by Eileen Wilks
“Excuse me. What’s the difference between intention and compulsion?”
“Intention imposes structure. Compulsion is a structure. So if I see a rigid, unchanging pattern, that’s a compulsion. I can tell whether a compulsion is native or imposed because an imposed compulsion is always present. Innate compulsions—hand-washing or whatever—are only visible when they’ve been triggered. I didn’t see rigid patterns in the thoughts of anyone here, so no one is under compulsion, imposed or native.”
“And intention?”
“That’s my own term. It fits what I see better than the way the sidhe talk about it. I could explain their terms if you like—”
“Not at this time, I think. What does it mean?”
“It’s my way of referring to the more common method of mind control.” She could see that they had no idea what she was talking about. “There’s two kinds, see? One—the really rare one—is what binders do. They permanently bind someone’s thoughts. Binders are extremely rare, in part because they’re killed the moment they’re discovered.”
“Harsh,” Isen murmured, “but understandable. I take it what you saw in the chameleons looked like the other type of mind control?”
She nodded. “It’s not a common skill, either—well, except in dragons—but some of the older sidhe develop it. It’s not the same as compulsion. Compulsions either evaporate when the action is completed, or they gradually lose power and dissipate. That may take a while, depending on the amount of power involved, but compulsions are basically temporary. Mind control is different. It’s an irresistible intention. That intention acts on the victim’s thoughts, and it requires an active, ongoing link. When that link is severed, so is the control. The thing is, I don’t see the link. What I see is the result. I could tell that the chameleons were being controlled because of the way the imposed intention made the other patterns bleed, but if a link was passive—if Dyffaya had a hook in someone but wasn’t actively controlling them—I don’t think I’d spot that.”
Isen had been jotting notes down while she spoke. He looked up. “Sam told us that the knife—Nam Anthessa—could act through compulsion, corruption, or persuasion. Compulsion is magical. You can see it. Corruption and persuasion are spiritual. Am I correct in assuming that you wouldn’t see them?”
“I won’t spot corruption, not unless it drastically alters the patterns of a mind I know really well. I think I’d see persuasion—it’s a thought, after all, even if it’s inserted spiritually instead of magically. I don’t know if I’d be able to identify it as persuasion. I’ve never encountered it, so I’m not sure what to look for.”
Cynna was frowning. “Sam didn’t mention mind control. He didn’t warn us that Dyffaya might use that against us, too.”
“The Queen didn’t warn me and Nathan about it, either. I suspect that’s because she didn’t know it was a possibility. Dyffaya didn’t have that skill before he was killed—it must be something he’s developed since. God knows he’s had time to learn a new trick or two. Uh . . . you’re on good terms with him. With the black dragon.” She could not bring herself to refer to the Eldest as casually as these people did. “If you could ask him—”
Isen shook his head. “I’m afraid not. He’s off on some unstated business of his own. My other question is about Dell. I understand that the two of you can pass information back and forth. Has she shared anything we should know about?”
“No. She’s alive. I know that much, but the familiar bond is really faint, as if she were a long ways off. I get some of her emotions if I concentrate, but that’s all. Still, the bond is intact, so whatever the godhead is, it isn’t a separate realm, and it is able to sustain life.”
“If she’d been taken to another realm, that would have severed your bond?”
“So I’ve been told.” By Winter, so it was both true and accurate, if not necessarily complete.
“Interesting. All right. I’m assuming that Dyffaya orchestrated these two attacks using a technique similar to that which he employed at the coffee shop yesterday. Does anyone have reason to think otherwise?” He glanced around the table. “No? We will proceed on that assumption. Next we need to cover immediate threats. Josh, Ridley, and I were all bloodied by the thorns. Nettie said the scratch on her face came from something on the ground, not the chameleon, so she should be free of hooks. Cynna and Kai, you weren’t bloodied by the chameleons?”
