by Natalie Grey
“Is one man,” she finished for me. “One druid. And he’d give his life to defeat this enemy in a heartbeat. I’ve seen him in my dreams, you know.”
“He’s seen you in his.” My words were bitter and I didn’t quite know why. I didn’t know who this woman was, but she had no claim to him. I didn’t like her watching him—especially not when he had so feared her, and when she had no interest in his welfare.
I didn’t want her telling me what he would or wouldn’t die for.
My words had surprised her. “He has?”
“He saw your offer to me, your first offer. He told me not to do the druidic rite because he was afraid you’d draw me away to another world and I would never come back. He said there was a dark magic about you.” I raised my eyes to hers and knew that I hated her for all of this, even if that wasn’t really her fault. “I guess that wasn’t what he needed to be worried about, was it? If I hadn’t gone on the rite … he might still be here.”
“The rite?” Her eyebrows rose.
I shook my head impatiently. This was hardly what I expected her to focus on. “Yes. The rite to see if I would be allowed to be trained. You were a druid, aren’t you familiar with it?” I flailed my hands. “Big sea monster? Temptation by nymphs?”
She blinked, and then she swallowed and looked away. “That….” She paused, then looked back at me. “That wasn’t a druid rite.”
I stared at her for a moment. The wind was whistling around my ears.
“What?” I managed finally.
“I thought you knew,” she said quietly.
“Well, I didn’t. That wasn’t a druid rite?”
“How would a prospective druid survive any of what you did?” she snapped at me. “You hardly survived it, and you’re already proficient in magic.”
“I didn’t know! I figured it was tailored to me in some way, that they knew I already knew some things about druid magic and…..” My voice trailed off.
My cheeks were burning. I felt beyond stupid. I had even wondered about the test, but I hadn’t stopped to think that what happened was tied, specifically, to the destruction of the hall. Which it had to be, didn’t it? Whoever did this hadn’t wanted me to come back.
Which meant it had to be Taliesen, Morgana, or Farbod. Didn’t it?
Unless it had been Daiman, himself. I felt a chill. What if that was how they had asked him to prove his loyalty? Would he ever—
“Whoever sent you into that place, sent you to die,” the woman told me bluntly. “I saw you fight. I can see why they would have turned you away. But to kill you outright—well, that begs the question, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. It does. I don’t know which of them would do that, but—”
“You don’t have to know,” she suggested silkily. “Let the hall be destroyed, and whoever did it will die. They are in there.”
I stared at her. “Is that what you’ve wanted this whole time?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “There is a darkness there more powerful than you could imagine. It is worth every druid in that hall to defeat it.”
I felt like I was in the pitch black, feeling my way blindly. “The spell holding the hall in time….”
“Is mine,” she finished.
“You said you didn’t have magic!”
“I built it long ago, before....” Her face screwed up as she tried to force out the words, but the curse would not let her. “Before the curse,” she finished angrily. “Of course … when I made that spell, I assumed that I would be there if it were ever to be triggered. I made it so that I would be immune, so that I could destroy them before their magic took hold.”
I stared at her.
“But you will do,” she told me. “If you bind yourself to me, you will be able to finish the plan.”
“And then you’ll just let the hall burn,” I said quietly. “When you’ve destroyed whoever you think caused all of that.”
“How would I know?” She lifted her shoulders. “I have been banished for far too long to guess at it. The only way to be sure … is to kill all of them, that serpent included.”
“The serpent isn’t yours?” I looked over at the hall in surprise. I had thought it part and parcel of the spell.
“No. It’s one of them—one of the druids.” She sneered. “It shows how far they’ve fallen, to create a form like that. But … it also shows how powerful they are.” She swallowed.
“You couldn’t defeat them in a fight,” I guessed.
“No. Whoever did this, they had been planning for a very long time. If you want my guess, I think you just showed up at the wrong time. That’s why they wanted to kill you. It wasn’t personal.” Her smile was genuinely amused. “They thought you would disrupt things.”
“And I still can! If you tell me how to work with the spell that’s there—”
“Can you promise me that none of them will get away?” Her gaze was fierce. “No, you cannot. The people who did this wanted to rule the world. They had the power to rule the world, because they had laid the groundwork since before they cursed me. They were patient. Frankly, I never expected them to do something as stupid as this.”
“What did they do?”
“They tried to use a human sacrifice to become … like a god.” She shook her head. “There isn’t a word for it in English. They would be a force of nature in a human body. And it would be an abomination. No human is meant to wield so much power.”
Again, I had the sensation that I did not quite understand. “And you knew they were planning this?”
“It was a legend of power, and power always tempts someone. I knew that someday, someone would have the patience to try it.” She drew her cloak close and shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “It had been so long since I cast it that I … forgot.” She shook her head. “But the spell they tried to do, and the force of my spell—they’re powerful. Even in the heart of the domhan fior, I could feel them.”
“And when it happened, you saw your chance to get even with them for what they did to you before,” I said quietly.
