Chapter 15
Rosabel La Rouge
When Taland said that the soldiers of the Delaetus Army were around, he meant it literally, it seemed. Because we walked out the front of the house and down the wide pathway between those gorgeous trees for a minute or two, and then we saw them.
They were standing all around the land where that house was built, with their backs turned to it and their eyes closed, as still as the trees at their sides.
Goddess, they were in perfect formation, creating a wall of bodies all around the house, leaving barely enough space for us to fit through between them.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen a stranger thing in my life.
We said nothing, Taland and I, as we went to their front and we analyzed them. Or rather I analyzed them while Taland watched me and focused on anything else around us every now and again, as if looking at these soldiers made him uncomfortable.
Goddess, I understood why. These men looked so real, yet unusual at the same time because their eyes were closed and they weren’t breathing. How strange it was to see a being that looked alive but didn’t breathe. I had never before known how much I saw people breathing without realizing it, or maybe I just noticed the absence of those slight chest movements much more than I ever thought I would.
Their skin looked like normal, ordinary skin, and even though at first glance they’d all looked the same, they weren’t. Different heights and different builds, different skin tones and different hair on their chests and forearms and brows that I could only barely see through the copper-colored helmets.
The swords strapped to their hips were huge, and they looked really heavy. Their armor plates were made of the same metal, which looked light and smooth through patches of dirt here and there. They wore brown pants and armor plates around their hips and groin area, too, and their brown leather boots looked a million years old, with metal on the tip of their toes as well as their shins. Their arms were naked from the shoulders down, save for leather gloves and the bracelets on their left wrists.
They weren’t exactly the same, though. The metal of it—yes. The color was exactly the same, and the image of it, like dried mud, was identical, but these bracelets were thinner and they were sealed shut—like cuffs. I couldn’t see a key lock anywhere—like the metal had hardened around their wrists like that and they could never be taken off again, which made me wonder.
“Can I touch them?” I asked Taland—too curious, even if the request did sound a bit ridiculous.
“Of course,” Taland said without hesitation. “You never have to fear any of them, sweetness. Their sole purpose now is to protect you.”
That made me feel all kinds of weird things, but I didn’t let myself dwell on his words for long. I slowly reached out my hand and touched the bracelet of one of them, my eyes on his face.
“ Fuck, ” I breathed when a second passed and his didn’t open. They remained shut—they all continued to look like they were carved out of marble or wax or something with those still chests.
But the feel of their bracelets was exactly the same as the one I’d stolen from the Vault. The only difference remained their width and the fact that theirs were closed—and tightly around their wrists, impossible to take off without breaking them or cutting their hands off.
“How many?” I asked Taland as I moved around the soldier one more time, this time touching his back and his arms and his armor plates as I went, his chin and cheeks— so terribly real —and his helmet, too. The guy didn’t even flinch.
“Thirty,” Taland said.
“I thought there’d be more.”
“There were. A hundred and twenty in total. The others were destroyed in the War of Mages,” Taland said. “These ones who remained were sort of… deactivated by Titus’s death.”
“They’re all men,” I said in wonder.
“They are,” said Taland. “Seven hundred years ago I don’t think they taught a lot of women combat. Titus needed men who were very good at hand-to-hand, as well as magic.”
Again, I circled the soldier I was basically studying. “They’re not really alive though.” They weren’t breathing, yet they were still standing. How very strange…
“They are puppets , sweetness. That’s it—they’re puppets.” This he said as if the words were being cut out of his very soul.
“How so?” I asked because I wanted him to choose what to tell me himself, hoping that would make this whole thing easier on him. It was obvious that he was… struggling with something.
He turned around, turned his back on both me and the soldiers. He seemed to be more at ease when they weren’t in his line of vision at all, and I didn’t mind. I went to stand beside him.
“If you don’t want to talk about it,” I started, even though I wanted to know so badly.
“I always want to talk to you about everything,” Taland said, and my heart tripped all over itself. I wrapped my arm around his and rested my head on his shoulder, waited until he thought about what to say.
“I hear them.”
“Yes, but how?” He’d said so before and I had no idea what he meant when the soldiers were so perfectly silent.
“In here.” He reached up his fingers and touched his temple. “I hear their voices. It’s…I don’t know how to explain it, but they’re talking to me.”
Every inch of my skin rose in goose bumps. “Taland, you’re scaring me.” I wrapped my arms around his tighter.
“It’s nothing to be afraid of—I just hear their thoughts, that’s all. I hear their voices. It’s like we’re connected on a deeper level.”
“You mean like mentally? ”
“Mentally, too.”
Too, he said. “But that…that’s…” What?!
I had no word for something as twisted, as scary, as fucking impossible as this.
“The curse,” Taland said, lowering his head. “That’s the curse, sweetness. This thing—this whole thing is not what we thought it was. It’s more, so much more.” His eyes squeezed shut, and he clenched his jaws so hard his teeth popped. “He tethered these people’s souls to his own. He linked them to his mind, to his magic.”
