by Natalie Grey
“When I decided to help you at the Acadamh,” Daiman said finally, “it was because every instinct told me that helping you would move the world toward wholeness. You were in pain because you felt your magic was evil. You were afraid. I wanted to help that. Before that, I had brought you to the Acadamh because I thought you fleeing, and not learning, would only keep the branches of the magical world further apart.”
I swallowed. It was strange to hear this rendition of events. “And later?”
“Later was … difficult.” Daiman managed a smile, but it was clear that the memory pained him. “I acted on instinct, and had to decide later if I had done so for any good reason. I decided that I had. The Acadamh was made to embody ideals the world needs—but it had stopped embodying them. You were the key to facing the truth and healing.” He looked over at me, clear-eyed. “And I still believe that … though the path is hard to walk.”
“And so that’s what you would tell the chief druid.” I swallowed hard. “Do you … think they’ll agree?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Druids have considerable latitude. We don’t always agree on things.”
His face was suddenly sad, and I knew we had stopped talking about helping me—or at least, that he wasn’t talking about just that. But what was he thinking of? His decision to join the Hunters? Something else, lost in the mists of four centuries?
It occurred to me just how little I knew of Daiman’s life before I met him.
“I will speak to them, if it will help.” My words were quiet, an attempt to draw him back to the world.
We couldn’t afford to get lost in memory just yet.
“It … may.” The troubled expression on his face did not lift.
I managed a smile. “Anyway, we don’t have to deal with it right now. We’re here.”
I was, suddenly, sure that it was true. I could feel the other world moving alongside my own.
“Are you ready?” I asked him.
“I am.” He smiled.
And then we both caught the tang of smoke drifting in a wind we couldn’t quite feel, from a fire we couldn’t quite see.
We tumbled out of the domhan fior at the same moment, to stare in shock at the smoking wreckage of the library where Terric had been hiding.
What had once been a hidden entrance, flat-tiled stone lying under earth and moss, had been rent asunder by sheer magical force. The marble had been scorched black, cracked by the magical blows that had blown earth and wards aside.
Smoke poured from the interior of the building. Terric wasn’t just gone—someone had made sure no one could repeat his research.
And was that someone Terric himself? Or—
My hand shot sideways into a nearby bush, and I dragged a bedraggled, bloodstained figure out by the hair. I bared my teeth in a feral smile.
“Hello, Darcy. Funny running into you here.”
Darcy struggled against the hold my magic had on her blood. Sleep was making her eyes droop, and my power was stealing the energy from the spells she wanted to throw at me, but even as her mind faded from consciousness, she knew what was happening.
I couldn’t help but feel some pleasure at the fear in her eyes.
I leaned close, still smiling. “You know what you’re going to do now?” I asked her. “You’re going to show us the way to Philip.”
“Nicky.” Daiman spoke quietly.
“I know,” I said, nettled. “But I don’t want to be nice to her.”
“No.” His voice was funny. “No, it’s not that….”
I turned, dragging Darcy with me, and started in surprise at the profusion of Monarchists that had appeared around us. Some, I recognized vaguely. Others, I had never seen before. And….
“Harry.” I sighed.
He didn’t smile, and he didn’t waste time. “You’re not the only one Philip has hurt,” he said bluntly. “Or her, either. So you’re not the only one who’s going after him. We might not be able to take him out on our own—but you can do that, while we hold his army at bay.”
I flicked my eyes sideways to Daiman’s.
After a moment, he nodded. I believe them. The thought imprinted itself in my mind, along with his quiet pleasure that I had asked.
That I had taken the time to consider what I thought, and what others thought, before leaping to a decision.
I nodded back.
“All right,” I told Harry. “Tell me who’s going, and I’ll take them.”
“We’re all going.” He didn’t pause to check.
I blinked. “Harry, you’re … you’re not a sorcerer.”
He pulled something from a sling over his back: dark and sleek, small compared to the way guns had once been, but—I guessed—deceptively so.
“Sorcerers can forget to watch their backs, too,” he said simply.
I grinned. “Then let’s go. Before Philip has any idea what’s coming. Darcy, want to show us the way?”
Chapter 22
We walked with Darcy stumbling ahead of us, her wrists bound in vines and a surly look on her face.
The brute application of some death magic, along with the threat of more, had convinced her to tell us what she knew. As she related it, the plan had been to take on Terric with Philip, and stay behind to bring me in.
I wasn’t entirely sure if this meant we were pre-empting the trap, or walking right into it, but I was certain that Philip hadn’t expected an uprising of the Monarchists.
We’d have numbers on our side, at least.
Meanwhile, unfortunately, having Darcy lead us meant she had to be awake, and hatred was practically pouring off of her.
I wondered what was going through her head. She had to know that by the end of today, one of us was going to be dead. She had to be banking on the fact that once we got close to the castle, one of her allies could free her from my magic.
Then it would be an army against an army, instead of an army against one.
I wonder if she realized I’d come to the same conclusion … and that I’d decided her usefulness would be done as soon as we saw the castle.
