Unless we wandered into a particularly willful bit of wild magic, our route would be just under four miles.
On the other side of the Boundary was a grassy firebreak leading into a light forest.
Addam said, “Can you smell it?”
“I’ve had this conversation with you before.”
“The air,” he said with relish. “I love the way the Westlands smells.”
I pulled a breath through my nostrils. The salt of the ocean was gone. Now I smelled sunbaked pollen and heavy vegetation. “You’ve spent a lot of time here, haven’t you?”
“Every summer for a week when I was younger, up until the governess got mauled by a manticore. Her fault. The manticore was just being a manticore. Don’t give me that look, Hero. It’s very safe if you stay within the wards. Haven’t you been here much?”
“Not often. Once or twice. It’s my first time in about . . . thirty? Thirty years.”
“Is it really?” Addam said, delighted. “It appears I am the subject-matter expert. I will be your tour guide.”
“I want to see every place that doesn’t have a manticore.”
He favored me with a grin and picked up the pace.
The firebreak ended, and we were in the forest proper. The pathway alternated between crabgrass and trampled dirt, but wide enough for me to walk abreast of Addam.
We were silent for a bit. The day brightened, and rainclouds scuttled toward the sun. I smelled more of Addam’s “air.” All of the odors trapped against the city’s concrete evaporated, leaving behind wholly natural scents. It wasn’t altogether pleasant, but it was fresh, and it seemed to make Addam happy.
A fat, non-aerodynamic bug circled in front of my eyes and landed on my shoulder. I raised a hand to swat it, and Addam grabbed my wrist. He shook his head seriously. “Never kill a bug balloon.”
“I was just going to give it a little move-on,” I said. I brushed at my shoulder while Addam made a sharp sound of protest. The bug balloon had skin as delicate as wet tissue, and was filled with an implausible amount of gore. I stood there and stared as it dripped off my fingers in chunks. Addam fished a handkerchief out of his back pocket, took my hand, and wiped it clean.
When he was done, he gave me an assessing look. “My vigilant warrior prince is unused to these woods. The bug balloon was inconvenient, but harmless. However, you must assume that everything else in the Westlands, outside the wards, is filled with horrible, nasty, toxic surprises. Little bunnies have inward-facing fangs; butterflies can dust you with a paralytic; goldfish carry blood-borne pathogens. The most dangerous things in the Westlands aren’t on the paths—they’re the pretty baubles that lure people off the paths.”
“Holy crap, are you giving me a lecture? Was that a lecture? I escape danger for a living, Addam.”
“And you are very good at it,” he said, but I knew by now his accent got pronounced when he was making fun of me.
We walked on. Overhead, a ghost zeppelin sailed through the clouds. There were woodpeckers the size of Dobermans. A tree with branches as wide as interstate highways. A pond filled with ocean waves. Nothing dangerous came close to the warded path, though, which gave us a measure of safety from which to gawk.
“I like your friends,” Addam said out of the blue.
“I have friends?”
“I’ve known Companions before. And maids. And houseguests. Yours are much more than that.”
I shrugged, pleased. He flashed dimples at me. “How long has your Queenie been with you?” he asked.
“Oh, she’s been with us forever.”
“And Max?”
“Since the business with the Heart Throne,” I said. “He’s a good kid. Been through a lot.”
“And you are . . . fond of him?”
I stopped walking. “Addam, Max is my houseguest. My seventeen-year-old houseguest. He—holy shit, he said something to you, didn’t he!”
“It’s nothing,” Addam said, reddening.
“What did he say?”
“I misunderstood,” he insisted.
“I really doubt that. What did Max say to you?”
“He . . . may . . . He may have suggested that my presence was . . . complicating the early stages of your relationship. May have!”
I groaned and stared up at the sky. A swarm of bioluminescent bees were buzzing on both sides of the pathway, pulsing reds and blues.
“I feel bad,” Addam said. “I think Max, in his own way, is being protective. He’s watching your back.”
