by Lee French
Unlike most magic constructs, the nail resisted her. She sawed the blade over it, filling the air with hideous metallic shrieking. Sparks flew. Tiny corkscrews of burning metal drove into Iulia’s flesh, searing her flesh an angry red through the dried blood. One bit Claire’s finger and she squealed in surprised pain. For Iulia to only be gasping with these burns spoke to both her exhaustion and the terror she’d already endured.
“I want this stupid nail to cut,” she growled as she slammed the force of her body behind her effort. “Cut. Cut, cut cut! My will is more important than Caius’s! Do you hear me?” Claire had no idea who she shouted at, only that something had to be watching and listening. “He’s a coward who can’t even face his own past! He can’t face death either, for that matter. It takes some kind of real man to bind himself to a magical place where he’s never going to find out what’s on the other side.”
Her dagger slashed through the rest of the nail in a sudden rush. Not braced for it, she fell. Enion tried to catch her and missed. Iulia squeaked and dropped. Leeloo caught her and lowered her carefully. Leeloo bit the nail before Iulia could recover and ripped it out. Iulia finally screamed.
Chapter 8
Claire
Claire used Enion’s offered claw to stand while Leeloo cradled and cooed over Iulia. Standing over them, Claire watched Iulia’s wrists heal. Her cheeks slowly filled in, suggesting the nail had caused her to wither to skin and bones. Without its influence, her body repaired itself to how she must have looked the day Caius sentenced her to this torture.
It was as if she looked into a mirror when Iulia looked up and smiled. Claire kept her dark hair short where Iulia’s hung past her shoulders in thick waves, but they had the same face and eyes.
“You’re a girl.” Her voice held strength now. “And a Knight. And you freed me.”
Claire leaned against Leeloo’s flank and nodded. “Yeah. I don’t suppose you know where we are and how to get out?”
“We’re in the bowels of the Palace. I have no idea how to get out, other than by the destruction of the Palace.”
“You’re really coherent for someone who’s been nailed to a post for two thousand years.”
“Has it been that long?” Iulia ran her hand over Leeloo’s smooth tail. “After a while, it almost became monotonous. Even the pain never truly changed. The quiet is somewhat disturbing, if that makes you feel better.”
Not long ago, Claire had wished for the chance to talk to Iulia. Now she had it, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. “I got the impression you were some kind of horrible witch who stabbed Caius in the back to destroy a seal that unleashed stuff he’d locked away on purpose.”
“Is that what they teach you?” Iulia huffed a mirthless laugh. “That arrogant ass. I gave him everything I had and he refused to listen. His way was the only way, his ideas were the best ideas. He took a good solution to a horrible problem and turned it into a disaster.”
“What?”
Iulia touched Claire’s cheek with soft, delicate fingers. “There were places in the world drowning in magical power. Men and women, born with the ability to manipulate it, played at being gods. They used it to fight their own battles, to settle scores and toy with normal people. Caius and I both have this gift. I met him in my youth. He was already…” She squinted and let her hand fall. “I’m not sure of a word you will understand.”
“How am I understanding you at all?”
“This place. It does that if you know how. In my case, I helped create it, making such things simple.”
“Wait. You helped create it? Why did you drug Caius and break the seal, then? I don’t get any of this.”
“Drug Caius?” Iulia laughed. “As if Knights can be drugged. Your sprites all counter the effects of poisons and sleeping draughts before they cause any real harm. What mad story is this from?”
Though Claire didn’t know Enion could fix poisons and other drugs for her, she knew he could heal her. Iulia had no reason to lie about that. “I notice you don’t deny breaking the seal.”
“Of course I broke the seal,” Iulia snapped. “We had to. It was too flawed to last. He wanted to wait until it broke of its own accord. I wanted to deal with it as soon as possible. When he refused, I grabbed his sword and broke it to force the issue. Drug him indeed. I’m sorry to spoil his fantasy version of what happened with the truth that women with power who disagree with him are not inherently evil.”