It didn’t seem like it.
I almost felt sorry for her. Then I remembered the smoking library—and Jo’s battered body—and reminded myself who Darcy served, and what she wanted from the world.
Her life had been forfeit a long time ago, as far as I was concerned.
“One thing,” Daiman murmured to me.
He’d made it a point to stick by my side on this journey. There had been one blazing glance between him and Lawrence, and both of them were now pretending to ignore the other.
It would be amusing if we weren’t marching to a battle.
“Mmm?” I looked up at him.
“I’ve been searching for Terric,” Daiman said quietly. “And I can show you how. It might be useful.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, it’s….” Daiman pondered how to describe it. “You know how you were able to find places in the real world, from within the domhan fior? It’s like that. If you try, you can see them as a manifestation of their magic. So, when we arrived at the library, I looked within the domhan fior for fire and flame. Terric was nowhere around.”
“That’s a handy trick.” I considered. “What do druids look like?”
“It depends on the druid,” Daiman said vaguely. “And on you.”
“Has anyone ever told you that druidic magic is frighteningly inexact?”
“Compared to sorcery? Really?” Daiman gave me a look. “And it’s not our magic that’s inexact, it’s the way the human mind sees the natural world—we’re not very good at comprehending it. Even what we see as fire and magic and death is usually more metaphor than reality.”
That sounded disconcertingly accurate, and also like something that would break my brain if I thought about it too hard.
I shelved it for later. If there was going to be a later.
“Anyway, there’s not much time to practice it,” Daiman said quietly. “But a
t least you know it’s possible, now, and that’s half of learning it.”
I reached out to take his hand, ignoring Darcy’s disgusted sigh as I did so.
“I’m glad you’re the one teaching me. You’re just the right amount of infuriatingly vague.”
“Oh, good.” Daiman began to laugh, and squeezed my fingers. “You’re the right amount of stubborn, for what it’s worth. A lot of people who don’t like losing … well, they can’t stand everything being difficult.” His smile took on a knowing gleam. “And you’ve got a long way to go yet. A long way, and a lot of frustration.”
I nudged him with my elbow, laughing.
Our laughter trailed off at the same time—for there, in the distance, we could see a castle.
And it turned out Darcy had thought the same thing as me, after all.
A gust of wind knocked me flat onto my back the next moment. The air was charged, a storm brewing. Darcy’s power might not be lightning, like Philip’s was, but power over storms and wind sometimes amounted to the same thing, and I had to fling up a desperate shield as a bolt of electricity shot down at me from the sky.
I scrambled to my feet, hauling Daiman with me, and met Darcy’s furious gaze. We stood alone, within a swirl of wind and rain, our companions no more than shadowy shapes in the gloom beyond.
“He’s going to realize that you aren’t the woman he wants, you know.” There were tears in Darcy’s eyes, and she dashed them away angrily.
I let out my breath slowly, trying to find the druid trance. I could see her in my mind’s eye. Power was concentrated at her core, and hanging around her in a cloud, and a warded shield surrounded her.
Now that I had found her, I could take her power if I needed.
Hell, I could take her life if I needed, once I got through that shield. I started draining one of the runes, surreptitiously.
“He is,” Darcy insisted, when I said nothing. “He is!”
“Then why bother to kill me?” Almost everything in me told me to end this quickly, but some piece of me still wanted her to redeem herself somehow. I wanted to hear a good reason for why she had done everything she’d done: betraying Jo, infiltrating the groups. If I could just keep her talking, maybe she would.
In the meantime, I would draw her power down. The rune I was working on flickered and died, and I waited to see if she had noticed.
She hadn’t. I started on another.
Darcy swallowed. “Who knows how many of us are going to die before he accepts what you are now?”
She cast a look around us defiantly, to where the Monarchists watched in silence. Did they think this was my fight, or were they waiting for me to take the wards down? We could have killed her easily, if everyone blasted her with their magic at once.
Apparently, they felt that was unsporting.
If we all got through this, we were going to need to have a talk about honor in battle.
Namely, the fact that it got a lot of people killed.
But something about her statement made me oddly hopeful, and a moment later, I realized what it was: “You don’t think he’s going to change me back?”
Darcy’s look of disgust said it all.
“Told you,” Daiman murmured.
I shook my head at him.
“Look, she believes it, I believe it, you might as well consider it. She and I don’t agree on much, after all.”
“Uh-huh.” I crossed my arms and started in on the third of the five runes. Her shield would be worth nothing soon, and my blood was practically humming with energy. “So you figured you’d help Philip out by killing me before I got the chance to hurt him any more. You know, he did a remarkably similar thing to me the last time I saw him. He decided to save me from how much I cared about Jo.”
“Jo.” Darcy sneered. “That bastard didn’t have the sense to see what he had. He knew Philip was on the lookout for strong sorcerers. He could have given you up and lived like a prince. Hell, he even suspected who you were, did you know?”