“Oh, he is,” I said in exasperation. “In a wholly inappropriate and awkward kind of way.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think his attention is meant to be salacious. Or derogatory. He’s young, and you are larger than life, and he has a crush.”
I growled a bit, but didn’t disagree.
“Have I upset you?” Addam asked.
“No.”
He sighed. “I’m doing an awful job trying to get into your pants.”
I barked out a laugh, surprised. “So that’s what all this is about?”
“But of course. I was scoping the competition.” He frowned. “I may be wrong, but I believe the ground is shaking. Is the ground shaking?”
“What? Damn it,” I said.
There was a quiver in the nearby foliage, in the massive fern trees that were as big as buildings. The quiver became a thrashing, accompanied by heavy, rhythmic footsteps.
The spit dried in my mouth. I shook my sabre from wrist-guard to hilt form, and stepped in front of Addam. Addam drew a long sword he’d borrowed from Lord Tower.
We both swore as something lumbered into view.
It was huge. And shaggy. It had orange-brown fur and forklift-shaped tusks. It looked like it had chewed through the barbed wire around Jim Henson’s workshop and fled into the wild.
It turned its head toward us, and I caught a glimpse of soulful brown eyes the size of hubcaps. Then it nudged the air above the pathway; gave a lowing moan when its nose sizzled; and ambled back into the giant ferns.
“Beautiful,” Addam breathed, which was one way of looking at it.
“Do you know what it was? Or whether it was vegetarian?”
He gave me dimples again.
We kept walking. As we went deeper into the Westlands, nature became less exaggerated and more outright perverse. Frogs with hind legs made out of serrated feathers. Birds with wings formed from dandelion spores. Foxes with tails that bristled with storm clouds.
I said, “I wonder if the Westlands looks like Atlantis did. Does your older brother ever talk about growing up there?”
“Christian? No, not often. I think it is hard for anyone born in the homeland to speak about it without remembering the war and the plague. So few of them made it out alive.” Addam thought about it. “He has said a few things, I suppose. He once told me that, in Atlantis, magic was everywhere. He said sometimes the magic was so thick that you exhaled it like smoke. He talked about the Petal Sea, too. My family lived by it.”
“I’ve heard about that. It’s filled with flowers.”
“It is. Or was. I assume it’s still there. Christian said the waves washed crimson blossoms over you. Oh! And Christian told me about dragons, back when dragons lived in Atlantis. He saw dragons.”
Dragonkind had been nearly wiped out during the Atlantean World War. What few remained were hidden, and they only flew to New Atlantis when summoned by Lord Chariot.
I started to tell him I’d seen a dragon during the Heart Throne raid, and noticed that my breath was misting in front of my face.
“So,” I said. “Funny thing happened on the way to July.” A puddle of water on the path made a brittle cracking sound as my boot went through it.
Addam smiled. “The Westlands has a mind of its own. Do not worry. It is not unusual for the seasons to change suddenly. Are you cold? Come here.” He held up his arm, as if he expected me to scoot under it. He laughed at my expression and dropped his arm. “Look at the size of th
at cloud. Most impressive.”
I looked up. The cloud was fringed in white with a pure-black belly, and heading right for the sun. It would kill whatever remained of daylight. “You’re sure this sort of thing happens a lot?” I asked nervously.
“Yes. We could—”
The road buckled.
Something cracked—a loud, vibrating crack.
Addam gripped my forearms and leaned into me. His anxious breathing was warm against my cheek.
“What the hell was that?” I asked dizzily. It felt like I’d lost time, like my eyes had just open from a nap. “What just happened?”
I looked around, but didn’t see any danger. We weren’t under attack. Were we? My stomach churned with nausea.
“I don’t know,” Addam said. “I felt sick for a second. Is it—? It’s snowing.”
I stared up at the sky just as one meaty snowflake landed on my eyelashes and melted into a blink. There was already a fine layer of white on the ground. We weren’t dressed for bad weath—
I froze. Just froze.
“Rune?” Addam asked.
I knew what I was seeing, but something in my brain actually tried to argue that it wasn’t possible. “The path,” I said. Addam let go of my wrists and looked down. “Addam, we’re not on the path. We’re off the road.”
