by C. J. Anaya
Well, crap. That’s not at all what I wanted. The plan was safety in numbers.
I wrenched myself out of Jareth’s hold and cupped my hands around my mouth.
“Graul! Lily! Don’t you dare leave me alone with this overbearing faerie prince.”
But all I got as a response was Graul lifting a hand in farewell as he continued to walk away from the palace with Lily on his shoulder. Once they reached the gate they disapparated from view.
“Traitors,” I muttered under my breath.
Jareth let out a satisfied chuckle.
“Did you really think I was going to let anyone interfere with all this alone time? Graul and Lily were never going to stay while we worked on retrieving your memories.”
“What?”
He gripped my waist and pulled me against him.
“You are so easy to read. I knew exactly what you were planning.”
“I thought Graul was sworn to protect me.”
“He doesn’t need to protect you from me.”
“I disagree.”
He barked out a laugh, rubbing his hands up and down my arms.
“Let’s get inside the palace and start working in the library. I want to start by examining the spell Kheelan weaved around your mind. Then we need to see if there are any books on memory retrieval spells.”
“Will there be a chaperon with us?”
“Only if you count the book pixies.”
“I don’t.”
“Then it looks as if I’ll get to have my wicked way with you after all, Crysta.” His grin was positively sinful.
I snorted in derision.
“Don’t bet on it. You so much as make a kissy face in my direction and I’ll freeze your man bits. You won’t be able to pee for a week.”
I quickly ascended the stairs while Jareth’s howls of laughter followed me.
Arrogant arse.
I scratched behind Chuck’s ear while Jareth stood over me, whispering weird incantations while studying the magic Kheelan had locked around my memories.
Chuck had fluttered into the library smug as you please the moment we arrived. The little squirt attacked me with licks and head nudges meant to convey extreme pleasure. I’d let him know in no uncertain terms what a pain he was and how much his disappearance had worried me before snuggling him in my arms. He’d fallen asleep pretty quickly.
“This is getting us nowhere,” I said as Jareth stood over me with one hand placed against the left side of my head and the other hand drawing tingling lines along my brow with his finger.
He stepped back and rubbed a hand over his tired face. To his credit, he hadn’t done a ton of unwanted flirting in the last two hours we’d been in the library. Instead, he’d studied the spell and its construction. The longer he was unsuccessful the more determined he became, which completely distracted him from his usually flirtatious demeanor and gave me an opportunity to really watch him and form a few opinions of my own.
Opinion number one: no one should ever have the right to look as devastatingly handsome as he did. It was unfair to all women everywhere.
Opinion number two: whenever he bit his bottom lip in frustration it made him look so adorable I had to wonder how I’d ever found him frightening on any level.
Opinion number three: continued close contact with him made my body ache with need.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t an opinion. It was more of a fact. Something I never intended to admit out loud to Jareth…or myself for that matter.
Geez, I hated this guy.
I really, really hated this guy.
Pretty sure I hated this guy.
He pulled out a chair and sat in front of me, giving me a lopsided grin.
“Perhaps I’ve underestimated my brother’s magical capabilities. It would seem he’s constructed an interlocking maze spell.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not.” He leaned back in his seat, shoulders slumped, looking so dejected I had to stifle the urge to give him an encouraging caress to his face, or knee…or anywhere really. The need to touch him was starting to make my skin itch.
“Tell me what an interlocking maze spell is.”
“It’s a spell filled with red herrings, a maze of magical threads weaved together leading to false trails and dead ends.” At my confused look he tried to explain in greater detail. “Picture yourself in a maze with arrows along the walls that point you toward a specific direction. The way out of the maze makes perfect sense, until you reach another long corridor of the maze or a new thread of magic and the rules change. The arrows are directing you to go back, then left, then right, and once you finally find the way out you discover a second maze attached to the first one. You’re essentially going in circles between the two mazes. There’s only one way out, but every turn of the thread looks like the way out.”
“Sounds terrible.” And I had to learn how to cast spells like this? I wouldn’t know where to start or even how to construct something that complicated. “So why don’t you just try every way out until you find the right way out?”
“There are consequences to choosing the wrong way out. For the last two hours, I’ve been studying the lay of the land, as humans say, analyzing the construction of the spell and counting how many false leads there are.”
“And?”
“Kheelan has constructed five hundred and thirty three ways out of the maze, but only one will truly unravel the whole spell. Only one way is the way out.”
I let out a puff of breath and shook my head.
“And what happens if we experiment? Try one way out and if it doesn’t work we cross that way off the list. It will take time but we can narrow it down.”
Jareth shook his head.
“Crysta, you’re forgetting the consequences part of this spell. Choosing a false lead creates an unwanted side effect.”
I swallowed down a lump of fear.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “But I’m completely unwilling to find out. The best way to go about this is to dismantle the damn thing, but I have to find the thread of magic that started the spell and that’s going to prove very difficult since this particular spell essentially has no beginning and no end. Maze spells never do.”
I stared at him for a moment feeling completely defeated.
