Chapter 19
Rosabel La Rouge
Fresh sunlight warmed the side of my face, fell over my shoulders like it wanted to hold me in its embrace. Like it knew exactly what I was feeling as I looked at the soldiers in silence, side by side with Taland.
They were different now, so different. Not just monstrous beings with white eyes like I’d thought when I first saw them, but now they were alive to me. Victims of an evil, cunning man who’d offered them slavery masked as freedom.
One choice they’d made and look what it had cost them. One choice, and they were suffering because of it seven hundred years later.
I bit my tongue so hard my mouth was full of blood, but I’d cried enough. While I lay on the bed with Taland and he told me about them all night, I’d cried enough for days and weeks and years.
These soldiers didn’t need my tears now—far from it.
“Why is he bloody?” I asked as I walked in front of a soldier with blood on his chin and a cut on his arm that looked deep, even though the blood over it had long dried.
Taland came closer, his eyes on the soldier I spoke of. He was shorter than the ones by his sides, his shoulders wider, his lips thin and his wounded chin pointy. They were all so different from one another, even though they looked like copies of the same man from a distance or when you first laid eyes on them. They were all individuals. You just didn’t see it unless you spent time watching them, I guessed. Unless you didn’t know their stories.
“He fought a few agents alone,” Taland said as he stopped beside me, looking at the soldiers, too. “The wounds weren’t deep. He healed himself right away. That’s just old blood.”
“Can they do that? Heal themselves?”
“They can when I tell them to. Basically give them permission to do magic. It all comes from me,” said Taland, and I pretended I understood exactly what he meant.
“They bleed yet they don’t breathe. Their beards don’t grow. They don’t eat,” I said in wonder, and continued to walk in front of them, thinking about which of the stories Taland had told me about them belonged to which soldier.
“They run on magic,” Taland said. “They’re…animated corpses, sweetness.”
Goddess, those words didn’t sit well with me at all.
“I think this is him,” I whispered, ignoring the tears that had welled in my eyes, blinking them away as I focused on the soldier in front of me now, who had only three fingers on his right hand. “This is the one whose stepmother tortured him.”
That story was particularly sad, I thought. A reverse Cinderella story, where he was the son of a rich man whose mother died, and whose father married again within the month. And his stepmother was an awful woman from what Taland saw, who’d tortured the kid physically whenever his father wasn’t home. She’d cut a toe and two fingers off him, as well as pulled out most of his teeth, among other things. All of it when he was only a boy, powerless to do anything to stop her. Too afraid to tell his father—or maybe he just knew nothing would change if he did.
And finally, Taland said, when he’d gotten the courage to strike back, he had gone into the house one night to kill both her and his father in bed. He’d found her sleeping in a nightgown and had noticed her growing belly.
He couldn’t do it, couldn’t kill her, not with a baby inside of her.
So, he’d ran away from home instead and had lived in the streets for the next few years, stealing, killing for food, nearly dying of plagues.
Then Titus had found him, had offered him a house anywhere he pleased, and a fortune to live with for the rest of his days if he served in his army.
Look at him now.
“The one whose stepmother despised him,” Taland said, looking at the soldier’s missing fingers.
Goddess, my heart ached as I tried to imagine it but couldn’t get the details right; and then I imagined the bigger picture, the pain he must have felt; and then I tried to stop imagining—all within the same minute.
“Do it,” I whispered, digging my fingernails into my palms, trying to keep from screaming my lungs out—at the sky, the earth, everything that had stood by and just watched such cruelty happen without interfering.
But the man responsible was already dead, his bones inside the bodies of these very soldiers, and now I wished that I could bring back David Hill again just to feel him exploding to pieces once more. I wished I could somehow bring back Titus, too, and watch the life drain from his eyes little by little.
Taland said nothing for a little while.
“Do you hear me? Do it, Taland. Set them free,” I repeated as he walked over to my other side, all the way to the last soldier in line, to the very edge where the mountain continued on a steep rise of smooth rock, impossible to climb. Even so, I knew someone would try to get to us from the other side eventually, but I was prepared.
Because this was inhumane. This was unacceptable.