“Could—” he said. His voice broke. “Did we teleport? That’s not possible. The wards should have—”
“Back to back,” I said. I put my back to his and brushed a thumb over my ring, releasing Fire. In a practiced motion, I transmuted my sabre into a hilt again. I put half the Fire into the hilt to bolster its own magics. The other half went into an aura that warmed the air around us. Addam stopped shivering.
If we had teleported, it couldn’t have been very far. The large cloud above our head had shifted only a little—the last fingernail of sun was about to get swallowed by it.
I spoke a light cantrip and pushed it away a bit so that it wasn’t directly marking us. “Addam, we’re going to move. Grab the back of my jacket. Don’t let go. If things get bad, do not step in front of me. Give me a clear blast radius.”
“I’ve never been outside the wards,” Addam said in a shaky voice.
“It’ll be alright, Addam. Stay focused.”
Frozen blades of grass crunched under our feet as we headed westward. A light wind picked up. It sliced through branches and undergrowth, kicking up a hoarse sound. The skin on my neck crawled.
“It’s getting darker,” Addam said.
My mind raced. We’d been taken off the path—and it couldn’t be a coincidence. I debated whether or not to unleash any of my other spells—maybe Bless-fire, or my Shield. But if something was smart enough to yank us off a warded pathway—if it was Rurik—than it was smart enough to outwait the duration of my spells. I didn’t want to be caught with empty sigils, not here.
Behind me, I heard the hiss of metal against scabbard. Addam had cleared his sword. That was good; he was thinking.
Then, with chilling speed, a fog rose from the snowy ground.
It wrapped itself around our ankles, then calves. In seconds it was at our thighs. I could hear Addam’s labored breathing. For some reason, that angered me more than anything else. He’d been smiling minutes ago. I liked when he smiled.
I stopped walking and shouted, furiously, “Only cowards use special effects!”
I pulled the Fire from my aura and flung it outward in a gush of flame. The flame burned away the fog and lit up the knoll. I banked the flame into a hot, steady glow around my right hand.
For a moment it was quiet—
—and then a burst of furious energy whipped through me. It doused my Fire. The light cantrip vanished. The wards in my clothing went dead.
I held out my sabre and swung it in a circle, looking for something to shoot. A null thread. That was a null thread.
Rurik.
I barely had time to shout a warning. Another wave of null energy lashed at us. I dove to the ground and rolled, screaming at Addam to do the same, but he was too slow. I could almost see the null thread sawing across him, writhing, bristling with an intensity that null threads just weren’t supposed to have. Addam’s belt—the sigils on his belt—began to smoke furiously.
Addam yelled and began struggling with the belt clasp. The null thread vibrated upward and vanished. I jumped up and went to Addam as he pulled the smoldering belt off and dropped it to the ground. The platinum disc sigils were bent in half like taffy.
Destroyed. The sigils were destroyed. Addam’s sigils were gone; his magic was crippled.
“It’s Rurik,” Addam panted. “Isn’t it? He’s here.”
The earth exploded to our left. A sapling, dirt, rocks mushroomed into the air. There was another detonation to the right. Then in front of us. Then behind us.
I shot a firebolt into a cloud of debris. The bolts momentarily lit up the glade, bright enough to reveal massive shadows prowling through the trees.
“Where is he!” Addam shouted.
“Calm!” I shouted. “Calm, Addam!”
The trees to our left began to tremble. I swallowed a fuck me and launched a volley of firebolts into the canopy. Something roared.
“Run—run!—don’t let go!” I yelled. I picked a direction and set off, just under a sprint. When Addam started stumbling, I grabbed his sleeve to keep him close.
We ran over slick whorls of snow. Thin, wiry branches snapped against my arms. Every few seconds, I fired a bolt above my head, using the brief illumination to avoid trees or boulders. We plowed through a narrow briar patch. I lost skin to the thorns.
Then the ground exploded beneath us.
Dirt and gravel filled my cartwheeling vision. I hit the ground hard, stunned.