“Your brother is a real pain in the a—”
“How goes the memory retrieval process?” King Roderick asked as he entered the library.
“Interlocking maze spell,” Jareth spit out.
Roderick’s eyes narrowed in anger.
“Flaming hobgoblins,” he snarled.
He grabbed a chair from behind, pulled it up next to me, and sat down facing Jareth. Then he reached for my hand and squeezed it before releasing it. Chuck let out an annoyed snort in his sleep. It was weird to me how this dragon managed to follow threads of conversation conscious or otherwise.
“What do we know about the spell?” he asked Jareth.
Yeah. Hi to you too, dad.
Geez, were we ever going to talk about the fact that he was my father and not my uncle? I didn’t really feel either way about that since I couldn’t remember anything about this guy.
Or we could go into total avoidance mode. I seemed to be an expert when it came to that move.
Hmm.
Like father, like daughter.
“Two interlocking mazes with over five hundred false exits,” Jareth said in a terse voice.
Roderick’s jaw stiffened in anger.
“This is not going to be easy. We have the assembly set for two weeks from now. We’ll need to know what Insley hid within the confines of Crysta’s memory before that. I don’t know if you’ll have enough time to find the starter thread to this spell.”
“I’ll have to,” Jareth said. “The alternative is completely unacceptable.”
Meaning, giving in to Kheelan’s demands and marrying him to get rid of the maze spell wa
sn’t high on Jareth’s to-do list. I completely agreed, but I didn’t know what we were going to do if the delegation arrived and we still had no answers.
We had to speed up this process.
“Is there any way you can narrow the false exits down to the most probable exits? Can you tell which ones are most definitely red herrings and which ones are a maybe?”
Jareth thought for a moment, biting his lower lip in thought. That simple gesture made me shiver. It reminded me of the way he’d kissed me last night and how much I’d liked it.
Unwillingly liked it.
Tolerated it, mostly.
I really hated this guy.
“I could narrow it down, but what would be the point? There would still be too many false exits to sift through after that.”
“We just try them one-by-one.”
“Absolutely not,” they both yelled.
I stared at them in surprise.
“Overreact much? I just think this would go faster if we cut out the obvious false leads and then try the rest of them to see which ones work and which ones don’t.”
“What part of horrible consequences are you not understanding, Crysta? If we choose the wrong exit the spell will react defensively, possibly the same way the death trap reacted when I was trying to get rid of the binding spell.”
I looked between Roderick and Jareth waiting for an explanation, but they looked at me like I knew what they were talking about.
“Memory loss,” I said, pointing to my stupid, messed up head. “I have no idea what happened.”
“Right,” Jareth said looking frustrated. I could tell he hated to be reminded of everything I didn’t remember because it meant I didn’t remember him.
At all.
“You stopped functioning, Crysta,” King Roderick said. “The death trap attacked your core magic and nearly killed you.”
“Huh. Well that sounds un-fun.”
Jareth let out a snort and grabbed my hand pressing his lips to my knuckles.
“It was very un-fun for you to experience it and very un-fun for me to sit there and watch your face turn an unnatural shade of purple. We are not going to put you in a situation like that again.”
“I don’t have a say in this?”
“No,” Jareth and Roderick grunted.
I pulled my hand away from Jareth—far too distracting—and started thinking about other solutions to this problem while he and Roderick continued to pick apart the danger. The thought I kept circling back to seemed the most obvious.
I had magic. According to Kheelan, I had lots of magic. Was there a way for me to study the spell around my mind and possibly figure this thing out on my own?
Based on Roderick and Jareth’s reactions to some of my suggestions, I thought it better to act first and ask permission later. Most likely a stupid move, but I was all about shunning the victim role, which meant taking action was my new motto.
I glanced at Jareth and Roderick, making sure their mind-numbing discussion about the intricacies of starter threads had their full attention, and then I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the spell wrapped around my brain by visualizing it just like Kheelan had taught me.
I saw absolutely nothing.
A promising start.
Well, if I couldn’t see the spell, maybe I needed to focus on something I could see, like my own core magic. I zeroed in on the sphere within my chest and concentrated on the swirling threads of magic with their glowing colors as they circled inside my core. The energy within them coursed through my system, creating a steady thrum of resonance throughout my body that I never would have noticed before if I hadn’t been so focused on my inner…well…my inner self, maybe? I didn’t know the terminology, but I didn’t need to at this point.
I followed the threads of magic seeping from my core, making their lazy way up my chest and latching onto an element of magic that didn’t yet belong within my core.
Was that Summer magic?
How strange. I’d never assimilated that particular seasonal element that I could recall. I latched onto the waving threads and followed them as they brought me to what looked like a huge labyrinth of golden threads interwoven to make up a structure that was both intricate and beautiful.
This had to be it. This had to be the maze spell. And since Kheelan was the one to cast it, the Summer magic’s presence made much more sense. I couldn’t see the beginning or exit of the maze so I began in the middle of a thread and gave it a mental tug with my thoughts. It made a lilting musical sound, much like a violin, and then quieted after a moment.
