by Rene Sears
I'd thought Matthew was all talk and bluster, right up until the day he tried to drive a sidheblade into the heart of a fae lord, one of the queen's nephews. We'd been part of the Association's guard for the fae visitor, which had made it worse. I'd tried to stop him; Marcus had actually stopped him. Seeing Marcus again brought it all back.
That bare recital of the facts didn't cover how it had felt, though. Matthew, Eliza, and I had shared a terribly grotty two bedroom apartment within walking distance of the Association's building in New York. We'd work with Marcus in the day and stay up late discussing magical theory over take out. Eliza was always terrifyingly competent and Matthew was our innovator. He could see ways of casting that never occurred to me and put them together into something new. One night I had come home to the two of them giggling and toasting each other with mugs full of some wretched Bordeaux; they had come up with a spell to keep roaches out of the apartment. I had thought Matthew's reaction to the fae—I hadn't let myself really believe that it was hatred—was a close-minded phase that he would get over in time. I had been wrong.
The nephew had lived, or nothing any human could have done would have appeased her. The Council of the Association banished Matthew to an island off the coast of South Carolina as punishment for breaking the treaty, and that was that. The Association didn't fuck around with banishment; Matthew would die if he set foot on the mainland ever again. I'd tried, once, to get in touch. It hadn't worked.
His trial had been awful. Marcus had to testify. He'd loved us all, but Matthew was his especial pride and clearly who Marcus had seen as heir to his Council seat and perhaps one day as head of the Association: strong in his powers and brilliantly flexible with his application of magic. He'd been capable of the most delicate manipulation, tying strands of power into complicated knots far beyond anything I could accomplish. Matthew had been so clearly destined for greater things. It had broken Marcus to see his prize pupil banished, having betrayed his teachings, and he had released us all and stopped taking students.
Eliza and I had finished our studies with another caster from the Council, under a glum cloud of sorrow. We'd kept on living in our roach-free apartment, and we kept sharing a room because neither of us could bear to move into Matthew's space, but the rest of our time there was haunted by his absence. The third cog in our little triangular gear was gone, having betrayed the Association and us. I'd been shocked, and grieving—and afraid to admit I was grieving, because what he'd done was treason, even if it hadn't succeeded. And I was so angry at him, for what he'd done to me and Eliza, and to Marcus.
And now Marcus was dying. I had to tell Eliza, as head of the Association, and as my friend. If my cell phone didn't work in Strangehold, I'd just have to summon a mirror link. I dialed her number. To my pleased surprise, it started ringing. It kept ringing, so long that I expected voicemail to pick up, but it didn't. Finally, a male voice on the other end answered. "Hello?"
"May I speak to Eliza? This is Morgan Tenpenny."
"You—you can't speak to her." I recognized the voice now: Jakub Kaminski, Eliza's right hand man. His voice was rough with exhaustion, and broken, and my chest contracted even before he went on. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, Morgan, but she's dead."
"Oh, no." I clenched nerveless fingers on the phone to keep it from sliding out of my hand. First Helen, then Marcus's illness, and now Eliza... "But I just talked to her yesterday."
"It hits fast. It's hit them all fast. Morgan...are you coming back any time soon?"
I hesitated, surprised and bereft, but then it occurred to me: Jake was in his twenties. Casters generally lived a long time. He had expected a few more decades at Eliza's side before he had to be in charge. Another thought—was there no one more senior to help him? Had they all died too? "How soon do you need me?"
"Now would be okay." He sniffed and I pictured red-rimmed eyes. The scope of it was too much for me to imagine, and I thought about how awful was that luxury, to not know just yet who had died, how many I had to mourn.
"I'm coming back," I said. "I'm—I'm on my way to get my nieces, do you understand? But as soon as they're safe, I promise, Jake, I'm coming back. You don't have to do this alone."
He took a long, hitching breath, and I thought I was not the only one trying not to cry. "Morgan, it's awful. Please come quick."