“When I saw you,” she corrected. “And it was not to ‘get even.’ It was because they were abominations. That this might free me … well, I do not deny that I would welcome that.” Her face had a hunger so great it shook me to my core. “But there is more to it than that.”
“What did they do to you?”
“That ... I cannot say. The curse forbids me.” She smiled. “Suffice to say, I am glad they failed in this—for the power they sought to use for their spell was my own, in part. I have hidden from them since they drove me away, but with this … with this, they would have killed me.”
I looked at the hall, and back to her.
What this meant, what any of it meant….
I wasn’t sure. I was sure only of one thing.
I shook my head, and she saw my reluctance. “Listen,” she said urgently. “You wanted to be a druid. You know the oath—to make the world whole. Those who worked this spell would break the world and remake it to suit themselves. If you care at all for the vows you took—”
“I took no vows,” I said quietly. “I’m not a druid. And I’m not killing Daiman for your vendetta.”
I walked away from her and left her there. Philip was wrong: whatever her fight was, whatever she wanted, it wasn’t more important than freeing Daiman.
Chapter Twenty
I didn’t want to see Philip. Not right away. I couldn’t face him yet. I strode across the strange wilderness of the Burren, bare feet on sun-warmed rock and the scents of greenery in my nose. I could barely see for tears, for some reason.
I was overtired, I told myself. That was it.
At last I sank down into a crouch, hugging myself and staring out at the landscape. The wind caught in the hole at my side. This robe really hadn’t been made to be comfortable even before the serpent ripped it.
Ceremonial nonsense. And all for a fake ceremony. I lay back and stared at the sky.
So it hadn�
��t been a druid rite. So someone had tried to make sure I wouldn’t come back. I forced myself to think about it logically.
Morgana would have had the opportunity. Slip me a different herb, and I might well end up in the wrong world.
Taliesen would have had the opportunity as well. He had been the one who cast the spell, hadn’t he?
But anyone could have added their own magic as soon as he started to cast. I pressed my hands over my eyes. There was no knowing, which was going to eat me alive if I let it. It could have been any of them, even—
Daiman. My mind kept circling back to that. Why was I so determined to wonder if he’d betrayed me?
Because deep down, I feared that Philip was right. Daiman was so invested in the idea that I could wind up with a clean slate. What if he started to believe I couldn’t? What if he had realized it long ago and brought me to the druids, for them to execute me when he couldn’t bear to?
That was crazy, my mind insisted.
But … was it?
I sat up and rubbed at my face. If I put myself in danger to rescue Daiman and he turned out to want me dead, well, I was going to feel really stupid, and the part of me that had been cast out of my home as a child, who had fought for the sorcerers of the world, was screaming for me not to take that chance.
Not taking that chance was ridiculous, though. What was I going to do, spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, trusting no one?
It was how I had lived before, but somewhere in the long years of having no magic, I had started wanting to trust people. Weak, my mind insisted, but I wanted something more than revenge and power.
Which meant that I had to take the chance of being the biggest idiot ever.
I stood up with a groan and started back toward Philip. I had walked in the other direction from him earlier, on purpose—but I could always find him. The feel of his magic floated toward me over the stone, partly a vibration in the air, the lifting of the hair on my arms as if the air were charged before a storm, and partly the smell of charred ozone. Philip had always smelled like that.
I couldn’t stop seeing his face in my mind, and the way it had changed when he realized I was dying. I realized now that I had expected to see joy in his eyes, or at least relief.
But he had looked at me like I was his last hope in the world, and he was losing me.
I didn’t know what to make of that.
He saw me from far away and I felt his attention riveted on me. He wrapped both hands around the bars and didn’t move while I came closer. When I stopped a few yards away from him—I prided myself on having enough sense to be cautious still—he didn’t say anything for a long time.
“I thought you were dead.” His voice was rusty.
Had he been … crying?
Anyone would cry if they thought they were stuck in a magical cage for the rest of time, I told myself firmly. He’d been crying for himself, not me.
I ignored the little voice of doubt that told me it probably wasn’t so simple.
“Turns out she was telling the truth.” I shrugged. “She knew a place I could be healed.”
“Who was that?” He sounded angry now, which helped me relax. This was a bit more familiar. “She came out of nowhere, she took you away while you were dying, I didn’t know if she was going to kill you herself—”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” I rolled my eyes. “If she wanted me dead, all she had to do was wait.”
“Don’t you think I told myself that?” His voice rose. He ran a hand through his blond hair and sighed. He looked away for a moment, his eyes closed. “But I was shut in here, Nicola. I couldn’t help you. I couldn’t do anything more than hold your hand while you died. Do you have any idea what that felt like?”
I stared at him for a moment, wordless. There were tears in my eyes. To sit, watching someone die like that—
But I did know.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, I know what that feels like.” I drew a breath. “I sat with Eshe while she died.”
He froze.
“You’d forgotten that,” I guessed.
He looked over his shoulder. “Yes.” He looked ashamed, at least, but his eyes burned. “She betrayed you once. She would have seen you dead.”
