Bound Sorcery: A Shadows of Magic Book Read online

  “Then don’t let it happen!” Daiman waved his hands.

  “It’s not that easy!”

  “What, your power just runs away from you?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know!” I pounded my fist on the ground in frustration. “Don’t you see, I don’t have the first clue what turned me into a psychopath in the first place. Maybe it was my magic! Maybe it’s something buried deep down in those memories. Who the hell knows what we’ll set loose if we undo those spells?”

  He said nothing. He was staring at me with a funny look on his face.

  “Don’t you get it?” I whispered. “The world’s better off without Nicola Beaumont. I don’t want to be Nicola Beaumont. I don’t want to be trained again, I don’t want to remember her life. And if … if it means I have to give up my power and my memories, that’s such a small price. Maybe I’m still alive, but she’s dead, and I want it to stay that way.”

  Through a blur of tears, I thought I saw Daiman’s face soften. He came to pull me up.

  “Eshe,” he said quietly.

  “What?” I wiped at my eyes. I didn’t know an awful lot about myself, but I hated crying in front of him.

  “We should go find her. You mentioned training—well, she trained you, once.”

  My head jerked up, and I opened my mouth to argue.

  “And then,” Daiman said patiently, “she refused to join any of the three factions and has been living in isolation since, doing God knows what. But she’s well over five thousand years old if the myths are correct, she never agreed with what you did way back when, and she didn’t think much of Terric. If anyone can help us … it’s her.”

  My shoulders slumped.

  “Just take me back,” I said quietly. “It’ll be easier than—”

  “Eshe will know what to do,” Daiman said seriously. “Nicky … what’s been done to you is breaking down. You know who you are now, the veils won’t hold forever. Maggie’s block won’t hold forever. If you’re afraid of what’s going to happen when your power gets unleashed, we need someone who knows more about magic than either of us, and who isn’t in Terric’s pocket … or a Monarchist. That’s Eshe.”

  “And you’re sure she wasn’t part of my plan before?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Very sure,” Daiman said confidently. “She wrote some scathing letters about it. They’re in the Acadamh libraries. I’ll show you someday … well, if there’s still an Acadamh to go back to at the end of this.” His voice was tight.

  “If Philip did kill Terric,” I began. I paused, not sure how to go on.

  “The Coimeail are some of the most powerful sorcerers in the world,” Daiman said bluntly. “They’ll protect the students. I’m next to useless there, but I’m not here. I can help, here. So let’s go.” He set off without waiting for a response.

  “Where are we going?” I called after him. “Daiman?”

  There was no answer, and finally I decided to follow him, muttering about stubborn druids who thought they knew everything.

  But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a tiny spark of hope kindled in my chest now. Eshe was over five thousand years old, and had trained me, and might well know more about magic than anyone alive—as well as knowing about my magic. Eshe might be able to do what everyone else claimed couldn’t be done. Eshe might be able to cure me of what made me, me.

  17

  Where Eshe was, it turned out, was … somewhere in the Mediterranean. Daiman said this with a sort of shrug, as if this were good enough information.

  “It’s a really big coast,” I called, scrambling over boulders behind him.

  “Not on the coast,” he called back.

  “What? Wait. Like in? Like, floating bubble palace?” Frankly, nothing would surprise me at this point.

  “No. An island.” He considered. “Although a floating bubble palace would be really cool.”

  “Right. And you have … no idea which island? Should we maybe get a map or something?”

  “It’s not on any maps,” he explained. He tipped his head back into the sunlight and took a deep breath of the fresh air.

  The wind being what it was, this offered a lovely view of his abs, but after a moment’s distraction, I remembered that I still had questions. I tore my gaze away and tried to reset my brain.

  “How do you hide an island? The Mediterranean is full of boats.”

  “Same way you hide anything.” Daiman looked at me. “One part encouraging people to go other places, one part hiding them someplace like this.” He gestured at the ambiguously-real forest around us.

