Magic Below Paris Complete Series Boxed Set (Books 1 - 8): Trading Into Shadow, Trading Into Darkness, Trading Close to Light, Trading By Firelight, Trading by Shroomlight, plus 3 more

by C. M. Simpson

  “Don’t you drag me into your reckless insanity!”

  Marsh curled her lip. “Huh. I didn’t. You came along all by yourself. I don’t get to drag you anywhere.”

  She caught his quickly stifled disagreement and resisted the urge to pursue it. It took her a moment to soothe the lightning, sending the shadows back to the quiet of their corners and thanking them as they went.

  She waited a little bit longer, trying to sense when they settled, even as she willed them to do so. After a few heartbeats, Roeglin dropped the dome from around them. Marsh gasped, but he smiled. “Tabia gave the all-clear. That was some display.”

  “I still haven’t found Mordan,” Marsh murmured but was interrupted by Henri.

  “Sure, worry about the kat,” he snarked. “Never mind about the two men who went after the raiders you were letting get away.”

  His comment was followed by the sound of a fist meeting flesh.

  “Ow! What was that for?” he asked, sounding hurt.

  Izmay was merciless. “As if you didn’t know.”

  “I...” He made a strangled sound of frustration, which was abruptly muffled.

  When Marsh looked toward him, she saw Izmay had pulled him into her arms and was kissing him soundly. Henri’s look of surprise had her smiling with the rest.

  “I wouldn’t be smiling if I were you.” Gustav’s voice wiped the expression from her face as surely as anything else, and Marsh turned toward it. As soon as he had her attention, the Protector Captain made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “This is nothing to be proud of.”

  Marsh followed the direction of his arm and then turned abruptly away, her stomach roiling. Roeglin wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her head into his chest. His next question was addressed to Gustav. “Did you see Mordan?”

  Marsh lifted her head and was in time to catch Gustav’s gesture toward the back of the cave. “They made the prisoners carry her.”

  Carry her? Marsh turned, pushing clear of Roeglin.

  “Where is she?” she demanded. “Is she all right?”

  Gustav caught her eye, reminding her that she hadn’t known where the kat was when she’d called the lightning. That Mordan’s remains could have been on the side of the cavern she’d obliterated with lightning.

  “But they’re not,” she whispered, trying to block the memory of the carnage she’d created.

  For a long moment, she thought Gustav wasn’t going to answer, but then he decided to be merciful. “No, they’re not.” He pointed. “She’s over there.”

  Marsh followed the direction of his finger and saw several druids crouched together. As she looked, one of them turned his head in her direction and nodded. Marsh took a quick breath and hurried toward him, only to stop as a small commotion rose from ahead of her.

  “No!”

  “You can’t!”

  “Please don’t!”

  These protests were followed by a voice laden with a weariness that stretched to the soul. “It’s okay. I deserve it.”

  Recognizing the voice, Marsh hurried forward.

  The raider who had tried to stand between his companions and the villagers was kneeling in the center of a knot of people. This time, two of the villagers faced off against Tabia and her warriors.

  “He tried to stop them,” one explained.

  “He wouldn’t have raised a hand if they hadn’t been going to kill you.”

  The two villagers defending the raider looked back at him, and he momentarily bowed his head before raising it to meet their eyes. “They are right. I don’t deser...”

  Whatever they thought of his admission, the villagers stood fast. “You don’t deserve to die either,” they told him.

  He paled and shook his head. “I deserve very much to die,” he told them. “I’m sorry.”

  Tabia lowered her bow, but the warriors around her did not. Marsh hurried to join the group just as the shield leader’s eyes turned white. “Tell me why,” she ordered, and the raider lifted his gaze to meet hers.

  “Elaine,” he replied. “My wife. She would never have forgiven me if I’d let them...” He gestured helplessly toward the villagers and their children.

  “Yet she would have been fine with you taking them from their homes to whatever fate awaits them?” Tabia demanded, and again he bowed his head, his shoulders sagging.

