“Nadin,” said Adren with a frown. “Who in the names of all the saints is she?”
He grinned.
Before he gave her a proper answer, Nadin grabbed Adren up into an unnecessarily tight hug.
“I was so worried about you!”
Adren coughed. “My lungs would like to work right now. If you would let them.”
“Oh, sorry.” He let her go. “How do you feel?”
She took stock. Aside from a few lingering threads, the spell had dissipated. The memories had receded back into their appropriate places in her mind. Her body seemed to be responding properly. She tried wiggling her toes, which was successful except for a knee spasm towards the end that sent it shooting up and whacking Nadin’s arm.
“Ow.”
Good spasm.
“Everything’s fine. Now. Who’s she?” Adren jerked her thumb at the woman in question, and the reason why she wasn’t going to say anything about what had happened inside the mound yet.
“I’m Denyeh,” she said.
“She helped take care of you during the night and while I went back to the mound.”
“You what?” The wooden hand resting on her stomach suddenly registered. “Oh, gods, Nadin, did you do what I think you did?”
“I didn’t go inside the mound. Loram found me before I could and, well, I took the hand from her. Well. We fought and I grabbed at her satchel. She kept zapping me with magic, which hurt, but I was almost able to get my hand inside the satchel when she realized what I was doing, so then we fought over that for a while…”
Adren waved at him to shut up. “Fine. Fine. Why is it on me?”
“Oh. Sorry.” He picked the hand up. “It had magic in it, which I used to help break the spell on you.”
Gods in hell, Nadin.
“And you couldn’t use your own magic because…?”
Nadin’s mouth rounded. “I… I didn’t think of that. I’ve never dealt with anything that powerful before.”
Adren glared.
“Is there anything I can do right now?” asked Denyeh. “Food? Drink? Instantaneous transmission of information from one mind to another?” Funny.
“Don’t make me like you,” Adren said with a grimace. She wanted to leave it at that, but she hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon, and her stomach had started to complain. “I could eat something.”
Denyeh nodded and made a graceful exit.
“Nadin, about—”
“There’s a really weird magic in this hand though,” Nadin said, voice lowered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“So you used it on me?” Saints and all the gods besides, what had he been thinking? Didn’t he know how unpredictable magic could be if you didn’t have proper control over it? Maybe he did.
Still, it had worked, and that was something.
And he was right, it had been unusual. The man had swung his sword down yet again when it was as if a rush of water had flooded down on her. It hadn’t been like what she felt forced under between each round of memory. Clean, clear water. Water with starlight in it. It came around her, almost as if it had known she was in pain, and buoyed her up through it. She had breathed it in, and it had filled her with warmth, but through into the depths of her being to give her strength.
It had reached to the dark place in her mind, too, but she’d balked at that, afraid of what it might release. And though this magic shouldn’t have been affected by her, it pulled back from the dark place to focus on the spell instead. The spell had shaken in the face of it, but it fell upon the twisted vines like the slow roll of the ocean and they dissolved beneath it. Most of them, at least. The magic had swept through and had gone before it could finish its work, leaving Adren cold and shaking in its wake.
“…weird that it wasn’t in the hand before,” Nadin was saying. Adren brought her attention back to the situation at hand. Hand. She groaned.
“Did something happen?” asked Nadin, leaning forwards. He wasn’t angry. Or, if he was, he hid it well. He should be angry about what happened in the mound.
“Just a bad pun.” And a throbbing in her forehead. She rubbed it. That sword… She sat up. “The sword!”
Nadin started. “The what?”
“The sword. I remember the sword coming down at me. It didn’t go away this time.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes, the sword you said I’d mentioned during those fits. I remember it. I kept seeing it happen, over and over again, until the spell was gone. Everything was a mess at first, and then there was a man with the sword and he swung it down at me and my forehead would start hurting. And then I’d be running with the unicorn until I was shoved down into the mess and it started all over again.” She paused. “My forehead still hurts, though.”
“What do you think it means?”
“It’s a memory. It doesn’t mean anything. It just is.” She bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to imply…
“You must have been really young when it happened.”
It was all he said.
It was all either of them could say. Someone banged on the door before Adren could put the pieces of her reply together. She got out of bed and they both listened as Denyeh answered the door.
“Oh, damn,” said Nadin. “I recognize those voices. They’re the soldiers that locked me up. She must have called them again.”
Adren raised an eyebrow and refrained from commenting on the people he chose to help him when he was in trouble. Instead, she tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention and mouthed: “How do we get out?”
Without hesitation, he started off down the hallway. She grabbed his shirt and he stopped.
“What?” he whispered.
“Invisibility first.”
“Oh.”
Hand on his shoulder, like in the mound, Adren turned them both invisible and squeezed to let him know it was done. They made their way down the hallway like this, past Denyeh and the soldiers in the main room, and out a back door into a yard surrounded by a stone wall. The kind farmers might make from the rocks they found in their fields, only tall enough to reach above Nadin’s head. In the yard, nudging the rough wooden gate, was the unicorn. At this sight, Nadin’s shoulder got a lot more than a squeeze.