  “Wait, so she put an island from the real Mediterranean—don’t give me that talk on what ‘real’ means again, you know what I’m talking about—and put it in another dimension?”

  Daiman considered this. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Close enough.” He considered for another moment. “I’ve wondered for a while if she knows some druid magic.”

  “Druids go that far back?”

  “She could have learned it at any point,” he pointed out. “And yes. Druid is … an inexact term. Just think of it as anyone who has powers that aren’t innate. Almost every society has had magical traditions—real and fake. There were a few druids in Rome who were absolutely convinced their power came from the Gods.” He shrugged.

  “How do you know it didn’t?” I gave a serene smile when he looked over at me, annoyed. “There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio….”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He caught up with me. “Anyway, however she got it done, she did it. So the trick is finding it … and then not having her kill us immediately after we arrive.”

  “This is sounding like a better idea all the time, let me tell you.”

  He ignored that. Another breeze ruffled the tops of the trees as we emerged into a small clearing. I could see the tramped-down circles where deer had slept the night before, and a flock of birds was startled into flight with a flutter of wings. I watched them swirl into the sky.

  It was difficult to stay mad after seeing something like that.

  “I get that she’s kind of our only choice,” I said finally, “but why would you think she would be willing to talk to me? You said she hated what I did.”

  “She hated what Terric did, too,” Daiman pointed out. “And this time you’re not coming to her, asking for her to be an ally in some political campaign. You’re coming to her, asking for help for yourself. She could take that much better. Anyway,” he added, “she knows how to stay out of everything, and that might be useful to know.”

  It was difficult to argue with that.

  The next moment, he stopped me with an arm across my chest. His touch made my breath come short, but his attention was focused ahead, on the forest floor, where a rabbit was nibbling at clover.

  “Oh, I don’t want to do this.” Daiman had explained on the morning’s walk that he would teach me to hunt for some of our food. The idea had seemed worrisome at the time, and seemed even more so now, when confronted by the animal, itself. “Can’t you be the kind of hippie that just eats berries?”

  He gave me a look. “No,” he explained patiently. “And if you want to keep eating meat, you’ll have to learn to do these sorts of things. Now, go. Start with the greeting.”

  With a grimace, I edged forward.

  “Hello,” I said awkwardly to the rabbit.

  “A greeting from inside you,” Daiman said quietly.

  “I don’t know what that means.” I shook my head and knelt down. I waited for the rabbit to look up at me, and I met its eyes. I’m here to ask you to die for me.

  I didn’t say the words, but it froze, staring up at me with its nose twitching.

  “Now invite it in,” Daiman said quietly from behind me. “You have to know it, in order to take its life with honor.”

  I let its black eyes stare into mine, and in a flash I saw sunlight and sky, a warren in the deep grass nearby, a mate and young rabbits learning to venture out on their own. I knew the world
in cycles of light and dark, the beat of a predator’s wings, the scent of clover and grass, and I found myself weeping. It was alive, its mind inside my own, and I didn’t want to kill it now. I could go hungry today.

  But when it shared its life with me, I had shared mine with it. It felt my hunger, and it understood. That was the way of things in its world. Predators ate, the same way the rabbit did. It was glad to know me first. It hopped up to my hand, and I felt a touch of apprehension. It wondered what dying felt like.

  I had struck a bargain without realizing it, and now I wanted the rabbit’s passing to be peaceful and quiet. I wanted it not to feel fear. I looked into its eyes and tried to give it calm, to ease the passing of its spirit out of this world.

  The pain was sudden and shocking. Ice stabbed out from my heart and the world disappeared into darkness. I was in a new world, one made only of pain, and I had never understood how much pain there could be. Every part of me hurt. I rebelled against the knives of pure cold that were twisting in my veins, but they did not stop, did not stop, would not stop….

  I came to in darkness, shivering. My face was far too warm, and the rest of me was cold.

