Ruthless Magic

by Megan Crewe

  Rocío choked out a casting, and the searing energy slammed into an invisible wall scarcely a foot from my face. The impact was so forceful that even with the protective shield, the air shuddered and walloped me backward. My ears popped. I stumbled and caught my balance, sucking in a breath saturated with the monster’s burning stink.

  If not for Rocío’s wits, we’d all have been fried to a crisp.

  “Lacey!” she shouted.

  The other girl had already vanished behind the heap of mangled flesh. I didn’t think she’d even glanced back to see what damage she’d wrought on us.

  Rocío pushed forward through the shield. I snapped out of my shock and dashed after her. As she tried to pick her way between the gigantic corpse and the debris of the shattered hedge, I caught her arm.

  “Let her go,” I said.

  She whirled toward me. “She can’t run off alone. She won’t have anyone to help if... if...”

  “I don’t think she wants our help,” I said. My ears were still ringing. “She tried to kill us, Rocío.”

  “I said I’d get us all through this.”

  “You can only protect the people who decide to stay with the group. If it matters so much to her to go it alone, we should let her. What do you expect she’ll do to you if you try to stop her?”

  Rocío’s shoulders sagged. She looked so wretched I wanted to wrap my arms around her, but I didn’t know if the gesture would be welcome. I settled for letting my hand drop to hers to squeeze her fingers. She’d said I made getting through this easier for her. Even if I wasn’t of much use otherwise, I had to keep giving her that.

  “It was my fault,” she said. “I should have been more careful how I talked to her. I pushed her away.”

  “You were right to speak up,” Prisha said. “She should have been more careful with her castings.”

  “Why did she attack us?” Judith asked, her voice muffled. She was holding her hand over her face to ward off the monster’s stench. Blood dribbled down her forearm from the little scratches from the hedge blast. The sting of my own wounds crept back into my consciousness.

  “Who knows what she was thinking?” Prisha said with a briskness that suggested she wasn’t merely nervous but outright scared. “I guess she decided she liked Callum’s approach. Good riddance, in that case. Now can we get out of here already?”

  “It’s shrinking,” Desmond said abruptly.

  All our gazes jerked to the monster’s corpse. It was contracting in on itself, the odor fading as we watched. In a matter of seconds, all that remained was a dark stain on the gray ground and the wreckage of the hedge it had smashed through.

  Rocío exhaled. “It was just conjured,” she said. “I wondered... The parts looked so real.”

  “Some mage was having too much fun playing Dr. Frankenstein,” Desmond said with a grimace. He gestured to the new passage the monster had opened up. “Anything interesting down that other way?”

  I peered through the smashed opening. “It looks the same as all the other paths to me.”

  “It’s on the right,” Judith said, toeing one of the glossy green shards. “We were keeping to the left. I think we should stick to that. Otherwise we could end up looping around through places we’ve already been.”

  “There you go,” I said, my hand still clasped around Rocío’s. “We have a plan: left to the end. Might I suggest that if anyone else is considering parting ways, they do it now and peacefully? As much as I appreciate the extra challenge.”

  “I’m good,” Desmond said.

  Judith laughed. “You know I’m not going anywhere.”

  Prisha merely snorted.

  “It looks as though we’re not getting rid of these ones,” I said to Rocío.

  She didn’t smile, but her expression had softened. “All right,” she said. “We’ll keep moving. But let’s heal any injuries as well as we can while we have the time.”

  She leaned into me, a sudden heat against my chest, letting me take her weight for one brief instant. My pulse skipped with giddiness that was utterly inappropriate for our current circumstances. Then she pulled away. I relinquished her hand.

  Desmond murmured a sealing casting over his arms. The scratches transformed into spidery tan lines against the deeper brown skin. He winced as he swiped his hand across them. How deeply had they cut into the muscle? My own scratches prickled pain down through my flesh, stark red against my general paleness.

