Rosalea had not had any energy to cry. She ached inside about Mere, and it was a little hard to believe. The old lady felt like she had been there since the dawn of time, and would be there when the dusk of time arrived.
Miri was trying to work her way through it. In snippets and sniffles, Rosalea and Taigan got the whole story of how they had gone down to the side of the valley where the Moryshin was. Miri was showing aptitude for earth-element magic, and she had been using dust in the air to smother cinders coming from the main fire and even a stray arrow.
But then, Connall’s pack had come and tried to take her. Mere had taken them into the fire; the actual flames had licked at their coats as they retreated closer to the humans. Mere was hit by one of the volleys of poisoned arrows. She had ranted about traitors, and she had nearly turned.
But Miri had called to her again and again, and her great-auntie had recovered herself and tried to take them the long way back home. “They think if they kill… if they kill the Moryshin…” she had broken off into wails. “They think they can replace him if he is dead, so they fight.” She managed. Rosalea rubbed her back, some of her wet, shedding fur stuck to Rosalea’s fingers, but she pet her anyway.
And that was as far as the story had gone before Nauru stopped. Sasha whined. Taigan signaled to Honor to stop, and Rosalea felt herself get tenser as Taj outright hissed. He could not see. The sun wasn’t up yet.
Rosalea did not have the energy for tears. She did not have the energy for surprise as the first wolf came up behind them. She looked at Taigan, and for a second she fantasized about handing up Miri and Nauru and sending Honor dashing away. They will not go, but it is the smartest thing to do. The wolves will not kill me because the dragon thinks she needs me alive.
Rosalea watched both Miri and Nauru press closer to her, but try to position themselves between her and the approaching red wolf. Two more came out from the trees to her right and left, a dark brown, and pale gray. Rosalea met the eyes of the first one, “So what’s it to be? You want to attack children?”
“The children do not belong to you,” the male grumbled. He had a long fluffy tuft under his chin that reminded her a little of a beard. His belly was also very shaggy and his tail had several spikes on it. “We will be taking them back. Two of them have always been ours.”
“I do not belong to you,” Nauru said flatly. “You gave me up, so you cannot take me back.”
Sasha just pressed herself more tightly to Taigan.
If I had magic, Rosalea thought, she visualized burning them or driving them off with pelting rocks. I cannot go on being unable to do anything. The wolf was speaking again, talking down to Nauru. Miri was growling. It is enough. This waiting and running from things is enough.
Something inside of her felt like it cracked. She did not know how else to quite explain it. One moment she was feeling fed up with being powerless; she was contemplating how far she could get against these wolves with just her hands and a knife. The image of Amalia covered in blood after this pack tried to maul her loomed in her brain. The image of Fen, dead below her. The image of Mere’s blackened body after she tried so hard to save Miri.
It is enough. There is no more room for mercy or inaction. Justice is not forgiveness. She clenched her fists, faintly aware of Nauru arguing back, all his little hackles coming up on his body. It is not forgiveness; it might not even be kindness because it is absolute. Her pulse raced so hard that she could hear a roaring in her ears. For a minute, she thought she might faint. The red wolf was advancing. No more, she thought again.
She felt a wet sensation squishing between her fingers. She looked down at her hands, raw, black magic dripping off of them. Big splotches dotted the earth beneath her, grass and plants wilting. The red-brown wolf saw, and his hackles came up.
“Touch my little ones, and I will kill you,” Rosalea said to him simply. She meant every word. She put her hands out, this feels a little like bleeding, she thought as she stretched her arms out on either side of her body. She didn’t know where this magic was coming from exactly, but it felt like it was inside of her.
“Demon,” the wolf snarled at her, lunging.
Rosalea pivoted on her heel, the same way she had when Raisa had made a lunge at her. She grabbed the wolf by the side of his neck and shoved his biting jaw to one side with her other hand. I can see his magic and pool. This feels closest to the Death Knife, she thought. She imagined fingers of her magic sliding through him as she pushed off of him. She shaped the magic like it was a red death knife, and it complied easily. She plunged it sideways into the snarling wolf, slicing into that inner pool of magic and the stream coming off of it. She cut it. He died, just like it was a Death Knife.
“Who is next?” Rosalea asked, letting the dark, long-bladed knife of magic go. “You?” she challenged the dark brown wolf. She called another knife. It materialized even more easily than the last in her hand.
***
Nauru felt the darkness gathering behind him as he argued with the enemy mystic. The enemy mystic had the same symbols on him that Mere had, so Nauru knew from his unique vision that he was some sort of plant-affinity wolf. Then the darkness peaked behind him, and when he looked back over his shoulder, Rosalea’s hands seemed to be covered in a black ooze that dripped off of them and splattered on the ground. Where ever it touched, things withered and died.
He did not recognize the symbols that were floating around Rosalea. But he could feel the darkness that radiated from her, the growing bloodlust she was feeling made his whole body itch. Her eyes were two points of glowing menace that was definitely a little reminiscent of the demons the mystics could turn into. He scrabbled away further as the red wolf lunged at her, pushing against Miri to back up. He focused on that voice that came to him sometimes and explained things to him. Help, what is this?
The voice that reminded him of Rosalea, but was not hers, did not answer. Rosalea killed the wolf several times her size, and then she called out to the other two, to come to her.
They fled.
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There was a moment that Nauru thought Rosalea was going to try to chase them, to run them down and kill them for the crimes of treachery they had committed, but she stopped after just one step.
She looked down at her hands, and the dark magic aura around her started to calm and dissipate. The voice came to him now. “My Desired one, magic comes with balances. Earth, air, and water balance one another to form a place all living things can be. A balance for life is death. This is a magic only certain kinds of creatures can currently wield, for it is a jealously guarded magic by gods.”
“Rosalea?” he called out tentatively.
