by Natalie Grey
And that meant I had to use my own.
I spread my own arms and let my head fall back.
It took only a moment to see the battlefield with new eyes: figures alight with magic running toward me, and the seething mass of Daiman’s spell. That barrier was still dangerous, damaging any who tried to climb over it to get to us.
But they were trying. Which meant I needed to stop them as well as I could.
I reached for one of them, one of the ones closest to us, and felt the power of ice coursing through his veins. He sounded like the creak and groan of a frozen lake in winter, his soul looked like white-and-blue, shining in the sunlight. He was gathering his power for a spell not unlike Daiman’s, to stab up through the earth beneath us and impale us on frozen shards.
He never got the chance. I grabbed the power from his veins in one swift stroke and staggered with the rush of power that flowed into me.
It was too much. I had never taken so much at once, so quickly. My experiments so far had been cautious, training me more for precision than raw power. Even with Philip, I had wanted him to be able to speak—and I had gone for his spells, not for his own life force.
This … felt heady and sick and wrong, and so, so good at the same time.
The sorcerer didn’t so much fall as he disintegrated before our eyes, and I felt, rather than saw, Daiman shudder.
I didn’t have time to think about that. A whole second life force was too much for me to hold in my blood. I needed to do something with it.
And so the sorcerer became a weapon against his own comrades, his power sent back in the form of death, arrowing through one, two, three of them before it was gone. I dropped to my knees and managed to push myself back upright. I felt like I’d run a marathon.
So, a bit more control next time, then.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much time to work on a strategy. I saw another sorceress close to Monarchists on the right flank, and I reached into her to siphon the power away from her.
She did not know what was happening, but she was smart enough to throw up a shield. A wall of power that carried the feel and strength of granite sprang into the air around her, and my power slid over it for a moment, finding no purchase.
Then I remembered the lichen. My power grew, grasping the surface of the rock with tiny roots, and I made it into ivy next, strong and questing, shattering the surface it gripped. I lapped up the power as the shield fell to pieces, and let my magic flow over her and into her blood.
She turned to face me at the end, she must have realized who it was she was fighting. I saw fear in her eyes from across the battlefield—and pure hatred.
“Traitor.” Her lips formed the word silently.
“Murderer,” I murmured back. I could see into her heart. I knew the absolute contempt she held for humans. I knew what she was.
I had once been the same.
She fell, and I shaped the next bolts of magic more carefully. Tiny darts of it shot across the battlefield, some intercepting the spells of my opponents, some striking them in the heart and planting the seed of death in their blood.
I gasped as I released the spell. Holding the whole battlefield in my mind made my head ache fiercely.
But even if I was unaccustomed to this magic, the battle was turning. I could see that already. Daiman’s first spell had been a surprise, setting Philip’s minions off balance, and even they, without a druid trance, could smell death magic in the air.
They knew who they were facing, and they were afraid.
And the Monarchists behind me? They were pissed. I remembered my speech to the Coimeail, when I told them that these people were fighting for freedom and not for mass murder.
I had been right. They had spent years running from everyone, hiding from those who should have protected them, and now they almost hated Philip more than any of the Separatists.
I watched as power streamed past me and overhead. Storms gathered and fought one another in the air above us, runeblades flew with eerie precision—Lawrence must be somewhere nearby—and fireballs met orbs of water with hissing and the smell of burning ozone.
Somewhere, I heard the staccato beat of a machine gun. How I knew the sound, I wasn’t sure—where the hell had I spent all those years?—but I knew that Harry was doing his part.
I felt, strangely, a swell of pride. This had always been a piece of the movement I wanted, even if I had not nurtured it. Beneath the all-consuming anger I carried for all those years, eating away at me like acid, there had been a seed of something stronger, purer, more enduring.
And no matter that the plague had endured, the quest for freedom had endured as well, and the numbers of those who supported it had swelled as well.
Now, they stood with me, and they fought against a man who would be a tyrant.
I remembered Harry’s words now: “We might not be able to take him out on our own—but you can do that, while we hold his army at bay.”
It was time to do what I had come here to do.
“Daiman!” I pitched my voice over the howls of the wind and the screams of combatants. “We should get to the castle!”
His eyes stayed fixed on an opponent as he trapped them with quick-growing vines, but he nodded.
“What’s your plan?” he called back.
“This!” I grabbed his hand and yanked him into the domhan fior.
Daiman was right, I saw. You could find power that manifested in the real world, showing here as creatures and flickers of light. When I thought about them too hard, they disappeared, crushed by the inexact strictures of how my mind tried to perceive them.
Here, Daiman’s spell looked like a long, low hedge. It parted with an accommodating rustle as we sprinted past, and I called a thank you over my shoulder. I could feel the power of our enemies rushing past in little sparks and tiny washes of heat or cold.
When we burst free of the chaos of the battle at last, I looked over at Daiman.
“I’m going to try to see how the castle is laid out—and where Terric might be.”
