Bound Sorcery: A Shadows of Magic Book

by Natalie Grey

  She turned her had to look at me. She was smiling now as the pain left her. My magic curled inside her, touching the ravages the orb had left, and I tried to smooth them.

  “I think you’re going to be a storm,” I told her.

  She managed a sleepy laugh.

  “You’re going to have waves and booming thunder, and people are going to huddle inside their houses by the fire and listen to the rain on the roof.”

  Her hand began to loosen on mine. Her gaze was distant, eyes drifting closed.

  “I think you’re going to be the tides,” I whispered. “And the fish, and the wind, and the birds. You’ll always be here, Eshe.”

  She opened her eyes briefly. “Thank you.” She reached up to touch my face, staring into my eyes for a moment. Then she nodded. “I’m ready now.”

  “Then sleep.” I let the magic flow into her and watched her eyes close for the last time. “Let go. Listen to the water. Sleep.”

  I felt her leave and I let my head fall onto my chest. I rocked. My mouth was gaping silently with sobs. Her hand was limp in mine and I held it in both of mine. I had done all I could, given her the only thing I could give her, and now she was gone.

  There were arms around me and I leaned back against Daiman’s chest and gave into the tears. I was too tired to pull myself away, to try to stand on my own.

  I can’t do this anymore. My mouth shaped the words but there was no sound to them. I can’t do this, it hurts too much.

  It seemed like a very long time until the tears passed. Daiman did not move. He held me until I pushed myself up and wiped at my face, and then I saw him staring down at Eshe’s body.

  He’d seen. The realization came like a blow. He’d seen. Of course he’d seen. He’d watched me kill someone. I shoved myself up and stumbled away. There was blood sticky on my side from the rocks.

  “Nicky.” He stood up to follow me, his face troubled.

  “I had no choice,” I told him. I threw the words at him, even knowing they weren’t enough. “She was dying anyway and she was scared. I didn’t want her to be afraid. I wanted to heal her but I couldn’t, that’s not the power I have.” I stared at him across the rocks. “I did the only thing I could,” I said pleadingly, and I knew it wasn’t enough.

  “Nicky….” He stepped towards me.

  “I can’t.” I turned and ran from his open arms, into the shadows of Eshe’s house. I couldn’t face him. He’d known who I was since the audience with Terric, but he’d never truly seen what I was—and I couldn’t bear to see him realize it.

  22

  Daiman found me trying to wade out into the breakers. I could see the seashore in the distance, not too far to swim, and I was determined to get there—away from him.

  Unfortunately for me, he was significantly faster at walking over water than I was wading through it. I heard him shout my name and pushed myself to go faster, but I heard the splashing of footsteps soon after, and he was at my side.

  “What?” I stopped to look at him.

  He knelt down so I wouldn’t have to crane to look up. “What are you doing?”

  “I was going back to the mainland. I would have thought that much was obvious.”

  “Shouldn’t we stay here until we make a plan?” He offered me his hand. “Here, climb up. Once you get above the water, it’ll hold you.”

  I didn’t want him to have to help me, but I was also getting cold. I took his hand and clambered out of the water. It felt sort of like a practical joke, but he was telling the truth—as soon as my legs were free of the water, I was able to stand up. I stood, bobbing slightly with the waves.

  “I don’t know what kind of plan we could possibly make at this point,” I said quietly.

  That was a lie. I did have a plan, and it was a very good one. Perfect, in fact. There was just one small problem: he was never going to agree to it.

  So I didn’t mention it.

  But he walked right into it, like he was determined to follow my logic step by step. “You need someone to train you,” he said earnestly. “Or a place to practice. I can’t think of anywhere safer than this.”

  “How is this safe?” I shook my head at him. “Philip already found me here.”

  “Philip?”

  “Julius,” I clarified.

  “I … know. I hadn’t realized he was—I didn’t know he had…. Is that how Eshe died?”

  Rage and grief rose up together in my chest, and for a moment, so many thoughts crowded my mind that I was choked silent by them. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream at him.

  “Did you think I did it?” I managed finally.

  “No.” He looked horrified. “No. Anything could have happened. I thought it was the wave. To kill Eshe, it must have been something incredibly power. Did Philip truly—”

  I shook my head and started for the mainland. I couldn’t say this while looking at him. “It was an artifact he had,” I called over my shoulder. “Something I made. Apparently.”

  Daiman didn’t say anything to that. He came to walk at my side, once or twice holding his hand out to steady me on the higher waves. He took his hand away when he saw my face.

  “Terric’s alive, though,” I offered finally. “Not sure how I feel about that.”

  “That seems fair,” he said, after a moment considering. And, after another moment: “I’m not sure how I feel about it, either.”

  “Well, Philip’s sore about it.” I felt a bit of a smile tugging at my lips. “That’s something.”

  Daiman gave a cough that sounded very much like a laugh, and a moment later we were both laughing. It was something. Not much of a something, mind you, but it was all we had right now.

