by Natalie Grey
What was there to say?
“You seem to think your power is somehow separate from everything else out there.” Daiman waved a hand. “Like somehow the sickness you built was any different from something natural. Guess what? You’ve been gone a long time and we still get sick. Things still rot, people still die. Plagues are living things, too, they play by the same rules.
“Death hurts, I won’t pretend it doesn’t, but it’s not special and the death you make isn’t evil, Nicky. It was what you did with it that was evil.”
I looked away. I’d cried myself dry in the past few days, and there was nothing left in me but hollowness.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told him. “I don’t know how to use my power for anything else.”
“You’ve been afraid this whole time of what you’d turn into when you had your power back,” Daiman said quietly. “Like just having this magic would make you evil. Well, you’ve got it back now, and what are you?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say to that.
I heard him come closer, and I was too afraid to look up. The scent of him was all around me, and he tipped my chin up with his fingers. Those brown eyes searched mine.
“You aren’t evil.” His words were so soft that I had to lean forward to hear them, and then only a scant inch separated us. “You’re not some psychotic bitch who’s out to kill everyone. I think Terric really did kill that Nicola Beaumont. I think the one that survived, the one that’s standing right here, is the one Eshe trained.”
“You didn’t see me when they first wiped my memory.” It wasn’t a very good joke. I was shaking. His fingers were still under my chin, and I shuddered when his thumb traced lightly over my bottom lip.
“You were terrified of me at the start, remember?” He looked pained by it. “You thought I was taking you to a fate worse than death, and rather than kill me and run, you just ran.”
I froze, and he smiled.
“I saw the rock when I woke up,” he said quietly. “I knew what choice you’d made. And you made it over and over again, Nicola.”
I jerked away from him at the sound of that name, but he only smiled.
“That name doesn’t make you evil any more than your magic does.”
“I know.” All the rest of what he’d said was too big to respond to. This seemed manageable. “But I just remember … other people saying it. I remember that Philip started a cult around that name.”
“So make it yours again,” Daiman told me. “You can do that. You’ve been gone from the world for a long time, but talent like yours doesn’t come often, even among sorcerers. Eshe told me that about you. She said you did magic like you breathed, that the magic was a part of you. She thought maybe that was your problem—that you’d never had to struggle to control it.”
I looked away at that. “It was part of why I wanted to learn to be a druid.”
“Maybe someday you will.”
I looked up, and found him smiling. “You think?”
“I think if Nicola Beaumont can come back from the dead as a woman I’d willingly protect, then anything is possible.” His smile was wider now.
I laughed, I couldn’t help it.
As our laughter trailed away into companionable silence, the thoughts of druids and plagues seemed to disappear, and there was only the two of us.
He took a deep breath and looked away for a moment. “Do you know when I realized I was head over heels for you?”
I froze.
“When I saw you with Eshe,” Daiman said quietly.
The world seemed to turn inside out. I could hear the waves too loudly, and a sort of ringing in my ears. “But I used my magic.”
“You used your magic to comfort a scared woman,” Daiman told me. He came close, reaching out to draw me close. “You didn’t turn away from your friend at the worst moment of her life, you stayed with her to the end. I had seen what you were over and over again. I saw that you wanted to protect people. I saw that you didn’t want to be a part of any of this.
“But I held myself back from you because I believed the same thing you did: that Nicola Beaumont was dangerous with her power. And when you helped Eshe, I realized that wasn’t true at all.”
I put my face in my hands.
“What if I turn back into the person I was?” I asked, my voice muffled. “I’m scared I will. I’m scared of what I could do if I did.”
He wrapped me in his arms and gave me Eshe’s answer. “So don’t.”
I made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. I spread my fingers over his chest and heard his heart speed.
“And because you’re not that woman, you need to save people who otherwise might have no chance.” Daiman’s voice was quiet, but there was no shred of doubt there.
I picked my head up to look at him.
“It took hundreds of us to stop you last time,” Daiman reminded me. “You are the one who can take Philip down. You’re the one who actually has a chance.”
“Terric—”
“Terric faced him on his own ground and lost, he’ll never win this time.” Daiman shook his head. “You need to go to Venice. If ever there was a power made for battle—it’s yours.”
“I’m scared,” I whispered again.
“So am I.” He reached up to take my hand, and our fingers curled together between us. “But I know I don’t want to see the world ruined by Philip’s ambitions, and I know you don’t want that, either.”
“No. I don’t.” I nodded. “I’ll … I’ll go. I don’t exactly have a plan, but I’ll go.” He laughed, and the sound gave me courage. I looked up and reached to brush my fingers over his lips, the way he’d touched me. He held himself still, but I felt his breath go shallow. “When this is over,” I told him. “If we survive—”
I didn’t have time to think before his mouth came down on mine. He kissed me hard, harder than I expected, and he didn’t release me until I was gasping with it.
“We will survive,” he said. His voice was rough, and his smile sent a shiver down my spine. “And why wait for then?”
28
It was past midnight by the time we had the presence of mind to discuss making a plan.