“I can’t,” Taland whispered, lowering his head, his jaws clenching.
“We’re part of it,” I said, shaking my head at myself, at him. “The longer we keep them here, the longer we are a part of this cruelty.” I went to him, grabbed his hands. “We’re no better than Hill or Titus, Taland. We’re?—”
His finger pressed over my lips. “ Don’t ever say that again,” he told me. “There’s not a single part of you that could compare even remotely to what those men were capable of. What I am capable of. You are not us and you never will be.”
Funny guy. He made me laugh. “Oh, you think you’re on the same level as Hill and Titus? Why don’t you try saying that to me when you actually order these soldiers to stay silent, and you don’t lose your fucking mind to their cries of help. Try then, Taland, and maybe I’ll believe you!”
Because I could be wrong, and we didn’t compare to the likes of David Hill and Titus, but he wasn’t evil. Taland, as much as he tried to appear so to the world, had a bigger heart than anybody I knew.
“Sweetness—”
“And maybe we’re not those men, but we will be if we keep this up. We will be just as guilty if we don’t release these soldiers.” That, at least, was a truth even he couldn’t deny.
A bitter smile curled the corners of his lips. “I can’t do it, baby. Not only because I can’t keep you safe on my own now, but because I don’t know how.” His hands framed my face. He touched me gently. “I don’t know how to release them. Hill only had the necromancy spell with him, not the original spell that made them, or anything that could set them free of this curse.”
My stomach turned. I held onto his wrists and rose on my tiptoes to give him a peck on the lips because it almost seemed like he was expecting me to push him away or something because I was pissed off and panicking.
“Then let’s figure it out.” We were no experts on revived soldiers or curses to basically possess them, but we could learn, couldn’t we? “There must be somewhere we can go to search for answers, someone we could talk to.”
“There isn’t,” Taland said. “I’ve been thinking about it since we got here. I’ve been searching their minds, their memories, trying to figure it out, but Titus was very thorough. He left no loose ends and if he ever created a counter spell for his curse, he never shared it with anyone. Not that these soldiers know, anyway.”
I shook my head, turned to look at them, then back at Taland. “Then we’ll make one,” I whispered. “You have the power, don’t you? If you can control all of these soldiers, you can create a spell to break this curse.”
Taland paused for a moment, and I knew that he wasn’t focused on me, even though his eyes were still just as white.
“You there?”
He sighed, smiled a little, and leaned in for a kiss. “Yes, of course. I’m here, just thinking.”
“You’re a Blackfire. Necromancy is kind of your thing,” I whispered. “Well, you were a Blackfire, but now you have the power of a Laetus and the expertise of a Blackfire. To me that sounds like a very good start.”
“It’s not so simple,” Taland whispered. “Titus didn’t use necromancy to create the curse—he used Whitefire. He created— forged this inter-soul link from scratch.”
“But you can destroy it,” I said—not because I knew he could, but I was just hopeful. Desperate.
“Destroying it doesn’t mean they will be free, though. That’s the thing—merely undoing the curse doesn’t guarantee that they’re released from the bond with Titus. He still lives, in a way, through them. Through his bones that Hill planted in their bodies.”
Taland’s eyes squeezed shut, and I understood. My head was killing me, too—all of this was too complicated, and I couldn’t even begin to understand what it took to make—or unmake something of this magnitude.
But I knew one thing, though. “We have to try.” For the sake of these men who were tricked and trapped and suffering every second of every day.
“We will,” Taland said. “We’ll try.”
“It’s going to work,” I said, not because I knew it for a fact, but just because I wanted to believe it. I needed to believe it. “It’s going to work, Taland. You are very powerful—that you were even able to bring them back proves it. And even after they’re gone, we will be perfectly fine because we still have the bracelet. We can both use it—together. That’s how we killed Hill, remember?”
Again, he smiled, but this time it was sad. Heartbreaking. “I do. I remember everything.”
“So, you know that we will be just fine, you and I. We’ll disappear somewhere, live off the radar.”
“On another mountain. Maybe an island somewhere,” he said, with a nod.
