“ ’Tis how he was following us all along,” Ranulf said, completely unnecessarily, Everett thought. “It must have been the Sorcerer’s plan for you to find the compass in the wood, near your portal.”
“I cannot think what you mean,” said Avery dismissively. “I tell you, we have no sorcerer in the king’s employ. His Majesty despises magic. It hath always been thus.”
“Open your eyes, boy!” said Almaric, and everyone fell quiet; Everett had never seen him so angry. “Raethius of the Source has controlled the throne since long before your time. He raised your father from infancy. It is he who rules Anglielle, not Reynard.” Almaric scowled at the fire. “You were brought up in ignorance, Your Highness. It is time you grew up and realized the sort of man your father is, and his so-called advisor. They are murderers, the both of them.”
Avery’s face turned red. He opened his mouth as if to argue the point, but then shut it again. Everett thought he saw tears in his eyes. Avery stood up, kicked a log into the flames, and stalked off toward the jungle. Everett wanted to go after him, but Ranulf put a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Leave him be,” he said. “His Highness is only being told what he knows in his heart to be true. Let him come to it in his own time. Meanwhile, we must wait until our vessel is seaworthy. Then we will go and rescue Her Ladyship.”
“Yeah, but when?” Ben asked. “We could be here for days, and that—that guy has Holly. What’s he going to do to her?”
No one wished to conjecture on that point.
Chapter 44
* * *
Raethius
It was a long time before Holly came to with the sort of headache that needles you behind the eyes and makes you sick to your stomach. She had been so cold for so long that it took a moment to realize that she was warm and dry now, lying on a rough surface. With a jolt, she recalled everything that had happened, and sat up abruptly.
She was sitting on a black tapestried rug embroidered with silver symbols. Beneath it were rough flagstones. Above her yawned tall stone columns and an arched ceiling. Altogether, the place was like an ancient chapel. How had she gotten off the Black Dragon?
Then the floor pitched, and she recognized the motion of a ship at sea. She was on the Black Dragon. But how could such a room be on a schooner?
Her hand went to her shoulder, and Áedán crawled into her palm, blinking his bulbous golden eyes at her. She wondered if he was warm enough, and she breathed on him as she would a dying fire. His scales flushed a warm gold. She placed him back on her shoulder, where he nestled beneath her collar against her neck.
Through the tall arched windows along one wall, a calm sea stretched in every direction, although the ship’s railing and the long black line of the spanker sail cut across her view. She was in the stern, then, beneath the poop deck. But the ceiling arched thirty feet above her head. It didn’t make sense.
The chapel was empty except for a pair of tall pedestals at the far end flanking a kind of altar. She could see no door, but maybe she could break the windows.
She felt around her waist for the wand scabbard and opened it.
The scabbard was empty.
Suddenly the chapel went dark as if a black curtain had fallen over the leaded windows. Along the walls, several bracketed torches cast a gloomy, flickering light. Beneath her feet, the floor pitched and rolled.
The first torch went out.
She was reminded of her dark walk through the king’s castle, the safe feeling of having allies around her. No one was with her now, except Áedán. Even Jade was gone.
A second torch went out.
“Who’s there?” Holly called sharply.
A rustling sound came from the far end of the room.
The third torch went out.
“I know what you’re doing,” Holly said, trying to steady her voice. “I’m not scared of the dark.”
A thousand whispers answered her, a susurrus like the rustle of silk: “Only of what comes out of the dark.”
Áedán stirred on her shoulder, gathering his energy. He would protect her, but he was all she had in the way of weapons, and she didn’t want to expose him too soon. “Wait, Áedán,” she whispered to him. “Not till I say.”
The final torch went out. The chapel was plunged into a darkness so complete Holly could almost touch it. The whispers gathered around her, a hundred voices speaking so softly she couldn’t make out what they were saying. They crept up her legs, crawling into her ears, tangling in her braids, winding around the wire frames of her glasses. She felt them tickling up her sleeves and inside her shoes. But they were just voices, weren’t they?