"I will. As soon as I can. I will."
He hung up without saying goodbye.
I had to save my nieces, and then I had to help whatever was left of the Association. Rose thought my nieces were the key to finding a way out of the storm. Would there be anyone left when the storm was past?
*
The library at Strangehold was a researcher's dream. There were stacks upon stacks of books in old leather bindings. The shelves were packed with books hardbound in cloth, books with glossy paper covers, and mimeographed pamphlets. Hawthorn had showed me tablets loaded with articles and books, and a computer—Strangehold didn't have internet access, but the entire catalog was sorted by topic, author, and location in the library, in addition to less useful-to-me categories, like color and font.
For all the resources available to me, I was no closer to an answer about how to get underhill than I had been three hours earlier, when I started running down references to gates, feygates, boosting other casters' spells, the faerie court, and, a little guiltily, because I didn't really have time and it wasn't relevant, the Queen's Blade. Not that I found much. There was a brief description of the position, which was pretty much what I'd thought it was, the queen's assassin and bully, excuse me, her champion of blood, and of the first to hold it, lord Ashtree. How he had left the position was not described, nor his successors; "others have followed, as the title is assigned at the queen's whim." Not much I hadn't known or guessed already.
I filled most of a legal pad with notes and speculations, but none of it would congeal into a solution. Anything I—or Rowan, though he hadn't offered—could do would drain us, and I wanted both of us at full battle readiness to get Gwen and the girls away. I closed my eyes in the hope that a solution would write itself across my itchy eyelids, preferably in letters of flame so I would be sure to pay attention. When it didn't, I stood up and stretched, spine popping, and gathered up my notes. I retraced my steps through Strangehold. Marcus might not be able to help magically, but he'd been a caster for longer than I'd been alive, and one of the best. He might have a suggestion, and in any case, it would do me good to talk it out.
Marcus was awake and sitting up when I came in. This time the smell of sickness didn't hit me quite so hard. A half-eaten bowl of soup sat on the bedside table, and he turned from the window at my knock. The view was only a courtyard full of potted plants, but warm yellow light that approximated the sun streamed in through the windows anyway.
He listened while I laid out the problem. "We don’t have to use Strangehold's back door. It would just be convenient," I finished. "If we could break through a feygate—or if you know another way to get underhill—"
He shook his head slowly, eyes focused inward. "No, nothing comes to mind. If the queen has barred the way, no spell that you or I could throw together can breach it. Faerie is in part an extension of her will, and we can't directly contradict it. Rose's workaround is subtle in its randomness, and that might be our best bet." His attention came back into the room. "I'll think about it, Morgan. We'll come up with something. It's just a question of finding the right lever."
"If we could find a way to focus the magic, like using a lens to intensify light..."
"You may have something there. Send Hawthorn to me when you leave—she may have a suggestion I can bend to our purpose so you won't be completely wrung out when you get there."
I rose to leave, but he said, softly, "Have you heard anything else from outside?"
My damned eyes were stinging again, and despair pressed the air out of my chest, but I couldn't lie to him. "Yes. Marcus—Eliza's gone. She died last night. I don't know who els
e is dead."
He laced his thin fingers together and bent over his lap so all I saw was the top of his head. I slipped out of the door to leave him alone with his grief.
But my own wasn't far away. I needed a distraction. Luckily I had one—my tattoos needed to be replenished before we left Strangehold, whether to Faerie or back to Atlanta. I wasn't going to risk using the torrent of magic outside, but it was calmer inside the hold—filtered by Strangehold itself somehow. I went looking for Hawthorn. At least overhill, it wasn't polite to just barge into someone else's home and start using magic, and I needed to pass on Marcus's request.
I found her and Rowan in the kitchen—what was it about kitchens that made people gravitate toward them? Even the fae, even in a place as strange as this? They looked as though they'd been having a discussion, but Hawthorn was happy to tell me the way to her spell room before she went to Marcus. Rowan offered to accompany me, I agreed, and we were off.
