It was back to square one for me. I could only hope that Tristan would make it unscathed, that he wouldn’t be dragged back into the fire. But I had no doubt this wouldn’t be enough to get him rid of Hughes. Whatever Hughes was after, it was very clear he was prepared to do anything to get it.
I thought I felt my lungs catch fire. I closed my eyes and let myself go.
36
Darkness. I lay in it, weightless. There was no fire anymore, and everything was peaceful.
Cold lips brushed my cheek—it must be Marianne. I was with the dead now.
Good. Very good. I could finally catch my breath.
I went back to sleep.
37
It was still dark around me, but now there was pain everywhere in my body. It was disappointing. I’d thought there would be no pain at all in death. Wasn’t that the whole point? Now I found I still had a body and a skin that burned like hell. And a mouth that felt completely parched. I could open my eyes, but it didn’t make any difference. The world was lost in darkness and in pain.
I felt cheated.
“Water!” I complained, very loudly. Except it only came out as a raw, pitiful whisper.
Something cold touched my forehead again, then my cheek, and some of the pain went away.
“You’re awake,” Tristan said, awe in his voice. “You’ve been so brave.”
Was he dead, too? That, I found profoundly unfair. After all the trouble I’d gone through!
Drops of water were falling into my mouth now, delicious drops that weren’t ever enough. I wanted more. The anger and the frustration tired me out really quickly, though, and I had to sleep again.
38
The next time I woke up, I knew I wasn’t dead, although I didn’t know why or how. I could see again. I was lying in a huge canopy bed made out of dark carved wood and protected only by sheer white veils. The room around me was bathed in moonlight, and I recognized it: it was Marianne’s bedroom.
How the hell had I ended up there?
“Tristan?”
My voice was less raspy but still pretty rough, and talking instantly made me cough.
Something moved in a dark corner of the room, out of my sight, and a second later the mattress dipped under the weight of a body. He was there.
“Don’t talk. You’ve been burned pretty badly. You need to rest. Emma and I have been fixing you. You’ve been out for days.”
My eyes opened wide. “Days?”
My friends must be going crazy with worry.
“The band? The bar?”
“Everyone made it out of the bar in time. Your friends are okay, they moved in with a neighbor, and I promised them I’d take care of you, but obviously, they can’t come here. And they can never know about the realms, magic, Hughes, or even the damned boxes.”
I didn’t really get why, but I understood that this was what Tristan wanted, and right now, I was far too tired to argue.
“Linus has been badgering me continuously, so we might have to drive there as soon as you can safely travel. I’m sorry, but I could take better care of you here than any hospital in your world could have managed. Those were magical wounds you had.”
I exhaled slowly. I wasn’t ready to contemplate the extent of the damage. So I just skipped the thought and instead asked about something else.
“What about the bar?”
Tristan made a face. “It’s totalled. Thankfully, the fire brigade arrived in minutes and everyone got out in time. The building is more or less still standing. I can’t say the same about my reputation, though.”
Yeah. Letting a venue burn down on the night of its inauguration while it was full of people had a way of not inspiring confidence.
“Were they the ones who found me? The firemen?”
Tristan shook his head and smiled. He’d shifted closer, into a ray of moonlight, and I could see him better now. He looked like shit—positively exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes. But the red glow was fiery behind the blue facade of his irises.
“You?” I asked. “You found me? How did you get there?”
“Well, it was a little more complicated than that.”
“What happened, then?”
He told me everything.
39
Tristan had intended to come with me to the cellar and be there with me when I’d opened the boxes. He’d thought he may be able to react on time to the magic in them. But then Dora had lured him away, separating us. She’d told him she knew where Hughes had taken me. And then, when he’d followed her to her realm, she’d used a spell to trap him there. She’d told him it was for his own good. She’d said she wanted to keep him safe.
Maybe Dora did like Tristan very much. Or at least she hadn’t completely given up on her idea of an alliance with him.
So, in effect, he’d been trapped in a prison of his own, just like me. And the irony was he’d prayed that I wouldn’t use our escape plan to come and find him. He was sure Dora would kill me if she could lay her hands on me.
We’d kept protecting each other, as we’d been doing from the start. Realizing that, I had to laugh. Working together had made us both stronger and, also, pretty vulnerable.
I told Tristan what I thought I’d found out while trapped in the cellar.
“Your sister created this magical bond between us when she died. But Hughes knew about her death, was probably an accomplice to it, and he managed to corrupt that bond with a death mark. As a result, I was linked to both you and him. I tried to undo that and I think I was successful: I unraveled Hughes’s trap.”
Now I needed to know where we were at and what was left of all these spells in the end. The first chance I got, I was going to check if I could still teleport to Tristan. He would probably be relieved if I couldn’t. I mean, people usually didn’t like it when you could follow them around and intrude on their lives like that. It might come in handy during some crises, but the rest of the time, it was mostly just creepy.
