by Natalie Grey
It brought back memories I didn’t want.
Philip swore. I turned to find him watching me.
“So now it’s down to us.” I lifted my chin. With a thought, I spent some of the last of my energy to undo Daiman’s bindings, though he didn’t move in my peripheral vision.
A wise choice; let Philip forget him for now.
“You killed them?” Philip’s voice was incredulous.
“Yes.” I lifted my chin. “What they were doing would kill billions. I couldn’t allow it.”
“Do you even remember what you were?”
“Of course I do,” I whispered. I wanted to be haughty and elegant, but my voice was hoarse. “We killed millions. And you clung so hard to my memory for 700 years that you still don’t realize that was evil.”
“Give me their names.” His finger rose, trembling. “Everyone who touched you, everyone who put those spells on your mind. Because they’ll pay for what they did. They changed you. You would never—”
“They did change me,” I agreed. “They made me a nobody. I lived with humans, I played with their children, I saw their lives. Maybe if Terric had never fought me, I’d be just like you—but I’m not. And I’m not going to let you do this again.”
He looked around the room at their bodies, his chest heaving.
“Seven. Hundred. Years,” he gritted out. “I honored your memory for 700 years and now you’re back and you’ve turned on us. You think you can just stop it all. I’m not going to let you.”
He turned in one fluid movement and his power blasted a hole through the back of the building. Something slammed sideways into me—Daiman, I realized a second later—as Philip turned back my way.
But he wasn’t going for me.
“I’m not going to let you be the end of this,” he told me again.
And he grabbed the chest and heaved the orbs into the waters of the canal.
31
I screamed. The sound was ripped out of me as I watched the orbs sink under the surface of the water.
I can’t let it into the sea, Eshe had said.
This magic was made to kill billions, and the sea would carry it all across the world in a tide of death.
“Get up,” Philip said brutally. He snapped his fingers at me. “And we’ll see what skill you still have left. You think I didn’t notice how weak you’ve gotten?” He smiled. “This will be interesting. I wonder if you’ll beg for your life.”
“Not fucking likely.” I struggled to my feet.
I didn’t even care at this point. The virus was already in the water, and—
The answer came to me right then and there.
“Keep him here,” I told Daiman.
“What?”
“Keep him here!” I ran for the door, dodging a lightning bolt, and pelted through the main part of the building and up the stairs. I needed to get close to the water—and not be dealing with Philip as he tried to kill me.
Or worse. I wonder if you’ll beg for your life had an ominous ring to it.
I burst into a room and managed to startle a couple in the middle of some activities I wished I hadn’t seen. Both of them yelled.
“The building’s collapsing!” Boy, I hoped that wasn’t true, but I told myself it was only a slight embellishment from a hole having been blown in the wall. “You need to get out!”
Thankfully, they didn’t question me. Off they went, wrapping bathrobes over some very inventive costumes, and I shut the door behind them and locked it.
The windows were open to the morning air. I looked out at the water, the canal running broadly out to see, and tracked the current.
Then I tried to purge my mind of terror, and sank into a druid’s trance.
There were ley lines here. It was one of the first things I noticed. They ran almost perfectly through the canals of Venice, pulsing brightly with energy. They lay deep below the water, where humans might never stumble over them, and I found myself marveling at the tracery, like a web of veins.
I made myself look away. I had to look further, for something fainter but far more destructive.
It took a long time to find them amidst the flickers of light that were schools of fish and people in their boats. But the orbs were something different than the life in a fish, or in kelp waving gently at the sea floor.
Theirs was a hungrier life force.
I sank through the water in my trance, noting the tiny motes of sea life around me. I was coming closer to the orbs and they were drifting away in the current. I pictured myself swimming after them, content in the deep waters.
One was drifting close to the ley lines, and I realized with a stab of fear—nearly jolting me from the trance—that it might infect the magic of the world, and the virus would be carried that way to all the corners of the earth.
Not if I could help it.
I reached down into the life of the virus itself. The tiny particles swirled inside the orbs, reaching out to me as they had been programmed to do. They were ravenous. They wanted warmth and blood. They wanted to break open cells and feast on everything inside. It was only how they had been made.
I sang the same song to them that I had sung to Eshe. They must return to what they had been, to molecules that could form life. I sang to them of water and sunlight, and all the things they might be. I told them how beautiful snowbells were. I whispered about dappled sunlight on moss.
Because I understood, now, deep in my bones, what Daiman had told me: death was not evil. Death, and sleep, and even what humans called rot, was not only good, but necessary. I thought of fallow fields awakening in spring, and the carpet of leaves feeding the new green shoots on the forest floor.
I told them all of it, and they listened. For a moment, they were ready to heed me.
And then Philip activated the orbs.