  Desmond turned to Judith. Prisha had managed to attend to her own cuts, though they looked more scabbed than sealed.

  Rocío finished healing herself and glanced at me in question.

  I loathed having to rely on her or anyone else, but my connection to the whisper of magic around us had worn far too thin. If the others needed me, if one major casting could swing the balance between us surviving and not, then I’d be ready—that was, as long as I didn’t freeze up again in the moment when it counted. Otherwise, I refused to turn myself into a liability simply to make a point.

  I extended my arm to Rocío. “Just enough to stop the bleeding,” I said. “That’s all that matters. Anything else can wait. And thank you.”

  We walked on as a group, our ears perked and eyes wary. Rocío’s casting tingled over my forearm. As we took another left, she let go of my wrist. Her head lifted and her forehead furrowed.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Judith was right,” she said. “There was something strange about the magic before that... thing appeared. The energy felt too tense and scattered to hold a casting easily.” She paused. “But now it’s calmed down. It feels steady again. I don’t know what’s affecting it.”

  I didn’t want to admit that the quiver of magic felt the same to me as it always did, like a distant breeze. “The shifts might give us some warning next time.”

  She nodded, still pensive.

  The skittering sounds that had dogged us earlier rose again. The back of my neck itched. Was another of those monsters stalking us? Nil admirari. Whatever came, we had to be more prepared this time.

  Lacey’s fire had dispatched the last creature well. I sorted through the lines I had memorized that referred to flames and burning.

  If Rocío could cast with childhood songs, and the other new-magic examinees drew on everything from rap to rock, I didn’t need to stick to the classics the Academy had drilled into us, did I? Maybe I’d connect to the magic better using a language that came more naturally to mind.

  The first song that popped into my head was a Christmas carol about roasting chestnuts. Hmmm. That wasn’t quite the tone I required.

  Judith was humming quietly to herself, a tune that I thought I’d heard her fall into before. “What song is that?” I asked when she stopped.

  Her cheeks pinked as if she hadn’t realized anyone would notice. “It’s just from a movie I liked a lot as a kid,” she said. “The words are in Mandarin, but there’s a line about ‘staying strong as woven threads.’ It helps me focus.”

  The path took another turn then, and we found ourselves faced with a wall of hedge broken only by a round opening so small we’d have to crawl to enter it. Inside, the sharp barbs of the “thorns” had fused together to form a smooth surface.

  “They probably wouldn’t have included a tunnel if they didn’t want us to go through,” Prisha said.

  “It could be a trap,” Judith said, pulling her sling closer to her chest.

  “I’d bet good money it is,” I said. “Any thoughts on the least potentially painful method of springing it?”

  There was no satisfactory answer to that question. We couldn’t know how to avoid trouble when we had no idea what the examiners might want to test us for next.

  “We’ll go through one at a time,” Rocío said. “I’ll go first, with a shield in case I set anything off. All right?”

  The urge to volunteer myself in her place filled me, but I caught the words before I said them. The unavoidable truth was that I stood a much higher chance of getting
us all killed than she did. I settled for saying, “Be careful, Dragon-Tamer.”

  She gifted me with a flicker of a smile before crouching down and crawling into the tunnel.

  We stood waiting with the skittering sound carrying around us. Judith hugged herself. The ground jiggled under our feet, and I teetered.

  When the tremor stilled, I leaned toward the opening. Shadows draped the other end of the tunnel. There was no sign of Rocío. I cleared my throat. “Rocío?”

  “Maybe there’s a ’chantment muting sound from the other side,” Prisha said.

  In that case, anything at all could be transpiring over there. Dread trickled through my chest.

  Before any of the others could speak up, I hunched down and crawled in. The roasting-chestnuts tune hovered on my tongue. The tunnel’s floor was slick and cool under my hands and knees. I scuttled through and out into the darkness at its end.

  In the hazy space into which I emerged, the shadows twisted close around me like echoes of the hedge’s thorns. They didn’t touch me, but they were so thick my hands vanished into their depths when I reached in front of me. I could scarcely see a foot in any direction.

