“That is the problem,” Roisin said. “It’s a Fae artifact. Its power is immense, and the temptation to use it, to use that power, is too great.”
I took a deep breath. “I guess I’m just a stupid human, but I still don’t understand.”
“Do you want to rule the world?” Oriel asked.
“Good Goddess, no. Who in their right mind would want that kind of responsibility? Besides, playing that game just paints a target on your chest.”
“And that is why you are the one best qualified to hold the Heart,” Roisin said. “I can’t imagine anyone, human or Fae, who would be less seduced by that kind of power.”
Reginn chuckled. “All of us know that we could do a better job of running things than the idiots who are in charge now. That makes us dangerous. And turning it over to either the Seelie king or the Unseelie queen would be an absolute disaster. Neither of them is qualified to feed themselves, let alone wield unchecked power. The only thing that makes either of them tolerable is their incompetence and the fact that the other is there to counter them.”
“Would you give that much power to one of your presidential candidates in the United States?” Tiana asked.
The idea horrified me. The idea of someone like the Prelate or Master Benedict having it was much worse. My feelings must have shown on my face.
“You see?” Roisin smiled. “You’re the only one here qualified to hold it since you don’t want to use it. And since we need a ley line mage to return it to the Well, it makes sense for you to take it there.”
No good deed goes unpunished, Sam’s voice whispered in my memory. They needed a ley line mage to return it to the Well. Somehow, I didn’t think that was a recent revelation. Dear Goddess, I was the most gullible fool in the world.
The ritual to break the rubies was much different than the purification ritual. Loud, strong, and bombastic. I created the same circle and pentagram, lit the candles, but past there everything was different.
I laid the Heart on a flat rock that Reginn hauled to the clearing, put my hands on it, and began my chant. The words were harsh, the cadence staccato, building to a shouted climax. I drew Roisin’s athame across my palm and let my blood drip over the Heart, then I swung Reginn’s great hammer down on the giant ruby with all my strength.
The Heart didn’t break, but the stone under it shattered, as did the ruby implanted under my skin and the one set in the hilt of my Knights’ sword.
The ritual left me so weak and tired that I could barely find the strength to blow out the candles and scuff through the lines of the circle. I fell on my butt and just sat there with my head spinning.
The Fae had watched, no longer driven away by the tainted Heart. They came out of the woods to help me to my feet and collected all the paraphernalia. Except for the Heart. None of them would even touch it, so I put it in its bag and carried it back to the inn.
“And that broke every one of those rubies?” I asked. “All over the world?”
“As far as we know,” Tiana said. “All of the ones we were carrying broke. And all of these are shattered.” She held out a silk bag like the one I carried the Heart in. I peered inside and saw it was full of ruby-colored gravel. “This bag was here in the inn.”
“Can you call Karl or Ian and see if theirs broke?”
The look on Tiana’s face told me that they couldn’t.
“This place isn’t completely part of your world,” Oriel said. “Kind of like Killarney Village. Electronics don’t work very well here.”
I did talk Roisin into removing the stone she had implanted under my skin. The pieces had sharp edges and were irritating me.
But I got an answer to my question later the following evening after dinner. Josh, Ian, and Karl pulled into the inn. Tiana fixed them something to eat, and they regaled us with stories of the chaos that ensued after I stole the Heart. The Fae and human resistance fighters attacked the Knights’ installations all over the world. The British government had teamed up with the resistance and captured the Knights’ headquarters in London and their compound near Windsor—a compound the Knights had captured earlier from the Illuminati.
Without the threat of ley line corruption, the Fae had come out in the open and presented a list of demands to the Universal Church and the United Nations. We didn’t have a TV at the inn, but Ian told me the news was full of the Fae, and humans all over the world were going crazy—even crazier than when they discovered the existence of magic.
“It’s a brave, new world,” Ian said. “The Knights and the Church controlled by them have played their cards and lost.”