Cynna shook her head. Kai said, “No. If you’re wondering if you’re likely to get snatched—”
“It has crossed my mind,” he said dryly. “Without Cullen, we’ve no way of knowing if we have magical hooks swimming in our bloodstreams.”
“I’d say it’s unlikely, given how much time has passed. Yesterday the hooks faded after a little over an hour.”
“Seventy-two minutes,” Arjenie put in helpfully.
“After seventy-two minutes,” Kai repeated faithfully, “and that was with humans. It’s been at least half an hour since the attacks.” It had taken them twenty minutes to get back to the house. It would have been longer—Nettie had been moving really slowly, making Kai worry that she’d been hurt worse than she claimed—but Isen had sent guards racing up the mountain to them. Nettie had made the last part of the descent piggyback. She’d still been so fatigued that Isen had taken one look at her and suggested that she put herself in sleep for a bit. She must have been feeling pretty bad, because she’d agreed. “If you did have a hook in your blood, your healing should have gotten rid of it by now.”
“You sound confident of that.”
“I think she’s right,” Cynna said. “Cullen thought his healing would get rid of the hook, only Dyffaya didn’t give him time. But his healing was slowed by blood loss. Yours isn’t.”
“Hmm.” Isen rubbed his chin. “Earlier, Kai, you indicated that you thought Nathan deliberately kept his healing from eradicating the hook in his blood. Even if you’re right about that—”
“I’m right.” She’d done more than “indicate,” as Isen delicately put it. She’d been fired up and furious then. She was still angry, but not enough. Behind the anger was a big, black mass of misery. Nathan meant to return. She believed that. He thought he had a chance to kill Dyffaya, to come back to her. But when? Even if he succeeded, how long might it take? Nathan didn’t think of time the way she did. To an adult, “next week” sounds like an easy wait, but to a toddler it’s an impossibly long time. To Nathan, a decade might seem like an easy wait, while to her . . .
“Even if you’re right,” Isen repeated, “it doesn’t necessarily follow that our healing can clear out these hooks. I don’t know that Nathan heals the same way we do. He can control his healing. We can’t. And what about Dell? Why didn’t her healing clear out the hook in her blood before Dyffaya snatched her? Do you believe she, too, slowed her healing so she would be snatched?”
“No, she wouldn’t risk the familiar bond that way.” Kai grimaced. “I suspect she wasn’t paying attention. Body magic takes conscious control. With everything that was going on she probably left things up to her healing, but it didn’t prioritize clearing out the hook. She doesn’t sense in the healing range,” she added. “Just the body magic part. If she didn’t stop and look for the hook using body magic, she wouldn’t know it was there.”
“I don’t follow you,” Isen said.
“Um. Okay, did you know that healing magic, body magic, and transformational magic are different aspects of the same kind of magic? The sidhe call it birith. It’s like with the electromagnetic spectrum—all the same kind of energy, only at different frequencies. If magical healing were the visual spectrum, body magic would be more like ultraviolet—higher energy, so it has different properties than healing magic. Transformational magic would be . . . I don’t know what’s that high energy on the electromagnetic spectrum. Something way above ultraviolet, though.”
“Gamma rays, maybe,” Arjenie
offered. “What Dell and the lupi do—is that transformational magic?”
“Yes for lupi, no for Dell. Dell uses body magic, not true transformation, which is why it takes her so long to change her form compared to lupi. Lupi have healing and transformational magic, but not body magic—which is supposed to be impossible, and that’s one reason the sidhe are so fascinated by them. You aren’t supposed to be able to have the low end and the high end of the spectrum and skip the middle one. The body magic part. But never mind that. The point is, lupi have healing and transformational magic, but you don’t sense those energies, so they aren’t under your conscious control.”
Isen spoke patiently. “And yet the Change is under our conscious control. We spend a good deal of effort learning to make it so.”
