Algardis Series Boxed Set

by Terah Edun

  Mae thought the woman was crazy but still she had to ask.

  “Why in the world would they do that?” Mae asked.

  Donna Marie gave her a brittle smile. “I have no idea but I intend to break those barriers down and find out exactly why myself.”

  Mae’s heart flipped as she thought about it. This woman had the power to unlock her gift and not just hers but half of the Darnes clan.

  Why wouldn’t she help her if it meant becoming something Mae had always dreamed of being.

  She had the chance to become a mage and as Mae looked around the forest scene and thought of everything she had gone through in pursuit of a cure for her siblings, she knew that this one step was something she wouldn’t hesitate to do.

  It was time to get her own magic and be the savior for once.

  ~*~*~*

  Liked the book? Keep reading Mages By Fortune: Algardis #2 and Mages By Assembly: Algardis #3! Review the individual copy of Mages By Chance here.

  Mages By Fortune Summary

  In this second book in the Algardis series, Mae is left with few choices about who to trust now that darkness within her own family has been uncovered. With children dying, Mae realizes that she must do the unthinkable in order to save them all.

  After uncovering a plot to use the wasting illness to activate their own mage powers, Maeryn Darnes doesn’t trust anyone. That’s a good thing as her own family is after her now.

  With her blood plotting against her, Mae must turn to the outsiders for aid. In secret, she works with them to strike the symbol of her family’s heritage from her neck—the famed tattooed collar.

  But undoing the magic of generations takes work. Maeryn Darnes is forced to enter into alliances with wandering mages and unscrupulous mercenaries to get the power she needs to active a ritual darker than anything she dreamed.

  As she makes a pact with the unknown, Mae has to wonder—had she made a deal with an even greater evil than the one that lurks in her own family’s home?

  1

  It wasn’t every day that someone walked up to Maeryn Darnes and told her that they could change not only her life but her entire family’s. Today was that day and it felt like all of the emotions she had building up inside of her because of it would force her to burst.

  Frustration at being forced to make a choice.

  Temptation at the possibilities being dangled in front of her, not just for herself but for others.

  Fear…because she couldn’t take back the agreement once made.

  Mae wasn’t stupid. There was a lot that the foreign woman wasn’t telling her. There was a gleam of anticipation in Donna Marie’s eyes that Mae didn’t understand and made her wary to the core. But the hope she held out in its place was almost too much to bear.

  Mae swiped her tongue over her suddenly dry lips and opened her mouth to speak.

  “I…” Mae croaked out.

  She intended to say ‘I agree’ but the words stuck in her mouth like she had a piece of fruit lodged in her throat. She couldn’t get the words out and for a moment, in panic she couldn’t even breathe. It was as if all her normal bodily functions stopped working and she was left just trying to resume speaking, drawing in air, and smiling, all of which usually came as second nature to her so it was disturbing to be without.

  As for Donna Marie, she looked at Mae with impatience growing on her face. As she looked down on the less tall Mae, for a moment her face transformed. Not physically but almost imperceptibly, as Mae saw something else in that moment. The tight smile on her lips didn’t reach her eyes. Instead of a welcoming warmth to a new sister in arms, all Mae saw was a woman so stressed, her right eye bloodshot and Mae was fairly sure, if she looked at her hands, she’d see claw marks from her own nails. Still if Donna Marie wouldn’t allude to it, who was Mae to intervene? Still it couldn’t be healthy and maybe that would be the key to Mae finally getting the upper hand in this rather all-around strange week. It was as if the persona that the foreign woman put on for the public was a mask and if Mae waited just a minute longer the entire façade would crack into a hundred pieces to reveal the truth underneath.

  So wait she would.

  “I, I just need more time to think it through,” Mae stammered, looking for an excuse for why her mind froze when her heart was telling her to go ahead with the best option she had.

  Realistically, it was the only option she had.

  Donna Marie glanced up at the sky with an exaggerated look of boredom.

  “If we’re going to do this now would be the time,” the foreign woman said in a sarcastic voice.

  Easy for you to say you’re getting exactly what you want, Mae thought caustically.

  Meanwhile Mae was limited by her current circumstances, the fact that the children of the greater holding were violently ill, and let’s be honest, some of her own relatives might be out to kill her even as she stood here deliberating.

  It was a lot to think about at the moment. She’d gain an ally by giving the foreign woman what she wanted, for however little time this played out and more importantly, Mae would gain something for herself in the process. Magic.

  A weapon which she could use both to attack and protect. It would be hers to command as she willed, just as one of her many cousins had used his wind magic to try to knock her off a ledge so steep that she almost plummeted to her death on it.

  That was supposition. We don’t know he meant to kill us. Maybe he would have captured us and brought our hovering bodies back through the window, she thought to herself stubbornly trying to think the best of the events that had proceeded her being here.

  But even she wasn’t that naïve. The force of his power had been deliberate and had quite the chance of being fatal if she and Ember hadn’t spied a balcony to dive down into at the last minute.