“I guessed,” I said noncommittally. I didn’t want to waste time on this, but I had to know: “Why didn’t he give me up, then?”
“He said it was too dangerous,” Darcy spat. “He was trying to remove the blocks on your magic so you could lead the Monarchists against us.”
“That’s how it happened,” Daiman said quietly. Clearly, this was the answer to a question he’d been asking for a long time.
Both of us looked over at him.
“Your magic was flickering in and out,” Daiman said, as an explanation. “It’s how I found you. Jo was trying to … unlock … your powers. He must have thought you were the leader they needed against Philip.” His voice dropped slightly. “He saw that you’d changed, Nicky.”
My throat seemed suspiciously tight, and I blinked away tears.
Jo had wanted me to be a leader—and what had happened instead was that Daiman had found me and Philip had gone on a murderous rampage to get me back.
And after all of that, I wasn’t sure I was the leader Jo would have wanted. What had he wanted the Monarchists to be?
I’d never had the chance to ask him.
And suddenly, I found that I didn’t give a damn about letting Darcy redeem herself. She’d come to the Monarchists, she’d taken Jo’s charity, she’d seen the people they were—and she had still betrayed them.
She would have changed her stripes long ago, if she was going to.
I dragged the magic out of the last two runes without any ceremony at all and threw all of it back in her face before she had a chance to realize the shield was gone.
That was the problem with using shields from artifacts—you couldn’t sense them, because they weren’t your magic. She hadn’t realized her protection was dying. She’d been too consumed with hating me, with scrabbling to reclaim a love that had never been hers.
The life drained from her eyes and she crumpled to the ground without a word.
Silence. The wind whistled eerily, and I turned my head to see the rest of the Monarchists staring at me without a word.
I didn’t dare look at Daiman.
“Let’s just finish this,” I said quietly. My voice was hoarse. “I want it to be over. I want to stop worrying about who he’ll kill next, who he’ll decide is the key to making me into the bitch I used to be. I want to stop worrying about who he’ll hurt to make a point. He’s dangerous. The people who follow him are dangerous. Let’s just finish this.”
They nodded. I could see that they didn’t know what to say, but they knew, at least, that I was right.
How many years had they spent knuckling under, only to realize that Philip would never be satisfied by anything other than a world of slaves?
They were afraid of him. But they had begun to realize that giving into their fear would only make things worse.
And that was, at least, enough for me to work with.
“Get ready.” Daiman’s voice was commanding. He swept his gaze over them as if they had no reason not to follow him. “They’re coming.”
I felt it, too, a moment later: a surge of magic and living bodies, running toward us across the castle grounds.
“They’re coming,” I repeated. I turned and spread my arms, letting power collect in my palms. “Let’s show them that the Monarchists aren’t what they used to be. Let’s show Philip that his reign is over.”
Chapter 23
It was all well and good to stand with a small army at my back and make pretty speeches, but as the horde rushed toward us, I realized an important fact:
I had never been at this place in a battle before.
Without having all of my memories, I could only assume that in my heyday, I had been at the back, directing the battles—or that I had sent other people to do the battling on my behalf, while I engaged in the occasional duel. I wasn’t quite sure.
All I knew was, the feeling of staring down one or two hundred angry sorcerers was entirely new. And with the Monarchists all behind me, I felt more th
an a little exposed.
My past self informed me that leading a battle honorably from the front was for chumps.
Call me crazy, but the bitch seemed to have a good point for once.
“Are you all right?”
I looked over at Daiman, and found that his eyes were still trained on our attackers. I could feel the power coiling in his palms, and he must have felt, in turn, the worry radiating off of me. He shot me a quick, worried glance.
“Yeah.” I looked back and nodded decisively, albeit with a nervous swallow after that. “This is just, uh … a new experience for me.”
To my surprise, he grinned. “It may be new, but it doesn’t really get easier. So don’t worry—being new at this isn’t really a disadvantage.”
“So why do you look so damned calm?”
I might have been snapping a bit. It relieved my tension.
“If I start moving, I might turn around and run. It’s not exactly logical to stand your ground when you’re being rushed by an army.” His muscles rippled appealingly as he raised his arms, palms still up.
There was a series of screams as the ground in front of the army erupted with vines and shards of stone. Power burst out of the eruption, pure power, nothing that could be seen as fire or leaves, simply a lethal blast.
My mouth hung open for a second. Daiman’s chest was heaving, but he wasn’t even close to tapped dry yet.
Don’t. Fuck. With druids.
Several of Philip’s lackeys tried to skid to a halt, and were subsequently trampled by the ones behind, who had too much momentum to stop. Those who tumbled down our side of the new hill were dazed. A few picked themselves up and kept running, but more turned and tried to scramble back the way they had come.
Some, I noticed, were no longer moving. If I closed my eyes, I could see the trail where Daiman’s power had ripped a hole through their bodies. There was no outward mark, but the collection of energy that made up their life force had been rent to pieces.
I swallowed hard, and began to really understand what Daiman had meant when he said that death magic was no more dangerous than any other kind.