  “Oh, thank God.” Daiman was at my side as soon as I opened my eyes. “Can you sit up? Are you okay?”

  “I … think so.” I tried to sit up, and found myself enfolded in his arms and rocked back and forth. For a moment there was only the scent of him, and the desperate fear that clung to him like a cloak. His body was warm, and his chest shook slightly.

  I relaxed into him not a moment before he pulled away. He cleared his throat.

  “Maggie,” I guessed.

  “Yes. I should have … yes.” He nodded.

  “She said I wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone,” I recalled. “I thought she just meant magic.”

  “She did mean magic.” He shook his head. “You started the hunt the way a druid would, the way many humans have, but you tried to finish it as a sorcerer.”

  “No, I didn’t! I just tried to….” I hunched my shoulders. “I don’t know. I just didn’t want it to be scared.”

  “That was death magic,” he told me gently. He saw me recoil. “It’s not—Nicky, it wasn’t wrong. The life was offered. All you tried to do was ease its passing.”

  “You keep making excuses for me.” I looked up at him in horror. “You tell me I’m a different person now, but I just tried to kill something with my magic.” I realized something and the breath went out of me. “Oh, my God. The sleeping—at the Acadamh. That was me.”

  “What? But your magic—”

  “She said she wanted to block me from hurting people,” I said bluntly. “But since I wasn’t trying to hurt them, I just wanted them to sleep … it must have worked. Oh, my God.” I sank my face into my hands.

  “It’s all right,” Daiman said quietly. His hand came down gently on my shoulder. “Nicky—”

  “It’s not all right.” I shrugged his hand off with a jerk of my arm and shoved myself backward, eyes blazing. I was glad when he sat back. “I do this without even thinking. I make people sleep, I make people die—just because I want them to. That’s not normal. It’s not right. I’m dangerous.”

  He was blindsided by that, but only for a moment. “That’s why you need to learn to control your power.”

  “No! It’s why I need not to have power. What kind of world is it where someone can just wish for another person to be dead, and have them die, as easy as that? What if I’d tried to hurt you? What if I’d tried to hurt one of the kids in the Acadamh, just because they were mean to me?” My voice was rising. “I can’t do this, Daiman.”

  “Hey. Hey.” He was holding my arms. “It’s not that easy. Not even for you.”

  “What?”

  “Sleep … sleep is natural. You wished it upon people at night, when their bodies were already telling them to sleep. You wished a peaceful death on a creature that had already decided to give you its life. Those are very different things than just killing someone on a whim.” He looked down. “You do perform magic more naturally than almost anyone I’ve ever seen,” he admitted quietly. His eyes met mine again, worried. “Both sorcerers and druids usually use rituals. It’s not something the magic needs, it’s just the way we focus our minds. We need to do it to channel the magic appropriately. Over time, you become less dependent on the ritual, itself … and for you, it seems almost innate. But that doesn’t mean you’ll ever just take a life without really meaning to.”

  “You shouldn’t promise for other people,” I told him again, quietly. He’d promised that Terric wouldn’t hurt me, and now he was promising that I wouldn’t hurt anyone else.

  “I’m not a naïve idiot,” he told me flatly. He stood up and walked back to his side of the fire. “Five hundred years isn’t young. I’ve seen evil, I’ve dealt with evil.”

  I hunched my shoulders. “Yeah, well, you never dealt with me. Even most mass-murderers don’t go for that many people.” I sank my head into my hands. “Fuck. I don’t even know why I did it. That’s the part I can’t get over. I think, why would anyone do that? And my mind tries to move on because it doesn’t know, but it was me. Why did I do it?”

  Daiman said nothing.

  “I’m actually asking.” I looked over at him. “Do you know?”

  “Uh.” He cleared his throat. “As I understand it? You had some means to enslave people, but you could … only enslave so many. So you decided to kill most of them and then work with the rest.”

  “Really? I don’t know how I was planning to—” I shook my head. “That wasn’t really what I meant by the question. You know what, never mind.” I sank my head into my hands again.