“But a faction of the Fae is still in the game,” Oriel said. “Until we’ve returned the Heart to where it belongs, the game isn’t over.”
Some of the Fae found us that night. I woke up to the crash of thunder and lightning. The inn shook with the violence of the unnatural storm.
Oriel and I leaped out of bed. I started to open the window, but he stopped me.
“Leave the shutters in place. Reginn has cast the wards around this place, and I don’t think anything can breach them. But if they do get past, we need to be ready.”
“If who gets past the wards?” I asked.
“This isn’t a natural storm.”
“Duh. I figured that out.”
“Fae. Elemental magic. Stay here.”
He left the room and, I assumed, went downstairs. He wasn’t gone long.
“They aren’t getting in, but Reginn says we should make plans to travel as soon as we can.”
The attack continued for a couple of more hours before those outside gave up. I didn’t get much sleep, so I spent the time packing and getting ready to go. I stuffed the Knight’s uniform in a sack, not that I expected I would ever have to wear it again, but ‘be prepared’ was a motto the Boy Scouts probably stole from the Hunters’ Guild.
Tiana fed us all a good breakfast and handed Oriel a sack of food. “I don’t plan on us stopping today,” she said, “so this should keep you for a while.”
“So, where are we going?” I asked.
“Norway. I thought we told you already,” Tiana said.
“Yeah, but I mean, how are we going to get there?”
“We’re going to drive.” The expression on her face conveyed that she wasn’t sure why I was having trouble understanding.
“We can’t go through the mounds?”
“Dear Goddess, no!” Roisin was usually unflappable, but for a moment I thought she was going to faint.
“We can’t take the Heart under the mounds,” Tiana said. “It would start a war. In this world, only a few Fae know we have it, and they want to take it. In Fairyland, everyone would be trying to get it. And we’re driving because none of us have wings.”
“Blowing up an airplane wouldn’t hurt the Heart,” Reginn said. “But that’s the easiest way to get it out of our hands.”
Okay. I didn’t have any more dumb questions, so I headed out the door. My next surprise was that the cars were all untouched in spite of the magical bombardment we had endured the night before. I mentioned it to Oriel.
“The Fae don’t think that way. Unless someone is a smith, like Reginn or me, mechanical objects don’t interest them. I doubt it even occurred to them to disable our transportation. Besides, all the cars were warded.”
Ian, Josh, and Karl got in their SUV, also with a sack of food from Tiana. Then she, Roisin, Reginn, and two other Fae got in another SUV with Reginn driving.
“They’re coming with us?”
“Why would they stay here? This inn was just a place to use for this operation.”
That made me feel marginally better. We followed the mages through the village and out to the highway with the Fae following us.
We made it to the south of London before encountering our next challenge. We were on the M25, a major freeway with four lanes running in each direction, when we passed through a cut in the hills. The world started shaking, the road cracked, and a chasm opened i
n front of the SUV Ian was driving.
Oriel cursed and I shielded, bracing for a crash. Somehow, the lane we were driving on stayed intact. With the world crashing down all around us during a major earthquake, we sailed right through.
My flip phone rang.
“Everyone okay back there?” Josh asked when I answered. I craned my head around and saw the SUV with the Fae right behind us.
“Yeah. The Fae are still on our tail. What the hell?”
“Magic attack,” Josh said. “Someone tried to get us with an earthquake.”
“I figured that out.”
I heard Ian laugh in the background. “Wrong way to attack an earth mage. I felt the forces before they hit.”
“And what happens if they do that when we’re in the Chunnel?” I asked. We were taking the undersea tunnel from England to France rather than chancing a ferry.
Josh relayed my question.
“Ian says that we’ll die, but they’ll probably never recover the Heart.”
“Oh, well, that’s okay then, isn’t it?”
There were a series of attacks after that. Fireballs and lightning in an ambush spearheaded by Knights Magica outside of Calais. We escaped down a side road. Then the Belgian Army interfered in a fight we got into just before Antwerp. Also, one of the Fae on our side tipped us off to another ambush near Bremen, and we routed around it.
