The Castle of Water and Woe

by Steffanie Holmes

  Arthur raced toward the hill, his hand raised again. Another fireball cracked against the ground. The fae it was aimed at crouched low to avoid the blaze, and let his arrow loose.

  No … I surged forward, but there was nothing I could do.

  “Argh!” Flynn spun around, wobbling on his feet. The arrow embedded itself in the grimoire in his hands, the shaft quivering from the force of the impact.

  “And I said reading was a bloody useless hobby!” Flynn yelled in triumph. He dropped everything else in his arms and hugged the grimoire to his chest like a shield.

  Another arrow whizzed past him, the felch grazing his arm. In the moonlight I could just make out a long, thin cut across his skin.

  “Bloody hell!” Flynn grabbed his arm and dropped to the ground, holding the grimoire out in front of him.

  Corbin was over the wall now. He ran toward the sidhe, his blade raised high. Rowan hung back. He bent low to the ground, taking shelter behind the wall. He clapped his hands in front of him, and the ground beneath our feet rumbled. The earth rolled under my feet, like a wave flowing down the hill toward the sidhe. A fae loosed his arrow at Corbin just as the earth buckled under his feet, sending his shot wide.

  “Thanks, mate!” Corbin yelled back at Rowan as he fell on the fae, cutting it down with a slash of his blade. The fae screamed as green blood smeared across the grass.

  “You can’t keep this up forever, witches,” the nearest Far Darrig sneered, notching another arrow in his bow. “Run along to your castle, and leave us what should rightfully be ours.”

  “You’ll burn before you take a single blade of grass from us.” Arthur picked up one of the fae and tossed him toward the sidhe. The fae fell against the stone lintel over the entrance, his head cracking and body crumpling down the steps. He didn’t get up again.

  My breath burned in my throat as three more green-clad fae poured from the sidhe, each one carrying a deadly bow and a long, curved bone blade. They kicked the body of their fallen comrade as they stepped over him, and lined up along the crest of the hill.

  I can’t just watch this. I have to help them. I surged forward, ready to vault the low wall. Blake dispatched the fae he’d been grappling with a single slice of his dagger, and rushed back to meet me. “Don’t come over,” he said, vaulting back over the wall to meet me. “Give me your hand.”

  “I can look after myself.” I held up the sword.

  “I know that. I’ve got an idea, but I need to combine our powers to do it.”

  “I don’t know how to combine powers or do spirit magic,” I said.

  “That’s never stopped you before.”

  I glanced down at the sword in my hand. It wasn’t as if I exactly knew how to use it, either. It was one thing fighting one-on-one with Arthur, who liked me enough not to cut me to ribbons, but bringing down an army of heavily-armed fae? At the very least, I’d lose a limb, and I liked all my limbs.

  Arrows wizzed toward us, hitting the air above the wall and dropping to the ground. Flynn yelled as a fae fell upon him, bone knife slicing at the air. The fire leapt through the grass, spreading in a line over the mounds, pouring grey smoke into the black night. I couldn’t see Arthur or Corbin through the blaze. I slipped my hand into Blake’s. “Better make this quick.”

  Arthur, Corbin, and Flynn marched toward the host. Rowan stayed back, his face stricken as he clapped out a rhythm that made the earth shudder and dance.

  Blake’s hand squeezed mine, firm and reassuring. For once, I appreciated his arrogant confidence that he knew exactly what he was doing. He closed his eyes, and muttered something under his breath. I tried to close mine, too, but then an arrow string pinged and Corbin cried out and I couldn’t stop them flicking open. Blake was still muttering, his long dark hair matted against his forehead.

  Something tugged at my mind, pulling random thoughts to the front, so the smoky battle in front of my eyes swum with random shapes and visions. Slivers of memory. Patches of quantum theory from my college days, sensations that felt both totally familiar and utterly alien. And then, a flash of something else – I was looking at my own face, silhouetted in the moonlight, from across the other side of the field. I could see my hand clasped in Blake’s and my face creased with worry.

  What?

  As soon as the image appeared, it flickered away, leaving only a nagging pain across my temples that grew and grew until it exploded through my entire skull. Red welts appeared in front of my eyes, and my whole body coursed with agony.

  Nothing more happened.

  Blake dropped my hand. My skin burning, I turned to him. My mouth hung open, trying to form words. But the pain was too great. Blake pressed his fingers to his own temples, and the look on his face told me he hadn’t succeeded in whatever he was trying to do.

  “It’s not working,” he breathed, the edge of his mouth twisting.

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “What’s a Sherlock?”

  “Never mind.” The pain in my limbs started to fade. I bent down, fumbling around the long grass from my sword. “We need to get out there.”

  “Wait, let me try one more time,” Blake grabbed my hand again, yanking me to my feet. “I have an idea. Do you trust me?”

  “Not yet. But I’m getting there.”

  “Good enough for me. We need a burst of power.” Before I could ask what he meant by that, Blake pressed his lips to mine.

  SEVEN: MAEVE

  Holy shit.