“And we can create our own protection shields and wards from scratch. We can be invisible to the whole world.” Maybe not invisible, but we could find a way to make wards last for a long time. Like the charm his mother made him—we could take that spell and alter it, enhance it. “As long as we’re together, I don’t mind living anywhere at all. I don’t care where we are or if we have to run and hide all the time.”
He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and brought me closer, hugged me to his chest tightly. “As long as we’re together,” he repeated in my ear because he wouldn’t mind living anywhere, either.
“We can’t keep them here forever.” That was unacceptable. The rest we could work with.
“They’ll be coming for us. All the time, they’ll be coming,” Taland said as I kissed the side of his neck, held onto his waist with all my strength. “They’ll be coming for the bracelet. I doubt another exists out there, and without it, the Council can’t figure out how to recreate it.”
“But they won’t get to us. They can try, but we won’t let them get close.”
A heartbeat later, Taland kissed my cheek. “They can try,” he agreed. “We’ll make it work. Whatever it takes.”
“Whatever it takes.” Pure joy came over me, as strong as the crippling fear that rivaled it. But it was okay, wasn’t it? “We’ve done the impossible before. We’re still here.” And that gave me hope.
Taland laughed and my toes curled. Goddess, I loved that sound.
“We’ll be just fine.”
I believed him.
We didn’t have access to books or any kind of online data that we could use to help us figure out how to undo the curse, set those men free. All we had was what we knew, and for the next three days, we spent every waking second going over different ways to undo spells and curses, or to null a spell or curse in its entirety.
When we weren’t sleeping—or fucking—we were trying to come up with the most effective spell, even while eating.
“I think it’s more a linking issue,” Taland said at noon on the third day. We had a decent plan on how to null the curse, how to basically reverse it, but we still had no clue how to separate his soul from those men. “I think it should be a reverse-bonding spell—is there such a thing?”
I shook my head. “Not that I know of. I’m no Greenfire, but unless the mage or the animal dies, the bond stays in place.”
Taland thought about it for a second. “Except this isn’t an ordinary bond—remember, Titus died and they remained connected. Almost like his soul remains here while the soldiers’ do and probably vice versa. And, sweetness, I’m pretty sure the bonding that happened in the Tree of Abundance in the Roe was real. If the Drainage was real, so was it, and they separated us from our bonded, didn’t they? We were… unlinked from them when we came out of the game.”
Shivers ran down my back. “Yes—unless they actually killed the animals.” The words brought bile up my throat because the idea of my beautiful vulcera dying made me want to lose my mind just like in the Whitefire challenge. It had been the reason why I’d taken to attacking ice and that roc statue, with nothing but a little hope that she’d make it. It had worked, true, but who was to say that they hadn’t killed the animals when the game was over?
“They absolutely have the capacity,” Taland said in the end, just as sick at the idea as me. Then he dropped the pen he’d been scribbling on a pad with and ran his fingers through his hair furiously. It had grown again, just like in the Iris Roe, and I’d asked him not to cut it because I loved to play with it when we were in bed.
“Nulling the spell,” I whispered, feeling a little defeated as I paced around the porch while he sat at the dining table we pretty much always left outside now. “We have to start there and hope for the best.”
He nodded. “I’ll try again to see into their minds, try to find any details that might help.”
I flinched. “That drains you.” Whenever he spent hours at a time staring at the sky and searching the minds of those soldiers, he was completely exhausted because he felt every feeling they’d felt, heard and saw whatever event exactly as the soldiers did when it happened to them. That would drain anyone.
“I don’t mind. You can sit with me and read.” He tapped the tablet on the table that we used to both read digital books and to watch movies sometimes.
So, I sat down beside him and hugged his arm to my chest and kissed him. “I love you. I won’t leave your side if you need me.”
That small, almost surprised smile that stretched his lips made my heart trip all over itself. “I love you, too, baby. More every day.” And he kissed me again.
Then he stared away at the sky and the trees, and for a while, I stared away with him, my head on his shoulder, my eyes half closed. I had faith that if there was any kind of way for him to figure this out in this way, he’d do it. Taland was something else. He was extraordinary. I believed in him just as he believed in me.