Finally, Claire had outside confirmation of something she already knew—Caius was a jerk. The rest of this, she needed to think about. She paced in front of Leeloo.
“Iulia is tainted? Corrupt?” Enion asked.
“I don’t know.”
Iulia cleared her throat. “Returning to the main point, Caius and his men hunted ghosts and gorgons. He used his skills with magic to lead his men to victory over them, but had no luck eradicating them. My mother and I discovered a way to ward our village against such things. In the autumn of my sixteenth year, he and his men encountered a nest of flying gorgons they could not defeat and found a safe haven in our village.
“Caius demanded to know how the village was kept safe. My father, wary of losing his wife, instead offered up his daughter. He had other children. No one was shocked when Caius, after questioning me and discovering my power, declared I would be his wife. He tossed my family a handful of coins and threw me on the back of his horse.
“With my help, they defeated the gorgons and returned home. Along the way, I considered fleeing my fate, but I had nowhere else to go. If I ran home, Caius would find me and punish my father. I had no money or status. He had both. I married him.”
Iulia sighed and stared into the distance, her eyes haunted. Claire wondered how many horrors the woman had lived through. She also wondered if anything she’d been led to believe about Iulia was true. Probably not.
“He put me to work right away. What Caius wanted more than anything was to be hailed as the hero who saved Rome from the monsters and ghosts. I persuaded him to help me construct the reverse of a ward—a seal. It would do nothing about the ghosts, but it would bind the living creatures. It took a year to create.”
“Caius discovered, quite by accident, that by tapping into the seal, he could enchant his sword so it affected magic, ghosts, and magically inclined creatures more than normal steel. He enchanted weapons for his men without regard for the effect on the seal. Cracks formed and the creatures within noticed. I told him to stop. I told him we had to reforge the seal if he wanted to use it that way. Then I made the grave mistake of telling him it would likely be a century before it broke.”
Iulia huffed a hollow laugh and shook her head. She scooped a handful of dirt and let it slip through her fingers. Claire had a feeling she knew how this story went, but it still held her transfixed.
“He didn’t care.” Iulia brushed her hands together and braced against Leeloo to wobble to her feet. She panted with the effort, but continued the story anyway. “Caius wanted to be the hero of Rome for sealing away the gorgons. If it broke after he was dead, some other hero could rise up to save Rome and earn his own name. He told me of his dreams for his grandson or great-grandson to be that man. He even asked how to make sure it would break at the right time for that. Since we didn’t have a child yet, we had a rather unpleasant argument, after which I took his enchanted sword and broke the seal.”
“I collected all that power so I could fix our mistakes. Thanks to his interference with my new effort, the result was a good, stable seal with me imprisoned inside it. Once again, as you can guess, he tapped into it and weakened the seal. This time, though, he went further and experimented with bindings and the horses they rode, and all kinds of things. I warned him, over and over. But all this,” she waved around the vast room, “had a price. He and his men were bound to the Palace. He created the Phasm problem. He forced it on all their bloodlines, including his own.”
Claire noticed her jaw hung open. The story explained everything, inclu
ding why all the so-called corrupted Phasms wanted to destroy the Palace. Their ghosts could sense it wasn’t right. As in life, they only saw the immediate problem and its solution, not the long-term issues. Aside from the part where tainted Knights turned into even bigger idiots and jerks than regular ones, they actually had the right idea.
“Charge straight ahead,” she muttered.
“Very much so,” Iulia said with a sigh. “I’m still imprisoned here, of course. I don’t know how to fix that, other than to destroy the Palace.”
“Say I did destroy the Palace,” Claire said, not sure how to accomplish it or if it would backfire on her. The idea felt right, though. Sort of. After all the crap that had happened to her since this whole knighthood thing turned her life upside down, she could at least see the appeal. “Then what?”
“Then I craft a new seal. Because I’m bound to this seal, when it’s broken, I should be freed. I should also be in a position to contain the power it releases, just as I did last time.”
