I realize belatedly that my surprise must have shown. Nothing for it but to admit it, then. “This is interesting. Who set it?”
“Arch Mage Talon and two others. Is something wrong?”
“No,” I assure him. “It’s simply not what I expected. I’m sure they know more of these things than I do.”
I step through and walk to the center of the room. The cell is tight, hardly six paces in either direction, without any windows. There must be a spell in place to keep the air fresh, or the room would grow suffocating within an hour or two. Against the back wall lies a bedroll and two precisely folded blankets. On the ground, beside the shackle, rests a dinner tray, the cup fallen on its side, a few last grains of rice drying on the plate. Some part of me registers the shiny metal of the shackle, bright as silver, and quails.
I push my memories of another cell, high up in a tower, firmly into the darkest corner of my mind, and cast another glance around the apparently empty room. No sign of Stormwind. She must be holding her breath, hidden from sight by the look-away charm. Unless she stepped out while I studied the door.
I slide my fingers into my pocket, feel the shape of a few charms, the slip of paper with instructions for her to go to the roof. But I need to be sure she’s gotten out first.
“This was opened without magic,” Graybeard announces, gesturing to the shackle.
“She picked the lock?” I ask, walking over to inspect it.
He shakes his head. “No, it’s warded against anything but the key that fits it.”
I turn to Kemal. “Who has the key?”
“Arch Mage Talon, I believe.” His expression is closed. Interesting. Does he know it went missing but isn’t at leave to say so?
I frown, tap the shackles with my finger. It’s the closest I can get to making myself handle them. “Well, there must be another way to unlock them because they sure are open.”
The mage grunts in response, then turns to survey the rest of the room. If Stormwind is still in here, I don’t want him to notice. Time to go.
“I don’t see anything else unusual,” I say, pretending to look over the cell one last time. With a shrug, I head out the door. After a moment, Kemal and the mage join me in the hall. I hunker down before the door and study the lock. There should be more than enough space for Stormwind to step out, press herself against the wall of the hallway. It’s the best I can offer.
“What happened to the door’s key?” I ask Kemal.
“We turned it over to the mages who first responded to our alarm, Master Stonefall and Mistress Ravenflight.”
Stonefall. Of course he would be involved. “The door was locked when she disappeared?”
“Yes.”
“Mmm.” I rise to my feet and give the door a soft push. It doesn’t quite close, a thin crack of darkness still visible, as I’d hoped. Just in case.
Kemal starts for the stairs, Graybeard a half-step behind him. With the prisoner gone, they don’t care if the door is shut now or not. I follow after, letting myself fall farther behind by degrees, so that I am starting up the stairs as they reach the landing.
I pull a mix of charms from my pocket, along with the tightly rolled message, and hold them behind my back, walking slowly. Please, I pray. Please let her have gotten out.
Cool fingers pluck the charms from my hand, startling me even though I was hoping for them. Gratitude swells within me. She’s out. Safe. And we’re almost free.
I move ahead, continuing up to Kemal and the guards posted there.
“—nothing you haven’t already found,” Graybeard finishes telling them.
I shake my head in agreement as the lycans glance down at me. There’s no way Stormwind will be able to walk past these guards without their scenting her. It’s time for a distraction. I reach out with my mage senses to the charms I’d stashed along the connecting hallway. As one of the lycans responds to Graybeard, I find the charm I want.
Skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
The lycans whirl toward the high-pitched shriek and set off at a sprint down the hall. Graybeard shouts, stumbling backwards. I can’t wait for him to decide what to do. I jog past him, careful to keep far enough back from the guards that they might not notice the sound of an extra set of footsteps behind mine. I can’t hear her over the beating of my heart, but that doesn’t mean their more sensitive ears won’t.
As they reach the corner, the screecher is already winding down. I use my magic to break the smoker I’d pressed into the crack beneath the same door. Graybeard shouts again somewhere behind me. The lycans move silently, swords drawn.
“Check the rooms here,” Kemal orders, yellow gaze sweeping the hall ahead. “We were below and passed no one on our way up.”