  When he replied his voice was riddled with emotion. “No. She was not all right with what we were doing. Just because it happened to us, she said, did not give us a right to make it happen to others. She said...” His voice caught. “She said we should try to leave, but I couldn’t take the risk. Our children...”

  Tabia was relentless. “Even so, she would never have known. You didn’t have to tell her. So why did you do it? Why didn’t they?”

  She gestured to where the other raiders had once stood and he flinched, his face paling even as he met her gaze. “Some would protect their families, no matter what it cost them or others.”

  He bowed his head, ashamed. “Elaine, she...she would never have accepted it. Theirs would have felt guilty and sad but still accepted it, but Elaine...”

  He broke off and shook his head. “You’re in my head already,” he murmured. “Why don’t you see for yourself?”

  As if that was an invitation to all, Roeglin took Marsh’s hand and walked up behind the man. He tensed when he heard them approaching and flinched when Roeglin laid a hand on his shoulder.

  Roeglin’s voice was hard when he spoke, and Marsh almost pulled out of his grasp. “Let us in.”

  After a moment of quiet, the man sighed. “Sure. Why not? The more, the merrier.”

  Bitterness laced his voice, but it was mixed with an overwhelming sense of defeat and loss. Marsh touched the edges of his consciousness and drew back. There was such sadness, such regret, that she didn’t want to see the source of it. She followed Roeglin despite that.

  His name was Arlin, and he had lived in a small enclave in the Devastation. Had. Until the day the raiders came. Unlike the caverns, there had been nothing to restrict the raiders’ attack, and nowhere for his family to run that they could not follow. They had been taken inside the span of a day and reunited two days later.

  And he had vowed not to put them in so much danger again.

  Despair crashed through him, and the raiders knew that. They knew he and Elaine worked as one, and that their children were exactly like their parents and worked in concert with them. Most of the time, anyway.

  And now he might have condemned them all. He curled over his knees, trying to suppress the sob that wanted to claw its way out of his chest. He had failed them all.

  How? Tabia wanted to know.

  Because they will kill my family because of what I have done.

  But they do not know.

  They will...There is always a force that travels ahead.

  Marsh pulled herself out of Roeglin’s grip and the raider’s head. Across the cavern, Mordan growled. The druids around her scattered, giving her the space she needed to roll to her feet and gather herself.

  Dan!

  I come. This hunt is mine! The kat was utterly sure of that, her mind voice adamant.

  Marsh wasn’t about to let her take action on her own. They are mine too.

  Memories of another raider rose unbidden. My wife and kids get to live even if I don’t.

  Her vision blurred, but not enough that she couldn’t see the path ahead.

  “Leclerc!” Gustav’s voice rang out as Mordan joined her and they broke into a run.

  “He lives!” she shouted back, bolting for the cavern entrance. It was as much of an order as she dared to give.

  Gustav groaned, but she was past him and not slowing down, even though she needed to scan the cavern ahead. Roeglin bounced into her head.

  How much do you like being on latrine duty? he asked but didn’t wait for an answer. Because I don’t think you’re ever getting a night off.

  Not his soldier, Marsh snarled bac
k and heard Mordan give a real-life echo.

  Fine. Then the Shadow Master will no doubt have something to say about this too.

  Marsh did her best to give him the impression of a mental shrug, and he replied with a mental slap upside the head. If you’re going to go charging into danger, at least pay attention to the danger you’re running into.

  For a moment, she wanted to ask him if he was coming after her, but then she caught a glimpse of what he was doing. “Merde.”

  I’m coming. He couldn’t, not until he convinced the raider to accept their mercy, and Tabia to grant it.

  “What’s the point? My wife and children are dead.”

  “Not yet, they’re not,” Roeglin told him. “Marsh is going after the advance party. Did you have a mind mage with you?”

  The man shook his head. “No.”

  “So if she catches them, no one will know what you tried to do?”

  “No, but they’ll find out. They always do.”

  “How?” That brought Arlin up short, and Roeglin pushed him on it. “How?”

