Bound Sorcery: A Shadows of Magic Book Page 14

  “Life,” was the only answer. He seemed determined to be enigmatic.

  Life. What was life? Life was a pulse. But then again, plants were alive, too. I felt myself frowning. Life was … energy. I was looking for energy. I tried to remember how the ley lines had felt, but couldn’t.

  And then I remembered Eshe’s island appearing out of nowhere. It had been there, and yet totally shielded from me. Like Daiman’s forest, it was something that existed only when you looked at it just right … and then it seemed like it had always been there. What if the problem was that I was still trying to see it with my eyes?

  Nothing happened. Nothing happened for long enough that I was almost ready to open my eyes, but what I lacked in patience, I more than made up for in stubbornness. I gritted my teeth and tried everything I could to look at the world differently, including looking sharply to one side to see if my eyes-closed-peripheral-vision had picked up anything.

  Daiman had the good sense not to laugh.

  I was just about to give up when I remembered the snowbells breaking through the moss, and then I heard it. It was the same as seeing with my eyes closed, but for hearing—a sort of music that was not in my ears at all, a trill of … something. I turned my head to look for it, blind and searching, and got to my hands and knees to crawl. The trill grew louder and louder, until—

  There was a scrabbling noise, and a mouse skittered over my hand and disappeared. I, for my part, was too surprised that the magic had worked to jump.

  “It’s music!” I said delightedly to Daiman.

  “Oh?” He crossed his arms, trying to look stern, but he was smiling broadly. “Sit back down and try again.”

  I sat back down and closed my eyes, but I was swaying back and forth happily. It was music. I knew what I was looking for now.

  This time I saw him, too—a lower note, pulsing with his heartbeat, and the high, pure sound of blood flowing in his veins. My mouth fell open, and I closed it. Was this what humans looked like to druids? It was beautiful.

  And then I heard something more, new and absolutely pure, and I knew with full certainty that it was a snowbell.

  He had made me a snowbell. I pointed, and heard his low laugh thrum over my skin.

  “Reach out for it,” he murmured. I could tell he was smiling.

  “You can’t touch music.” But I was smiling, too. I felt my fingers move as if I could brush the petals softly, and I tried to touch it with my own heart.

  The note faded softly, and then cut off all at once. In its absence, I felt bereft.

  I opened my eyes, and recoiled. The flower lay on a tiny patch of moss, its petals and leaves brown.

  “I killed it,” I whispered. I looked up at him, horrified. For some reason, killing this poor flower seemed to me to be one of the worst things I had ever done. “I didn’t mean to kill it, I swear I didn’t.”

  “I know you didn’t.” But Daiman was staring at it, shocked into silence, himself. Slowly, reluctantly, he murmured, “I suppose it makes sense that you could sense the life force so quickly. It took me three weeks.”

  “Why does it make sense that I could do it?” I shook my head, stubbornly not understanding. “I’m not a druid, I’ve never done anything like this.”

  “What you work with is life force,” he told me. He was trying to be gentle, but there was no way to make these words gentle. “You haven’t done a druid trance, but you can see life, in your own way.”

  “I don’t want to see it my own way!” I scrambled back from the edge of the crate, away from the moss. I didn’t want to touch it. What if I killed it all? I sank my face into my hands.

  And then I remembered Daiman, little ten-year-old Daiman, marching away from the druid hall in a rainstorm. So I had killed a flower. So I was too instinctive with my magic to control it yet. Well, that was a weakness, and it was why I was here. I had to learn to use magic deliberately.

  I picked my head up. It had been a long day, and I could feel exhaustion dragging at me, but I was not going to back down now.

  “I want to try again.”

  Daiman smiled. “How about we rest for a bit?” he suggested. “Some dinner, maybe we talk about how it feels to use your magic, so you can catch yourself before it happens.”

  “I want to try again,” I said stubbornly.

