Max was loitering in the hall, and looked startled to see us emerge. “I wasn’t standing guard or anything, I just – what’s going on?”
I didn’t slow down to answer. “We have to get to Duniyasar. Kylie’s in trouble. Come on!”
“What happened?” Max asked, following me and Saina down the hall.
“It’s not the Heiress of Duniyasar. It’s the Airess, A-I-R. A woman of the air and of Duniyasar.” I tapped my cheek, where Kylie’s mage mark, displaying here elemental designation of air, was. “She made that prophesy after being given Duniyasar, the first time she went there without me – when she ‘strayed from Heartbound’s sight’.”
“But… the faithless?” Saina asked, confused.
Max answered that. “‘Fionnrath’s Destiny’ is the English name of her spell. In Scotland they call it the Faith of Fionnrath. It’s so obvious! How did we miss that?”
“We were distracted by the heiress thing,” I said, “and we trusted Lydia to look after her prophet. But she doesn’t care about Kylie, she cares about Kylie’s spell!”
“You think,” Saina panted (we weren’t going to slow down just to talk), “that she’s given up on trying to get Kylie to Fionnrath and she’s getting the spell home more directly.”
I didn’t bother wasting breath to confirm that; it was obvious. Although I had more breath to spare than the others. The magic zinging up and down my nerves was like an extra-strong dose of caffeine; if I was tired, I couldn’t feel it. The others were flagging a bit, especially Max, who wasn’t the athletic type and hadn’t been regularly training of pit competitions. I grabbed their arms and pulled them along.
Malas wasn’t present in the hospital ward. One of his apprentices greeted us with a friendly smile as we entered, which quickly turned to alarm when Max brushed past him behind the supply desk, snatched up a scalpel in a little sterile packet and tossed it to Saina.
“Hey, you can’t – hey! This is a hospital!” the apprentice protested as Saina tore the packed open with her teeth and sliced her fingers open. “That’s not – I’m calling security!”
“Please do, we need all the help we can get,” Max said politely while Saina smeared the Duniyasar access runes on the glass doors in blood. She pushed the door open and stepped out –
– Into snow. She stepped back inside and pulled it shut, horror dawning on her face.
“Are the runes all correct?” I asked.
“I’ve been learning the pattern since I was a toddler. It’s correct. She’s locked us out.” She stared at her bleeding fingers. “Kylie’s specifically revoked my permission to be there.”
“Does anyone else have permission to enter, apart from you and Kylie?” Max asked.
“Some other family members, but there isn’t time…”
“Another way, then. The back door way. It malfunctioned and let Kylie and Kayden in once before; maybe if we go find a prophet and we get lucky – ”
“There’s no time! And the chances of it malfunctioning again – ”
“Do you have a better idea?!”
I wasn’t paying that much attention to the conversation. The magic was heavy in my mind, strange details in my vision were sharp, some colours were far too bright and others too dull. The vivid red of Saina’s blood seemed almost to glow on the glass, standing out against a backdrop of dull snow. The clip in her hair, the bright silver of the compass fetish in Max’s breast pocket, every third word or so in the conversation they were having, milling about, confused, wasting time while my mage was in trouble, she was my mage and I was supposed to be with her, helping, I could have protected her if I was there, where I belonged –
“Saina,” I cut in. “The magics built into Duniyasar. Very old, right? Old laws? How old?”
“I… I don’t…”
“Older than these laws?” I shook my sleeve down, baring the familiarity mark on my arm.
Saina and Max exchanged the briefest glances. Saina tossed me the scalpel. I sliced my fingers open, and both Max and the healer’s apprentice winced. They could lecture me about blood contamination later.
Saina took my wrist, and I viciously tamped down the urge to pull away while she guided my hand through the access runes. Ignoring the still-protesting apprentice, I pushed the door open and we stepped out…
Onto sand under a black sky, lit only by a handful of stars and a large full moon.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Max told Saina. “If Kayden’s wrong about this ‘airess’ thing – ”
“Then I shouldn’t stray from his sight, right? Come on.”
There was light on the top of the tower, under the glass dome, but not enough to make out anything distinct. Somewhere behind us, a sandstorm picked up – Max and Saina still didn’t have permission to be here, and just because I could pass through didn’t mean I could give them permission to do so. We raced for the door of the large stone building, mercifully unbarred, and slammed it behind us against the vicious wind and thick sand.
Whatever Kylie’s magic was doing was getting worse, and I had the terrifying thought that I might be feeling her dying. Was this what it felt like for a familiarity link to break, not neatly through magic, but because the spell had been messily unseated from its mage’s corpse? There had to be time, there had to be time. We raced through the halls, random details jumping out at me in the otherwise barely noticeable environment; an asymmetrical lantern hook that snagged on my awareness like a shard of glass, a brown stain that clashed with the yellow stone around it, the even, rectangular shape of a door.
