pull out a golden horn.
“Fall back!” Magnus screamed in everybody’s heads. “We can’t protect you as easily if you’re all scattered.”
Three seconds later, Atlante blew the horn.
The sound probably wouldn’t have been horrible if measured scientifically, but there was magic in it that made me want to scream, to flee, to throw myself into the Valley of Lost Things untethered and take my chances. Only Magnus’s foresight saved me and everyone else. We felt the impact of the horn blast in every nerve, but filtered through the shielding Magnus had thrown up, we could resist the feeling of utter terror Atlante was trying to project.
Atlante blew again, but by that time I had gotten myself together better and was back to funneling more power into our defenses. Lucas was once more in his dance trance. Whatever that horn was, it wasn’t strong enough to overcome the lyre, my song, and Lucas’s dance.
Atlante blew again, and the hippogriff dropped to let him mount. The guys knew he was trying to make a break for it but looked at Magnus, uncertain how close to Atlante they could get without making themselves too vulnerable. Magnus seemed undecided himself.
The only one of us who knew what to do was Gordy, whose dragon armor made him immune to fear. He ran in Atlante’s direction, but just as he was about to reach the sorcerer, the hippogriff rose with unexpected speed, spun around and used its hooves to give Gordy a violent kick in the chest. Even protected by dragon armor, Gordy was still smashed against the floor and stunned. In another smooth motion the hippogriff repositioned itself to allow Atlante to mount.
Any second the sorcerer was going to open another gateway into the Valley, and then we’d lose Jimmie’s body again, perhaps forever.
At that moment something that looked like an amplified moonbeam, its silver marred by flecks of angry red, hit both hippogriff and sorcerer, blinding them instantly and surprising Atlante so much he lost his grip on the horn. Khalid, moving faster than I had ever seen him go, flew over, grabbed the magic horn, and flew back before Atlante had even been able to dismount, let alone reach the horn.
“How dare you offer my guests such violence in my domain!” roared Arianrhod, from whom the weaponized moonbeams had doubtless radiated. “How dare you!”
As if her cry had been a signal, the guys surged forward. In moments they had Atlante off the hippogriff and knocked out, allowing me to cast a quick spell that would keep him unconscious as long as we needed. Servants of Arianrhod appeared from somewhere and got the hippogriff tied to a post I hadn’t noticed before. Blinded, the beast seemed almost tame.
“I think we’ve gone beyond a tynged,” I said. “We have to get Atlante out of Jimmie’s body and put Jimmie back into it.”
That wasn’t part of Magnus’s plan, needless to say, because it deprived him of what little leverage over the rest of us he still had. Although we now knew that Jimmie wouldn’t be destroyed if Magnus’s spell ended, Arianrhod’s remark about it being difficult to get Jimmie soul back into his body under those circumstances might still have restrained us a little.
I might have hoped that the way some of us had argued with Arianrhod about how crucial Magnus was would have convinced him we were not trying to get rid of him anymore. Evidently, he was not convinced enough, because he refused to agree unless we were all bound by a tynged.
“Only if you are also bound to surrender Robin’s body at some point,” I said.
“Remember, he already is,” Arianrhod reminded me. “He swore such an oath to me before.”
Once again we were stuck having to work out the tedious details of a tynged. Arianrhod helped, however, so the process was faster than it might have been—at least until we tried to complete it. For the first time I could remember in any of my lives, the tynged didn’t take. I could feel the golden energy wrap itself around us, but it just swirled uselessly. There was no feeling of binding. Magnus and I tried to draw those bonds to us, but we failed, and eventually the energy dissipated.
“How could that happen?” I asked, frustrated. “Are you not really agreeing?”
“Check my mind and see,” said Magnus. “I want this to work as much as you do.”
“There can only be one answer,” said Arianrhod. “Magnus must be bound to a conflicting tynged.”
Magnus looked confused. “My lady, we know yours wouldn’t conflict. The only other one I have ever sworn to was imposed upon me by Nicneven, queen of the Scottish faeries and witches. She’s dead, though, and the tynged would have lost its force as soon as she died.”
“Tell me of this tynged,” said Arianrhod, staring at Magnus as if she were trying to see the binding around him.
Magnus described the tynged, which was indeed extensive, until Arianrhod raised a hand for him to stop.
“It prohibited you from accepting any general or contradictory commands from other tynghedau, did it not?” she asked.
“It did. There’s also a clause that gave it precedence over any other tynged I might enter into later. At the time, I thought that was overkill.”