Evidently our adversaries expected us to go through Copenhagen to Gothenberg and Oslo, but we took a ferry across the Skaggerak Strait in the North Sea directly to Norway. Considering the weather and twelve-foot seas, I might have chosen a magical brawl instead.
Three days after leaving the inn in England, we pulled into an inn outside of Bergen, Norway. The Fae who ran the inn took us in, fed us, and gave us beds for the night. I had barely slept, and Oriel hadn’t at all. Ian, Josh, and Karl had shared the driving, but I was pretty sure Reginn was the only driver in the SUV following us.
“So, we made it,” I said as I drifted off to sleep.
“Not quite,” Oriel said. “It’s about nine or ten hours to Bud, if we’re lucky.”
“Bud? Bud, Norway? What the hell’s in Bud?”
“The boat.”
Chapter 30
The coastal road north out of Bergen was breathtakingly beautiful, and breathtakingly scary. At times, it ran along cliffs that dropped hundreds of feet to the ocean, and in other places, we crossed fjords on bridges so high and so exposed that it felt we were floating in the air. A couple of times, we had to board a ferry to cross wide bodies of water instead of driving hours around.
“Danu buried the Heart of the World in the Well of Magic about eight thousand years ago,” Oriel told me as we drove. “I think I told you the story, didn’t I? A Fae sorceress named Fuamnach fashioned an artifact to harness the magic of the ley lines and enhance her power. She tied all the ley lines into the ruby and confronted Danu. The battle lasted five days and broke the world. After she won, Danu took the Heart and buried it in the Well. Modern scientists call the event the Storegga Slide, the largest submarine landslide ever. The entire Norwegian continental shelf collapsed.” He chuckled. “The scientists still don’t have a good theory as to what caused it.”
“And the Knights found it? Buried under millions of tons of rock and mud?”
“So it seems.” Oriel shrugged. “Whether you believe the legend or not, you can’t deny the power of the artifact. You’re a ley line mage. What are you feeling?”
“Power. Incredible power. We’re driving over an immense pool of ley energy. There aren’t individual ley lines here. I guess they haven’t separated yet. I can believe that there’s enough power here to break the world, and with the Heart as a focus, I can’t even imagine what I might be able to do.”
Our band of merry travelers reached Bud late in the afternoon. We topped a hill and were presented with a stunning panoramic view. The North Atlantic lay in front of us, with numerous islands and the strandflat open toward the southwest and the northeast. Gentle mountains rose behind us.
There was an inn, run, of course, by the Fae. We parked down the street and gathered our possessions. On our walk towards the inn, we encountered a cute young sea otter in the middle of the road. Majestic swans swam in the harbor.
The harbor was why we were there. Bud had a good natural harbor and rich fisheries. The Fae had rented a boat to take me and the Heart out into the ocean. They would take me directly over the Well of Magic, and I would use the Heart to focus ley energy to force the artifact down into the Well and bury it.
I had asked, but no one was able to explain how the Knights managed to find the Heart and bring it out of the Well. Or why everyone was so confident that the Knights wouldn’t be able to recover it again.
The boat was a large trawler, built for stability in whatever weather the North Atlantic threw at it. I had no idea what happened to the owner or the regular crew, but I never saw any of them.
When I boarded, the entire crew was Fae, some Seelie, some Unseelie. No one bothered with a glamour.
It might have been late spring, but it was colder than hell with the wind blowing in off the ocean. I wore layers of sweaters under the oilskin coat and a life jacket they gave me. The wind was doing thirty to forty knots, and the waves were white-capping. Lizzy probably would have loved it. I covered myself in my shield and still shivered.
“The center of the Well is about a hundred kilometers northwest,” Roisin said, her hair and light summer dress flapping in the wind. As far as I could tell, none of the Fae noticed the weather. Roisin and Tiana had drilled me in what I was supposed to do. I listened but wondered how confident they were. It was all theory. No one had ever done it before, except a goddess.