Interesting.
I definitely wanted to find out where these threads might lead me. I placed a mental hand on the top thread and glided across, following the dips and turns of the path until I came to a beautifully carved door made out of the purest of golds. Maybe this was the starting point of the maze. Or better yet, maybe this was the end point and we could skip all the other false exits in between. I eagerly gripped the handle and pushed the door open.
Within seconds I lost my ability to focus on the spell. My eyes shot open, my hands lifted of their own volition, and blue threads of magic began seeping from my fingertips.
“Crysta, what are you doing?” Jareth asked in alarm.
“I don’t know. I’m not doing it on purpose.”
“What do you mean you’re not doing it on purpose?” King Roderick asked.
The blue threads quickly wove together creating chains of ice, the links locking into place at a frenzied pace. Chuck roused himself from sleep and flapped his wings in alarm. He quickly zipped up above my head and began chattering at me urgently.
“I don’t know what you’re saying, Chuck.”
Jareth stood at attention and grabbed my wrists, but my body resisted the movement, rebellious with a mind of its own.
“Stop, Crysta. You have to stop casting this spell.”
“I’m not casting anything,” I said. “I’m not the one doing this.”
“Then who is?” he shouted.
The chains slowly moved their way over to me, dipping and undulating like two predatory snakes. I did not have a good feeling about this.
Roderick grabbed my other wrist and wrapped a hand around one of the chains, but his strength and Jareth’s combined were no match for the force of my own magic.
For a moment the chains hovered in the air before me, and then, with the swiftness of a viper they struck out, wrapping themselves taught around my body and squeezing the breath out of me.
I grunted in pain as one of the links rubbed up against my lower rib and then I screamed when the links tightened and I felt something crack.
Had my own magic just broken my ribcage?
“Crysta,” Jareth shouted.
He and Roderick began throwing spell after spell at the chains that continued to wrap me from chin to waist. My ribs creaked and groaned at the pressure and my windpipe felt as if it was being crushed.
Chuck ripped at the chains with his talons, but the little guy didn’t have the strength necessary to rip them apart.
What was happening? Why was I attacking myself?
Burning hot pain seared my skin as one of Jareth’s spells managed to melt through the top chain above my breastbone, but the links reformed and cinched even tighter.
Spots danced before my eyes. The lack of oxygen made my thoughts fuzzy. I tried to inhale a few deep breaths, but there wasn’t any room to maneuver. After a few moments I completely blacked out.
Coming to wasn’t very fun. I knew I wasn’t dead because my ribs had never hurt so badly in all my life. I took in a deep breath just to check and see if those chains were still wrapped around me, but all I got for my efforts were jolts of fire coursing along my ribcage. I let out a pain-filled moan and tried to take a smaller breath.
“Hold on, Crysta,” Jareth said. “I’m trying to heal you as fast as possible but there was a lot of damage done to your upper body.”
It seemed like he was trying to sound
calm, but I noticed an edge of hysteria just underneath the tenor of his words.
“How the hell did this happen?” Roderick said, kneeling on my other side. “Did Moridan use Dark Magic to override control of her core?”
“I don’t know.”
Hmmm. It must have been bad then. I closed my eyes and allowed the warmth of Jareth’s magic to relax my muscles. My fingertips brushed against the soft carpet of the floor. Still in the library then. Not moving me had been a good call.
I was such an epic failure. Not only could I not control my magic, but I’d almost killed myself with it.
Who does that?
Who lets their magic have a mind of its own and nearly dies being attacked by it? Death by ice chain strangulation. How lame would it have been to have my subjects learn that I’d unintentionally committed suicide through my own ignorance?
Sheepishness and shame were seriously uncomfortable emotions.
“Why didn’t Chuck release magic from her core like he did last time?” Roderick asked.
“I think this scenario was different. Last time her magic built up pressure internally. He was able to diffuse that, even absorb it, but this magic attacked externally and turned solid. There was nothing for Chuck to absorb.”
More things from my past I couldn’t recall. Delightful.
“Okay, Crysta,” Jareth said. “That’s the last of the breaks to your body.”
He slowly pulled me into a sitting position and once I managed that he gathered me into his arms and held me tight against his chest. His embrace fierce and unyielding. Chuck managed to nuzzle his way onto my lap just underneath Jareth’s arms. He let out a strangled sigh of relief before burying his claws within the fabric of my light blue tunic.
Roderick grabbed one of my hands, bringing it to his lips and giving it a loving kiss.
“I’m very much considering placing my daughter in a cage of glass and never letting her leave it. I don’t think I can take much more of this.”
“You and me both,” Jareth said.
I ignored the comforting feel of his arms holding me and shifted a bit just to get comfortable, but he seemed to think I was trying to escape. He and Chuck almost snarled at the aborted contact and then he pulled me into his lap, which was far worse for me in the physical department. Maybe it was just best to stay put until he worked his fear for me out of his system. I rested my head against his shoulder and let him rub my back, ignoring the tiny tingles of pleasure his touch evoked.