The bottom floor of the central tower was better lit than I’d ever seen it, a bright light shining down through the hole in the roof, presumably originating at the top. The wide stone stairs, with the thick, tapestry-strewn stone underneath them, gave the round room an unsettlingly asymmetrical look. Max went to charge up the stairs, but as soon as his foot hit the stone they glowed with runes and he yelped, jumping back as if shocked.
“I was hoping she wouldn’t think to activate those,” Saina said.
“They won’t hurt me,” I said. “I’ll go alone, you two – ”
“No need!” Saina pulled a knife out of her boot and slid it behind the frame of one of the wall tapestries, levering it forward to reveal… a doorway. Leading to a tunnel.
The base of the stone stairs wasn’t thick to bear the weight of the stairs. It was thick because it was concealing a second hidden staircase underneath.
“Did you really think we’d so casually give this place to other people if we didn’t have a secret back door they couldn’t lock on us?” Saina asked. “Come on!”
The hidden stairway was dim, but not as dim as I’d expected. The tapestries were fairly thin and let light shine in from the tower, like hidden stained glass windows. With Kylie’s magic messing with my senses, I couldn’t even make out the images being projected on the walls as we thundered past them, climbing as quickly as we could, but the irregularity of the shadows formed by the weave’s structure in the tapestries jumped out at me. They’d been woven in such a way that the projections of light on the wall were full of little lines of shadow, long lines meeting and separating and crisscrossing at points marked by simple, spiky little shapes of shadow. Normally, I’d just figure that the structure of any tapestry probably just normally made shadows like that. I didn’t know anything about weaving.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Except that the strange symbols were familiar to me. I’d seen them etched into a skeleton in the labyrinth of dreams. Ancient runes that Refujeyo didn’t teach.
At any other time, something like that would be fascinating, but right then only one thing mattered in the entire world and that was what was happening at the top of the tower. We charged up the tower, not wasting any further breath on conversation, while the magic tried to claw its way out of my throat, pool under my fingernails, collect in my eardrums. I could hear little beyond the roar of my own breath and thundering of my heartbeat as the stairway beneath our feet came to an abrupt end and we pushed our way out from behind another tapestry.
Because the concealed staircase was right under the normal one, we came out on the floor beneath the top floor. I leaped onto the normal staircase and took the stairs two at a time.
The top of the tower was where the light illuminating the rest of the tower was coming from, but once I was up there, it wasn’t all that bright. I could clearly make out several random, unimportant details – Lydia on the opposite side of the room, arms raised and mid-chant, frozen in surprise at my appearance. Ancient runes etched into the dome glass glowing brightly, and more runes drawn around the room in blood and ichor (the handful I knew were runes for containment and redirection, the kind you’d use to make a barrier or a shield or a prison). A couple of broken glass panes, wind carrying sprays of sand through them and scattering them across the tower floor.
The only important thing in the room was Kylie, slumped against the central pillar, eyes mostly closed, hand gripped tightly around the stem of an ornate golden chalice that still dripped milky liquid onto the floor. I ran to her, ignoring the distant exclamations of Lydia, the sounds of Max and Saina struggling up the stairs despite the defensive runes. The Destiny was buzzing through my skin strongly enough to make the air itself feel itchy; I ignored that and dropped to my knees, cradled her head, peeled back her eyelids.
Kylie’s skin was hot, burning hot, and I wasn’t sure how much of that was a genuine fever and how much was the unreliability of my own senses. Her eyes wouldn’t focus on me, her breathing was shallow, and her lips and gums were tinged worryingly blue. I could try mouth-to-mouth, but I didn’t think it was going to help; the problem was inside her, caused by what she’d drunk, and me forcing air into her lungs wasn’t going to give her any more oxygen than her breathing on her own. It occurred to me that her symptoms looked like what I’d come to expect from somebody being killed by their own spell. It occurred to me that Malas, while an excellent diagnostician, had been fooled by magical potions and poisons before. That if somebody wanted to kill a young mage with a powerful spell without causing any suspicion whatsoever, a method like this, in a place and time where they would be expected to be channelling an unusual amount of power, was a great way to do it.
There was nothing I could do. The poison was inside her, and there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t do anything; there was nothing I could do. I wrapped my arms around my friend and blinked tears out of my eyes just in time to see Saina, howling in rage, draw her knife and launch herself across the room at Lydia, but Max, with unexpected speed and strength, held her back.
“She dies for this!” Saina snarled.
“You can’t! Think of Kylie!”
“We can get her back to the school,” I said, struggling to get to my feet with Kylie in my arms. “We just need to activate the portal back, and if we’re fast, we – ”
Lydia snatched up the little flags that activated the portals and tossed them through one of the broken window panes. The sandstorm swallowed them. It would take hours to go out and find one in this storm, and I didn’t think that Kylie had hours.
“We can’t let her get away with this!” Saina insisted, pulling free of Max.
“You have to!” Max said. “Please, don’t hurt her; you’ll make things worse.”