I would run tests later. But not now. Now, I felt empty, or maybe just content to be there.
“So how did you do it? How did you bring me back? I really thought I was done for, you know. I slipped away thinking I was never coming back.”
He smiled.
“You remember granting me a wish?”
Of course I did.
“Well, considering what I used it for, it shouldn’t have worked, because wish magic is tricky and you can’t normally use it for anything really useful, like saving someone’s life or even your own. You can only wish for something you really want, deep down, at a very basic level. Like an instinct.”
“Survival isn’t an instinct?” I asked, not really following.
“Your own survival is. Not the survival of others. You can’t normally use a wish to save someone.”
Oh.
“But I was lucky enough to find an impulse I could latch on to. At first it didn’t work. Maybe my wish could only be granted once you’d undone that spell you were fighting and you were free again.”
You mean when you were free again, I thought.
“Tell me what you wished for.”
But he only laughed.
“I can’t tell you that. It’s wish magic 101. It only works if you don’t disclose anything, and I’ve told you too much already.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“I will torture you until you explain.”
But I had all the strength of a two-day-old kitten and could only paw at the covers with my bandaged hands before letting out a pitiful, discouraged whimper.
“Don’t worry,” Tristan said. “You’ll be up and running in no time. Keep resting, and we’ll talk more later, when you’ve recovered.”
He patted the pillow, in a gesture that I would later spend hours analyzing in agonizing detail. Was he being patronizing? Affectionate? Or plain awkward?
“Just one thing,” he said, standing up. “Emma found the pendulum on you when she undressed you, the night we arrived here. It
’s on the nightstand next to you.”
“Oh. I’m sorry I stole it. Marianne said I had to. And it did save my life. You can have it back now. Sorry again.”
He shook his head. “No, it’s all right. You can keep it. But don’t use it too often to visit Mar. Death is a dangerous, addictive place. Don’t make it love you too much.”
After that, he left the room so that I could rest again.
A couple of nights went by. Emma, the cook, brought me unforgettable food, even though she still refused to acknowledge my bare existence. I didn’t mind too much. I liked her anyway. The shortest way to my heart had always been through my stomach. Well, until recently it had.
Two days later, Emma declared I could lose the bandages altogether. She didn’t pronounce that diagnosis to my face. She still wasn’t talking to me, and she did a really astounding job taking care of me without ever looking me in the eye.
She took a good long glance at my throat, arms, belly, everywhere but my head, and skipped on the magical shower-and-wound-dressing spell she’d been using on me for the last couple of days. She just nodded and left the room without an explanation.
Tristan knocked on my door minutes later.
“Come in!”
His teeth shone in the darkness as his face appeared, framed by shadows. This place was chronically underlit, and I was really starting to miss the sun.
“Emma says you’re as healed as you’re going to get,” Tristan said. “She’s lit a fire in Marianne’s bathroom. You can go take a bath if you want.”
I spared a thought for people nursing serious burns in my world, because taking a bath days after being singed to the third degree was not something people normally did, I knew that—not when there wasn’t any magical cure.
I felt healed, but it was still a very emotional moment when I got up to use the bathroom next door. My body felt weird, foreign. As I’d noticed before in the castle, the equipment was strange, modern and antiquated at the same time. There was central hot water and the bathtub settings included low-pressure hydromassage. Yet the room was lit by candles and firelight, and I had a mini-freakout when it occurred to me that this might be to protect me from my own image in the mirror.
I soon found out I had nothing to fear there. In the big silver mirror, all I found was my good old face. Clearly, realm magic was far superior to human medicine. I had no scars from the fire, none at all. Only the thorns had left marks.
Tristan explained it like that later: for some reason, I was protected—to a degree—from any magic imposed from the outside. Sometimes spells worked on me, sometimes my body held on to magic and used it, like with that death mark, but most of the time, I just shook it all off. And this was what I’d done with my burn scars. Normally, even Tristan’s magic couldn’t have erased all of them, yet they’d completely disappeared, and most of my skin was smooth again.
But where the thorns had bitten into my flesh, the lacerations had left thick scar tissue, as gnarly and twisted as old roots. This, Tristan thought, had happened because these cuts had been partially self-inflicted. My left palm in particular was in tatters where I’d held on to the thorns and invited fire to feast on my flesh.
My relationship with magic was rebellious. It didn’t obey any laws but its own. How so very rock ’n’ roll of me.
40
That same day, I borrowed clothes from Marianne’s closet again, stylish black dress pants and a sweater threaded with red and blue wool that ended up being the exact same color as the Rentier eyes. Then I was invited for a lavish breakfast in the castle’s grand dining room. It was obvious that Emma was happy, probably because she knew I’d be out of her hair shortly. I also gathered, through her interactions with Tristan, that after taking care of me he’d gone back to living in the caretakers’ apartments instead of the castle itself, and that she disapproved of this.