Strangehold had a perfect room for casting. So many spells required a circle to contain or intensify the energy. Like many casters, I had a permanent circle in my workroom—in my case it was a circle painted on the floor of my seldom-used guest room, under a throw rug I moved whenever I had a more complicated ritual to undertake.
My circle was mainly used to intensify magic since energy near my home was diffuse and I needed ritual to guide the forces. There were different traditions—followers of the Order of the Golden Dawn, wiccans who approached magic as part of their religion, among many others—but no matter what casters called themselves or what rituals they used, the aim was the same: to manipulate magical energy to change the world.
This circle far outshone my ring of paint on the guest room floorboards. It was inlaid into the floor in a mosaic of different colored stone. Empty brackets on the walls, ready for candles, marked the cardinal points—if this places could be said to have anything like East or West. A fountain burbled quietly in one corner. Water trickled down a flowering hawthorn tree carved in marble. Next to it, a raised platform built of golden wood housed a few chairs. An observer's station? But no one was there now.
"What do you need to do?" Rowan asked.
"Our magic overhill is slow. A lot of human casters prepare spells ahead of time so we'll have them if we need them." I remembered Helen's bracelet and pulled it out of my pocket to show him. "Helen put hers on a bracelet. A lot of people wear them as jewelry. I used to, too."
"But now you wear them on your skin. It seems unusual. Why?"
"Jewelry can be taken off you." A flash of memory: Matthew yanking the necklace off my neck, the burn of the chain against my skin. My frustration and helplessness as he knotted my wards in a flow of energy, cutting me off from my spells. I hadn't been able to stop him, and he almost started a war between Faerie and the Association.
I dismissed the past and pulled up my sleeve. Five stars arched across the inside of my right wrist. Rowan leaned in to take a closer look.
"You've woven strands of magic in the image itself."
"Yes. When I pull energy into the tattoos, it directs it in the configuration I need. Cast a glamour." He raised an eyebrow and summoned an image of stars and planets dancing in the air in front of us, as though a cartoon character had been conked on the head.
The central star on my wrist pulsed silver and vibrated gently against my skin.
"So you know when spells are worked around you." He nodded approvingly and banished the glamour of stars.
"Yes." I tugged my sleeve down. "There's a theory that keeping that much magic so close all the time could be harmful, and there is a chance a spell could backfire and hurt me, but I think it's worth the risk." I walked over to the observer's station and set Helen's bracelet by the fountain so her spells wouldn't clash with mine inside the circle. A pang of loss shot through me—this was all that was left of her. The quartz clinked against the stone hawthorn. Tiny stone roses bloomed as well, carved on the fountain amongst the hawthorn's flowers.
The center of the circle was marked with an inlaid sunburst pattern in different colored stones. I folded myself down into a crossed leg position and opened myself to the energy around us. Rowan dropped to the floor across from me.
"All I'm going to do now is pull energy into the pathways I set up when I had them inked." I closed my eyes and reached out. The energy here flowed plentifully and easily. The ouroboros over my left shoulder was nothing more than a well for magic, so I'd never be caught without a spell if there was no leyline nearby. I'd nearly drained it at Helen's house. The oak tree over my heart had once been just a well also, but now it was more. I started to direct energy there, and then Rowan joined his magic to mine.
Here in Strangehold, built at the source of magic, both of us were stronger. Our combined power sent me reeling internally. If Helen's power had been elegant loops and Matthew's intricate knots, Rowan's was a wave that washed over and through me. I felt like I was floating. It was euphoric—I was euphoric. The room spun. I felt so full of magic that the tattoos could crawl right off of me and my skin might split. What would emerge, better and more powerful? I sent energy to all my tattoos at once, and they tingled, full, but almost I thought I could send them more.