  The man’s face cleared. “Oh.” Marsh saw the brief flicker of hope Roeglin caught flit through his head. “Can she really catch them?”

  Mordan had been following the conversation through the link between them, but she had also been tracking the cavern ahead using what Marsh was fielding with her scans. She pulled Marsh back into the present.

  The prey is close.

  The prey was indeed close. Marsh saw that as soon as she turned away from Roeglin’s mind and paid attention to her own. From what the shadows showed her and the life signs reflected, the advance group had heard her footsteps coming after them as she ran down the tunnel.

  They had slowed their pace but didn’t look as if they suspected she was not one of their own. Some looked back, dropping into a jog, but they didn’t stop. Marsh looked for gates. She had already stepped out of one she’d seen only through the shadows. Perhaps she could do that again.

  I’ll meet you there, Roeglin told her and was joined by Izmay’s declaration of agreement.

  Merde, she thought, wondering where the shadow guard had learned the skill so fast. Knowing he and Izmay were watching, even if she couldn’t work out how, she chose a distinctive patch of shadow.

  We learned by watching you, Roeglin told her and Marsh frowned.

  Since when had she given him permission to share?

  Focus.

  As if she needed to be told. But Mordan’s roar from the far edge of the trail suggested that she’d needed it very much. Marsh threw herself into a roll that carried her forward and under the flight of several crossbow bolts. The raiders had finally realized she wasn’t one of their own.

  It was too late to try shadow stepping. They’d already turned back.

  “Merde,” she shouted, and her curse was greeted with amusement.

  Well, at least she’d made them laugh...and she’d succeeded in distracting them from the kat long enough for Dan to change her position. Now to distract them some more. She was relieved to find she was no longer alone.

  Izmay and Roeglin charged from the piece of shadow she’d chosen, dragging Henri and Jakob with them. They led with spears, skewering a raider apiece as the men turned to face them. Mordan used the raiders’ distraction to take down one on the closest edge and Marsh came to her feet.

  She pulled a sword from the shadow and drove it forward in one fluid movement, killing the raider in front of her. Leaving the blade to dissipate in his chest, she drew another from the dark, keeping her hand and arm moving so that the sword materialized into solidity in time to finish the stroke she’d traced through the air.

  The raider blocked the strike, but he couldn’t block an attack coming in from behind, and Roeglin’s aim was deadly. With the numbers even, the battle was short-lived. Izmay nudged one with the toe of her boot.

  “What do we do with these?”

  “We search them,” Marsh said, trying to ignore the way her hands were shaking.

  The others stared at her.

  “For clues,” she explained. “One of them has to be carrying something that will show us where they came from. We are going to find them, and we are going to burn them to the ground.”

  She felt Roeglin’s shock even before she caught the look on his face. “What?”

  “That. I’ve never heard you sound so angry,” he answered.

  “Or so bloodthirsty,” Jakob added and Roeglin scowled at him.

  He backed up, raising his hands. “What? She does. Ever since the kids—”

  “Merde.” Marsh was on her feet, all thought of clues and origins and vengeance forgotten. She whirled and ran back down the tunnel.

  Roeglin’s horrified, “Sons of the Deep!” followed her, but she didn’t stop, and she didn’t slow.

  17

  Some You Win, and Some

  Behind her, Marsh was sure she could hear Roeglin shouting. Or maybe that was because she could hear his voice in her head, as well. She ignored him, bouncing through one patch of shadow and into the space she’d appeared from to attack the first set of raiders.

  “Leclerc!” Gustav shouted, slapping down a hastily raised crossbow. “Slow your ass down!”

  Well, at least he wasn’t trying to stop her, which was more than she could say for Roeglin. He was shouting to every mind mage in range. One of them tried to grab her as she went past, but she ducked under his arm and then stepped through another piece of shadow, hoping she’d directed her next step correctly.

  It was a relief when she appeared under the stand of brevilars where she’d hidden to heal herself. She kept moving, though.

  Aisha!

  Not waiting for a reply, she ran for the ruins, wishing she remembered the shadows there well enough to step straight through.