Just like that, the hallway clears, the other lycans thumping their hands against the wall until they find doors to push open. I reach out with my senses and activate the last charm I’d hidden here: a stinker. It will take a moment, but the smell should help mask Stormwind’s passing.
“Young mage,” Kemal says as I reach him. “Do you sense anything?”
“They feel like the charms students use for pranks. There’s nothing greater than that at work.”
“Pranks?” stammers Graybeard, finally catching up with us. He grips the sides of his robes with his fists, his face pale. “Students?”
“Don’t you think?” I ask him as the color rushes back to his face.
He mutters an oath, and raises his hand. Any moment now, he’ll call up a wind to disperse the smoke.
Kemal barely spares the man a glance. Instead, he turns to me. “Get upstairs and tell the guards at the door there’s been a disturbance.”
I step into darkness, one hand out to touch the wall. The smoke is like a wall of night. No amount of blinking clears my sight. A hand curls into the cloth of my robe, gripping it lightly from the back: Stormwind.
Smiling fiercely, I keep going, moving quickly. My fingertips bump over a doorjamb, and then reconnect with the wall on the other side. I stride briskly along, my fingers jumping over another empty doorway, and then, as a breeze begins to pick up in the hallway, the last one before the stairs.
Behind us, a lycan curses, the distinct stench of garlic and onions rising on the breeze. I hope to God the smell is enough to cover the scent of Stormwind’s passing. It can’t be much farther now. There were only three doorways on each side of the hall.
I stub my toe against the bottom stair. Wincing, I step up and wave my hand along the wall until I find the snakelike railing, the iron scales cool against my palm. We just have to make it up the stairs. The breeze quickens, smoke roiling around us, the world beginning to take shape in shades of gray. I take the stairs as fast as I can in the twilight.
Almost there. Almost there. Almost—
I slow to a walk on the landing, pressing against the railing as a half dozen lycans race down the steps, blades drawn and eyes burning.
Something, or rather someone, stumbles into me from behind, then eases back.
“There,” I say, pointing down to the hall. “A disturbance — felt like charms at work.”
“Go,” the one in the lead says, and the other five race on. But he doesn’t. Instead, he approaches me slowly, moving with sinuous grace until he’s less than an arm’s length away, his lean face wary now, cold. This close, I can see him clearly, his eyes amber and gold, and utterly focused on me. “You.”
It’s the same lycan I met in the garden. I press back, feel Stormwind ease herself down the step behind me. The smell of garlic and onions is nowhere near as strong as I would have liked right now.
He sniffs once, breathing deeply, his nostrils flaring. “Tell me, girl, why are you here, smelling of the rogue mage and wearing journeymen’s robes?”
This time there is nothing of humor in his eye. I know instinctively that he won’t believe any story I might tell him. He won’t let me go. I don’t let myself look up the stairs with their passage to the roof and freedom. They may as well be back in
our valley in the mountains. I can’t outrun him, can’t fight my way free. And, remembering his kindness in the garden, his sense of courtesy, of justice that has nothing to do with class or rank, I know I can’t kill him. I’ll have to find some other way.
At least I can try an explanation.
“I was dressed as a servant on orders,” I say calmly. “I am a mage, and went down to the prisoner’s cell with Kemal to check it. The disturbance began on our way back up.”
His hand closes on my wrist before I even realize he has moved. “You’re in league with the rogue, aren’t you?” His eyes narrow with fury.
Fight him.
I start at the sound of the voice in my head. The phoenix? But it doesn’t sound like his voice, though there’s something familiar about it….
“You are,” the lycan snarls.
Stormwind tenses behind me. I shake my head, push away the thought of the voice. Now is not the time to worry about voices in my head that know nothing of my ability to fight. “No,” I say. “I don’t have anything to do with rogues.”
“To think I gave those boys a lesson in manners for you. I should have known you for a liar.”