"Stop," I croaked, and managed to tear myself apart from our shared energy. It was hard to let go, and I felt deflated when I did, sagging back into my skin, into only myself. I opened my eyes and slumped back, chest heaving. I was sweating and—I looked down—my tattoos were glowing, the colors of the ink illuminated by silver light. That had never happened before. The oak tree on my chest shone through the fabric of my t-shirt. It had changed. Among the branches, two acorns hung between green leaves.
I looked up to see Rowan staring at the glowing ink outline of the tree through my shirt. He was a picture drawn in silver for a moment, and then the light began to fade, lingering in his eyes.
"Forgive me," he said. "I didn't expect...that."
"I didn't think we'd be able to work together at all," I said, sidestepping what had just happened. Had it felt the same to him? "It surprised me when you could help with the wards around Helen's house. My understanding was the fae and human approach to magic is too different to blend, even if the energy we use is the same."
"Were I only fae, that might be the case." He watched me closely.
"You had a human parent? Like the girls?"
"Only it was my mother who was fae, and my father a mortal man."
"How is it that you..." I tried to think of a tactful way to ask it, but gave up. "Then how were you the Queen's Blade?"
He turned his hands over. The fading silver light picked out scars over his knuckles. "I don’t claim to know the workings of her majesty's mind, but...I think she saw it as an honor she gave me." He sighed. "And at the same time it spared any other from the task."
Pity lanced me. Even so, I was aware that I was pitying someone who had killed a lot of people. "How did you quit? I always thought it was because of the peace with humans, but it wasn't, was it?"
He looked at me and smiled, but shook his head. He stood, and offered me a hand. "You are replenished, are you not? We should find Hawthorn. I believe I hear the dinner bell."
I heard nothing, but I took his hand and let him pull me up, my legs stinging from sitting for so long on the stone floor. He could keep his secrets until he wanted to tell me.
And now, I was ready, if only we could find a way to act.
*
I woke up all at once, unsure what time it was. Strangehold's light was all artificial, of course, but the windows mimicked sunlight, and by that metric it was shortly before dawn. I wasn't sure why I had awakened; I vaguely remembered a dream where a woman I didn't know but immediately liked had been telling me something urgent, but it slipped further away the harder I tried to hold on to it.
Someone knocked, then shoved the door open before I had a chance to say a word, or do more than pull the blanket up reflexively. Lady Hawthorn swept in, almost as elegant as ever in a long night
dress and robe; but strands of hair poked out of her disheveled braid and her eyes were wide. "Morgan! You must come at once. Dress and arm yourself. The way is open." She took my arm and leaned closer. "Your nieces! The time is now. Hurry!"
I leapt out of bed. Her urgency cleared the befuddlement of sleep, and I pulled on jeans and my boots as she waited, all but tapping her foot, then retreated to the bathroom to change into a sports bra and shirt, and shove my hair into a ponytail. My tool bag was next to the bed, and I slung it over my shoulder. The sidheblade waited in my bracelet, and my tattoos were fully charged. I was as ready as I could be.
Hawthorn led me into the hall, where Rowan was waiting for us. He was dressed not for earth, but for Faerie; he wore the archaic clothes of the fae court—doublet, breeches, knee-high boots, all in dark gray—and was armed with a sword and a dagger. That I could see, that is; doubtless he had other weapons concealed somewhere on his person. A leather satchel dangled off one shoulder and he crammed the other arm through the loose strap as we half-walked half-ran.
"He never should have done it—oh, the idiot man!—but he has and we must make the most of it or it is all for naught. Rose says he can't hold it for long, and the door may well reset as soon as he lets go." She caught up her skirts to move faster and I followed behind her.
"Hawthorn—what has he done? Who?" Although I had a sinking presentiment that I knew.
"Marcus has provided Rose the energy she needs to secure the door underhill, the idiot, and he has almost certainly killed himself as well."
"Can she return the energy?" My breath caught in my throat. Oh, Marcus...I was pretty sure already that she couldn't, but I knew jack shit about ghosts, really, so maybe there was a possibility...