“My tynged with you was specific, so it was allowed,” said Arianrhod. “The one you sought to make with Taliesin included general language to ensure you harmed no one in the party.”
“Yes, but I still don’t see how that’s relevant,” insisted Magnus. “Nicneven is dead, and there was no language about my obligations under it passing to anyone else.”
Arianrhod looked at him even more intensely. “Did you feel the tynged release you?”
“No, but I just assumed—” Magnus began.
“Then there is but one answer,” said the former goddess. “Nicneven is still very much alive.”
Magnus went pale. “But that means—”
“That if she can find you, she can give you orders you’ll have to obey,” I finishe
d for him. “I don’t see how she could be alive, though. We all saw her die.”
“Maybe we saw someone who looked like her die,” suggested Alex.
“No, I was too close to her to be fooled,” insisted Magnus, “and in any case some random shapeshifter couldn’t have commanded me under the tynged; only she could do that.”
I felt a little sick. “Unless Nicneven’s stand-in was created by the same spell that created your current body. Nicneven could have supplied the blood to one of her witches. Spells, maybe even a tynged, can’t always distinguish us. Perhaps your tynged couldn’t distinguish between Nicnevens.”
“God, you’re right,” said Magnus, looking sicker than I felt. “I was about to object that there was no way Nicneven could have switched places with her double near the end of the battle, but under your theory she wouldn’t have had to. The double could have been in place during the whole fight.”
“Or longer. You had Nicneven under a love spell long before that battle,” I pointed out. “Nicneven would have to have been planning so far ahead that she had changed places with her double long ago and used a huge amount of blood in the duplication spell, so that it would last.”
“We suspected she had a powerful seer,” I said. “Given how much seers are confused by duplicates created by that spell, Nicneven might not have known what was coming, but perhaps she knew she was in some kind of serious danger and made the swap days, even weeks, earlier. You zapped the duplicate, not the real Nicneven, with the spell. Later, after I released the spell, the double forced you into a tynged which the real one can now enforce because the tynged can’t distinguish the two.”
“It’s even simpler than that,” Magnus said glumly. “The tynged actually mentioned Nicneven’s name. I wasn’t just being bound to the person with whom I was making the tynged; I was being bound to Nicneven in an absolute sense, whether the tynged could distinguish the original from the double or not. At the time I thought that was overkill too.”
“I’m lost,” said Gordy. Magnus was apparently too worried to go for the obvious dig.
“If Nicneven was lurking somewhere nearby, why didn’t she intervene later?” Gordy continued. “We only barely won. If she had caught us by surprise near the end, couldn’t she have beaten us?”
“I think I know why she didn’t,” said Alex slowly. “Maybe she didn’t get a warning of danger. Maybe she just needed to be in two places at once. She knew her presence was needed to prepare the invasion of Earth from Elphame, but she had an urgent need to be elsewhere at the same time.”
“Where else was she so urgently needed?” asked Lucas.
“You might not have been told this,” replied Alex, “but Nicneven draws the witch side of her powers from Hecate. They’ve been connected…allied…since ancient times.”
“So what…oh, wait, I get it,” said Lucas.
“Exactly!” said Alex. “Nicneven must have been on the Olympian plane, working on springing Hecate from Tartarus. It would have been easy enough to get there through the invitation of one of Hecate’s allies. Working out her little jailbreak must have taken a long time, but she could spend that time because she knew fake Nicneven could handle things in Elphame just as well as she could.”
“I didn’t think anybody else knew that spell,” said Carlos.
“Whoever used that spell to trick Oberon in the first place did,” I pointed out. “Hecate has a wide range of powers, made still broader by her allies. She’s a perfect candidate to have developed the spell in the first place. That also explains another mystery.”
“Dark Zeus?” asked Eva.
“Yeah, and that’s the only theory I can think of that would. Hecate couldn’t control the original—but she could clone him.”
Most of this elaborate theory couldn’t be proved, but it was an incredibly convenient explanation for so many different puzzling developments. My gut told me it was right on target.
My gut also tied itself in tight little knots over the fact that I had used the blessed water from Brendan’s well to destroy the wrong enemy. Logically, we couldn’t have won the battle any other way, and Nicneven wasn’t there to destroy, even if I had realized the truth. None of that stopped me from feeling as if I had made a terrible mistake again.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Carlos. “It sounds as if we are in a worse mess than we thought.”
“That’s why Vanora sprung that trap on all of us!” said Gordy abruptly.
This time the rest of us were lost. Before any of us could ask the obvious question, Gordy realized he needed to explain himself.