“Ow!” He wiggled out of her grasp and rubbed his shoulder.
“What is wrong with you?” Adren hissed. The unicorn trotted up to her and nibbled at her ear, which dampened the effect somewhat.
“I had to put you on its back,” Nadin whispered. “I couldn’t carry you all this way. And then Denyeh showed up and there wasn’t time to keep it hidden.”
“There are soldiers in the house right now, Nadin. With swords. I swear, if it was a good idea to punch you right now, I would.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, staring at his shoes. As if that would help. Gods, Adren hoped that only this Denyeh woman knew about the unicorn. If she’d told those soldiers…
“We’ll talk about it later. Right now, we have to get away.” The unicorn nickered and moved its nibbling to the top of her head. She gave it a gentle push back down, only for her arm to go rigid.
“Are you all right?” asked Nadin.
“I will be,” Adren replied through gritted teeth. “Some bits of the spell are still hanging around.” The only joint on her arm she could move was her shoulder, so she managed to get said arm back by her side, but it was awkward until her muscles loosened again. “So. Going now. Come on.”
The three of them got to the gate and were about to unlatch it when an unearthly mist rolled through and over the wall. It filled the yard and became so thick that Adren could only see a few paces around her. Saints. The fairies must have been peeved that Nadin had stolen the fake hand from them.
“Fairy magic,” Nadin whispered. “It’s not real.”
“Got that. Do you see any of them?”
“I don’t think so…” His eyes narrowed. “Not close enough for me to tell, at any rate. The illusion makes it difficult.”<
br />
“What do you mean?”
“Because of all the magic. Fog makes it hard to see physical things. This much illusion makes it hard to see magic things unless they’re really obvious. Oh—” He stopped himself. But Adren already knew where his mind was going. Hers had already gotten there when he’d first mentioned the difficulty.
“The fake hand has obvious magic, doesn’t it?”
Nadin nodded.
“Give it to me.”
Reluctantly, he obeyed. The wood was smooth, smooth enough that Adren almost couldn’t tell it didn’t have paint on it. But there, beneath her fingers, she felt the faint lines of the grain. It was an amazing piece of work, really, if in poor taste. The colouring must have been from stain, and whoever had done it had taken care to make the result as realistic as possible. If she weren’t holding it at that moment, Adren would have sworn it was real. It also felt lighter than a piece of wood its size should be. Interesting. Perhaps it was hollow? She cuffed Nadin with it.
“What were you thinking?” The hand let off a spark when it connected with Nadin, but it didn’t seem to do any physical harm. Adren offered it back to him.
“I couldn’t just leave you like that, could I?” he yelled, taking the hand.
“I’m glad you didn’t. And that you didn’t leave me in the mound.”
“I should have.”
Adren drew back as if she’d been slapped. Nadin sighed.
“It wasn’t about you. The only reason I helped you was because I thought of the unicorn having no one to take care of it. And because of those attacks you get. Because watching them—” He clenched his hands into fists and took a deep breath. “Because watching what happened with that spell was like watching my mother’s illness all over again, except this time I could do something.” And, for the first time since they’d arrived in this town, the honeysuckle taste of Adren’s truth sense spread over her tongue and filled her whole mouth with its sweetness. “Yet another reason to hate humans, I guess.”
She didn’t know what to say. This whole time, she hadn’t considered how everything had been affecting Nadin. Of course he’d been concerned about her, that much was clear, and he’d been upset about the fairies. But, even though she knew about his mother’s illness, had seen it first hand, she hadn’t thought he would be struggling with memories of his own.
This was the moment where she knew she should say something comforting. Something empathetic. She had no idea what that might be.
“A human wouldn’t have done everything you did to help me.”
Nadin only stared at his feet and frowned.
The mist had thinned above shoulder level, not enough to see the forest, but nearly enough. And in that mist was movement.
“Nadin, get down!” Adren pulled him behind the wall and down until his head was well below the thicker portion of the mist and pushed the unicorn out of sight. As for herself, she peeked over the top of the dense part, like a selkie watching above the waves, waiting for an interloper to pass.
For interlopers had come.
Fairies, but not like Adren had seen them in the mound. Out here in the mist, they had taken on the appearance of fairies from human legend: tall, unearthly, and beautiful. They stirred up the mist around them as they surveyed the town with cold, indifferent eyes.
Adren had never seen fairies look like this before, with jewel-toned eyes and shining black hair, so tall that they were visible from the waist up, wearing robes of rich silk dyed in vivid colour and decorated in the intricate detail Adren remembered from the walls of the fairy mound she’d lived in. They looked like the saints come to walk the earth, only wild and fey. And not kind. With the curls of mist all around them and the way they seemed to glide through it rather than walk, it was as if time had stopped.
She shivered, expecting them to see the wooden hand’s magic at any moment and converge on it in their uncanny silence.
They didn’t. They walked by without even the smallest hesitation.
She ducked under the mist.
“Nadin. Why aren’t they coming here?”
“Because we emptied the magic out of the hand. They can’t see it.”
“We?”
He shrugged. “I’d almost emptied it helping you, and the last bit got out when you hit me with it. Did you see the spark?”