  Of course, when I realized that, I started to cry. I stopped in my tracks and sat down on the rolling not-quite-ground, face buried in my arms. I had thought I was all cried out when I sat next to Eshe’s body, but I hadn’t even been close. I cried until my stomach hurt and my throat ached, and this time, Daiman held my hand and let me squeeze his so hard the bones creaked.

  “Oh, God,” I said finally. I didn’t know what else to say. I was utterly drained. I tried to find something other than my shirt to use for blowing my nose, and was just about to give up when a white handkerchief appeared in Daiman’s hand. I didn’t ask where he’d gotten it. I wiped at my eyes and blew my nose, and when I was done, I realized he’d fixed the hole the rocks left in my side, too.

  “She was your friend,” Daiman said quietly. He lifted one shoulder. “I know it’s more complicated than that. But she was, wasn’t she? She said you’d been her best student.”

  I sniffled and nodded silently. We had been friends of a sort once. She had been one of the few people who had understood me, who hadn’t feared just how much power I had. And then she hadn’t sided with me at the Assembly and I had hated her for that—just like she almost certainly hated me for what I did later. She’d been horrified, certainly. I remembered all of that now.

  But there weren’t words to describe any of that, and so I said nothing.

  Except one part: “I killed her.”

  Daiman looked over at me sharply.

  “I made the orb Philip used, and when she’d eaten all of that magic, I helped her die.”

  “That’s not the same as killing her,” Daiman said quietly.

  “I think it is.” I looked over at the seashore, and then down at the water beneath my feet. It was deep and black, and I had the sudden, very human sense that there might be very big, scary things down there. I stood up hastily. “Let’s keep walking?”

  He nodded quietly.

  I struggled over the waves for a few more minutes before I realized it was now or never. “Daiman.” I blushed when I said his name. It sounded strange in my mouth. I’d never realized quite how intimate it could be to say a name.

  “Yeah?” He looked completely unaffected by whatever inconvenient crush I’d picked up. Damn him.

  I sighed and tried to collect my thoughts to explain
my plan to him. I had to approach this carefully, or he was going to say no. He was almost certainly going to say no anyway, but I had to try, and I was determined to give this a good shot.

  “The artifact Philip used,” I said finally. “I think it was one of the ‘gifts’ I sent to city leaders to start the plague. That’s why it killed Eshe, it was meant to kill millions of people and she said she couldn’t let it into the sea—so she swallowed all of that herself.”

  Daiman gave a murmur. I couldn’t make out the words—it was the almost-familiar sound of Gaelic—but I knew a prayer when I heard one.

  “I told her I could fix it, that it was my spell, and she said I couldn’t undo death with more death.” We hit the shore and waded onto dry land together. My boots, soaked by my own unsuccessful attempt to swim here, squelched slightly.

  Daiman nodded. “That is why sorcerers work together,” he explained. “Together, a wind mage and a water mage might quench a fire where neither could together. It stands to reason that—”

  “But I have to make up for it.” I interrupted him bluntly, my voice flat. “What I’ve done, I mean. I’m not just another sorceress. We came here because Terric was trying to kill me, and I wanted more than anything for Eshe to take my power away so I couldn’t hurt anyone else, but Philip’s also trying to restart the plague.” My voice was growing stronger with my conviction. I couldn’t just sit by while this happened. “Right now, I can’t stop him. My powers won’t let me stop him. I’d just … feed it, for all I know.”

  “He really is trying to restart it?” Daiman sounded almost lost.

  “Yes. I don’t know how far they’ve gotten. I know it took them a lot to make the orb he used on Eshe, and I don’t know if that was the only one they had.” I shook my head. “But I have to stop them, don’t you see?”

  “We do have to stop them,” Daiman murmured. “I’ll send word to the druids.” Pain crossed his face. “I don’t know if we can risk sending word to Terric.”

  I couldn’t care less about Terric. It was his mention of the druids that interested me.

  “Yes. Do that. And … I need you to train me as a druid.”

  “What?”

  “Train me as a druid,” I repeated.

  “That’s … insane.”

  “I don’t see why,” I said, prickly. “Eshe was right. You can’t cure death with more death, and I have a lot of death to cure. I have a lot to make up for. I can only do that with the opposite of my power, and it’s not like I’m suddenly going to be granted a different form of sorcery. So I have to learn to heal—like a druid does.”

  “It took me decades to learn to be a druid,” he said quietly. “I’m still learning.”

  “Well, I’m immortal, that’s got to count for something.” I folded my arms across my chest, prickly. “I’ve got time.”

  “Depending on where Philip is in his plan, you may not have any time.”

  “All right.” I glared. “So tell me this, how am I supposed to use death magic, plague magic, to stop these people?”

  “I don’t know, use it on them?” He threw his hands up.

  My look could have frozen hell itself. I could tell from his reaction. “I am not using my magic ever again,” I told him through gritted teeth. “Never. Again. You told me it’s what I do with magic that’s important, not the talent I was born with. So help me make that true, because otherwise, Philip gets exactly what he wants.”

  There was a silence.

  “What does he want?” Daiman murmured finally.