  “You will.” He came to help me up, and for a moment we lingered, inches apart. Then he cleared his throat hastily and released me, stepping back. “I’ll go get us some fish.”

  “Uh-huh.” I settled myself down on a crate, staring up at the ceiling and tapping my fingers on my stomach. As soon as I lay down, however, I could feel sleep dragging at me.

  Daiman’s fingers brushed against mine. “Just sleep,” he told me.

  I twined my fingers with his, not thinking. His hand was warm.

  “Just sleep,” he murmured again. “You’ll get it. You’re one of the stubbornest people I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something—druids are a really stubborn bunch of people.”

  I gave a little half-laugh. He was trying so hard to ease my mind.

  And I did sleep. At some point, I heard him return and start a fire, and I was vaguely aware of flames dancing and Daiman humming. The sound reminded me of forests and snowbells and the eerie beauty of wolves, and even the smell of fresh-cooked fish couldn’t bring me up from my half-sleep. I slid into darkness with a contented little sigh.

  But when sleep had me in its grasp, there was nothing to protect me from my memories.

  24

  I was staring at a mantelpiece adorned with candles and a very strange painting of a woman looking over her shoulder. She was pale, with luminous eyes and black hair, and it took me a moment to recognize myself. The fire was too hot, and the rest of the room too cold, but I stayed where I was anyway. I wasn’t sure why.

  I gave a start as I looked at my wrists. One hand was braced on the warm wood of the mantelpiece, and below the embroidered cuff of a velvet robe, I could see scabs. I stretched my arm slightly to free it from my sleeve, and stared hard at the lasting mark of manacles.

  I’d seen a jail cell in my dreams before. Now I knew I had escaped, or been freed—but it had left its mark.

  “Come back to bed,” a man’s voice drawled.

  I looked over my shoulder. On a large, four-poster bed hung with brocade curtains, Philip was lounging under the covers. The firelight played over smooth skin and he looked….

  I wasn’t sure. This memory wasn’t as simple as my memory of Terric had been. Philip didn’t seem young or idealistic. However old he was in this memory, the years had already hardened him. Even his lazy hedonism had an edge to it.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, heedless of the pain as my aching wrists brushed my body. From the set of my shoulders and the look on my face—I could feel it settling into an unimpressed look—I was not pleased with him, but I didn’t know why. I was trapped in Nicola’s body, acting out the words and movements of a moment long past, but I couldn’t quite remember her mind.

  “You can’t still be angry.” Philip arched one blond brow. He seemed utterly assured, more assured than I would be to be facing down the famed Nicola Beaumont when I was half-naked in a bed.

  “Oh?” My past self spoke the word with deadly softness, and my present self had the urge to look away and pretend I wasn’t there, observing this—like a guest at a dinner party while the lord and lady of the house had a spat.

  “You weren’t killed.” Philip sounded annoyed now. He paused. “It didn’t shake your resolve, did it?”

  “Shake my resolve?” I gave a bitter laugh. “They killed a hedge witch in front of me. They beat her to death while she was still bound, just for sport. They left her body for the rats. One of their own kind, and they cared more about their petty notions of heresy than they did about the life of one of their own. I have no reason to spare them when they do not spare each other.”

  “So everything will go forward as planned.” He gave a shrug. “What
is lost to us, then?”

  “Mmm.” I strolled toward the bed. “And that’s what you care about, isn’t it? Not me. Just that everything goes forward as planned. That my resolve wasn’t shaken.”

  My present self was practically pressing my hands over my ears to avoid hearing this fight.

  “Of course,” Philip admitted negligently. He lay back as past-Nicola walked to the edge of the bed, and his smile was sleek and self-assured. “If our positions had been reversed … what would you have cared about?”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this, but my past self laughed. The sound was an elegant little ripple, practiced and amused. “The plan, of course,” I heard myself say. “If you were in prison and I had what I needed, I’d have left you to die.”

