by Natalie Grey
“Nicky!” Philip was grabbing through the bars to help me up.
I had neither the strength nor the wherewithal to turn him down. I let him drag me to my feet. I was sobbing with the pain now, and the sight of the beast in such pain was strangely pathetic.
Philip was saying something, I could hear it vaguely, but I was still trying to understand the words when the beast slithered back the way it had come—back into the real world, back to guard the hall.
And then even Philip’s hands couldn’t keep me up any longer and I fell, knees thudding onto the stone, forehead resting against the bars as I tried not to go down entirely.
Chapter Eighteen
I was vaguely aware of Philip swearing fiercely, but all I could manage for myself was to keep my hands wrapped tight around the bars. I was terribly hot—unless maybe I was cold—and I was shaking fiercely.
My side hurt like hell. I tilted my head down to look—a dangerous proposition, one that caused the whole world to spin sideways—and gave an agonized gasp as I tried to raise my arm to look at the wound.
I really wished I hadn’t. It turned out that a spiked, barbed tail moving very fast did just about what you’d expect when it met unprotected flesh.
The result … wasn’t pretty.
And the wound was already turning black.
I looked up at Philip, and found him staring down at me—and it—in horror.
“So … this is pretty weird, huh?” I was trying to pull off the joke, but I was a little too woozy to pull it off. “Doesn’t, uh … doesn’t look good.”
“Nicola.” He’d used my nickname earlier, but now there was just his terrified face as he dropped to his knees, and I knew he was speaking out of some instinct that should be long-dead. I’d heard that tone before, sincere and worried. I hadn’t heard it often, though.
It was enough to make me wonder what was really going on in his head.
I looked at him and realized I was clutching his hand through the bars. “Hmm?”
“You have to fix it,” he said urgently. “Use your magic. You have to get the spell out of you.” When I said nothing, he shook my hand urgently, rapping it lightly against the bars. “Can you hear me? Nicola?”
“I….” Right. I had to do something. I looked down at the wound and grimaced.
“Your magic is death magic,” he was saying. His voice sounded very faraway. “Just like this. You can undo this spell, can’t you?”
“I don’t think I can. Actually.” I slipped sideways and landed on the good side with a muted cry of pain. Fuck, fuck, fuck…. “Can’t you?”
“For God’s sake.” A muttered oath. “Not if you won’t let me out, and I know you won’t. And … I’ll be honest, I never knew how to heal. Nicola!”
“What?” I looked over at him.
“Stay with me!” He looked panicked.
“Oh, right.” I patted at the bars weakly. “If I die, you’re stuck. That can’t be good for you.”
“It’s not just—” For once, I had the great pleasure of seeing Philip Allaire tongue-tied. “It’s more than that,” he said quietly. “Nicola, please. Please, you have to do something. You have to fix this. Look at me, stay with me. You only have to focus for a little bit. I know it hurts, but it will stop hurting as soon as you fix it.”
“Should’ve … never agreed to do the rite,” I muttered. “Would’ve been able to stop whatever happened.”
“No,” Philip said flatly, “you wouldn’t. And do you know why? Because you’re so damned convinced that this isn’t your problem. You would have turned around and left, just like you did when you overheard those people talking in the hallway. You should have stayed and listened. Then we’d know what we were dealing with. But you were on some damned fool quest for honor.”
My eyes widened. I was diverted, momentarily, from the pain. “What did you just say?”
“I said you had a chance not to get into this mess at all,” he told me furiously. “You could have realized that someone was up to something shady. You, of all people, should have realized it. If you’d thought about it, beyond trying to run away from everything, you’d have understood that you can’t get away from politics and danger by going somewhere else.”
“This isn’t—” I tried to push myself up and failed, and stared at him angrily “—helpful,” I finished.
“You need to hear it.” He wasn’t repentant at all.
“Well, consider it heard. And do something useful with yourself.” I was snapping the words at him.
Anger was really the only thing I had to distract myself. If I thought about how angry I was with him, I could forget how terrified I was about this wound. I could forget the slow-creeping realization that it was poisoning me.
Death magic was seeping into my blood, and even the knowledge that the serpent might also be mortally wounded wasn’t helping much.
“Nicola.” He spoke quietly. His tone was even and mellow, the product of centuries of practice—Philip had always been a consummate courtier. But below the affectations, I heard a deeper worry. “What do you want me to do? What can I do?”
“Heal me.” I wiped at my eye, which seemed to be leaking tears. I hated how weak crying made me feel, and I hated that when I remembered him saying he couldn’t heal, the tears just welled up and came out all on their own. “Or find me someone who can.”
“I can’t heal,” he told me again. His voice was strained. He said it like a man punishing himself. “And I can’t find anyone unless you let me out.” He closed his eyes briefly, and turned his face away. “And I’m not sure who I could find anyway, if the hall is destroyed.”
“It isn’t destroyed!” I coughed on the words, and the spasm wracked me with pain. “Fuck, that hurts. It isn’t destroyed.” I gripped at one of the bars and stared at him. “They can still be rescued.”