I looked next to me, but there were only dead leaves and snow. No Addam.
“Rune!” I heard him yell.
I tried to call out, but the most I could manage was a painful bleating sound.
Something cried, in my voice, “Addam, it’s got me, help!”
I flopped on my back and fired a bolt into the air. It sizzled upward like a flare, until tendrils of darkness, with sentient precision, swarmed and extinguished it.
“I’m coming!” Addam shouted.
“It’s got me! Help me!”
“Rune!”
Addam was moving away from me. Being lured away from me. I fired six times into the air. Each bolt was swallowed by the curls of darkness. If Addam saw it, he didn’t come back. I heard him shout my name again, and the sound was so faint that tears came to my eyes.
“Ad . . .” I gasped, my lungs on fire. I braced my arms, shoved off the ground, stumbled in the direction I thought Addam had gone. My foot plunged into an animal hole. I twisted it while trying to keep from falling.
I shot more firebolts into the air, and ran on my hurt ankle. Branches whipped my face. The trees around me were shadows rimmed in an artificial twilight. I didn’t see a rock, tripped into a tree, raked my palms raw against sharp, pus-colored bark.
“Addam,” I said. My voice was back. I sucked in a breath and shouted, “Ad—”
An arm wrapped around my neck. I smelled rot and clean fabric. I jabbed my elbow backward into doughy-soft flesh. The arm around my neck went slack. I crouched, pivoted, balanced. Rurik stood there, recovering from a stumble. I touched my ankh, released its spell, lifted my arm, and hurled Shatter.
A tree next to Rurik splintered with a sonic boom. Broken rocks whizzed outward like bullets, and fog and snow blew clear. At the center of the maelstrom, Rurik stood unharmed. Not even his cloak stirred.
“Illusion,” I whispered. But I’d felt his arm around my neck. “This isn’t real.” But I’d felt his—
Rurik came at me with long, sweeping strides. He bunched my shirt in one hand and swung me through the air. I came down hard on the fractured tree trunk. Jagged splinters stabbed into my back, sharp enough to cut skin.
Rurik reached down with his other hand. He splayed
his fingers and pressed them on my face. He wore no gloves. His palm was moist and smelled like infection.
Magic surged from his touch. My mind first went blank, and then unfurled into blurs of color.
And then Geoffrey went off into the bushes with the girl. I stared hard at the ground and pretended I hadn’t noticed, even as all the other scions snickered at my humiliation.
And then a black-haired young man backed me into a corner. He said, “You don’t have a court anymore, you’re no one, you live here on my father’s sufferance.”
And then the grass that covered my father’s grave came away in clumps as I tore at it, howling with an emotion too raw and broken to be just grief. Brand’s arms locked around me.
And then the underwear was torn off my body. Cold air pressed against my bare ass like an insult. I was shoved against a sofa that smelled like horse manure and hay.
“Ah,” Rurik said. “There. There. That’s where you live.”
The metal of my sabre was cold against my palm. I angled it to shoot Rurik in the balls. I fumbled. The sabre was gone, its weight gone from my hand.
Rurik lifted me up, spun me, and slammed me face-first on the trunk. He twisted my arms behind my back. Just like I’d been pinned the night I was—
No. No. I would not be sucked into those memories. I gritted my teeth and grabbed for my willpower, but it slipped away like oiled marbles. Concentrate, I had to concentrate, without concentration or touch I had no hope of activating my sigils.
I pictured the emerald ring on my finger. Tried to imagine the Bless-fire stored within it. Tried to imagine burning the undead skin right off Rurik’s rotting, smug face.
Long fingers, covered in white evening gloves, reached from behind me and brushed the hair out of my eyes.
The sight of those elegant gloves dissolved my connection.
Ahead of me, another man, this one in a hound mask, stepped right out of my nightmares and into the clearing’s dim haze. He turned and examined the forest. “Dreary,” he pronounced.
“No,” I said. My heavy breaths sounded like sobs.
“It’s been a long time,” the Hound said. “Bet you’re surprised to see us here.”
The Last Sun Page 22