  Philip’s hand shot out and yanked me onto the bed, heedless of my gasp of pain when his fingers caught the edge of the raw skin. He pressed me down onto the bed, his smile bright and ruthless at the same time. I could feel the weight of him, the heat of him.

  “Your heartless bitch,” he murmured against my mouth.

  Past-Nicola gave a low laugh, raking his back hard enough to leave marks. I felt her smile when he hissed in pain.

  “Only the plan matters,” she whispered.

  “Only the plan,” he agreed, and he bent his head to her as the memory blessedly disappeared.

  In the present, I sat up gasping for air. For a moment, too many memories crowded my head at once in a jumble of names and faces and half-forgotten words. My head had been so clear for so long. This was too much. I bent my head and pressed at my temples as if I could push the memories out with my fingers.

  By the fire, Daiman gave a questioning murmur.

  “It’s nothing, just a dream. Go back to sleep.” I stared at his face and took comfort in the lines of it, the bump in his nose, the brush of brown hair over his brow.

  I was afraid to go back to sleep. The memories were sinking away as I moved further away from unconsciousness, but I couldn’t hold them at bay if I were sleeping. I knew that now. I looked around and chose a spot on the floor where I would be leaning up against the rough corner of a crate. I stared at the fire and dug my nails into my palm. I didn’t want to know how that memory ended.

  But all my resolve and discomfort couldn’t keep sleep from my exhausted body, and it was not long before my head slumped onto my chest and darkness claimed me once more.

  I was fighting. I was scared, and I was fighting, and there was rope at my wrists, and I remembered nothing about myself. In this memory, there was none of the practiced smoothness with which my mind slid away from the void in itself. No, it was new and I could feel my memories missing, and I was furious with whoever had done this to me.

  Everything in me hurt. There was the rope, scraping the skin raw. There was the sore place where I had clearly lain on this surface for far too long.

  And there was a bone-deep ache I could not name. I felt half dead.

  “Hold her,” someone instructed, and I yanked at the bonds with all my might, snarling.

  I opened my eyes to candlelight in a small room. Even that dim flicker stabbed at my eyes and I hissed in pain. “Let me go.”

  “It didn’t take,” one of the people said to another. There was worry in her tone. She wore a plain brown kirtle, and her face was old and worried.

  I hated her on sight. She looked weak.

  “I told you she was fighting it,” another said sullenly. I tried to crane my head to make out his face, but he was no more than a black shape against the candles.

  Past-Nicola tossed her head, searching for a way out. White-washed walls, dark wooden beams, and the single door closed and barred. No way to escape.

  “Of course she fought it, that’s what the mind does.” A woman with grey-streaked blonde hair—their leader, I guessed—looked manifestly unimpressed with all of this. “That’s a thing you have to manage when you take memories.”

  “Let me go!” The words hardly came out right, they were so full of rage. I hated them, I hated all of them.

  Their leader ignored me. “Do the spell again,” she ordered the first woman, the tired woman. “Jared clearly can’t do it right. You do it.”

  “I’ll kill you! Every one of you!” I yanked at my wrists and took only resolve from the way my skin broke and bled. It fed my hatred.

  My present self shrank away in horror. She was going to kill people. I was going to watch her kill people.

  Wake up, I pleaded with myself. Wake up, wake up. But I was asleep, and vulnerable, and I could not stop this.

  Another woman detached herself from the shadows in the corner and came to kneel down by the bed. The others went to push her away as I spat my fury at her, but she was undeterred.

  “You were nearly killed,” she told me gravely. “You should rest. Only when you have rested will you be yourself again. No one here means you any harm.”

  She was mortal. I could see it in her. She was, and so was the woman who gave them orders.

  “What the hell do you know?” My voice was ugly.

  “She has a point,” the man said. He had an elegant drawl that I hated. “If she refuses to rest, there are other ways for this not to be a problem anymore.”

  The others looked at him sharply, and he came out of the shadows to look down at me. I’d never seen him before in my life, but he seemed to recognize me.