She knelt down. She seemed a little watery, and she was staring out into the air with a look that seemed somewhere between disappointed and bewildered. “I am sorry, Nauru, did I frighten you?”
“No!” But it was not all true. For a moment there, every instinct in his body had been aware of how dangerous she had been.
Taigan was sliding off of his horse and slowly setting down Sasha. “Rosalea?” he also asked. Nauru pressed himself up to her, and she put her arms around him.
She looked up at him. “That was magic. I just used magic without my liana. She’s dead.” She gestured with her hand toward the withered plants, as if the two things were connected.
Taigan slowly knelt down next to her, “It was black like unsorted Uryan magic,” he said, peering into her eyes. They got glassy, and she squinched them shut. She seemed so unthreatening now, nothing like what she was exuding before. The dark magic that had killed the enemy wolf was no longer visible.
“Taj is saying something that sounds like someone like you might be… more than human. He says you may have access to unusual magics. He says you might not have been able to feel your connection to them because no one has taught you how.”
Rosalea looked up at him. “Death? As a magic?”
“It might not be the only one,” he tried to reassure, “but even if it is, it probably saved our lives.”
Rosalea closed her eyes and as he pressed close, she leaned against Nauru and rested her forehead against Taigan’s. “No more letting things happen. Less is not more, I cannot stand to have any less than I do.”
Nauru squirmed. There was a connection between Rosalea and that selfish Uryan that bugged him a little. Rosalea sat back up again and smiled as she saw Taigan’s cheeks were a little pink.
“Do we keep moving until we find mother then?”
Rosalea took a deep breath in. “I know what way they went. We will start walking that way and hope we can find them. Miri, I want you to try calling for them.”
“Enemies might hear.”
“Let them hear,” Rosalea said with hard, flinty tones that made Nauru fold his ears back. “Let them hear and let them come.”
Nauru let himself be picked up and carried a little of the way, resting his head against her shoulder. A new image was now floating near Rosalea, and it was a tree with a heart at its center. A Moryshin is a creature with death magic, he thought.
***
Miri’s calling for them drew them all much further north than the den. Amalia could not hear it, but her mother had.
Miri cried and squealed over and over as soon as she saw Nekana, running to her mother with more whimpers in a few seconds than she had made in her whole life. Amalia’s heart sunk as she saw Taigan, holding Sasha, Nauru, and Rosalea trailing behind.
“Where is Auntie Mere?” Raisa whispered.
Amalia closed her eyes tightly. In a few moments of Nekana trying to comfort Miri, it became clear Mere was gone. Miri began to tell every detail rapidly as she begged for comfort from her mother. They had been driven out of the den by Connall’s pack. Rosalea had killed one of the wolves with magic? What?
“Rosalea?” Amalia asked, ignoring Miri’s torrential pour of information.
“Does not come with any kind of proper magical vision, like I might have hoped, but,” she held her hands palm up.
Raw, liquidy black pooled in her palms. When she opened her hands, it splattered on the ground at her feet, away from Nauru or anyone else, and plants withered away around her feet.
Nekana was laying down, holding Miri close with her head, but she also saw. “Rosalea… Rosalea, that is not human magic.”
“I lost my liana. I lived. It is twisted. Maybe that is what this is. I just… I cannot let anyone else go. I cannot stand by any longer. I… feel different, off…”
Amalia looked pointedly at her mother, Ask her, she willed.
Nekana stared. Taigan spoke politely, “It is lucky she found the resolve to connect to it. Three wolves surrounded us, and two more thought about coming into us. Where is Bazil?”
“Here,” he said, materializing from shadows. He limped terribly. He was now also missing an ear, and a good portion of his tail. “There was an ambush, in the den. My shadow movement both almost got me killed and saved my life. Sorry, I was… staring.”
Bazil’s magic was a mystery. He was the only wolf with an affinity for a lack of light. There were a few other mystics of different species that had it. Amalia thought it was a sign of the magic twisting from a too-old Moryshin growing too weak to stop the corrupting influence magic had on all of them.
But Rosalea’s was not a mystery.
“Where is Nakai?” Rosalea asked.
“Dragon,” Raisa said flatly.
Amalia felt a temptation to interject, and ask the question for her mother before the conversation shifted. “Rosalea—”
***
“Then we go and get him,” Rosalea said. No more. The dragon is the biggest problem. Maybe this new access to magic I have can solve it. The wolves all stared at her. “We have a strong array of magic between all of us. Whatever the dragon is doing cannot be kind. What good is a Moryshin that will not even see you to help you? What will he do? Stop you from re-entering the forest? Is it worth losing Nakai?”
Nekana breathed out slowly. “There are caves ahead where the dragon is probably hiding. We may not have powers if we leave the boundaries.”
“I will try it,” Raisa said.
Rosalea was not that surprised that Raisa supported the idea. She hated the dragon, gods, and even the Moryshin pretty openly. She could not feel good after what Connall had shown he was doing.
Her family stared at her. “What? I’m going to die anyway.” She shifted her poisoned legs a little. “Probably when this stuff reaches my heart. And after that last fight, I’ve only got a few more spells in me.”
In the rising gray light of the dawn, it became evident as everyone studied her. The lurid sick-green mark had twined its way up her legs and around her chest in a visible way.
“I can do one thing for my brother. I can find out if I can cross the barrier and keep my magic. And if I do not? If I become normal or I die? Maybe being without magic is the trick to being cured. Please.”
Nekana breathed out slowly. “All right,” she said softly. She got up and pressed her forehead to Raisa’s.
Rosalea would have gone after the dragon on her own if she could have so she could save them all. I could not stand you, but I think I should have been more like you all along. Just thinking about losing any of them, about letting Gods or Fate or whatever push her another inch summoned the dark aura.