  The kiss tore my breath away. The fire in Blake’s lips tore right through my body, becoming part of the pain that still coursed through me, transforming it into hot pleasure. Fire flared from my lips right down to my toes, lighting me up like a supernova. The battle around us disappeared. I forgot about my friends, about the fae shooting arrows at us, about the pressing need to close off the gateway. All that existed was Blake’s soft, full lips and his hot body pressed against me and the feeling of his tongue wrapped around mine.

  Blake pressed his hand against the small of my back, his fingers seeking the heat of my bare skin as his body sunk against mine. His hardness dug into my thigh, and the ache inside me pulsed with want of him.

  Through the fog of my desire, a rational thought surfaced. This is ridiculous. There’s a battle going on, and I’m kissing a guy I’m not even sure I trust.

  As much as I knew that to be true, my body refused to listen to my head. It wanted more, more, more. It wanted to fall into Blake, to become part of him. Blake’s lips moved against mine, and I realised he was chanting something.

  The heat grew and grew inside me, part of the ache and yet, also separate, like twin pillars of fire burning me up. The second pillar consumed me first, blazing with a new kind of energy – a heat that tickled the inside of my skin, that prickled in my fingers and burned behind my eyes.

  Blake’s fingers grazed the edge of my breast, and the heat rose into my skull and burst out. The pain flared through my body, worse than before – a thousand daggers piercing my skin. The heat of Blake’s body took this pain, and transformed it so that it become part of myself, so I owned it, embraced it, relished it. And then, like a great sigh, my body convulsed, and all the pain flew out of me, taking me with it.

  My eyes tore open, but I wasn’t inside my own head any more. Even though I could feel Blake’s lips on mine, his head wasn’t in front of me. Instead, I was on the other side of the field, pressed against the edge of the sidhe, watching Corbin leap on top of a fae named Hefeydd, who for some reason I felt a stab of sympathy for.

  My eyes stung from the smoke of the fire. My fingers were wrapped around something hard. I looked down. I was holding a bow. I had no idea how to use a bow, and yet … and yet, my fingers moved instinctively, drawing back the string to my shoulder, as though I’d done this a million times before.

  At the same time, I was on the grass in front of the sidhe, locked in a wrestling match with Flynn. His usually-sweet face was twisted in an ugly scowl, and his fingers dug into my shoulde
rs as he tried to throw me to the ground. I wanted to help him, and I also longed for him to die already.

  And then I was somewhere else, my bone sword crossed with Arthur’s, my arm shuddering against his weight. Then I was looking at Arthur from behind as he sliced through a fae’s chest. Then I was running across the field, sword at my side, aiming for two figures standing on the low wall.

  One of the figures turned, and I was looking into my own eyes.

  There was this itching in my fingers, faint but persistent. Jumbled thoughts pressed against the inside of my head – a hundred voices all shouting at once, commanding me to act. To slice, cut, loose the arrow, help my friends, kill the witches, kill the fae.

  It was like trying to remember something, but as soon as I thought I was approaching it, the memory would slip away again. I was supposed to thrust the sword in my hand through the girl on the wall. Into my own gut. Only it wasn’t me. Or it was me. A different me.

  Where was I? Who was I? I didn’t even know. My fingers let go of the bow. Arthur’s sword slid through my chest, the steel burning me inside and out. I shoved my face in the dirt. I nocked another arrow. My lips burned against Blake’s.

  Okay, this is weird.

  Blake’s voice pounded against my skull, whispering in his foreign tongue. This time, the sounds formed words in my mind. Push them back, he whispered.

  And then I knew what had happened, and what I had to do.

  I drew back into my head, holding all the me’s together, collecting the well of random, disjointed thoughts and impressions and compulsions. I turned all my heads toward the entrance of the sidhe, where the gateway lay. The itching in my fingers grew worse.

  I pushed with my mind. Even as I did this, my heads – all the people inside my head – fought back. They wanted to stay. They had to finish off the witches, or the king would hurt them.

  Get out of here, I roared, and I drew up the heat Blake had stirred within me, and I thought of my parents who had been so cruelly taken, of my boys broken and bleeding in the field, of the dream Blake had shown me of my guys burned and impaled on spikes, and my heart broke at the idea of losing them. But I held the image and all the horror and pain it evoked, and I thought the thoughts that made my stomach churn and my blood run cold, and I gave it to them. I let the pain flow from me, allowing it to multiply and spread through their minds like a disease.

  And all the bodies I inhabited shuddered with my horror, and saw the pain they would wrought. As one, they turned and walked toward the sidhe, their limbs jerking as they fought against the command booming in their heads. Pain surged against my temples. Faster, faster, I urged them. I wouldn’t be able to hold this spell for long.

  Back we pushed them, back into the sidhe. When the boys realised what was happening, they rallied. Arthur cut down a fae, stabbing his sword right through its chest. I cried out as the blade tore through me, gasping as it punctured my lungs. The pain tore me from that fae’s mind, and I pushed harder, forcing the others to rush down the stairs of the sidhe.