“Where does Emma sleep?” I asked him in hushed tones when she’d disappeared after setting a basket of viennoiseries and two huge plates of eggs and stir-fried vegetables on the table.
“She has a house in the forest,” he said.
We ate in silence for a while. The breakfast was superb, but the atmosphere in the room was increasingly awkward. Tristan and I hadn’t spoken much since I’d been up. He’d been otherwise occupied or he hadn’t wanted to disturb my convalescence. I knew we were going to part in a couple of hours, when he drove me back to Dompierre, and I still didn’t know how I felt about that.
I didn’t even know if I was relieved from my “mission,” which had been to keep him safe from Hughes. Hughes was still out there, and he’d probably try something else to get rid of his cousin. But was it really my business anymore? Although Tristan had given me the pendulum, I’d left it in a drawer in Marianne’s room. I had to go back to my life now, hadn’t I? But I still felt as if there was a lot of unfinished business between us.
“I need to know if I’m still at risk of summoning you,” was what I finally blurted out.
Tristan nodded without smiling. “I thought we could run a test later today.”
“Good.”
“But first, after breakfast, I’m driving you to Dompierre.”
“Okay.”
Yeah, it seemed obvious that he did want me out of there.
“Your friends have news for you. I spoke to them yesterday. They moved in at Elise’s and now they’re waiting for you.”
“At Elise’s?”
He told me what Linus had said to him over the phone. After the bar had burned down, Elise had taken the band in, letting them sleep at her farm. The following morning, she’d approached Linus with a proposition. She and her husband had been renovating an old barn on their property, but now that spring was approaching, they were going to have too much to do on the farm and they weren’t going to have much time left for construction work. The barn had heating, water, and electricity now, but there was still a lot to do. Elise had offered Linus and the guys to come live there for free in exchange for some manual labor. There was no time limit on the deal, she said, so we could live there, keep working and making music, and take care of the renovations during our downtime. Linus had accepted and the guys had moved in while I was at Tristan’s. Their having almost no possessions to actually move had made it extra simple.
“Wow,” I whispered. “That’s great.”
It was true: it was the perfect solution for us. We could make this work, keep writing songs and saving up for studio time. We were moving forward, and this felt really good.
There was another long silence before Tristan concluded.
“Whatever you do is up to you, Victoire. Obviously, you have a link to the realms. But you can still go back to your life and forget about everything. Your memory will get fuzzier with time, and soon what happened won’t bother you at all anymore. Your mind will make up some story to account for your scars and any other lingering memory.”
Another silence stretched for a couple of seconds. So, this was what had happened after my elevator accident, how I’d forgotten all about him. It was a defense mechanism, not Hughes’s doing.
Tristan was giving me an out, a chance to go back to my normal life.
“Maybe it’s the best thing to do,” he concluded.
Yes. And maybe he, too, needed me out of his hair. I’d done my job. I’d untangled the obtrusive bond, or at least I hoped so. He’d used the wish I’d granted him. There were no loose ends, not in the magical sense at least.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I can’t decide for you.”
“Well, what’s the alternative?”
“I can’t even tell you that. You can visit whenever you want, obviously. Probably your magic is going to make the decision for you, and you’ll see things more clearly.”
“Probably,” I agreed, wondering what he wanted, but also knowing that it couldn’t be a factor in my own decision.
It was dusk in my world when the fog dissolved around the old country road we were drivi
ng along. Ten minutes later, we were at Elise’s place. She and her husband lived in a nice, tidy, and welcoming cattle farm a little ways away from the main road leading into Dompierre. Their three children had already left home to study in bigger cities. Their farm was full of nooks and crannies, and something delicious was always cooking in the big kitchen.
When Tristan and I arrived there shortly after dark, Elise welcomed me with open arms. She’d been worried about me, she said, casting suspicious glances at Tristan. He had put on one of his Circus Manager costumes again, although I still couldn’t see it.
“I didn’t even get the chance to congratulate you before that awful fire broke out,” Elise whispered in my hair while hugging me. “You were magnificent on stage. I’m so very proud of you. I can foresee great success in your future.”
I hugged her back and thanked her profusely. She insisted on giving us tea and homemade cookies and marginally warmed up to Tristan, although it was fairly obvious she held him responsible for the fire.
My new digs were tucked away in a little grove. The renovated barn was a low stone building with a brand-new curved tile roof. The windows and the shutters were in bad need of a new coat of paint. A rosebush, naked for the winter but covered in rosehips, was climbing the wall. The rest of what must have been a little front garden had pretty much grown back to wilderness. There was a ground floor with three rooms, and a big attic under the roof, Elise explained.
As soon as I entered the building, Linus ambushed me with an extra-big stifling hug.
“You look wonderful,” he said. “I’ve been worried to death. You could have called.”
Moonlight Binding Magic Page 20