Behind my back, I hear the faintest of taps and smoke blooms, bursting into the landing and filling the stairwell. The lycan curses, his grip tightening to bruising intensity. I twist hard, trying to drop to my knees, but he yanks me forward. I stumble in the darkness. If I can just break his grip—
“To me!” the lycan shouts, drawing the attention of the lycans amid the growing confusion below us.
Fight him, the voice in my head orders. But I don’t know how. My best chance is to find some spell, perhaps just a burst of power to push him back—
Move!
My mind stumbles to the side as if it has been pushed away, to an empty space beside myself. I watch through eyes I no longer control as I expertly twist my arm, breaking the lycan’s hold. The force that has taken over my body sends me surging forward, my fist pistoning out to catch the lycan square in the jaw. He reels back, disappearing into darkness.
Up, I try to shout, though my mouth no longer belongs to me, the being that breathes in my body answering me not at all. Except that it seems to hear my thoughts, for my hand reaches out, closing on the cold iron railing, and my feet race upwards, skimming over the steps faster than seems quite right. I can only hope that Stormwind is following behind me.
I break through the upper edge of the smoke as a half dozen lycans tear down the hall toward me.
“Stop her!” the lycan below me shouts. He sounds like he’s gaining ground.
Smoker in my pocket, I tell the thing that has possessed me. Break it.
My hand reaches into my pocket, closes on three charms, and smashes them all against the railing. And then I’m racing around the top of the stairs and sprinting up the next flight, my vision consumed by blackness and my sense of smell overpowered by the stench of garlic and onions, so strong it obliterates all other scents. Just as well I’d thought to put a few of each charm in both my pockets.
A lycan pounds up the steps behind me while the rest sound like they’re heading back toward the main entry to make sure I haven’t slipped past them. Stormwind will hardly be able to follow in my footsteps. I’m leading a guard after me, and the phoenix cannot carry us both at the same time.
At the top of the steps go straight, I order. There’s another stairwell at the end of the hall. I might even be able to make it down again and out the unprotected window. Or up a flight to the roof. Anything to confuse them.
The force that controls my body complies and I race ahead. My heart beats frantically, slamming against my ribs. Each breath tears through my throat. I’m moving too fast, the doors flying past me. I can’t run this swiftly — no human can. How is this even possible?
Without any suggestion from me, my hand finds another smoker, pitching it hard against the wall I pass. Are the lycans behind me? I can’t tell, can barely hear anything beyond the roaring of blood in my ears.
Something slices across my upper arm. I twist, skidding across the polished stone of the hall, my breath coming in a strange, gasping cry that breaks off before it makes almost any sound at all. A crossbow bolt skitters across the floor, another shattering as it hits the stone at a sharper angle. I hold completely still, eyes trained on the smoke behind me.
Pain. I understand it in a detached, unreal way as my body climbs carefully to its feet. Whoever hit me must be nothing short of amazing. They’d shot through a wall of smoke, using the sound of my running to guide them.
A slick wetness trickles down my right arm, and I know in an academic, almost theoretical way, that the pain from my wound is a burning thing. I feel only a whisper of it, like a ghost wound I cannot quite confirm.
“Stop.”
The speaker materializes from the smoke: the same lycan as before, crossbow trained on me.
“Hands in front of you,” he says, walking steadily toward me. At his back, the smoker still darkens the hall, the day-bright glowstones barely penetrating its shadow.
My hands move in front of me. Am I giving up? Granted, I don’t think even the thing that has taken hold of my body can move faster than a quarrel shot from a crossbow. At least not when it is barely five paces away.
When the lycan reaches me, he grabs my good hand and lowers the crossbow. I barely register the scream of pain through my body as I clench my right fist and slam it into his chest, ripping my left hand free as I step into the blow. Drops of blood splatter on his leather armor, but it’s my blood, dripping down the hand that struck him. He staggers backward, mouth gaping, the crossbow clattering across the floor.
I follow up with a round kick to his torso, which he partially blocks, and I’m already whipping forward, left hand driving at his face. He raises his arm, blocking my fist, and somehow I expected this, expected him to raise his guard too high. The fingers of my other hand flick out and nimbly pluck the dagger from his belt as I whirl past him.