  I heard the rustle of footsteps and an arm looped itself tentatively around my shoulders. I hesitated for a moment, but gave in and leaned my head on his shoulder. This felt comfortable, and after the whirlwind of the past few days, I wasn’t strong enough to resist that.

  “You keep talking about who you really are,” Daiman said. “Like you think your real self is in your magic or your memories. But you’re actually a person, too. You can make choices. And … right now, we don’t even know what your magic is. All I heard was that Nicola Beaumont made a plague and killed people, but I didn’t know she could make them sleep. And you know you did those things in the 1340s, but it’s been a long time since the 1340s. You’ve got a lot of memories in there.”

  I turned my head slightly, not quite ready to meet his eyes, but wanting to hear more.

  “I guess what I’m saying is, you’re more than you were then. That’s just getting older, right?” His voice took on a teasing tone. “You’re aging well, though.”

  I elbowed him in the side, laughing despite myself. “You never mention a lady’s age, Bradach!”

  He was still laughing, and I pulled away to shove him. I couldn’t seem to stop laughing, though. His laughter was infectious. After running, fearing, being a prisoner, being confronted by my past … it felt good to smile. It felt good to acknowledge just how ridiculous it was to ask some random person why I’d decided to kill most of the world, because it really was ridiculous trying to piece together something that big. It was beyond ridiculous, really.

  And then he sat up, and his face was very close all of a sudden. I watched the smile fade as he reached out, almost unconsciously, to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear.

  “Nicola….” His voice was low.

  That name. It woke us both up at the same moment, and I jerked back as if his touch was poison.

  “I should sleep.” Never mind that I was wide awake and we’d lost most of the day.

  He was too flustered to call me on it, or maybe he just couldn’t deal with the idea of trying to make conversation for another few hours of walking. “Right. Yeah. I’ll, uh … I’ll go get some firewood.”

  And he was gone, while I leaned my head back on a tree trunk and tried to remember how to breathe.

  This was the worst thing either of us could be doing right n
ow. Because sooner or later, Daiman Bradach, Hunter of the Acadamh, a druid trained in the aftermath of the world I’d built—no matter how much he liked to tell me I was a different person, sooner or later, he was going to realize just who I was and what I’d been, and that there wasn’t any separating it out into neat little boxes.

  When that happened, it would be a lot easier for him if he and I weren’t very close.

  I figured I’d save him the trouble of figuring that out on his own. Starting tomorrow, I vowed, things would be different. I’d get him to leave me with Eshe, and that would be the end of it. He could go back to the world he belonged in, and forget all about me.

  And I’d try to forget about him.

  I wrapped my arms around my knees, dug my nails into the sides of my arms, and tried to ignore the voice that told me I was preparing to say goodbye to the only person in the world who thought I had a good side.

  18

  I didn’t, of course, have much to compare them to, but the next days seemed to be among the most difficult I had ever experienced. I spoke to Daiman coldly … if I spoke to him at all. Often, when he commented on the weather or how close we were to Eshe’s hideout, I did not answer. I barely ate, so as not to interact with him, and used icy pleasantries when I did, turning away before I could see how he took my curt words.

  And the dreams got worse.

  Philip’s words rang in my head: my Nicola. I woke from dreams of his voice whispering promises I could not remember, afraid and exhilarated all at once. I dreamt of a windswept castle and laughter around a banquet table. I dreamt of bodies at my feet, and did not know if I had ever seen any of this before, or if it was no more than the shape of my own fears.

  We reached the Mediterranean after only a few days. In Daiman’s shadow-land, the land we traversed was indistinguishable from the land we had traveled to get to the Acadamh, or at least it was right up until the end. Even Daiman’s forest was no match for the arid sea winds, however, and gradually the forest trailed away into cypress and scrub brush, olive and citrus groves showing their twisted branches to the sun, with the occasional whiff of lavender on the breeze.