We sat up reluctantly from a luxurious bed of moss and I watched sadly as Daiman pulled his clothes back on. Firelight mixed with moonlight, and I had the jarring memory of Philip lounging on the bed we’d shared so long ago.
This would make a better memory.
“We’ll need to—” Daiman looked up and seemed to forget his train of thought. “You should get dressed.”
“Oh?” I stretched out on the bed of moss and grinned impishly up at him. “Are you sure?”
He pulled me up with a laugh that made my knees go weak, and kissed me, tongue sliding into my mouth as I melted against him. “Very sure,” he said, when he let me go. “But only for now.”
I still grumbled as I pulled my clothes on, and I managed to get my shirt on inside out the first time. “Couldn’t we ask Philip to hold off for a couple of days?” I asked, craning to look for the tag. “Maybe get a room in a nice hotel, spend some time on the beach….”
Daiman laughed. “After Venice,” he promised me. “I know a place.”
I settled down by the fire, unable to hide my smile. After Venice. If we made it through this, “after Venice” was going to be exceedingly messy. Terric was hardly going to forgive me. In fact, very few people would. And between the internal divisions between the Monarchists, and Terric’s lies to the Separatists, there would be few places in the magical world that weren’t in a state of total upheaval.
And Daiman had just told me that he’d stay by my side through all of it. I couldn’t keep myself from smiling at that.
There wasn’t much time for sappiness, however. We determined quickly enough that getting to Venice wasn’t going to be easy. We didn’t know how much time we had, and it wasn’t entirely out of the question that we’d get stopped at checkpoints or otherwise detained by peo
ple who wouldn’t believe we needed to go save the world.
After a few rounds of suggestions—most of mine involved stealing a vehicle, an option the resident druid did not approve of—Daiman disappeared with a vague mutter that he might have a plan, leaving me alone in the warehouse with a mostly-dead fire and just my own thoughts for company.
I made a determined effort to think of nothing but the glow of the embers, but thoughts of Philip kept creeping into my mind.
Where had I met him in Venice? I could remember glimpses of ornate churches and bridges over canals, but with memories constantly adding to the clamor in my head, it was nearly impossible to sort out which memories were which.
It turned out, getting over a thousand years’ worth of memories back at once was not easy to process. Whatever Eshe had done when she undid the spells in my head, the memories didn’t seem to be coming back in batches. Instead, they sometimes came one or two at a time, a trickle of thoughts that tugged gently at my mind, and sometimes in a rush, like a river in spring.
Given her affinity for water, I wondered if the thought of a river in spring was mine or hers—and that thought made me want to cry.
Cry, and get revenge. Philip had a lot to answer for.
Daiman appeared out of thin air after not too long, and jerked his head for me to follow him out of the warehouse.
“Get ready to lie,” he said quietly. “I told this man we needed to get you out of Greece, but I couldn’t come up with a reason.”
“Luckily for you, lying is something I’m good at.” I smiled up at him. When he looked vaguely uncomfortable, I elbowed him in the side. “You’d better hope I’m good at it, if I’m supposed to catch Philip unawares. Also, you just told me to lie to someone.”
He gave a reluctant shrug, which I took to mean that he was uncomfortable about the fact that he agreed with me.
He really was adorably rule-abiding.
We picked our way down to the beach, where a single boat bobbed in the shallows. A man with more grey than black in his hair held an old lantern up suspiciously.
“Kalispera,” I said softly.
Well, there was a surprise. Apparently, I spoke Greek.
I wondered briefly where I’d picked that up, and decided that this was not the time to devote thoughts to that particular subject.
His face softened slightly at that, though he still looked suspicious. “This one says he needs to take you away.” He jerked his head. “Is he good to you? Is he safe, or will he hurt you?”
I looked over at Daiman, who was frowning in confusion. He, apparently, did not speak Greek.
I couldn’t stop my smile. “He would never hurt me,” I told the man. “He has risked everything to protect me. He’s telling you the truth.”
The man nodded. “Then I will sell him my boat. I told him, ‘I must meet the girl first.’ There are too many that are taken away and sold. Sometimes tourists.”
“I thank you for your kindness.” I reached out to take his hand for a moment. “May the world repay it tenfold.”
“Hmph.” He clearly wasn’t comfortable with emotion. “Pay it to another, and we’ll call it even.”
“I will.” I looked over at Daiman. “He’ll sell us the boat,” I said in English.
“Thank you,” Daiman told him. “So much,” he added.
“Well, go on, then.” The man jerked his head. “You want the lantern?”
Daiman shook his head. “No lights. We need to be … secret.”
The man nodded. He helped me into the boat and helped Daiman push it back into the water.
He watched us until we had rowed our way into the rougher swells, and then I saw him hobble his way back up the hill toward the tiny town. His lantern bobbed as he went, and I liked to imagine he was going back to a warm house and a loving family.
“What are you thinking?” Daiman asked me quietly.
I didn’t have to think before I spoke. “People like him are why the world is worth saving.”
Daiman smiled as he hauled the oars in and turned on the engine. I saw an extra canister of gas in the bottom of the boat, and I noticed that we had turned almost due north.
“So we’re going by sea the whole way?”