  “You know what she did,” he told all of them. “What does the world have to gain by keeping her alive?” He looked at me as if I were some sort of curiosity in a zoo, a vicious animal that could not be trusted.

  The part of me that was watching wanted to cry.

  “I don’t think she’s done yet,” the young woman at my bedside said finally. Her eyes were distant, as if she were seeing something far beyond all of us. “I think she’s still needed.”

  “She would have killed you or made you her slave,” the man said brutally. “She tried. She nearly succeeded! And you think we should be merciful?”

  “I think she’s still needed.” The woman sat back on her heels.

  “But what does that mean—”

  “She’s had true visions before,” the female mage told him. She nodded to me. “If she says Beaumont is needed, then we should keep her.”

  “So in a few years she can stab us in the back?” The man looked furious. “Forgive me if I’m not willing to risk my life for a midwife’s hunch.”

  Past-Nicola wisely kept her mouth shut, but I had no doubt that she had every intention of killing everyone in this room when she had the chance.

  “She’d be killed if they found her like this,” the leader said flatly. “She’ll understand why we did what we did.” She nodded to the sorceress. “Try the spell again.”

  “And make sure she doesn’t remember me,” the sorcerer said flatly.

  The sorceress leaned over me and I heard Nicola screaming for her to stop, screaming that she’d kill them all, that she wasn’t going to forget this.

  And then the memory ended, so abruptly that I held up my wrists when I awoke, expecting to see blood and rope.

  Nothing. That was long ago. It was centuries past now, and dawn was breaking and I was in the warehouse. I could hear birds, and the rush of the sea breeze against the concrete walls.

  I tried to slow my breathing, but I could not stop the fear that made my breath come in little jerks. If they had listened to that sorcerer, if they had done what even I thought was the logical thing, I’d be dead.

  Instead, they had listened to a woman I would have killed without a second thought: I think she’s still needed.

  I stared up at the high, dirty window and came to a conclusion. I’d never known her name, and she was long dead, but I would prove that woman right. I would make good on the reason she had saved me.

  I crawled to Daiman’s side and shook him gently.

  “Hmm?” He came awake with a sleepy smile that made my insides turn over.

  “Can we start practicing again?” I
asked him. “There’s a lot I still have to learn.”

  25

  Daiman, however adamant he’d been that there were no shortcuts in the druidic arts, did concede to a small change in plan: rather than working with plants right away, I would begin working with wind.

  “This might be frustrating,” he warned me, as we made our way about halfway down the slope to the beach. “I didn’t start with wind until a few years in.” He shrugged. “Then again, you saw the life force quickly enough. Maybe by the end of today, you’ll be able to make a very nice little storm.”

  “We can hope.” I chewed my lip as I stepped carefully down over the rocks. They weren’t covered in seaweed, not so far up, but they were still slick with salt-spray.

  Down below, tourists were strolling along the white sand, looking for sea glass and shells, or just savoring the quiet. I tilted my head as I watched them.

  “What are you thinking?” Daiman’s voice was soft.

  “It’s a good life,” I told him. “Not having magic. I don’t remember everything yet, but I remember I wasn’t unhappy.”

  “They kept you without magic that whole time?” He settled down on the rocks and frowned. “I mean, I guess I thought … well, I don’t know what I thought. Do you know what happened after your fight with Terric?”

  “I dreamed some of it last night,” I admitted. “I hate the memories. They seem like they happened to someone else.” I tried to steady myself. “I woke up, and they had wiped my memory. I was scared. It was two sorcerers, and two humans. I don’t know why they were working together, and they argued about just killing me. They’d taken my magic—or it was still drained from the fight. One of them, a human, was sure that I would be needed in the future, so they decided to wipe my memory again and keep me hidden.” I shook my head. “I don’t know anything more than that. I don’t know who they were. I don’t even know … I guess I thought it was right after the fight, but I can’t be sure.”

  Daiman said nothing, but his frown had deepened.