“Sometimes one person has to die for the world to be made more whole.” I had long ago forgiven Eshe for what she did. I had even forgiven Terric for what he’d done—what he’d done to me, anyway. “Eshe did what she did to save millions of lives.”
“What about our lives?” Philip looked at me. “What about us, Nicola?”
“Which us?” The words were weary. “I didn’t come here to fight with you, Philip.”
He heaved a sigh and slid down the bars to sit. “I know. I’m … sorry.”
I gaped. I had never heard an apology from this man before.
He rolled his head sideways to look at me. “You were my shield, though,” he told me. “Not just mine, all of ours. Sometimes it seemed like you were the only person who didn’t think that because there were less of us than the humans, that we mattered less. When I thought no one would ever listen to us, that—fuck, that the Unitarians would win and the whole world would learn about us … you were always there, with that fire in your eyes.”
He was still looking toward me, but his eyes were focused years way.
I dug my nails into my palm.
“I was afraid that they would come for us,” Philip admitted. “I had nightmares that they came in the night with chains and torches. I saw what they did to you—the marks on your body.”
I looked down. I could feel a strange smile tugging at my mouth. “You joked with me about it when I came back. You taunted me, as I recall. Asked me if I had lost my resolve.”
“I was terrified!” The shout burst out of him. “Do you not understand? Were you never afraid like I was?” When he looked up, his eyes were haunted. “It seemed like you weren’t. It … gave me hope. You felt like some otherworldly protector. Do you have any idea what it was like to have you come back after centuries, when I had never forgotten you, when you had been my beacon in the darkness … and hate everything we stood for?”
My hands were clenched so tightly they ached, and I seemed to be having trouble breathing. I wasn’t sorry for him, I told myself. What we had done was wrong, it was wrong.
And he was still the same sociopath who had been prepared to kill again—billions, this time.
It was just that every time I looked at him, that truth seemed a little farther away.
We stood in silence while clouds scudded across the sky above us.
“Why did you come back?” Philip asked finally.
“What?”
“You said you didn’t come back to fight with me. Why did you come back?” He stood up and took pains to adjust his shirt and pick dirt from his pants. It was almost like he was embarrassed.
Like his speech had been real. But it wasn’t, was it?
…Was it?
I rubbed at my temples. Philip, bad. Freeing Daiman, good. Simple rules to live by. I just had to keep repeating them to myself enough to remember them.
“We need to prepare to take down that serpent,” I told him. “Your last plan was good. I hurt it—a lot. I think I can kill it. But once we get past that, there’s another problem. The whole hall is frozen in time, and that’s not the same spell as the one that made the serpent.”
“Frozen in time?” Philip looked justifiably nervous.
“…Yeah.” I crossed my arms. To my knowledge, there had never been a sorcerer who had time magic. There were rumors, because there were always rumors, but over the ages, the general consensus had become that time was too big to manipulate.
For all we knew, time magic was one of the things that burned a sorcerer up in inside. Not all of us became immortal, after all. Over half, it was said sometimes, died early in childhood. No one knew why: the magic was too much for them, the balance was wrong. It could be anything, really.
But
druids, it seemed, could change time.
Unfortunately for our plan, neither of us was enough of a druid to know how.
“How do you know about this time spell?” Philip asked now.
“It’s hers—that lady’s.” I tried to remember her name. “Bronach, I think she called herself. She was powerful once—before she was cursed, she made the spell that holds the hall now.”
“Why?” He looked wary.
“There’s an old druid legend, I guess. It says that if you sacrifice enough lives, you can become like the tides or the wind, a force of nature in a human body. She said she knew that someday, someone would try to do that, and that it would be an abomination. She made the spell to trigger if they did, with the assumption that she would be there to kill them and then release the spell. …That wasn’t how it worked out, though.”
“Imagine what she could teach you,” Philip murmured.
“Imagine why they cursed her,” I snapped back. “A druid that powerful? She would have to be taken down by many others. It makes you wonder why they banded together, doesn’t it? Because it reminds me of something, certainly.” I crossed my arms. “It reminds me of me.”
“Maybe they were jealous of her power, did you think of that? People are always jealous of the ones who are stronger.” He shot me a glare. “She knows how to undo that spell—and that’s how you get your precious Daiman back.”
“She won’t give me Daiman back.” I ignored his bitter words and stared at him. “She says what must be done … is destroying the hall. She doesn’t know how many might be abominations. She doesn’t think we can fight them if we make the mistake of unfreezing them first. She wants to let the whole hall burn.”
Even saying the words made my chin tremble.
“You didn’t take the bargain,” Philip said quietly. “Did you?”
“Of course not!” My chest was heaving.
“You should have.” He looked at me sadly.
“What? I don’t know enough to double-cross her, and—”
“Not to double-cross her.” He shook his head. “She’s right. If she’s telling the truth about what’s in that hall—and it’s a weird lie to make up if that’s not it—it’s best destroyed.”