“Like bonding?”
Taland turned to me, suddenly excited, and said, “Yes, exactly. Exactly like bonding.”
And suddenly I understood him better.
Even though only Greenfire mages were able to bond with familiars, I had experienced the whole thing in the Iris Roe, too. Whether it had been fake or real, I was made to bond to that vulcera, and the emptiness her disappearance had left me with was still there. I doubted it was ever going to go away. She was still with me every time I closed my eyes to sleep. Every time I thought of green. Every time I didn’t know what I missed, until I remembered her face.
“But you can’t bond with people ,” I said, trying to make sense still. “And Titus was Whitefire, right?”
Taland nodded. “Laetus, but his primary color was White. But all Laetus could bond if they chose to. And when he created this curse, his basis was the bonding ritual. That’s the very foundation of this…connection.” It sounded like he was figuring all of this out, too, as he spoke.
“Fuck, Taland,” I whispered, throwing a look back at the soldiers—they hadn’t moved a single inch. Not even a little bit. “I don’t get it. How are they able to be alive without actually being alive? They don’t breathe—do their hearts beat?”
“Magic,” Taland said. “They function solely on magic. The curse is a sort of self-maintaining system. It uses magic to produce magic—it all started with the initial burst. That’s all Hill needed to bring them back—a burst of Laetus magic.”
“The bracelet. Just the bracelet,” I said, shaking my head over and over.
“Just the bracelet,” he confirmed.
“But…but he wasn’t Mud, was he? He wasn’t Laetus. It wouldn’t have worked for him!”
Taland thought about it for a moment. “Unless he had already drained himself, turned Mud. Then consumed a massive amount of energy to fire himself up—like you did with the Rainbow.”
“You think?” Because I had a very hard time picturing someone like David Hill rendering his own magic useless and counting on someone else to help him get it back. I had only been able to drain the Rainbow because of Taland. Whom did Hill have that he could trust so fully, I wondered?
Was it Madeline?
“I think so based on his behavior,” Taland said. “Think about it—he had everything else prepared. When he told you he was going to need his bracelet, he seemed very certain that he could make it work. I don’t know—he just did everything else exactly right, and he would have known that he couldn’t reactivate the curse without Laetus magic. That’s why he even had that bracelet in the Vault to begin with.”
And it absolutely made sense. Sounded like Hill. Exactly like Hill.
“All these years he went behind everybody’s back,” I whispered, closing my eyes for a moment, trying to get the image of his face away from my thoughts. Impossible.
“And he was incredibly smart about it. Gathered everything he needed, put it in the Vault. Not only did he make everything look legal, hid it in plain sight, but he ensured the best security system and countless trained soldiers would be there to keep it safe.” Taland shook his head. “The only part of his plan that went astray was us ,” he whispered. “He couldn’t foresee that we’d fall in love.”
Goddess, how I loved those three words.
“I think I know why he chose me that day, and not Poppy. I think he thought I was too damaged, too closed up to allow anybody in.” That’s why he’d showed me those pictures of my parents, and why he’d asked me if I was sad or happy. I’d said no and he’d believed me. Or at least he didn’t know how I really felt.
So, in the end, maybe my ability to play a rock did help me. It didn’t doom me—it saved me. Saved us all from him.
“He had a plan for everything,” said Taland in wonder.
“Imagine that kind of dedication to his actual fucking job,” I spit. He’d have made the world a better place for real if he’d spent all that energy being the actual IDD Director, instead of plotting to take over the world.
“He’s dead,” he said, as if he was reminding himself, too. “He’s gone—that’s all that matters.”
“Except now you’re stuck with thirty dead guys who live off magic, not air, and you have white eyes, and I have no clue what we’re going to do next!” I laughed—couldn’t even tell you why. The pressure, the fear, the paranoia?
But the bitter sound was cut off abruptly when something moved to my side.
I turned, heart in my throat, but Taland said, “ It’s okay ,” before I started screaming.
Because one of the soldiers who’d been perfectly motionless until now, standing in line with his eyes closed, was walking down the mountain. His eyes were open and as white as I remembered, as white as Taland’s, and he stepped out of the formation and continued to walk ahead like we weren’t there at all. He must have been six foot seven, shoulders as wide as most tree trunks in this place, yet you could barely hear his footfalls on the forest floor as he moved. Walked, just like normal people, even though he was everything but.
That my heart didn’t leave my body was a miracle.
“What…what…what the hell?” I finally managed when the soldier went too far for me to see or hear, and then I turned halfway to the others, expecting them to come alive and open their eyes, too.
None did, though.
“Someone’s close to the wards down the mountain,” Taland said. “He’s going to check to make sure they go away.”
I shook my head again. “Are you serious?”
“They have our location. I wasn’t trying to hide,” Taland said. “They’ve come before—twice now. It’s fine.”