  “Rocío?” I said. “Anyone? Can you hear me?”

  I turned back to the tunnel, planning to stay near it until the others arrived, but the brambly shadows had swallowed the opening up too. They swayed as if in a low wind.

  I took a tentative step out into the space, and another, wading through the shadows, but no wall met my outstretched hands. This space was bigger than the passage I’d left.

  Several more steps got me nowhere. I swiveled, trying an alternate angle. There was nothing but shadows as far as I walked that way too. A cold sweat formed on my skin.

  “Rocío! Prisha! Hello?” I yelled. The shadows brushed my mouth and coated it with a mildew flavor.

  I spun around again, and this time the darkness parted in front of me. I perceived a figure up ahead, her back to me, light brown hair spilling past her shoulders. She was too fair to be any of the other girls in our group but Lacey, only Lacey was waifish and this girl was tall and large-boned. I eased toward her cautiously. The shadows pulled farther back, and she turned to face me.

  It was Margo. She stood with her blue eyes fixed on me, her bangs rumpled and the tails of a characteristic fitted plaid shirt hanging loose over her jeans.

  “Finn,” she said in a voice raw as if from crying.

  O Hades, what had the examiners brought on us now? I’d only heard my sister sound that wretched once or twice before, when I’d been a kid and she a teenager.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “You can’t be Champion,” she said. “I came to tell you to stop. Say you’re done with this. Say you don’t want it anymore.”

  She reached into the shadows and broke off a piece that turned solid in her fingers. Her freckled hand clutched the dark green thorn, which curved dagger-sharp.

  Was this real or just an illusion? I wasn’t certain the examiners would have gone to the hassle of bringing Margo here to confront me, and I couldn’t imagine my sister turning that makeshift knife on me.

  “I’m not going to stop,” I said. “I’m seeing the Exam through to the end, or at least as far as I can get.”

  “Please,” she said, and raised the thorn-dagger.

  I braced myself, ready to dodge. Whether she was real or not was of no consequence; the examiners’ conjurings could deal plenty of damage.

  She didn’t strike out at me, though. She pressed the tip of the thorn to her cheek.

  “Margo!” I cried out, and leapt at her, but she slipped backward, just beyond my reach. Her hand dragged the sharpened edge down, splitting her skin from cheekbone to jaw.

  Blood bubbled in a stream down her face and neck, soaking into her shirt. The wound gaped angrily when she opened her mouth. My stomach lurched.

  “Stop,” she said. “You’re forcing me to do this. I can’t stop until you stop. Please.”

  It wasn’t her, I told myself, my heart hammering. It couldn’t be her. The examiners wouldn’t dare ’chant a real Lockwood into carving herself up. My family’s outcry, the Circle’s backlash, would ruin every mage on the Exam committee.

  Nevertheless, a cold wave of nausea washed over me when the fake Margo set the knife against her other cheek.

  “This is just a trick!” I shouted as she etched a matching red line through her skin. “Do whatever you want. I’m not quitting!”

  Please believe me. Please let this end before I change my mind.

  Margo brought the thorn-dagger to her sternum above the open neck of her shirt. “Please,” she said, sounding even more desolate than before. “It hurts. I don’t want to do this. Please let the Exam go so they’ll let me go too.”

  I clamped my mouth shut against the nausea still surging inside me. Then she plunged the blade into her chest just below her collarbone.

  I turned away, unable to bear the sight, but I heard it. I heard the wet rattle of her breath around a moan, the rasp of metal against bone, the patter of blood spilling onto the ground. Acid seared up my throat.

  “My heart,” she said in a gurgle of a voice. “I have to cut out my heart to make you see.”

  “No!” I protested, and staggered away from her into the shadows.

  I made it several steps before knifing over. The remains of my breakfast spattered from my mouth.