She tried to slap them away, but her fingers couldn’t grasp them. Goose bumps shivered along her arms, and the hairs on the back of her neck prickled in response. An acrid, smoky smell circled her body, swirling around her head.
Áedán stirred. Silently, Holly shook her head. Her heart was pounding now as the whispers grew louder; the smoke filled her throat. She covered her ears and found she had locked the whispers inside her head, where they circled and laughed. “Get away from me!” she cried out.
A burst of light. A single candle on the altar had lit.
“Where are you?” Holly asked, moving toward the candle. She tried to keep the tears from her voice. “I’m not afraid of you, whatever you are.”
The whispers ceased. In the dim light something dark and thin flew before her eyes, but it was gone the next instant. As she moved forward, a black shadow began to grow behind the candle like an expanding balloon. She halted, afraid to go farther.
“Expecting someone?”
The voice came from behind as an icy puff of air tickled the nape of her neck. She spun around.
A few feet away stood a figure.
Too thin to be human, he was a humanoid figure at least eight feet tall, with grotesquely long, pencil-thin arms that ended in only slightly wider hands. The fingers were more like talons, multijointed and in almost constant motion, like a spider’s legs. The creature was covered in a silky black cloak that it wore like a second skin, with sleeves that were feathered like wings. But the most awful thing to Holly was its pale, birdlike head, which glowed with a sick light of its own beneath a loose hood. The white skin was puckered like a plucked chicken. Its black, lashless eyes, hunched close together under a jutting brow, rarely blinked, and its mouth moved in a jerky, exaggerated motion, as if unused to talking.
Holly’s breath coughed out in horrid little puffs, hardly filling her lungs. Her muscles froze. A smoky stench floated off the creature in waves.
“You. Were. Expecting. Someone,” it said. The hissing voice flew to her ears, shot through them, and then faded.
Her knees weakened. She backed up. “Who are you?” she managed to ask, though she knew.
“Raethius,” hissed the creature. It threw up its great winged sleeves, and as it did so, grew like the shadow she had seen. In one movement it flew to the ceiling, then collapsed in on itself again. “Raethius of the Source.” He extended a taloned hand to her. “Sit, Adept.”
Holly fell backward onto the stone floor without meaning to, her legs turning to mush beneath her.
The smoky air stung her nostrils. The voice spoke only inches from her ear. “It is not control. Only persuasion.”
Holly pulled herself up off the ground. The Sorcerer perched on a large stone chair that had materialized out of nowhere. On either side of this throne stood two tall blazing candles that cast sharp, flickering shadows all around them; on the other branches of the candelabras sat several large, bloodred birds.
“It wasn’t Crewso I saw in Hawkesbury,” Holly said. She forced herself to look into the Sorcerer’s horrible face. “It was one of these birds.”
His neck stretched out impossibly long, like taffy, and his beaklike face darted forward into hers. “I speak. I speak!” he hissed. “You are but dust.”
Raethius retracted his neck and swept his winglike arm across the room. “These a
re the Elements of the earth: stone. Dust. Iron. See how I command them.”
The flagstones rumbled beneath her. A crack split the floor at the far end of the room and opened into a chasm. Holly scrambled out of the way, but the fissure chased her until she fell through it. Her fingers grasped the jagged edge of the abyss, from whence a cold, fetid breeze blew. Her hands began to slip.
Just as she let go, the earth rushed up under her feet and threw her back onto the stone floor. Her heart rattled in her chest, her back drenched in a cold sweat despite the icy air. Through it all, the Sorcerer’s black eyes stared straight ahead.
“These are the Elements of the water: the sea, the rain, the rivers.” He pointed to the windows. The sea rose up, then crashed inside. Holly barely had time to scramble to her feet before the water engulfed her. Seawater filled her lungs. A moment later she fell, warm and dry, onto the flagstones.
Holly panted. It’s not real, she told herself. She thought it again, like a mantra: It’s not real. It’s just a show. It’s not real. It’s just . . .