“Well, we’ve thought Vanora might be under someone else’s control. That someone is probably Nicneven. That still doesn’t explain why she had Vanora launch that attack on all of us. We were completely oblivious to what Nicneven was up to. If anything, she just drew our attention to the fact that something was up.”
“She probably expected to capture all of us,” pointed out Lucas.
“Even so, it seems rash,” said Gordy. “If it were well planned, she ought to have gotten all of us, or at least more of us, don’t you think? This looks to me like she was overeager to do something, but what? Her team had already taken Olympus.”
“But not Gwynn, and not the Order,” I said. “Maybe she struck when she did to keep us from interfering.”
“Maybe,” conceded Gordy, “but why not wait to attack our faerie allies until she already had us captured? Why start an attack that forced her to go after us before she was ready?”
“You’re going to have to tell us,” said Magnus. “Unless you’d rather I just ripped it out of your mind—”
“No need,” said Gordy, raising his hands. “I’ll just spit it out, then. Nicneven wants you, Magnus. Somehow she knows you haven’t succeeded in making the perfect copy of Tal’s blood, which you need to keep the spell going, that you still need Tal. You might solve that problem anytime, though. She needed to threaten Tal to flush you out while you still had an interest in him.”
“Why not just capture Tal and use him, then?” asked Carlos.
“Duh, because Tal wouldn’t have cooperated, and she has Magnus under a tynged that requires him to obey her.”
Magnus slapped Gordy on the back and said, “Good thinking!” I could hardly have been more shocked if Nicneven had surrendered on the spot. One of Magnus’s chief pleasures had always been ridiculing Gordy, after all. Given their past history, Gordy looked almost afraid to take the compliment.
“If what your friend has said is true, Magnus, it means that you must go somewhere Nicneven will never find you,” said Arianrhod.
Going into hiding was the logical thing to do—except that Magnus had to be pretty much out of my blood.
“We can’t risk your being caught by Nicneven. Whatever she wants with you we can’t let her have,” I said. “I’ll give you some blood to tide you over until we finish her once and for all.”
Most of the guys looked at me as if I had completely lost my mind. Maybe I had.
“You can’t let him leave here with Jimmie’s soul,” said Eva.
“Already thought of that,” I said, turning to Magnus. “As a condition of receiving my blood, you have to help us remove Atlante from Jimmie’s body and put Jimmie back into it. You know exactly what you did, so you’re the person most likely to be able to undo it.”
“How do I know I’ll get the blood once I’ve done that?” asked Magnus suspiciously.
“Simple,” I said, grinning. “We might have problems binding you with a tynged, but I can bind myself to do what I promise, and there’s no reason you can’t be the recipient of that.”
“Excuse us,” said Gordy. “We need a quick conference.” He grabbed my arm and started hustling me to the opposite end of the room, as far away from Magnus as we could get. My evil twin, in yet another rare display of restraint, took the hint and didn’t follow. Arianrhod also held back, probably to keep an eye on him and certainly on Atlante, though he was bound and un
conscious. Everyone else, however, followed me and Gordy.
“You know he can adjust his hearing enough to tell what we’re saying, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, but he can’t interrupt as easily from over there,” said Gordy. “Anyway, you’re letting Magnus just leave like that? What about Robin?”
“I feel sorry for Robin,” I admitted, “but not sorry enough to risk Nicneven getting her hands on Magnus again, especially if you’re right, and she needs something from him. Besides, the tynged he has with Arianrhod means he has to free Robin eventually, one way or the other.”
“I still don’t like the idea,” said Gordy. “What keeps him from allying with Nicneven?”
“He only did that before because he thought he could control her,” I pointed out. “I think he hated the situation when she could command him. He has every reason now to stay clear of her. That doesn’t worry me a bit.”
“He’s different,” said Eva, looking somewhat self-conscious for having said anything.
“What do you mean?” asked Gordy.
“You’ve all noticed it, if you think about it,” she replied. “When he first appeared, he was pretty much his usual self. The whole Jimmie mess is vintage Dark Me. Somehow, he isn’t the same now.”
As she spoke, I realized I’d let him link to me without thinking twice about it. I would never have been so willing before.
“He’s not as insulting, and sometimes it almost seems as if he cares about us.”
“He’s acting,” said Gordy, without a second thought.
“We’ve seen him try to pretend to be Tal,” said Carlos. “Remember that fiasco in Elings Park. He was easy as glass to see through. He’s not like that at all now. He’s not trying to pretend to be Tal. He’s…somehow more like him, though. It’s easier to take his orders and listen to his advice.”