“Worse? Worse?! Kylie is dying, and – ”
I glanced around the room again, taking in the runes. I couldn’t read most of them, but knowing that I was looking at some kind of barrier for magic, it was pretty obvious what was going on. Lydia wanted Fionnrath’s Destiny. The runes were to stop the spell from leaving the tower once it was out of Kylie. They wouldn’t hold a spell indefinitely – magic wasn’t that easy to contain – but when Kylie was dead, there would be a viable host inside the barrier – Lydia. She was trying to make sure that the spell would have to choose her.
“We can stop that bitch from winning,” I snarled, making for the stairs with an armful of Kylie. “Get her out of the tower, at least.”
“Same problem,” Max said. “Don’t.”
“We can’t let her win!”
“And if you kill her or take Kylie, what do you think will happen? The spell will still choose someone.”
“Someone else from Fionnrath, yeah. But she won’t win.”
“What if it isn’t someone from Fionnrath?” Max asked.
Oh. Kylie’s family. If that spell went to someone else in Kylie’s family, put them in the same kind of danger as Kylie… Kylie wouldn’t want that. She wouldn’t want her death to do that.
We couldn’t save Kylie. And the only way to protect her family was to do nothing. To let Lydia win.
I slumped back down to the floor, knocking both knees painfully on the hard stone. Kylie’s breathing grew shallower. It couldn’t end like this, there had to be something, something I could do. Anything.
I glared at Lydia with a hatred I’d never felt before. She looked back, impassive.
“So then,” Max said, addressing Lydia for the first time. “This is what things have come to. She trusted you. You were supposed to guide and protect her. And now you’ve killed her for personal gain.”
“For duty. We would have taken her in, loved her, but she refused and I knew I could never change her mind. The welfare of Fionnrath is more important than any one person.”
“She was a child.”
“Don’t act like you didn’t put her in the firing line!”
“… What?”
“You’re the one who bound her up in that sick little familiarity experiment, yes? You all tied her here, used her as a prison to keep our spell from us. This school found our prophet and bound her up in contracts, then you tied her up in your experiment, and the High Crone bound her further in favours by giving her this place. You made it impossible for me to extract her, and forced me to extract the spell. If you’re so offended by her death, you shouldn’t have put her in danger in the first place.”
They were talking about her like she was already dead, like she wasn’t here in my arms still breathing, shallower and shallower every moment. She wasn’t dead! She was still here!
“I didn’t kill her,” Max said, somehow still sounding calm. Cold. “Refujeyo didn’t kill her. You did. You came and poisoned an innocent, trusting student who meant you no harm and committed no wrong against you, because you wanted her power.”
“Oh, is that what you want? A confession? Are you recording this? Fine.” Lydia spread her arms wide. “I did it. I killed an innocent girl, a crime for which there is no atonement, and her blood will be on my hands forever. A debt that cannot be repaid, and I bear it with honour. I did it, and I’m not ashamed, because it had to be done. Some things are worth sacrifice, and I’d give anything for my town. There; I hope you got a good, clear recording of that for your Council and your courts. Do you think it’ll actually help you? That it will make any difference? That Refujeyo will side with that, over political expedience?”
“Oh, I wasn’t recording,” Max said calmly, withdrawing his fetish from his breast pocket. “I just wanted to make sure that you understood the true depth of the debt you owe Kylie. A debt that, contrary to what you seem to think, can and will be paid.” He flicked the compass open, pointing one silver needle at Lydia, and the other at me – no, at Kylie, in my arms.
Kylie took a deep, shuddering breath. Lydia immediately dropped to her knees.
The magic within me started to calm while Kylie breathed and, after about half a minute, opened her eyes. She still wasn’t completely with it, and blinked in fuzzy confusion at Lydia, face red and muscles slack, panting on the floor.
Kylie got better. Lydia got worse. Max’s fingertips around his fetish reddened and blistered under the heat it produced, but the metal didn’t melt and his grip didn’t waver. His face remained eerily, chillingly blank, while he kept casting, not faltering until we knew that Kylie was in the clear.
We knew that Kylie was in the clear because Lydia had paid her debt by taking her fate.
Kylie got up and blinked at all of us, confused. “What are you guys doing he – Lydia!” she gasped, noticing the corpse. She dropped to her knees beside her mentor, checking for a pulse.
“Are you okay, Kylie?” Max asked, his voice neutral, distant.
“Are you okay?” I asked Max.
He ignored the question, folding up his fetish and putting it away. A task that apparently required all of his attention.
Saina cleared her throat. She looked from the tower she’d entered despite being specifically forbidden from it, to the familiar of Fionnrath’s prophet who’d helped her tresspass, to Fionnrath’s prophet crouching over her dead mentor and envoy from Fionnrath, to the promising young Refujeyo mage who’d just killed that envoy in her ancestral property, a powerful place associated very strongly with Refujeyo.
“I do hope we haven’t started a war,” she said wearily.