  Cave. Mordan’s reminder was accompanied by an image of the tunnel under the burnt-out barn.

  Yes. As fast as thought, Marsh stepped into the next piece of shadow, willing the magic to take her to the tunnel. Mordan chose a different shadow patch, but they both emerged at the same place...as did Roeglin, Izmay, and the others.

  Gustav was not impressed. Marsh could feel the anger boiling off him even though he didn’t say a word. She ignored the urge to apologize and ran for the ladder. Why in all the Deeps she hadn’t been able to think of somewhere above ground, she didn’t know.

  She climbed as fast as she could just as Mordan vanished into another piece of shadow and Roeglin led the others after her. Smartasses!

  Quit your complaining, Roeglin answered, reaching down to haul her up the last few rungs. The kids are okay.

  They’re here?

  No, the raiders have them. They took Brigitte and Zeb and Gerry too.

  Marsh’s heart plummeted, and she almost missed his next words. Mordan is already on their trail. Mina has sent the pride ahead.

  The pride? It took Marsh a moment to remember the shroom kats that had saved her and the team on their way after the first body of raiders, and then she shoved all thought of that away. The kids might be fine now, but the raiders had already shown they’d kill their prisoners to make an example.

  Not gonna happen, Roeglin told her, but Marsh ignored him.

  Dan! she called, pushing past him. Show me where!

  The kat obliged and Marsh twisted out of Roeglin’s grasp to slide into the closest piece of shadow...or she tried to. The damn man didn’t let go. I’m coming too.

  She shook his arm free as they emerged in the middle of a clump of brown noses, the knee-high brown fungi shattering as they landed.

  Very funny, kat.

  Mordan gave her a look and twitched her tail. The landing place had not been deliberate, and the kat had other things to think about.

  Marsh caught her mood and half-crouched as she ran to join her. Her heart caught when she saw what the kat was stalking. The prey has laid a trap.

  The kat twitched her tail again, laying her ears flat against her skull.

  Where? Mar
sh asked just as Gustav and the others came through the brown noses behind them. The stench of crushed fungi reached her, and she covered her mouth and nose. With that much damage, they’d probably released spores into the air, and she knew what that could do.

  Only when they’re mixed with ground blue buttons and flame shroom, Roeglin told her. Have you found them yet?

  Found them? Marsh wondered, and he gave an exasperated sigh. Oh.

  She’d been so busy staring at where the shadow mages and the children were tied in the middle of the path that she’d forgotten to look for the other lives in the cavern. The kat had brought them out a little ahead on the trail, and that had bought them some time.

  Where was Mina’s pride?

  Coming.

  Marsh didn’t think they were going to come quickly enough. She watched as the raiders began looking around, and almost jumped out of her skin when Gustav laid a heavy hand on her shoulder.

  “Show me,” he growled, his breath warm against her ear. It took her a moment to understand.

  When she did, she closed her eyes, focusing on collecting the information he wanted from the shadow threads and the gleam of the life force within the cavern.

  “Well shag the shadows and shard the shrooms,” he murmured. “This is a goat-sucking mess.”

  At least he didn’t say it was a goat-sucking mess she’d gotten them into.

  Of course, Roeglin relayed it and Gustav replied. “No, Leclerc. This goat-sucking mess is all mine.”

  Marsh couldn’t help it. She peeked into his head to find the meaning and found he blamed himself for the shadow mages and children’s capture. “Not your fault.”

  He grunted. Roeglin, pass this out. We can’t wait.

  Roeglin did as he asked, giving them all the plan Marsh could see forming in his mind. She didn’t need to hear Henri’s muttered, “That’s insane,” or Izmay’s soft whistle to know Gustav’s plan was pure crazy.

  “Roeglin, call Tabia. Tell her we’re gonna need some help.”

  Well, there was an understatement. But Gustav wasn’t privy to her thoughts, and he wouldn’t have cared anyway. He knew what he was doing, and this particular piece of insanity was the only chance they had of getting Brigitte and the kids out of there alive.