“I meant that you can’t decide to Change into an eagle or a cat instead of a wolf. You can’t Change into a different style of wolf, either, by varying your coat or bone structure. You can choose when to transform, but not what you transform into. Although,” she added, “you’re right, in a way. Having any control at all means you do sense those energies, but in a very limited way.”
Arjenie nodded. “Like phytoplankton.”
Isen looked as puzzled as Kai felt.
“Oh. Sorry. I meant that phytoplankton are sensitive to light, but they can’t actually see. Lupi may be like that with transformational magic. They’re sensitive to it, but they don’t see with it.”
“Good analogy,” Kai said. “Nathan only has the healing portion of birith, but he does sense it, so he has some control over it. Only for himself, though. He’s not a healer, so he can’t extend that sense to others, so . . . oh.” She shook her head. Stupid. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? “I just realized that Nettie ought to be able to sense those hooks if they’re present in anyone’s blood. Anything Nathan can spot and heal in himself, she should be able to spot in others.”
“We’ll find out after she’s recovered,” Isen said. “For now, I’ll accept your optimistic prognosis about whether Josh, Ridley, and I are likely to be snatched. Arjenie, you look like you want to say something.”
Kai realized that she felt better. Not good, but not like she was going to fall apart any minute, either. Forcing herself to think clearly enough to explain had steadied her.
“There is something I noticed,” Arjenie said.
Could Isen have done that on purpose? Asked her questions that forced her to think instead of feeling? It was the sort of thing she might do to help someone get a grip, but he didn’t have her Gift. How could he have known what she needed? Probably it was a happy coincidence. Still, she was curious enough to check out Isen’s colors.
“Go ahead,” Isen said.
His colors were darker than usual. More of that midnight blue and no happy yellow, and there was red anger smoldering away at the base of his thoughts. But no churning. Isen’s colors were calm, amazingly so, not roiling the way . . . the way everyone else’s colors had been, she saw as she looked around the table. Not anymore. Like her, they’d steadied.
Maybe it hadn’t been coincidence.
Arjenie was saying that so far, everyone had been snatched in pairs. “. . . two people at Fagioli, two here at the house, and two on Little Sister. I realize we’re talking about a pretty small sample, so while this is suggestive, it doesn’t prove anything. But maybe he has to grab people in pairs.”
“Interesting,” Isen said. “And reassuring in its possibilities. I don’t—ah, thank you, Carl.”
The houseman had apparently decided it was lunchtime, though it was still short of eleven o’clock. He’d appeared with a tray of sandwiches. Lots of sandwiches. They were passed around, with each of the lupi taking three or four. Kai ended up with one, though she wasn’t sure who put it in front of her. She certainly hadn’t; the thought of eating made her queasy. Carl vanished and reappeared with another tray, this one carrying lemonade and glasses. “Coffee’s coming up,” he said tersely.
“The ward,” Cynna said, pushing back her chair.
“Ah, yes. Carl, we’ll wait on the coffee so Cynna doesn’t have to keep resetting the ward.” As Cynna stood to take care of the ward Carl’s entrance had broken, Isen went on, “I don’t want to interrupt your meal, Kai—ah, I see you got one of the roast beef sandwiches. You’ll have to let me know what you think of the horseradish spread. I think it needs a bit more kick, but Carl disagrees. While you’re eating—”
“Give me a minute,” Cynna said. She was crouched on the other side of the table, so Kai couldn’t see what she was doing. She felt it when the ward sprang back into place, though.
“I need to call Ackleford,” Kai said.
“You will. From what I’ve put together, the attack on Little Sister may have taken place a trifle ahead of the one here, but they might have been simultaneous. In both, Dyffaya appears to have used a node to bring in the attacker, which is troubling given that—”
Kai broke in. “Not exactly.”
Isen tilted his head. “No?”
“He used the node on Little Sister to bring in the chameleons. Here, I think he used chaos energy to transform an existing plant.”