  I answered without thinking. “He wants my power.” I blinked. I wasn’t entirely sure where that idea had come from, but the more I thought about it, the more I was sure of it. “He wanted to be able to do what I did. He kept that cult going because I was his that way, entirely his—it was almost better than having me alive.” I still didn’t know where the words were coming from, but my mind was beginning to remember things I had wanted to forget for a long time. I felt a bitter smile twist my face. “You know, I don’t think he’d have liked it if I went back with him”

  Daiman managed to summon a smile at that.

  I stared at him, trying to hold back the words, but I broke: “Please, Daiman?”

  He looked away, and I saw the flickering of trees. I wondered if he was trying to be somewhere he could think, somewhere he felt safe.

  “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll teach you.” Under his breath, he added, “And I hope to God you turn out to be good at healing, because the Chief Druid is going to kill me for this.”

  23

  How to shield ourselves was a problem. For all we knew, Philip would have druids in his cult, and we knew he had found Eshe’s island. Worried that the forest Daiman created might not be safe anymore, we decided to stay in the normal world.

  It took a bit of trial and error, but we at last slipped out of the forest in the parking lot behind an old shipping warehouse. I looked around for security cameras while Daiman transformed into a sparrow and flew up to work his way into the building.

  He returned not long after, transforming from a bat and dropping the last few feet onto the pavement.

  “There isn’t anyone inside. It gets used, but not frequently, I think. If we use one of the back rooms, especially, we’ll have time to hide before anyone sees us.” The forest reappeared for a moment, and he ushered me a few feet sideways. When it disappeared again, we were inside. “There you go.”

  “That’s a nifty trick.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” He looked quite proud of himself.

  “You know, you’d make a hell of a bank robber.”

  He gave me a look. “That would not be considered acceptable behavior for a druid.”

  I closed my mouth on the observation that druids sounded like a dull lot. I didn’t want him not to train me.

  And anyway, he wasn’t dull. He was distractingly, infuriatingly the opposite of dull. And right now, I needed to focus.

  The back room had a bunch of crates that had seen better days, but wasn’t, at least, full of cobwebs. That was something. I took a seat on one of the crates at Daiman’s suggestion, and looked at him expectantly.

  “Close your eyes,” he told me.

  I obeyed, warily.

  “Now I want you to reach out. I want you to tell me every spark of life around you as far as you can feel.”

  I opened my eyes again.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “You’re not going to give me some speech about being a druid and what it all means?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” This seemed like it should be a more ceremonial moment.

  He grinned and sank into a crouch. “When I first appeared on the island,” he told me conversationally, “I marched right up to the training hall and told them I wanted to be a druid. I thought they were going to be very impressed with me. They sent me off to do this, instead.”

  I curled my knees up to my chest to listen, grinning.

  “So I tried for … oh, probably five minutes, and then went back and told them I was ready. And, of course, they knew I was lying.”

  “Oh?” I could smell a story here.

  “So the Chief Druid, herself—it was Morgana, at the time—she came out and she leaned on her staff and said she’d heard that the most talented druid trainee in centuries had arrived, and it was only right that she should meet me.” Daiman was grinning. “Well, I was stupid the way only a ten-year-old can be, so I puffed up my little chest and told her yes, I’d learned the meditation in only five minutes. And, Morgana being Morgana … she slammed the door in my face, told me that liars were not welcome—lazy liars, especially—and summoned the biggest rainstorm you ever saw.”

  I gave a little shriek of laughter and clapped my hand over my mouth. “What did you do?”

  “I should have run home,” Daiman said. He shook his head. “Thing is, I was stubborn as hell, and so I went and found a place where the trees didn’t let the rain in, and I practiced unti
l I got the trance down and went back.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound so—”

  “It took me three weeks.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I knew how to look for berries, but by the time I was done, I looked a sight.” He gave a little laugh. “Didn’t help that Morgana figured out where I was in the second week and made sure that spot wasn’t dry anymore.”

  “Oh, no….”

  “Oh, yes,” he said gravely. “The thing was, I stumbled back about half-dead and with poison ivy all over, and said I’d mastered the trance, ready to storm out and tell them they’d lost a good student by being so arrogant, and Morgana asked how exactly I’d thought I would be a druid if I had just pretended my way through the whole training. She said if they took me in the day I arrived, they’d have doomed me never to be one.”

  “…Oh.”

  “And, by the way, there is a whole speech.” He smiled. “But you get it all the way at the end of your training.”

  “Right.”

  He gestured for me to sit back. “So try again. Be patient.”

  He should know by now that patience was not my strong suit, but I couldn’t very well protest after that story. I closed my eyes and tried not to sigh. I could vaguely see the glow from the windows as a red flare in the side of my vision, and I could hear his breathing and my heart.

  But otherwise, it was just nothing.

  I opened one eye. “Are you sure about this?”

  “This is where it starts.” He leaned back against a stack of crates and crossed his arms over his chest, grinning.

  “Couldn’t we … combine lessons, or maybe skip ahead—”

  “There are no shortcuts in the druidic arts.” His words were precise, and almost tart enough to remind me of Eshe. He raised a single eyebrow when I grinned at him. “You will need more than several seconds’ worth of patience if you hope to learn any of this.”

  With a sigh, I closed my eyes again. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”