No!
But my body doesn’t mind me. I drop down, attempting to knock the lycan’s legs out from under him as he pivots to keep me in his sight. He stumbles, avoiding me. I regain my feet, moving fluidly. He snarls, his fists jabbing at me. I block the first with my left arm, dagger coming up to slice at his arm. He grunts, eyes widening as the dagger scrapes against his leather armguard — he hadn’t even realized I stole his blade.
I block his second fist with my right hand, my arm shuddering, muscles screaming. Then I whip sideways and kick hard. I feel my heel connect with his thigh, the shock reverberating through my boot and up my leg.
He stumbles again, and I step into the opening, my good hand with the dagger coming up in what will be a killing strike.
No! I grab my hand with my mind, and for a moment I’m frozen there, the dagger a hair’s breadth from the lycan’s throat, my body not yet mine to order. “No,” I scream again, unsure if it is with my mind or mouth or both. And then I’m firmly back in control, whirling and slamming my hand with its dagger against the wall with all my strength. Again, and again, until the fingers sealed around the hilt lose their grip, the dagger clattering to the floor.
I bend over my hand, gasping, aware of pain tracing the lines of the bones in my hand, the far greater pain of the partially ripped muscle and shredded flesh of my upper arm. I squeeze my eyes shut, chest heaving.
When I open them again, it’s to the sight a sword blade hanging in the air just below my throat.
The lycan moves with brutal efficiency, catching my good wrist and twisting my arm behind me, his sword never wavering. Not that swords are much good in such close combat, but his dagger’s on the ground where I dropped it. He doesn’t trust me enough to retrieve it right now.
He pushes me face-first into the wall, pinning me there with my arm. I need to get away. I reach out with my mage’s senses, fear and pain sharpening my thoughts, and what I find is stone, heavy and ready to fall, ready to burn as lava burns, smoke and fire a
nd ash. I find bones that wait for flames as kindling does, find air that dreams of death.
No, I beg, my sunbolt smoldering within me, burning the tips of my fingers. Not this. Never this.
Claws dig into the skin of my wrist as he keeps me pinned to the wall. Claws, I think, struggling to focus, to push away the magic I dare not use. Is he fighting a change? Lycans don’t have claws in their human form.
“What are you?” he demands.
Dead, I almost say. It won’t matter to him. What he wants to know — how I’d been able to fight him, why I’d acted as if my hand were possessed — is not an answer I can give him.
He snarls with frustration. A cord loops tight around my wrist. Then he grabs my other wrist and pulls it back. If he is gentler, I don’t notice, agony rippling along my arm. I try to swallow my pain, but I hear it anyhow, a faint screech trapped in my chest.
A hand grasps the hair at the back of my head. I feel the brush of claw tips against my scalp as the lycan twists my face to his. “Do you know where she is?”
He waits until my breath returns, weak and raspy. “No,” I say, letting my gaze wander away from him. I can barely hear my own voice past the pounding in my ears. A blackness that has nothing to do with smokers roils at the edge of my vision. I can’t be wounded that badly. Perhaps it’s the wound combined with the strain of housing whatever it was that took me over.
His fingers tighten on my hair and I try not to flinch. Every movement hurts, not just my arm.
“You’re lying,” he says softly.
I consider him, the steady burn of his eyes easier to look at than the shifting smoke. “I hope she is free,” I tell him. “But I don’t know.”
He opens his mouth to speak and then pauses, looking down the hall.
Four shapes step free from the gradually dissipating black fog, blades gleaming. Lycans. I need to focus. With every moment, I slip a little farther from any chance of escape. If only I had finished my studies and had a hundred more defensive spells at my fingertips, spells that have nothing to do with fire. If only my parents had not hidden my Promise, if my mother had not left me to the streets…. My mother. Brokensword.
Memories of Ash (The Sunbolt Chronicles Book 2) Page 23