“Hmm. I would prefer to think that he can’t access this node, which ought to be closed to him. But why do you believe this?”
“Two reasons. First, from what Carl told me, Nathan didn’t react until the guard out back shouted.”
“That was me,” Josh put in.
“Where were you?”
“On the roof. A big stalk from that vine shot out over the deck. I’d never seen anything like it. It was so fast—and it grabbed Benedict’s leg.”
“But the vine was rooted already when that stalk shot out.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Over by the west end of the deck.”
“And the node is underneath the deck right outside the French doors. That’s twenty feet from where the vine rooted.”
Isen spoke. “You don’t think the plant could have moved away from the node after being gated in?”
“It’s theoretically possible. Mobile plants are rare even in high-magic places, but this was not a normal plant. But why would it move? Why not put down roots where it came in?”
“It needed sunlight?” Arjenie suggested.
“Maybe, though mobile plants tend to depend on magic and meat for energy more than sunlight. It’s the timing that wrecks that scenario, though. If the plant had been gated in and scuttled down to the end of the deck, then set roots—all that took time. Maybe only a few seconds, given how fast it grew, but those seconds mean it didn’t happen that way. Um . . . you know that Nathan doesn’t use gates to cross between realms, right? Well, people with that ability are sensitive to gates.” They made Nathan’s gut tickle. That’s what he’d told her. “But he didn’t react until Josh shouted, which means he didn’t notice anything. There’s no way Nathan would miss something like that. Therefore, no gate was used.”
Isen nodded slowly. “I can accept that. And your second reason?”
“The vine looks like a giant, mutated version of one I’ve seen growing here. It doesn’t have the purple flowers, but the leaves look the same. I don’t know the name of the native vine—”
“Morning glory,” Isen said dryly, “of some kind. Lily would know the exact name. They spring up on that side of the house every year. I didn’t note the resemblance at the time, but I believe you’re right.”
“Morning glories don’t have thorns,” Josh said.
“This one only grew thorns where it needed them,” Kai said. “Where it was attacking people.”
Isen nodded. “That I did notice. All of which means that the node here is still closed to Dyffaya. This is good news. But the timing of the attacks suggests that he wants to keep us from closing the other node to him, which in turn means we need to do just that. Cynna? Nettie? How quickly can you finish what you started
?”
Cynna grimaced. “Um . . . it is closed to him.”
Both of Isen’s eyebrows shot up. “Explain.”
“When the chameleons attacked, the node was primed and ready for the next step. I didn’t have time to undo everything, not with the chameleon draining Cullen’s blood, so I finished the rite . . . only Nettie wasn’t there to involve the mountain’s guardian, so I couldn’t do it the way we’d planned. So I, uh, tied the node to me.”
“That’s not possible,” Kai said without thinking.
Cynna looked at her. “Actually, it is.”
“But . . .” She shook her head. “I can see that you believe what you say.” Cynna’s colors were clear, without the snot-green of a deliberate lie. “But you may be mistaken. It’s hard to believe that you did something that only an adept or sidhe lord with the land-tie is supposed to be able to do. And if you did, you wouldn’t be sitting here talking to me. You’d be screaming in pain. If you were still alive, that is. Node energies are strong.”
Cynna and Isen exchanged one of those looks—the kind that had bugged her so much when she first sat down. She resisted the urge to snap this time, but it reminded her that she still didn’t know what Arjenie had wanted to tell her.
“I can’t tell you how I know what I do,” Cynna said finally, “or how I’m able to handle the tie, but you’re right about one thing. Unlinking myself from the node will take time and a lot of prep, especially without Cullen to help, but it has to be done as soon as possible. The energies involved aren’t compatible with mine.”
SEVENTEEN
“SO that’s what they did!” Dyffaya exclaimed. He slapped Nathan on the shoulder, friendly-like. “Clever bunch your lover’s mixed up with.”
Nathan didn’t scream. Screaming took too much energy.