I stepped away from him and looked down at the trees, laughing like a fucking lunatic. “Who?! Who the hell is— who? ”
“The Council, the IDD. Soldiers, agents,” Taland said, hands in his pockets as he looked at me with his white eyes.
“ And? What happened?!”
“Nothing. They realized they can’t get through, and they walked away. They’re gonna keep coming back for a little while longer, I suspect, before they leave us alone for good. They’ll want to make sure that we stay here, I suppose.” And he was awfully calm about it. Not in the way that Taland was usually calm, no—it was a different calm, one I didn’t like at all.
With my eyes closed, I took in a deep breath and I tried to get my shit together. I really tried.
“What if they come through?” I asked in a whisper, but Taland had come closer to me so he heard.
“They won’t. Can’t .”
“But…but…” I didn’t even know what to say. Fuck, I was freaking out and I didn’t even know how to stop.
Luckily, Taland did.
He grabbed my face in his hands and came close until the tips of our noses touched, and even though his eyes hadn’t changed, hadn’t gained their colors back, in my mind I saw them for how they really were.
“Breathe with me, baby,” he whispered. “Breathe with me.”
So, we did.
I breathed and I forced myself to cling to him, to let him ground me like always. To calm me down.
“Who does this for you, by the way?” I ended up asking after a little while, as if that made any difference. But it was the perfect distraction because I’d always been curious to know. He always calmed me down, but who calmed him?
“You do,” Taland said. “When you breathe.”
“No, I mean?—”
He grinned and it was a glimpse of the old Taland that stopped my heart for a second. “I know what you mean, baby. When I ask you to breathe with me, I do it for my benefit, too. When you’re okay, I’m okay.”
This guy.
I rose on my tiptoes and kissed his lips with all my being, and fuck, it felt good. It felt great to be wrapped up in his arms and to have him squeezing me to his chest as he deepened the kiss, to hear the soft moans that came from him, to be reminded of what mattered.
Him. Us. Forever.
And then I also remembered that there were dead and sort-of alive soldiers from the past standing in a perfect line just a few feet away from us.
I moved back, eyes on them, expecting to find them moving, watching us. They didn’t.
Taland shook his head. “They are not going to move—and if they do, they will do so to protect you.”
“I know, I know. It’s just so new,” I said, closing my eyes for a moment. “You’re incredibly comfortable around them, though.” He hadn’t once glanced at them at all.
“I am. You should be, too.” And I believed him. I did.
But I still turned and looked for where that soldier had gone off to, to see if he’d returned. “Where is he?”
“Still down there,” Taland said, wrapping his arms around me from behind, resting his chin on my shoulder.
“Do you think he maybe needs backup?” I wondered.
“If he does, they’ll know.” He didn’t need to explain that he meant the other soldiers.
“How? We can’t see him from here—and all their eyes are closed.”
Taland thought about it for a moment, then said, “We can all sort of see through each other.”
That gave me a good pause. “I don’t…get it.”
“They see through my eyes. We all see through that soldier’s. If he needs something, we all know— they know. It’s like…a network,” Taland said. “I still don’t understand how it works exactly, but think about it this way: we’re all connected to the same computer, if you will. The same curse.”
I turned my head to him, and he kissed my cheek. “So, you’re all… one ?”
“I think so,” Taland said. “Though I can give orders to them without really needing to say anything, just think it. Just… want it. I tested this since I brought you here,” he said. “If I think about them doing pushups, they do pushups. If I think about them jumping up and down, they do. Hours ago, I thought about them standing here in a perfect half circle around the house, keeping watch, feeling the wards of this safe house, and here they are.”
“Goddess, Taland, that’s incredible.”
“It’s…heavy,” he said. “Crowded.”
My stomach sank. “Your mind?”
Taland nodded. “I’m…not alone anymore. Not for a second.”
“What are they saying?”
He didn’t tell me for a little while, and when he did, I knew he was being as vague as possible on purpose. “Just things. Images, flashes of who they used to be. What they used to see.”
“You can’t make it stop?”
“I’m trying, sweetness,” he said, and the soldier who’d gone to check on whatever danger was out there seemed to just materialize between the trees and went back to his place without ever even glancing our way. He turned around, kept his arms loose to the sides and closed his eyes—and it was like he’d never even moved in the first place.
“Are they gone?” I dared to ask.
“Yes,” Taland said. “Nobody’s out there right now. Wanna?—”
“Go inside, yes,” I cut him off. “Let’s go inside.”
When we turned, the two soldiers who’d been directly behind us opened their eyes, stepped out of the line and moved back just a couple feet.
“They’re just making way,” Taland whispered, eyes on me. “I know they’re making you uncomfortable.”
“You just thought about them making way?” He nodded. “And they just heard that? Just like that?”
“Yep,” said Taland, trying to wave me off like it wasn’t a big deal, even though he knew it was.
My Goddess. Thirty super soldiers who were connected to your own mind and all you had to do was think something to get them moving?
Yeah, it was a big deal, all right. Maybe that’s why I laughed all the way back to that house again.