“These are the Elements of the air: the wind, the smoke, the storm.”
By now she knew what was coming. From nowhere an icy breeze blew back her hair and gathered itself into a cyclone. It picked her up and flung her toward the leaded windows. But as unreal as she knew it was, she couldn’t help but shield her face, and the wind died.
“These are the Elements of fire,” the Sorcerer said. “The heat, the flame, the destruction.”
A sphere of fire bloomed at the far end of the chapel and rolled like a great cannonball toward her, gaining speed. But this was her Element; Holly stood her ground. At the last moment, she whispered to Áedán. He threw up his curtain of flame just as the fireball engulfed her. She felt warm and safe behind the orange wall, but she hoped Raethius couldn’t tell Áedán’s magic apart from his own.
Áedán pulled back the fire curtain with a jolt as the Sorcerer’s fireball vanished. Holly sat on the stone floor in front of the Sorcerer’s throne, unharmed.
“You do see, Adept,” he said. “I create you. I destroy you. Most important, I contain you.” Raethius stood and walked in a broad circle around Holly. “Do not for a moment doubt that it is at my whim that you breathe the air and walk the earth. Because I allow it.” He stopped in front of her, towering over her, his clawlike feet just inches from her own. His neck stretched down and thrust itself in front of her. “Do you understand?”
Holly licked her lips, trying to revive her dry throat. “I . . .” She took a breath. “I understand that you . . . you need me.”
Áedán winced and he crouched lower on her shoulder. Raethius’s black eyes blazed back at her, but she could tell she’d struck a nerve. Why else would he capture her, if he had all the power?
“You do not understand.” The Sorcerer threw out a hand, and a gust of wind hurled Holly against the stone wall. With another gust he yanked her back. “You are a piece of the puzzle I construct. A part of the power that I amass. But you are not needed.”
His strange, birdlike mouth curled in disgust. “The wand. Where is it?”
Holly’s heart warmed only briefly. She was all too aware that her greatest weapon was gone, but at least Raethius couldn’t take it from her. She tried one pathetic tack: “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t be a fool.” The Sorcerer folded his winglike arms. “I know it exists. My emissaries have seen it. But I wonder: How did you forge it?”
Holly closed her eyes. She pictured Almaric and Ranulf, the forest, the Elm. She pictured Ben and Everett. She repeated to herself again: I will not tell. I will not tell. I will not tell.
But his voice crawled into her ears like a wriggling insect, chewing its way through her ear canal and into her brain, where it bounced off every neuron. She found she could think of nothing else, even when she tried to picture her home, her father and mother; every person, every scene, had the Sorcerer’s face on it, asking, How? How? How? until she knew she would soon go mad.
“What difference does it make?” she screeched. “It’s mine!”
“But you do not come from this world.” Raethius glided to the wall beneath the tall windows, then back again. “It appears the Wandwright still lives, though I have not seen her for many an age. How are you, who do not come from this place, one of us?”
“I’m not one of you,” Holly said. “I don’t know what you are.”
Inside her head, her mother’s voice said, Stop it! You’ll only make him angry. But alongside it she heard another, newer voice: But he needs me alive.
“I am the Fire and the Water, the Earth and the Air,” said Raethius. “I am above and beyond your kind.”
The wind gathered underneath Holly once again and swept her up to the chapel’s lofty ceiling; then, abruptly, the wind died and she fell onto the hard flags. She landed on her ankle as it twisted the wrong way. She screamed.
“Before you are insolent to me again, Adept, remember that I do not need you whole. Only alive. And only for a brief time. My mercy will last no longer than my patience.”
Holly cradled the ankle, which was already swelling. It was broken. She tried very hard not to cry, but a few tears escaped her. Áedán paced; his feet felt sticky and hot on her shoulder. Raethius approached her.
Before she could stop him, Áedán emerged and threw a bolt of power from his tiny foreleg. The curtain of fire sprung up around them. As warm and comforting as it was, it frightened her more than the Sorcerer himself. Now he knows.