“What kind of thing holds magic in it and then gets emptied like that?”
“Is that unusual?”
“Very.”
And very impossible for the magic Adren knew about. Spells and enchantments involved finite amounts of magic that worked only according to the purpose for which they were set. Once that purpose ended or was made to end, the magic dissipated. Objects that could be used to allow humans to use magic usually housed spells or enchantments or both. The rarer of these objects allowed the user to channel magic the way a magical creature would.
The shorthand was that Adren had magic, or fairies had magic, but the truth was magic was everywhere; they only had greater or lesser ability to use it. When Adren’s magic had surged from the dark place in her mind and filled her body, it wasn’t that it had been hiding there and finally came out. Rather, her capacity to hold and direct magic, which had been blocked behind the dark place, had cleared out and the magic had rushed through, ready to use. The idea of an object that held a finite amount of magic with no specific purpose… it made no sense.
“Are you sure it wasn’t a spell or enchantment and you broke it?” she asked.
“It definitely wasn’t. I told you the magic was weird.” He paused. “Um. Adren? We have a problem.”
Adren raised her eyebrows and looked where Nadin was pointing.
The soldiers had entered the yard.
Chapter Eight
Nadin gaped.
“Get down!” Adren whispered. He obeyed, but the unicorn remained as it was. The soldiers drew their swords when they saw it, only the tips of the blades visible above the thick mist.
One of them opened his mouth to speak, but the unicorn screamed and they all went pale. Before Nadin could stand, Adren unlatched the gate and grabbed him, dragging him out of the yard. Through the mist they ran, the unicorn following, away from the town. As they did, Nadin answered Adren’s questions about the soldiers, telling her about his whole experience from being accused as a spy to what the guards had said about the Saint’s Gauntlet. At which point Adren demanded he explain and he told her what Denyeh had said about the saint who’d lost his gauntlets on the way to heaven.
It took some time for him to say all this. Running and talking at the same time is hard work and he’d also had little rest since escaping with the hand. They had to go for long periods of silence while he gathered himself to be able to speak, and these periods became longer and more frequent the longer they ran. But it was quite a ways from Denyeh’s house to their destination, so he managed to get the whole story out before they reached it.
And reach it they did, Nadin gasping and holding onto a tree for support, Adren merely breathing hard. Somewhere along the way, the unicorn had parted ways with them and headed off deeper into the forest.
“I don’t… understand… how you do it,” he said. “Your legs are so… short.”
“It comes from running from the law so often.” She grinned. It was sudden, her smile. Brief, but bright as the sun peeking through the clouds on a dark day. Her smiles always hinted at a deep reservoir of happiness that she only seemed to tap into in the moments she was pleased with herself. This one was no exception.
When he’d recovered enough to stand upright by himself again, Nadin looked up. The beginning of a dirt pathway stood before him, with real trees on either side and illusory ones forming a dead end. “Wait. Why did we come here? Aren’t the fairies going to be coming back when they realize the hand isn’t in the town? Or am I missing something?”
“You’re not missing anything.” She paused. “Well. You haven’t missed that. What do you know about fairies and pride?”
/> “Um. Nothing, I guess.”
“How much do you know about fairies? And don’t try dancing around your ancestry, either. It’s obvious by now that you’re part fairy.”
“No, I’m not!” His voice shook and the tips of his ears turned red. Adren raised an eyebrow.
“Then tell me where your magic comes from.”
“You want to do this now? What about the fairies?”
“If this hand is important enough to them to search the town the way they’re doing, they won’t be back for a while yet. Why does it matter if I know?”
“Because if you know whether I’m human or not, you’ll have already decided what you think of me. I’ll have had no chance to… to earn my standing with you.”
Adren’s eyes widened.
“Say something!” said Nadin.
“I didn’t think that mattered to you.”
“Well, it does.” He crossed his arms. “Can we… could we get back to talking about fairies?”
“All right,” Adren said gently. “They care about their status with other fairies in the mound. And humans, too, but they don’t talk about it like that. They can’t bear to lose face, especially with fairies that have higher status than they do. And I bet that someone lost a lot of face when you stole the hand.”
All through this, Nadin regarded her through narrowed eyes. “Why are you telling me this? You don’t tell me things. We just do things.”
“Because I need you to find Loram for me and negotiate a deal for her to save face.” As he opened his mouth, she wagged a finger at him. “Don’t tell me all the reasons why you can’t. You have face with them, I don’t. I was duped, but you got us out and then took from them the thing that caused this whole mess to begin with. More than that, if you’re part fairy, you’re a relative in their minds, however distant. Do you see?”
With a grimace, Nadin nodded.
“So…” Adren gestured towards the mound.
“Wait, what—? There? Why would she be in there?”
“I just told you why.”
Outside the town, the mist had dwindled, though it still curled through the air. The forest was ghostly with it, and it seemed to move in the trees like a living thing. Illusion though it may have been, even the magic behind it hazed the air with twining threads that clawed their way along only to melt the moment they touched anything solid. Nadin bit his lip as he stared at it.
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