Claire imagined what things might be like without the Palace and Spirit Knights. Without the Palace, Justin wouldn’t be a Knight anymore. Neither would Claire. They could do regular people things. Without the Palace existing in the first place, she never would have met him and she’d still be stuck in foster care. Maybe someone else would lose out on that.
She patted Enion, wondering if their bond would break. Then she remembered what kept her alive and how Caius claimed it worked. Pulling down the neck of her armor to reveal the locket, she cleared her throat to make sure she had Iulia’s attention. “If the Palace is destroyed, I die. How do I fix that?”
Iulia approached with Leeloo’s help. Both dragons, Claire noted, had been remarkably quiet during all this. Iulia brushed her fingertips across the locket face. Something flashed across her face too fast for Claire to decipher it. “This complicates things.”
Chapter 9
Justin
Justin could barely think through his anger. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had inspired such rage in him. Claire deserved a fair chance to succeed or fail on her own merit, and they refused to give her that.
“That’s not what I see.” The Knight who spoke up had an Arabic accent and olive-toned skin, and seemed to be a few years older than Justin. He wore beige and brown linen clothes with sandals. Justin knew him only in passing. “I see a man defending his apprentice. Setting aside the idea of whether Claire is being treated unfairly or not, I’d expect no less vehement a response from any Knight over allegations against his apprentice.”
Though he still wanted to pummel Djembe into paste, Justin stopped struggling and looked away. Others in the crowd nodded with Khalil’s words. Some took aggressive stances toward him. No one seemed that opposed to Djembe and Elder Yun. If this devolved into a brawl, Justin had the sinking feeling he’d be on the losing side.
To make matters worse, Justin noticed Avery’s hands shaking. The detective needed to get out of here before he flew apart. Taking a deep breath, Justin relaxed. He still wanted to rip Djembe’s head off, but he could contain that so long as no one provoked him.
“I suppose.” Elder Yun waved in dismissal. “But I’ll be watching you. All three of you.”
“I need some fresh air,” Justin grumbled. He yanked his arms away from the two men restraining him and shoved his way through the crowd. Avery followed. At the bottom of the stairs, he noticed Khalil chasing after them. “The show’s over,” he snapped.
“May I speak to you both in private?” Khalil asked.
“I have to get out of here now,” Avery spat.
With a sigh, Khalil held up his hands in surrender. “You hear the dissonance, don’t you?”
Justin whirled and grabbed a fistful of Khalil’s shirt. He couldn’t explain why he still wanted to beat someone. “What do you know about that?”
Khalil flicked his gaze at the open archway. “This isn’t a subject for the stairwell. We should talk. All three of us.”
“Fine. My room is closer than Avery’s.” Justin restrained himself from shoving Khalil as he released the man and ran up the steps. Khalil deserved none of this wrath. This urge to do violence bothered Justin a great deal. The Phasm’s influence had inspired this kind of thing in him. When Claire killed it, he thought he’d gone back to normal, but maybe it opened some kind of horrific door inside him that he couldn’t shut.
Inside his room, he crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. Khalil watched Avery punch the wall again and return to frantic pacing.
“You were both tainted. Him for longer?” Khalil nodded toward Avery.
“Yes. What’s happening to us?”
“I don’t have an explanation.” Khalil rubbed his temples. “About a year ago, my mentor’s Phasm tainted me for a few weeks. I was lucky. A witch interfered and saved me. Since then, I’ve had this problem.”
“Great,” Avery snapped. “It doesn’t go away.”
“It does eventually,” Khalil said. “Five past Knights preserved their accounts of being tainted in the library. After reading all five, I’ve come to the conclusion it takes staying at the Palace nonstop for a long time to get over this. That’s why I spend so much time here. To soothe it away. At this point, though, I’m nearly ready to give up. My new wife wants to spend more time with me now that we have a child on the way, and I’m having a hard time justifying a need to return here frequently.”