“I don’t give a damn about that.” His eyes burned into mine. “I care about you being rescued. You’ve learned some druid magic, haven’t you? You have to use it now.”
“Not healing!” My voice cracked. I was truly scared now, and it was starting to feel like I was floating.
I remembered the fear in Eshe’s eyes, and for a moment, panic drove everything else out of my head. I was drowning in it, I couldn’t contain how much fear there was in my chest.
I was dying. After 2,000 years, I was dying, and it was all far too sudden.
You never saw death coming. You never got a chance to prepare. You’d think that after so long, I’d think I had lived enough, but I was pretty sure living so long just made the fear of death worse.
I stared up at the blue sky, and for the first time, I felt just how small I truly was. The world didn’t give a damn if I survived any of this. I’d had plans to make things right, balance my ledger.
The world didn’t care.
I’d be leaving Daiman without any hope for a rescue, and even if he somehow, somehow, managed to get free … he would never know what had happened to me.
I turned my head and felt my mouth gape with tears. I tried to press my lips together, and had the sudden thought of how ridiculous it was to try to control myself. What use was dignity now? I was dying, I had no reputation to maintain. There was nothing to be gained by dying without tears.
Even Philip’s sudden exclamation of shock didn’t make me open my eyes, but a moment later, hands closed around my arms and I was hauled upright.
“What….” I didn’t quite have enough in me for a full sentence, and anyway, most of me was occupied with the pain of being hauled around with a gaping wound in my side.
“Come on,” a woman’s voice said urgently. She looped my arm over her shoulders and hung on with grim determination, dragging me along none too gently while my feet scrabbled for purchase on the ground.
I opened my eyes and saw brown eyes and a milk-and-honey complexion that I envied. Red hair escaped from its braid to fall around her face, and her small lips were pressed together in determination. Something seem
ed wrong about the face, like it wasn’t quite there at all, but every time I tried to figure out why I thought that, there were no clues to help me.
“Come with me,” she said. She was making for the horizon, away from the cage.
“Nicola!” Philip was roaring my name.
The woman didn’t spare him a glance, but she clearly heard him. “Who is he, and why do you have him in a cage?”
“Philip….” I tried to remember how to speak. Then I couldn’t remember his last name.
“Stay with me,” the woman said urgently, and I had a jarring moment of déjà vu. Someone had said the same thing to me not too long ago.
“Where?” I asked her. The full sentence seemed like too much effort, but then I remembered something important. “You th’druid who wanted help?”
“Yes,” the woman said impatiently.
“You can heal?”
“No.” She sounded frustrated, and then gave a little noise of satisfaction. “Good. We’re close.”
The world had turned very different colors all of a sudden, and I gave a look around myself.
Either I was dead, or this was the weirdest acid trip ever.
We were in … well, I guessed one could call it a forest, although every single piece of it seemed to be trying to decide what it wanted to be. Bushes flickered between having glossy leaves and shining red berries, and being patches of brambles, while tufts of grass were either properly sized or far taller than me, and the trees couldn’t seem to pick a color.
“Is this real?” I hoped not. Trying to focus on things was making me feel a bit sick to my stomach. I was still failing on more steps than I managed.
“As real as anything else,” the woman said.
If I’d ever doubted that she was a druid, I didn’t anymore. If there was one thing all druids shared, it was the same supercilious attitude toward reality.
“I hope I am never that infuriating,” I muttered.
“I have no doubt that you have your moments.” Her tone was dry. She stopped moving. “We’re here. Go in.”
Before me spread a pool of something that was pretty certainly water. It rippled and had waves, at any rate, despite the fact that it was a small pool. I couldn’t tell how deep it was, either. I looked down into it, then up at the sky.
An aurora rippled its way in front of the stars.
An aurora that wasn’t reflected in the water.
I tried to take a step back. “I don’t like this.”
“Oh, for—” The woman rolled her eyes. “It can heal you. I can’t. You’re dying.”
“But—” That water looked far too dark and strange for my tastes.
“We don’t have time for this.” She unwound my arm from around her shoulders and shoved, hard.
The next thing I knew, the black was closing over my head … and I was very, very sure it wasn’t water at all.
Chapter Nineteen
The plus side of the pool not being water, of course, was that sinking into it didn’t feel like drowning.
…Mostly, that was. I dropped into it like a stone, and found out in short order that it was deeper than it had any right to be.
Down and down I sank, trailing bubbles up through the stuff-that-wasn’t-quite water. I didn’t think to reach out with my druidic trances. I didn’t think to do anything at all, actually. I just watched as things floated past me, visions flashing in the dark.
I could see Philip’s face again as I stared up at him from the ground of the domhan fior. I hadn’t been quite aware of the dawning horror on his face then, but I could see it now: he was realizing that he was watching me die.
I found it in myself to be amused by the fact that a man who had tried to kill me more than once was so upset about my expiring of other causes.
I saw Daiman in the moment just before I disappeared into the druid rite, his face frozen in the moment of realizing that I was terrified. Had he, too, thought something was wrong?