Bring the water, said the new voice in her head. That’s the power—fire plus water.
But even if she could manage it, she had no wand.
Through the orange flames, Raethius smiled and waved one hand.
Áedán’s flames froze in place. They faded to a pale blue, hardening, until they fell in icy shards all around her.
“Your little Elemental friend is impetuous,” said the Sorcerer casually. “One of three Salamanders, am I right? The weakest of the three, if I make my guess.” One of the pasty-white claws extended. “Give him to me.”
“You can’t have him.” Holly stumbled away, one hand over her shoulder, where Áedán huddled. She knew she had nowhere to run, that Raethius would take Áedán if it pleased him, but she would not hand him over. The Salamander crawled into her sleeve.
A tiny, powerful cyclone whirled around Holly, pulling the Salamander out of her grasp. His sticky feet clung to her, but she didn’t dare hold on to him, for fear of tearing him apart. For a moment he hung suspended in midair between Holly and Raethius, his golden fingers splayed out. He looked to Holly, his eyes full of tears; and then the wind shot him to the far end of the chapel, where the red birds waited. They descended.
Holly covered her eyes. She couldn’t help the tears now; they poured through her fingers, her chest heaving. The Sorcerer had once been only a horrible creature, but now he was something she could hate. A throbbing ache opened inside her, a black place. Her eyes were swollen, her cheeks streaked with tears. She said in a thick, awful voice: “I will never help you. Never.”
Raethius weaved his spidery fingers through the air. Something off to his left clanged, like pipes being dragged across the stone floor; a moment later several pieces of iron assembled themselves over her head and around her body to form the bars of a small cell.
“We commence on the morrow,” said Raethius. “You, who are so in tune with this world that you earned the loyalty of an Elemental Salamander, will be affixed to the bow of the Black Dragon. You will guide this vessel to the Isle of the Adepts. And then you will surrender the wand to me.”
She would not look at him now. Her hate was so overwhelming, she thought she might tear her own body in half just to push through the bars and murder him.
His neck elongated, stretching to meet her gaze. He whispered in her ear. “You will not refuse me, Adept. There are others you cherish. They will be reduced to dust like your Elemental ally. Do not think on it.”
<
br /> He stood and raised both arms wide, the sleeves becoming black, glossy wings. “On the morrow, when the moon is full,” he said. The cloak enveloped the Sorcerer as the beating of a thousand wings filled the air. Then a thin column of very black smoke shot up from the floor, and he vanished.
Holly was alone.
Chapter 45
* * *
Chasing the Dragon
“I don’t favor this idea at all,” said Almaric firmly. “However talented His Highness appears to be with the wand, the magic is borrowed, and therefore unreliable. Not to mention that the spell itself is highly advanced.”
He sat at the table in the ship’s mess with Everett, Ben, and Avery. Jade and Ranulf stood nearby. Only half a day had passed since Holly had disappeared, and miraculously, they were at sea again. Kailani and Rowan had spent hours underwater fixing holes in the ship’s hull, and Almaric and Morgan had repaired the sails with patchwork magic. They wouldn’t hold forever, but they would do for now.
The boys hadn’t even argued about revealing Avery’s wand to Almaric and the others. It was the only tool they had left besides the locket, which Morgan had strapped to the ship’s compass. It would lead them to Raethius.
“But it be possible,” Avery was saying. “Lady Holly performed this trick before, and didst transport many of us at once.”
“The Vanishment,” said Almaric icily, “is not a trick. It is an advanced spell. Lady Holly used a wand of her own forging, she trained for some time, and she is an Adept, you forget. I beg Your Highness’s pardon, but you are mortalfolk. It would be foolish to try. One leg would end up in a shark’s mouth whilst another in the crow’s nest, and an elbow in another kingdom altogether. No. I shall not allow it.”
“But he can already do osclaígí,” Everett put in. “That’s an Adept spell, isn’t it?”
“A much simpler one, my boy,” said Almaric. “It does not involve transporting people.”
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