“Didn’t you study your history?” He grinned at me. “By sea is always quicker.”
“Unless you get eaten by the kraken,” I quipped. I watched as the coastline began to rush by far quicker than the engine was carrying us. “And you can fold water, too.”
“’Fold?’” He frowned at me.
“The way we would take one step in the forest, but go much further. What do you call it?”
“Ah.” He nodded. “There’s a Gaelic term for it, but it doesn’t exactly translate. It means—roughly—that the world does its best to accommodate your needs. So, when we walked through the domhan fior, it helped us move as quickly as it could, and gave us food and shelter.”
“Domhan fior?”
“The true world,” he explained. “To a druid, the domhan fior is more real than what you call the ‘real’ world. It’s part of what gives us our power.”
I settled back as comfortably as I could against the edge of the boat and considered this. “So … has no sorcerer ever studied the druidic arts? Really?”
“I think Eshe might have,” Daiman said, after a pause spent considering. “But otherwise, I know there is a … prejudice against it, you might say. Amongst druids.”
I raised my eyebrows in a silent question.
“Those who don’t like sorcerers at all would tell you that sorcerers only want more power, so they should not be taught the druidic arts. There are quite a few of those, I’m afraid.” Daiman gave a rueful shrug. “Those who like to think they’re more fair about the whole thing—and not at all prejudiced, of course—would say that it is impossible for a sorcerer to become a druid, that an essential piece of being a druid is the discipline of learning to summon magic. A sorcerer, being born with magic, would have a crutch they could never throw away, and thus would never be a true druid.”
“Do you believe that?” I looked over at him curiously.
“I used to.” He frowned and steered us out to sea slightly to accommodate an outcropping. “In a way, I still do. But I think it’s less of a problem than many of them do. Every druid is different, as is every sorcerer. Even if a sorcerer were not able to learn the druidic arts quite the same way as a mortal, would that be so bad?” He gave a chuckle. “To some of the purists, of course, the answer to that would be ‘yes.’”
I smiled and looked out to sea, my mind churning. When I looked back and found him watching me, I realized it had been a long time since he stopped speaking.
“What are you thinking of?” he asked me softly.
I took my time about answering.
“Sometimes I think I remember how to use my power,” I said carefully. “But I’m afraid to test it.”
I held up a hand in front of me in the darkness and saw dark tendrils swirl around it—the same power that had killed Eshe. It took all of my control not to stop the spell.
“Do you have a plan?” Daiman asked me.
“Go to Philip, tell him I got his message.” I hesitated. “Try to kill all of them before they can do any harm.”
There was a long silence.
“You don’t sound like you like that plan,” Daiman observed. His tone was carefully neutral.
“I really don’t.” I let the spell trail off and folded my arms across my chest. “If I just kill everyone who’s doing something I don’t like, what makes me different from a dictator, you know?”
“I think in this case, it’s entirely justified.”
“Yeah, that’s always how it starts.” I gave him a look. “Seriously, Daiman. I just go around, being judge, jury, and executioner? Where does it end?”
“It ends where you want it to end.” He lifted his shoulders. “The slippery slope isn’t always all that slippery. You don’t like killing people. I can’t see you w
andering around just looking for someone to kill and getting so power-drunk that you just off people who cut in line or don’t hold doors.
“The truth is, if you’d been born being able to summon ice, like Maggie does, or having Eshe’s power over water, you wouldn’t be afraid of it being a slippery slope to use your power—even though you could still kill people with it. Stay true to who you are now, and you won’t let it become a problem.”
I considered this as the night faded away and dawn brought Venice into view, a jewel on the waters.
He was right. In fact, he was more correct than he knew.
Because I wasn’t sure how much power I still had. I knew, without knowing how I could tell, that my power had atrophied since I fought Terric. And I knew, from Daiman and the Coimeail and Eshe, that taking my power would take my life.
If this fight drained me, there wouldn’t be any chance of me turning into a tyrant—and as much as it felt like a knife twisting in my chest to think of leaving Daiman….
…There was some comfort in it, too.
29
We tied the boat at the end of a long sea wall and walked the rest of the way as the sun peeked over the horizon. I saw flickers of boats going out to sea, and heard the occasional not-quite-there shouted greetings between fishermen, but otherwise it seemed as if we were alone in the world.
My heart had started a slow, steady pound as soon as I recognized Venice in the distance. I was about to use the magic I feared—and, even more fearful, I was going to come face to face with Philip.
That was more scary, not less, now that I remembered him. Philip knew things about me that I would rather no one knew.
Worse, he had admired those things. He had encouraged them.
I remembered the way he and I had smiled at one another, ambition laced with cruelty and desire, and shuddered. I wanted no part of that anymore.
“Where should we start?” Daiman asked. We were coming around the point of the island and would need to swing south along an archipelago to reach Venice proper.
His voice reminded me of the present, and I was glad of it. I managed a smile and pointed, squinting to make out the tiny break in the city. “You see at the south, there, the canal? That’s the Canal della Giudeca—or at least, that’s what they called it when I was last here. We’ll start on the north side of that.”