Ian didn’t seem bothered by the weather either. “It’s like this all winter in Donegal where I grew up,” he said.
I thought they were all full of BS. I’d spent nine winters in northern Minnesota, so I knew what cold was. If not for their magic, they’d all have been bundled up more than I was.
We set out, the boat bouncing from one wave to the next, rolling back and forth. I quit worrying about getting seasick about ten minutes out from shore. If I wasn’t sick yet, I doubted it was going to happen. I sat in the cabin and drank coffee laced with aquavit while waiting for my big moment.
It took the greatest part of the day to reach our destination. I felt the pilot cut the engines back and stood to look out. What I saw wasn’t encouraging, especially with all the yelling the Fae were doing.
We were surrounded by five ships, all sleeker than ours.
“What’s going on?” I asked Tiana when she entered the cabin.
“Our enemies are making a last-ditch effort to stop us. They’ve given us an ultimatum to surrender the Heart, or they’ll sink us. They figure they can recover the stone from the bottom of the ocean easier than extracting it from the Well.”
“And? What are we going to do?”
“Fight, and try to buy time. Are you ready to try and send the Heart back into the Well?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
I followed her up to the deck and looked at the boats circling us. The seas were too rough to sit still, so we continued under power but much slower than we’d been traveling.
“Are ye ready, Lass?” Ian asked me.
“Got a question, Ian. If the Heart has all this power, why don’t I just use it to blast those boats?”
His eyebrows rose, and he looked past me at Tiana.
“You don’t know how to use it,” she said.
I remembered the tunnel under Stonehenge. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled the stone out of its shielded bag. There was so much ley energy surrounding us that I didn’t have to reach for power. I faced the ship closest to us and just directed the ley magic through the stone.
Scarlet-red light shot from the stone, and the ship silently exploded into its molecular components. One moment it was there, and the next moment only a fine mist remained.
“Well, that was spectacular,” Ian said. “Wonder what you could do if you practiced.”
The trawler lurched as the sea rose beneath us, carrying us a hundred feet into the air on a water spout. The ship started to tip, and I had to grab onto the nearest thing to keep from sliding down the deck.
We stabilized as the Fae on board used their magic to fight against the magic attacking us. With so much magic surrounding us, I had no idea what the outcome would be.
“Bury it!” Tiana screamed.
I wasn’t going to get another chance. I reached out to the Well and pulled magic into me. It felt like I’d stepped in front of a tidal wave. Ley energy washed through me, into the Heart, and through it into the ocean in front of me.
A whirlpool started, widened, and deepened. The boats attacking us were pulled into it. It happened so quickly that I barely had time to register what was happening. Our ship tilted and began to slip into the whirlpool also.
Hard hands clamped onto my ribs under my arms. I looked up into the face of a man morphing into a seal. A selkie. He lifted me and dove toward the railing.
“You need to get off the ship,” he said into my ear, “else everyone will die.”
We flew over the railing, through the air, and into the center of the whirlpool. I continued to pull magic from the Well, and the whirlpool grew larger.
We fell. I could see the walls of water spinning around us, and occasionally one of the white Fae ships whipped past. All I could see below us was an open tunnel without a bottom.
The magic grew stronger. It filled me to bursting, and the Heart glowed with such power that I no longer could stand to look at it.
“You are doing fine,” the selkie said, his mouth still next to my ear. “It is an honor to carry the Heart with you, to be part of your legend.”
I had always been told not to trust the Fae. One thing hadn’t changed since I was fifteen years old. I trusted far too easily.
For the first time, I admitted to myself what I’d known since we left the inn in the Cotswolds. I was a sacrifice. And I was okay with that. My last thought, as we were swallowed by the magic and I lost all feeling of the world around me, was that I hoped the Goddess would grant me a small bit of forgiveness for making William Strickland’s daughter an orphan.
Knights Magica: An Urban Fantasy (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill Book 5) Page 23