He nodded to me.
“Can you sense him?” I asked.
“I haven’t tried yet, I didn’t think there was any way it would work with so many sorcerers between us and him.” Daiman took my hands. “But we can look now. Nicky … what will you do when you find him?”
Why? My voice echoed in my memory, and I fought the urge to spit that I would strike at him while he had his back turned, and repay betrayal with betrayal.
But there was so much more at work here.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I still don’t know. I don’t know why Philip protected him … or attacked him. There’s too much I don’t know, for me to say what I will do when I see how things are.”
Daiman squeezed my hands. A smile tried to break through on his face, but his eyes were full of worry. “You remembered something about him. Terric. Didn’t you?”
I closed my eyes and felt my chin tremble. “Yes. I remembered the day he tried to kill me. He … pretended to be my ally and then he stabbed me in the back. And….” I sniffed and pulled a hand free to wipe at my eyes. “And it doesn’t make sense to feel so bad about it. I would do everything he did and more to stop someone who was doing what I was trying to do. Why do I feel so betrayed that he did it back then?”
“Because you’re human,” Daiman whispered. “Above all else, Nicky, you’re human. I think sorcerers forget that sometimes.”
“So what the hell do I do with that?” My voice was half-laugh, half-sob.
“You try to do the right thing,” Daiman said quietly. “Like you said to me all those weeks ago—you’ll have to live with the choices you make now, for a very long time. Make the choice you won’t regret.”
I felt a tiny seed of calm in my chest.
The choice I wouldn’t regret. I could do that.
And I knew, from that, what I had to do.
It was as if the clarity helped me sense him. There was the feel of embers ahead o
f me: burning low, nearly guttering out.
“He’s here,” I said. “And I have to face him alone. The way he faced me. Watch my back, Daiman?”
His smile was like dawn breaking, and his kiss was gentle. “Always,” he whispered.
I looked up into his eyes and drowned in them one last time, and then I nodded and turned away, striding across the rocks and flowers of the Burren, and toward a fight that had been coming for six hundred years.
Chapter 24
I had a split second, when I fell out of the domhan fior, to examine Terric before he realized I was there.
He wasn’t in good shape. His fight with Philip at the Hunters’ library had stripped him of most of his power. He had grown even thinner since I saw him last, and he had already been lean. Now, he looked gaunt. He looked like his power was burning him up from the inside.
Philip had left him alone, trapped in this little room. There was no door, and no windows to speak of. Light came from tiny holes in the rock, and the rock was far too thick for Terric to melt even if he were at full strength.
He wasn’t even close to full strength now. His power, and his life, were both close to the edge of gone.
This was a man who had stabbed me in the back, ordered the executions of children, and ruled the majority of the magical world on stolen credentials. He was a dangerous fanatic.
And all I could feel was pity.
Then he saw me, and his eyes flared.
“Terric, wait—”
That was all I managed to get out before his power scorched me.
“Terric!”
A burning chunk of rock flew past my head.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, I am trying to help you!”
“The hell you are.” His voice was a snarl. He circled in the gloom, fire rising in his hands as he searched my shields for an opening. “I know who sent you. I know what they want.”
“I don’t even know what they want,” I admitted flatly. “But I think very much that they’re just worried you’ll reflect badly on them. I think they’ve decided that it’s the Acadamh or you, and they’d prefer the Acadamh.”
His face twisted. “They don’t know a goddamned thing!”
He had to know that his wall of fire wasn’t going to do anything against my shields, but he threw it anyway. Flame roared against the wall of my magic, and I flinched away from the heat.
Terric’s power might be running low, but he was one of the strongest sorcerers who had ever lived. That was no lie.
And he no longer cared if he lived or died. He was literally burning himself for the fuel to throw at me.
“So tell me,” I whispered. “Tell me what they don’t know.”
“What it takes,” Terric shot back. “What it takes to rule. They don’t know the choices they’ll have to make. They don’t know the cost—and it’s because they choose not to! They knew the children were disappearing. They knew what was happening. They just chose not to think about it. And now they’d put it all on me!”
His words were half fire, or so it seemed, cracking and roaring in the air as he flung another spell at me. I heard them trail away into a scream of pain, and saw his lips bleeding.
He was breaking apart, breaking down.
“You’re killing yourself,” I told him quietly. “You’re going to die if you keep doing this. And I won’t.”
He started to laugh. His voice was high and wild. “You think I care? You think there’s anything left? They can do whatever they want, the world will listen to them. I’m just a liar now, didn’t you know?”
“You … did lie about something pretty important.” I felt that was a valid thing to point out. “You ruled most of our world based on that. I think it’s reasonable for people to be angry about that, frankly.”
He was startled into laughter, but it trailed away in a gurgle and he slumped back against the wall. His shirt was plastered to his ribs. I could see his chest rising and falling too fast, and his pulse racing. I could make out the shape of every bone.