The image was already gone and I was sinking deeper. I stared down at Eshe as she died and felt the pulse of life in her release into the ocean and the sky. I stared at the wall of water she’d conjured against Philip and knew how deep and how vast Eshe’s power had been—and how small it still was against the world.
I saw a young boy, dark eyed and dark haired, running across a field in autumn. He was running like only a child could run, utterly careless. His cheeks were pink with the cold and he was smiling a bright, fierce smile.
It was Daiman, I realized. However many centuries ago, this little barefoot boy was Daiman.
I clawed for that memory, reaching out to it even as the darkness dragged me away and I kept falling, and when I opened my mouth to call out for him, I realized I had no more air. This place, which had seemed like nothing in so many ways, was now suffocating and dark and unsafe.
I didn’t even have time to be afraid before it spat me out again on the shore of the pool. I hit the ground with a thud and found that my hair was sopping wet. My robes clung to me uncomfortably, and my boots had better not be ruined.
Then I wiggled my toes and remembered I didn’t have any boots anymore. I’d left them in the hall.
If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. I crawled onto the bank disgustedly and looked around myself. Stupid weird pool that wasn’t water. Stupid hall being stuck in a stupid spell. Stupid hair dripping water down my nose.
It took me a good few moments of fuming to realize that I felt completely fine. My thoughts were clear, and my side didn’t hurt anymore.
I pulled at my robes in disbelief to stare at the skin. The robe was a lost cause, still shredded and covered in blood, but the skin … I pulled the neck of the robe and peered down at my side to make very, very sure. Yes, the skin was all healed. I poked at it. It felt healed inside, too.
“I told you it would heal you,” the woman told me.
I jumped and swore.
She was nearby, standing near a tree with her cloak hanging around her. She stood still as a statue once more. Now that I could see her face, it seemed surprisingly childlike. Her cheeks were round and smooth, her eyes wide-set under brows just as flaming red as her hair.
Her face still looked wrong somehow.
“What is this place?” I looked around myself and tried unsuccessfully to figure out what was going on with the trees.
“This is the heart of the domhan fior,” the woman said, after a while. She looked around herself pensively and added, “I think it might be the heart of the world, really.”
As soon as she said that, I noticed something: the waves in the pool, the ripples of the aurora overhead, the growth of the trees, all of it was linked to a slow, deep pulse. The heart of the world, indeed.
“I jumped into the heart of the world?” I asked, and a moment later, as my thoughts caught up with me, I corrected myself: “You pushed me into the heart of the world?”
“It was the only way to save you,” the woman said, with a shrug. As if she’d suddenly acquired a devotion to the truth, she added, “That I know of.”
“How did you know about it?” I gave her a very careful once-over. I didn’t see weapons, and I couldn’t sense any particular power about her—but I also got the sense that what I was looking at wasn’t real at all.
It was very disorienting.
“I fled here.” She looked down at the ground and drew her cloak around her. For the first time, she looked scared. “I was … as injured as you. I was cut off from my magic. I can’t remember how I found this place the first time. The water saved me.”
From her tone, I wasn’t sure if she considered that to be a good or a bad thing.
I drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “What were you running from?”
She looked up at me, surprisingly direct. “I can’t say.”
“Let me guess, you can’t tell me what cut you off from your magic, either.” I raised an eyebrow.
She inclined her head, her smile halfway between sardonic
and bitter. “Your guess is correct.”
“Why?” I demanded, frustrated.
“Curses aren’t made to be convenient.” She jerked her head back the way we had come. “They’re made to be deadly. Come.”
I scrambled up, but with ill humor. “Why are we leaving?”
“Because I hate it here.” Her shudder told me well enough that she wasn’t lying. “This is my prison. I am not safe in the human realms any longer. Sometimes I am not even safe in the rest of the domhan fior. So I must stay here, and any haven may become a prison in time.”
She made her way quickly through the trees, but I caught up with her easily enough now that I wasn’t dying. “You want to go home,” I said quietly.
“Home.” Her lips twisted. “My home is dead and gone, for the most part.”
Fifteen centuries. That was how long she said she’d been waiting for an ally.
Under a curse. An extremely, extremely powerful curse. I followed her a bit more cautiously now, looking at her as if I could see more than a cloak and the back of her head. As if I could figure out what the problem was.
She brought us out of the domhan fior at the top of the hill, staring down at the hall, and flung out one arm to point at it. She might look childlike at rest, but now she looked utterly furious. She looked like a queen.
“Do you know what that is?” she demanded.
I forced myself to look at the hall. The flames and the smoke still hung frozen in a moment of conflagration, with dark wisps of fog swirling around the whole, whispers of dark magic. I did not see the serpent, but perhaps it was still there.
“I don’t know what kind of spell that is,” I admitted finally.
“Not the spell.” She shook her head.
“What, then?” I looked at her, at that strange not-quite-face.
“It’s death,” she told me. “Every person in that hall is dead.” She paused, and must have seen me go grey. “Or about to be,” she finished. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me! Daiman—”