The virus leapt forth, seizing on anything it could find like a drowning man gasping for air. This was what it was, this was what it had been made. It whipped itself into a frenzy when it found only fish and seaweed, and it raced through the dark waters with a singular purpose.
No!
My plea slowed it only somewhat.
Listen to me! I was everywhere and nowhere, and containing this would take what little magic I had left.
I knew what would happen then … and yet, part of me welcomed it. It was neat, elegant.
Hadn’t I wanted to get rid of my magic? How better to do so than by undoing the work I was best known for?
I hung in the darkness of the trance and put everything I had into pleading with them. Don’t bring death. You have been put together like this by a madman.
But we exist now, the virions told me. However we came to be, this is what we are.
It is not what you need to be. I showed them streets filled with bodies, let them hear the wails of parents crumpled over the still forms of their children.
And then I let the memory go. I let it be gone, and at once the same as my memories of the dew-soaked grass outside my home, the sun rising over Eshe’s village. I showed them the rabbits in the domhan fior, and Daiman’s sparrow form bobbing on a branch at the Acadham.
Let me sing you into the world once more, I told them, and you can become anything you wish.
I waited, terrified, as it drifted ever closer to the boats and their inhabitants.
And then …
Yes. I felt the plague release. I staggered as my power drained from me and the orbs shattered. The virus scattered into sunlight in my mind’s eye, and fish swam curiously to nibble at it.
The door burst open and I looked over my shoulder at Daiman.
“It’s over,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” Daiman looked half-dead. “He escaped. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not.” I tried to walk to him and sank to my knees, entirely drained. “The virus is gone. I undid it. Eshe was wrong—death isn’t just one thing, and my spells can be undone.”
He came to my side. “But
Philip—”
“We’ll find him.” I reached up to smooth his hair from his face. “If I had to choose between Philip’s death, and almost 7 billion lives, I’d choose all those lives every time. We’ll find him someday, Daiman. We will.”
Epilogue
I woke to the sound of waves and sunlight falling, warm and soft, across my body.
“Daiman?” I picked my head up and looked around the room.
The room was ablaze with light. From the whitewashed walls to the white sheets, everything was bright sun or dark shadow. Only the blue of sky and ocean outside gave my eyes any respite.
I wrapped the sheet around myself and padded to the window.
It had been a week now, but this view didn’t get old. I leaned my arms on the sun-warmed wood and stared out at the water. I could hear shouts in Greek and smell the scents of coffee and fish and cooking bread rising over the village. The faint sound of lambs bleating came from the hill behind the house.
It wasn’t a luxury resort, but it was every bit as perfect as Daiman had promised.
The door opened and he came in, a copper coffee pot and some fresh bread and cheese on a tray. He smiled to see me awake.
“You’re up early.”
“I feel better every day.” Draining my magic had been harder on me than either of us realized—and undoing a spell 7 centuries in the making had almost completely drained it. I smiled. It had taken two days for me to be able to stand up, and even now I got tired easily. “And you’re the one who took the beating from Philip, shouldn’t you feel awful, too?”
He gave a secretive smile as he laid the food out.
“You’re really not going to tell me what happened with that?” I went to sit on the bed.
He leaned down to kiss me, only a quick brush of his lips against mine, but the kiss deepened as it always did. When he stood up, both of us were flushed.
“Do you really want to know?” He poured the thick black coffee into a tiny cup and held it out.
“I really do.”
“We battled—not for very long, mind you, but enough to give each other some bruises. He’s strong, I’ll give him that.” Daiman sipped his own coffee. “And then he ran. He must have decided he wasn’t going to win, because he vanished into thin air.”
“He just ran?” I should have known he would pull something like that, but it still disgusted me.
“Was Philip ever really one to fight fair?” He raised an eyebrow.
“No,” I admitted. I considered. “I wonder where he went.”
“Maybe you’ll remember something,” Daiman suggested. “In time.”
“I hope I notice if I do,” I said disgustedly. There were still so many memories pouring into my head that I could hardly keep track of them. I tore a piece of flatbread off and wrapped it around some cheese. “If he’s smart, though, he’ll go somewhere I never went with him.”
Daiman was quiet for a moment. “We’ll find him,” he said finally. “We will.”
I grinned, “Then maybe I’ll be allowed back in polite society.”
“Something like that.” He leaned over to kiss me, and then froze.
“What?”
“Is that … yours?” He nodded to the bedside table.
I looked, and frowned. A scroll lay there, tied with white ribbon. “No.”
We exchanged a look and I reached out tentatively to untie it and scan the contents.
“What does it say?” Daiman’s voice was cautious.
“It’s a letter from the Coimeail.” I looked up at him. “Apparently, Terric has gone rogue … and they want me to kill him.”
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