  I couldn’t hear my sister anymore. Tentatively, one hand on my gut, I swiped at my chin and straightened up.

  The shadowy brambles had converged around me. There was no sign of Margo.

  There was still no sign of any escape either.

  All of this was just an illusion—even the shadows. I might be wandering in circles on one of those paths between the hedges, oblivious to everything real around me.

  I wobbled on. After another few steps, Prisha’s purple blouse shone out brightly between the shadows ahead of me.

  Thank the Fates! I hurried toward her.

  “Pree!”

  She swiveled to reveal a length of vine coiled around her neck.

  “Finn,” she croaked. “Please. They said if you forfeit now, they’ll let me go.”

  I didn’t have the chance to respond this time. I’d emitted no more than a strangled noise when the end of the vine wrenched up into the great wall of shadows above us, yanking Prisha’s body with it. Her chin snapped up; her limbs flailed.

  “No!” I snatched at her, and Rocío shoved between us. She held a thorn as long and narrow as an ice pick. I froze as she stabbed it into her abdomen. A red circle of blood bloomed on her shirt. She jerked the thorn out with a pained grunt.

  “Leave the Exam,” she said in a whimper. “Please, Finn.”

  I sprang after her, after Prisha, but an invisible force tugged them just beyond my frantic hands. I lunged again, faster, to no avail. My breath rattled in my chest.

  I had no guarantee they were illusions. They’d been in the maze. I didn’t doubt for an instant that the examiners would manipulate those of us in here however they pleased. No one questioned the deaths reported from the Exam.

  “Stop it!” I pleaded.

  “I can’t unless you give up,” Rocío said.

  Prisha clawed at her noose with a gurgle that made me want to vomit all over again. Rocío rammed the pick into her side a few inches above the first wound. Her shoulders buckled, but she lifted the thorn again, higher.

  If it was them, if the examiners were compelling them, I couldn’t conceive of the agony they were in.

  I couldn’t let this horror continue. I couldn’t take the chance. “Okay,” I said. “Okay! I—”

  The acquiescence caught in my throat as my gaze snagged on Rocío’s sunburst charm—on every perfect point around its untarnished circle.

  It wasn’t her. The real Rocío’s necklace had been warped by the sentries’ assault yesterday.

  The examiners must have missed that detail. I might have too, if she hadn’t b
een drawing so much of my attention. These were illusions after all, as Margo had been.

  I covered my face with my hands, fighting to steady my breath through the fleshy smack of Rocío driving in the pick, through Prisha’s gasps. Then, queasy but with my jaw set tight, I drew myself up and strode forward with firm but unhurried strides.

  The illusions didn’t pull away this time. As I made to march between them, they dispelled into the shadows as if they’d never existed. I wiped the sweat from my brow and forced myself to keep walking.

  Please, O gods of Olympus, let that be the last of it. If there was a Tartarus, it had nothing on this place.

  I tensed up at the sight of another figure ahead of me. The shadows crept back, withdrawing into the more solid brambles of familiar hedges on either side of me, where they’d been all along, undoubtedly.

  Desmond—the real Desmond—startled at the rasp of my footsteps. His intent yet distant gaze tripped over me. He relaxed and offered me a tip of his head.

  He’d escaped ahead of me even though I’d gone in earlier. Had his limited vision made seeing through the illusions easier?

  I halted beside him and glanced back the way I’d come. Roiling shadows choked the other end of the path.

  “Just us, so far?” I asked.

  “I haven’t seen anyone,” Desmond said. “I mean, no one real.”

  The hollowness of his voice, the way it broke on the last word, told me more than any description could have. Whatever he’d faced, it had cost him.

  “I thought I should wait for the rest of you,” he added. “Or... however many make it out.”

  I crossed my arms, attempting not to consider how close I’d come to not making it. “Of course,” I said. “We’ll wait.”

  Rocío had entered ahead of all of us. What did it mean that even she hadn’t emerged yet?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rocío