  Which left more questions than answers for Mae. Who were these mysteriously murderous relatives? What was it that they had been doing to her siblings? And what would they do once Richard told them just who it was they’d caught spying from the second floor?

  In fact they could be torturing him for important information right now! Mae thought horrified at the prospect.

  She didn’t know Richard that well. He was one of the dozens of younger generation cousins that roamed the halls of the Darnes greater holding. She saw him in passing at the breakfast at dawn’s day, and again at noon’s meal before the ‘children’ were separated from the ‘young adults’ of marriageable age for the last meal heading into the night. He didn’t share any of her studies and their parents weren’t that close. So she couldn’t say that he would keep their secrets or even try to. So instead she wondered just what he had said and what the cloaked figures would do with that information.

  Hunt me down like a deer to kill? Or bring me before the elders like a recalcitrant child? Mae wondered in her head.

  She was fairly sure which of those options would leave her alive for another day but neither were ones she could say she preferred.

  The thought of it all made Mae’s stomach knot in turmoil and that was just one of the aspects that she had to be careful of before making her call. The others? Were both better or worse than anything else she’d ever been faced with before.

  Mae bit her lip in indecision. She wasn’t going to rush into this. She just wished she had someone with whom to discuss it over. Someone she trusted. But she was alone in this and the choice was hers to decide. Which made it even worse not better. Because make no mistake, if she did this, if she went through with what the foreign woman wanted…there would be repercussions.

  Mae took a deep breath as she thought about it. Thought about what Donna Marie was asking, which on the surface wasn’t much, and if you stirred the pot…was everything.

  Mae didn’t want to be one of those foolish people who leaped before they looked, but from the female mage’s own words…this was as much of a fishing expedition for her as it was a learning process for Mae.

  “But to do this is a big leap,”
Mae whispered to herself as she clutched her right elbow and tried to think it through.

  It remained to be seen why her family, her elders even, had locked away the gifts, supposing they actually were there in the first place. What made the power of women and girls so undesirable that they were outright forbidden? Nothing justified it in Mae’s head and even just thinking about what had been done to her when she was very young had Mae simmering in rage. It was all she had wanted as a child, to be special, to be unique and to think that these gifts were hers to claim all along but because of a decision made long before she was born, they had been cut off? She couldn’t fathom the reasoning and she didn’t think those who had made the decision long ago could understand her pain.

  Not that she could ask them.

  The methodical placement of the tattoos along her collarbone had been decided generations ago and was something her sister, her stepmother, her grandmother, and even her great-aunt had gone through. As far as Mae knew, it was something generations of the women in her family had been subjected to.

  She had never learned why.

  Heck, she had never asked why.

  It just was.

  Only brief memories of the process from her childhood flashed in her mind at any time. She remembered being in a room filled with light and female faces surrounding her on all sides. They bent down over her body with rings of light about their heads like halos and she looked up at them in confusion from where she lay flat on her back with something cold and hard underneath her.

  She’d been five.

  Or four. She couldn’t precisely remember what age it’d been done at just like she didn’t remember the words they’d said…just flashes of movements and all those faces. It seemed all the women of her clan old enough to marry had been present. And from what Ember had told her the one time she’d opened up about it with her sister, she too had had the same experience. Although Ember remembered more than her…suggesting that perhaps that she had been older than Mae when it happened?

  Ember had talked about smells which Mae couldn’t remember.

  Scents of sandalwood, a rare and costly aroma that Mae had only smelled once…when she’d been taken to one of the city-states with her father for trade. The idea of it being present here, so far into the rural shadows of the Nardes kingdom was preposterous. One thimble was worth more than an entire season’s production of vegetables.

  Which left the question of how Ember had encountered it when she was so young and how her family could have afforded them to splash about a perfume so costly that a child remembered its scent more than a decade later. It was things like that which Mae dreamed about knowing. But she didn’t have anyone who was willing to answer her questions and was able to. There was only so much Ember remembered that was different her own recollections and often if pressed too hard she closed down anyway. It taken her years to realized that was Ember’s defensive mechanism. Only being vocal when she knew absolutely everything there was to know about the subject at hand. As an eight-year-old being snapped at by her older sister though, Mae had simple taken offense and endeavored to not speak or do her mean sister any favors for the foreseeable future. Which had lasted all of a few weeks until there was something else Mae wanted and only Ember could provide.

  But now all I want is answers, so many mysteries in a family that I thought I knew like the back of my hand, Mae thought as her eyes drifted over to Ember’s still form.

  As her memory was triggered, Mae struggled to remember if she had ever gone back to press Ember after she’d shut down. To insist they talk about that strange fateful day that they both had shared…if only because their recollections were so similar. But she never had. Because the look in Ember’s eyes when she had first brought it up was one Mae recognized all too well, it was one that was haunted.

  Funnily enough, except for this almost disturbing episode Mae had thought her childhood was idyllic. Oh, they had their struggles. With so many bodies and babies to feed in the family, they had to stretch their food to feed everyone. That meant weeks without meat as the hunters drifted further out to find something that would stretch for them all or when they did find a few hares or even a deer, it was chopped into thick finger-length bits to put into a pot of stew for everyone to partake. But no one died of starvation and everyone who was family was blood. They stood by one another. The secret that sat at the heart of them was simply unspoken of.