Justin rubbed his face and tried to think. His anger still simmered, waiting for an excuse to boil over. When it came to Claire, Djembe knew how to rile him up. He couldn’t remember doing anything to Djembe, so he had no idea why the other man insisted upon prodding him. If Claire was the entirety of their dispute, he had no idea how to deal with it, other than advising that she stay away from the Palace. Somehow, he suspected she’d reach that conclusion on her own.
“Being tainted does leave a permanent mark,” Justin said with a sigh. “It’s just not one anybody else can see.”
Khalil nodded. “I’ve kept this to myself. It’s hard enough talking about it with my wife, and she was the witch. When I imagine some of our colleagues’ reactions… I’m not ready to handle public shaming for something out of my control. Even if it would help other Knights come forward.”
Picturing Djembe’ s reaction made Justin nod. He rubbed his face again, still working to keep himself under control. “I need to get out of here, but I want to be there for Claire when she gets out of that stupid Ordeal.”
“I remember what it was like when I first returned. Go. I’ll stay and make sure no one pounces on her when she’s done.”
“Thanks.” Justin kept his hands to himself and waited while Khalil ushered Avery out. The moment his door shut, he snatched up his cloak and plunged through the wall to return home. He hit the ground in front of his sycamore and breathed freely. The noise stopped and his anger lifted enough to feel it might have been artificial.
“Welcome back,” Tariel said. She still stood where he’d left her. “I thought you’d be gone longer.”
“It felt like years.” Justin hugged her neck, reveling in her warmth. “If I never have to go back there, it’ll be too soon.”
“I take it the visit went poorly.”
“You could say that.” He breathed in the smell of horse and let it soothe him. “I think I want to take a ride. Marie will be upset with me, but I’m probably not good company right now.”
“Which is the best reason to inflict yourself on me.”
Justin smirked and considered fetching her saddle. Someone might see him on his way to or from the stable, and he’d probably snap at them. He didn’t often ride bareback. Maybe he needed that today—something different and closer to nature, in a manner of speaking. He’d have to face a reckoning when he returned because he’d probably miss part of dinner, but he’d rather let Marie yell at him again than suffer with a memory of shouting at his girls for no reason.
When he gripped a fistful of her mane, Tariel bent her
knees for him and he climbed onto her back. She shifted, helping him find his seat, then picked her way through twisted and gnarled roots. Justin reached up and brushed his hand over a branch as they passed his sycamore. This felt like an ending for him.
To an eighteen-year-old runaway kid with a younger pregnant wife and no idea how to handle being a grown-up, the Palace had been a sanctuary. He’d gone there when everything crashed down on his shoulders so hard he didn’t know what to do. The men there, especially Kurt, his mentor, helped him through it. They gave him advice, let him vent safely, and taught him how to avoid turning into his dad.
This time, the Palace had felt like a prison. He fastened his cloak and wondered what purpose that served. Knights who’d been tainted had a unique perspective on Phasms. Their input should be encouraged, he thought. Last week, he’d thought a tainted Knight entered into a pact on purpose out of some evil motivation like revenge. But tainted Knights only made the mistake of not wanting to believe someone they cared about in life would harm or use them in death.
“I’m sorry to interrupt what I can tell is serious thought,” Tariel said, “but where do you want to go?”
He wanted to go anywhere that wouldn’t remind him of the Palace or his job. “I don’t care that much. Not Portland. Otherwise, wherever you feel like.”
“Do you want me to walk so we can talk?”
“Not yet. Maybe some speed will clear my head.”
Tariel launched into a gallop, racing past trees and vaulting over shrubs. Justin had to lean over her neck to avoid low branches and concentrate on not fouling her balance. The demanding simplicity of the run helped him release tension he hadn’t realized he held. They burst through a hedge and onto a two-lane road lined with more hedges and trees. Tariel turned east and ran until the road ended and wilderness began.