  Jump now, Blake yelled inside my head. He tore his mind away, and I grabbed hold of his voice and jumped with him, falling back into my own body just as the last of the fae were swallowed up by the gateway.

  My head swam. The pain tore through me as the other minds ripped from mine. My legs gave way beneath me, and I collapsed in the dirt.

  “Maeve!” Blake dropped down beside me, his hands reaching for my face. Ice rose from his fingers, clashing against the burning in my skull, cooling the fire of agony that threatened to engulf me.

  “Did we …?” My voice cracked. I forced my eyes open. Blake’s face loomed over me, his crystalline eyes wide with concern. A lattice of red webs spread across his cheek, exactly the same as Flynn had after Blake used his magic on him. But what was even more interesting was that I only saw from one angle and only existed inside one head – my own. The other voices were gone.

  But the pain, the pain was definitely still there.

  “We did it, Maeve. We pushed them back into the sidhe.” Hands shoved under my back, behind my knees. Blake groaned as he lifted me into his arms, cradling me like a child. “Geez, what have you been eating?”

  “Curry,” I croaked out. Blake laughed.

  “You’re something else, Princess.” My body lurched as Blake stepped over the wall and trotted down the hill toward the sidhe. “Will you be okay to do this ritual? We need to close the gateway before they start coming back.”

  “I’ll manage.” My mind was already whirring through what had just happened, trying to piece it together. Blake had done some kind of compulsion – which I now knew to be a type of fae magic – and he’d used me to give him the power he needed to conpell all of the fae at once. That was why I’d seen through all their eyes simultaneously, why I’d experienced all their thoughts, along with my own.

  And the kiss … the kiss caused my spirit magic to flow to the surface – the twin pillars of my desire and my dormant powers rising inside me. Somehow, Blake’s kiss unleashed them, and for the first time I’d actually felt myself performing magic.

  Was that … normal?

  Blake lay me down in the grass, and rushed back to collect the last of his magical objects. Corbin dropped down beside me, brushing my hair from my face. “What the hell happened?” he demanded. “Maeve, what did he do to you?”

  “We saved you,” I groaned. My temples throbbed every time I moved my jaw. At least the sensation of needles stabbing into my skin was fading.

  “You’ve hurt your face,” he whispered, stroking my temple. I winced as his fingers moved over my skin, leaving hot trails of pain in their wake. “He used spirit magic on you.”

  “We used it … together.” I gently lifted his hand away. Corbin frowned.

  “The point is, the fae are gone.” Blake was arranging stones in a sigil at the entrance of the sidhe. The lattice of red veins ran all the way up his cheek, fanning out around his eyes like a masquerade mask. My stomach flipped at the idea that I’d done that to him. I knew from my own face just how much it stung. “We need to get this spell done before they turn around and come back.”

  I stared down at my hands. They were just hands – flesh and bone and muscles and tendons and blood vessels and a bunch of internal goop (biology wasn’t my favourite science subject). How had magic – real magic – come from inside them? How had Blake’s lips activated something that was supposed to be a part of me?

  And – most importantly – was that same level of spirit magic still humming through my veins? Would I have it when we closed the gateway, or did it wind down again after Blake and I performed that spell?

  I guess I was about to find out.

  Flynn raced around the field, using huge sprays of water from his hands to put the fires out. Arthur stalked after him, sweeping his sword through the long grass to hunt for any fae stragglers. Rowan dumped an armload of objects on the grass beside the sidhe, and collapsed down beside me.

  “You were amazing.” He touched my cheek. “I’ll make you something to take the sting away when we get back to the castle.”

  “I’ll be fine.” I rolled on to my side and crawled to my knees. “I just need a moment. At least we know for a fact this whole sexual release aiding spirit magic thing is true.”

  “Right.” Rowan gave me an odd look.

  Flynn jogged back to the sidhe, holding his arm where the fae arrow had cut him. “Good thing the Irishman’s here to clean up Arthur’s mess,” he grinned, flexing his biceps.

  “Funny, I thought the Irish were better at starting fires than putting them out,” Arthur shot back. I guessed that was some historical reference I didn’t get. Flynn stuck his tongue out at Arthur.

  While Blake fussed with the objects, and Corbin argued with him, and Arthur picked up all the arrows and bones knives and other weapons the fae dropped when their bodies disappeared, Flynn grabbed my hand and dragged me to my feet, ushering me around the side of the sidhe.

  “What
are we doing?” I asked, imagining some unpleasant task like scalping a fallen fae so we could wear his skin as hats.

  My words were stifled by Flynn’s lips against mine, hard and urgent. Instantly, a line of fire shot straight through my body, lighting up my core, dragging up that hunger that Blake had already stirred below the surface.

  “I’m getting you ready for the ritual,” he said, his hand snaking over my breast. “I saw Blake kiss you before you did that… whatever you did. You’re right – it really works, and we need that power now, so I’m offering to do my duty.”

  “Your duty?” I murmured against his lips. “You didn’t get drafted.”