  But then the children started dying again. In large numbers and what had once been a generational curse now seemed never-ending. Nerves were frayed and boundaries broken. Not the least of which was her own. It was how she’d started doing research into the cure in the first place and ended up breaking into her grandmother’s private sanctum to retrieve the grimoire.

  Even just thinking of the tome that she’d risk so much for made Mae flinch.

  It was gone…in the hands of people she’d rather it not be and what was worse, they’d destroyed it with fire. She hadn’t seen what they’d done with the incantation on the ripped off page itself because by that point she’d been running for her life. But Mae couldn’t imagine the group of mad cloaked individuals had done much good with it.

  Without that page Mae had to wonder if they could even do what needed to be done. Which meant she had to get it back. But first things first, she had to get out of her latest scrape in one piece. So she stood up and looked around the clearing with a firm face. It was the same as it had been before. The air was a little stiller. The gloom about them all a little heavier. But it was still her, three strangers, and her sister, at once all alone in the forest and together. These strangers had clearly kidnapped them but they’d also saved them from a deathly fate. So Mae stood on the cusp of a choice, to trust them, to work with them and in the process, make a deal that would shake the very foundation of her family’s core. But also save the ones who needed help the most, the children.

  It wasn’t as hard a call to make as she would have thought.

  Mostly because she was on the black list for a large grouping of her closest relatives at the moment and the idea of coming to them with her idea for help was worse than foolish, it could spell the death warrants of not just the children, but herself and Ember.

  For knowing too much in a time it would seem that it was best to know nothing at all.

  Decided she nodded to herself, turned back and stepped forward. As she did a chill wind blew into the clearing and directly at her leaving her cold all over. If she was at all superstitious, Mae would have thought that a ghost had walked over her grave at that moment for a warning.

  But she wasn’t.

  Instead she put on as much charm as she could and directed a compelling gaze to the woman who held her future in her hands.

  Hers and her entire family’s it seemed.

  Mae just desperately hope that her faith in the foreigner wasn’t misplaced…for all their sakes.

  2

  “Have you made up your mind?” Donna Marie asked in a commanding tone.

  “I have,” Mae replied warily.

  Donna Marie raised her eyebrows and looked at her. She wasn’t going to ask a second time.

  A brief smile flashed over Mae’s face. The foreign woman’s imperious nature sometimes reminded her of Ember…in her most annoying forms.

  “Alright, what’s next?” Mae asked with a heavy sigh. She was going in, whether she liked it or not.

  Donna Marie’s eyes brightened as she smiled.

  She didn’t waste any time in replying.

  “Now, I take a look at what makes you and other females like you, so very special,” Donna Marie said in an encouraging voice. “Once my study is done, I can aid you in invoking that incantation you’re so desperate to see succeed.”

  Mae’s voice stiffened as she said, “It will succeed.”

  It has to, she said to herself.

  Donna Marie shrugged, “It will or it won’t. But you’re on a strict timetable from what I gather and I…am not. So it’d be in your bes
t interest to cooperate promptly.”

  “I already said I would!” Mae snapped, bristling. She didn’t like being threatened.

  “How long will this take anyway?” Mae said as the woman just watched her. Figuring she could move this along Mae started to unlace her front and prepared to be examined.

  “A few hours at minimum,” the foreign woman said in a casual voice as she inched forward with predatory eyes.

  Mae paused the moment those words uttered from Donna Marie’s mouth.

  “Hours?” she said with a shocked gasp. “We don’t have that.”

  “This isn’t just some etching I’m going to do on your chest girl,” Donna Marie replied quickly. “I need to not only to use my gifts to study your inked collar but I need to do it with your aid.”

  “Why?” Mae said uncomfortable.

  “Why what?” Donna Marie asked with irritation.

  Mae stopped fiddling with the buttons that held her vested overcoat tight at her waist and stared at the foreign woman.

  “Why do you need my help?” Mae said in a voice that was unshakeable. “You’re just studying them right?”

  “Well…” Donna Marie started to say in an uncomfortable voice.

  Mae squinted at her and looked over at Rivan to see if he had anything to say about this. But his gaze was narrowly focused off in the distance and unreadable in any case. As for Dot, he was looking directly at her with what Mae could only characterize as an avaricious look that immediately made her cringe.

  “Just look at it and get on with it,” Mae complained.

  Donna Marie flapped her hand as if to wish away any tension in the air and prompt her to move on.

  “It’s a little bit more than a look,” Donna Marie said in a weaselly tone. “But I promise it won’t hurt.”

  That wasn’t what Mae had in mind, but she was already in this hip-deep. Donna Marie was the only unlocked female mage she knew of in the kingdom, and pretty much the only person willing to buck her family’s traditions and work with Mae on a subversive cue to her siblings’ ailments.