“So what d’you want?” he asked bitterly.
“The truth.” I spoke Philip’s words without thinking.
“There are a lot of truths,” Terric mumbled. His cracked lips stretched slightly in a smile.
He looked most of the way to insanity right now, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
“Let’s start with what you’ve been doing,” I said quietly. “Where did you go, Terric? And why?”
“To do … what needed to be done.” He shook his head, and I saw a tear make its way down his cheek. He slid down the wall, laughing again. I wasn’t sure he was even aware I was in the room anymore. “I was already … damned. Didn’t make a difference if I did it. Might as well be me. Wipe out … every one of you … f’rever.”
The words hit me like a blow. “You were trying to learn how to hunt us down. But….”
“Haven’t you figured it out?” He was laughing again, a bit hoarsely. “The spells they use—those don’t need a Hunter to cast them. I could have made it so that the second a child was born with your powers, they were killed. I could have built that.”
I felt cold, and then far too hot.
“And Philip—”
“Wanted the spell.” Terric sank his face into his hands. “He was following me. The whole time. Should’ve known. But … I thought he’d be after you.”
“He was.” I shook my head and sank into a crouch to look at him. “But you … he’d been working on you a long time. He had plans for you, too. He wasn’t just going to let you go, you had to know that.”
“Easy to say that now,” Terric snapped.
He was right. I stood up with a sigh.
“And us, Terric? What about us?”
His head came up warily. He stared at me in silence, unsure what I wanted.
“What happened between us?” I whispered. “All of it. I remember you showing up. I remember you trying to kill me. But the rest of it….”
“You don’t remember.” Terric looked away. He looked like he was fighting tears. “Just as well, really. Nothing worth remembering. I did what I had to do.”
“I know that.” I didn’t flinch from it now.
Something flickered in his gaze.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s … nothing. I … you were a monster.” He spat the words. “And you could turn into one again at any time. Either of us could. Or Philip. Or that little girl you met in your old camp. But I won’t help him. I’ll never help him again.”
The last part of it slotted into place, and I felt the breath leave my lungs in a whoosh.
Any child born with your powers could be killed instantly.
It wasn’t death magic Terric wanted to wipe out. It was strong magic.
And that was why Philip wanted it. He wanted to make sure no one would ever be able to rival him again. He wanted to kill anyone who could even come close.
Revelations were funny things, though. On the one hand, they made the world clear. They showed you the path.
On the other hand, they distracted you.
Terric threw the last of himself at me with a scream, breaking through my barriers. Fire singed my hair and scorched my skin as I stumbled backward.
I fell, ribs and elbows hitting the rock, and the sensation jogged the last of that memory loose. As Terric swayed and fell, his power exhausted and not quite enough to kill me, as I pushed myself up to ready the spell that would end all of this….
The memory took me.
“Why?” My voice was pathetic, high as a child’s.
“You know why.” He seemed so young here, so fresh. I could see the storm behind his eyes, and the fear. “Someone has to do this. You’re a monster.”
“They’ll kill us!” I screamed the words at him. “Do you think this is a game? They can find us, they can put irons on us. They beat their own kind to death on the suspicion of being what we are, just because they’re healers, midwives, old women. They’re monsters, and i
f I have to be one to finish this, I will be.”
“Some of them are monsters.” His face flickered. “And most of them aren’t. And most of us aren’t monsters … but some of us are.” His eyes raked over me. “So tell me: why should we live while they die?”
“You know why! You know exactly why I do this. Because it’s natural to fight for your own kind!” I was pushing myself up, but I had no strength for magic. He had chosen his time well.
I was going to die. I knew I was going to die.
“I was five years old the first time they caught me doing magic. I tried to make our cow less scared while they butchered her. It was a kindness. They beat me until I could barely walk and my mother … my mother told me that if I ran, she would send them in the other direction. That was her kindness, that she would cast me out forever. That was the best she could do for me.” I was crying. There were tears streaming down my face. “I’ve watched them hunt us down. I’ve watched our weakness cost us. I’ve given up on trying to change them. Don’t … don’t tell me what I already know. In the end, it’s us or them. And I’ll fight for us. That’s what I’m doing. That’s the purpose of this life.”
I fell to my knees. The world was starting to go dark. I had used too much magic. I was failing.
One more blow, and it would be over.
But it never came. His voice, when it came, was so soft I could barely hear the words:
“So make a new life.”
The memory released me and I stumbled.
Terric turned his head to watch me.
“You walked away,” I said quietly.
Chapter 25
“You didn’t fail.” My voice was one of the only sounds in the room, beyond the wheeze of Terric’s breath. “You could have ended it. And you walked away instead. To give me a chance to become this.”
Terric turned his head away again. He was barely breathing.
Behind me, a figure tumbled out of the domhan fior.
“Nicky—”
But Daiman’s words broke off as he saw me crouch by Terric’s side. I reached out a hand.