I knew it would take time. Possibly days and months and years, but I was okay with that as long as we kept trying.
What I didn’t expect was for Taland to wake me up three hours later with, “I think I got it. I think I know how to set them free.”
The sun had already chased away the night not half an hour ago. Taland and I walked hand in hand through the trees, toward where the soldiers had created a wall of bodies that pretty much nobody could get through with weapons or magic.
Taland had wanted to sleep last night—a trip down the minds of those soldiers had drained him worse than we’d imagined because he’d been searching for details this time around. He’d willingly navigated their memories, searching, and that had taken a toll on him. He’d need energy to do what needed doing, and now he looked well rested. Though he was paler than I’d ever seen him before, and he hadn’t even bothered to shave, which never happened. But he was rested, and I’d even made him eat a little.
For now, it only mattered that this worked.
Taland had the bracelet around his wrist. His step didn’t falter even though his jaws were clenched, and he barely even blinked until we made it all the way to them. The two soldiers in front of us stepped to the sides to make way, so in tune with Taland’s very thoughts it was scary as hell. I looked at his profile, wondered what it was like in his head.
Fuck, he looked like shit.
“You okay?” I asked, even though he obviously wasn’t.
“I’m fine,” Taland said, just like I knew he would.
We made it to the other side and turned to look at the soldiers, all standing in a perfect line, their shoulders inches apart. Their eyes were closed and their chests still, their hands loose at their sides. I still hadn’t gotten used to how real and fake they looked at the same time, and I didn’t think I ever would.
Then they all opened their eyes at once, and a scream caught in my throat. I could have sworn all their attention was on me, just like I felt Taland’s.
Four of them moved, left the line and started to pick up things from the forest floors—twigs and rocks and leaves that made no sense to me at first.
“What are they doing?”
“I need to create a ritual circle to help me focus the magic better, the same one Titus used,” he said.
“Oh.” I swallowed hard. “So, you just thought about it and they got to work?”
“Pretty much.”
“That’s…” I had no word, really. Terrifying and fascinating and mind-blowing and dangerous just didn’t cut it.
“I know what it looks like,” said Taland. “I suppose it is strange for you to not see me communicating with them, but I do. I talk and they hear—I just don’t talk in words.”
“Yeah, yeah, you talk in thoughts, ” I teased. “It’s just telepathy—no biggy.”
“I wish I could show you, sweetness,” he said, raising goose bumps on my forearms.
“I think I’m fine.” I really didn’t want to know what it was like to have all those people inside my head, listening to my thoughts while I listened to theirs.
“Yes, you are. This is going to take a little while, I think,” he said and led me to where those four soldiers were arranging leaves and sticks in a perfect circle between two trees.
“What exactly are you going to do here? Do you know?”
Taland flinched. “Not with a hundred percent certainty. It’s just a handful of memories that I came across from when Titus did the binding ceremony with the soldiers. We never really learned Binding in school, but I’ve seen it a couple of times and what he did was very similar—with a few changes in shape. The memories of the soldiers are frail, incomplete, but Titus used the same spell to trap all of them and I think I can combine those memories they still have together to create the full picture of what I need to do to release them.”
I nodded. “So, it’s Binding .”
“Yes, and no,” said Taland. “It’s soul-linking mixed with the curse. Greenfire and Whitefire magic combined, which is what concerns me the most. I haven’t had this bracelet or all these colors long enough to know how to separate them, how to use one at a time.”
“You can do it,” I said, and it was easy to sound certain because I was. “If there’s one person out there who can, it’s you, Taland. You can separate the colors and you can do the spells. You can set them free and set yourself free as well.”
The way he looked down at me for a moment…
“There’s a chance I might not make it.”
I squeezed his hand on instinct. “What…what do you mean?”
“We said no more secrets and I don’t want to keep this from you, so there is a chance I might not make it, baby. Not a strong chance, but a chance.”
If he’d cut off my head right now, I’d have been less shocked. “But…but why ? How?” I didn’t even know what kind of a question to ask because my brain was suddenly refusing to work.
“I’m connected to them on a deeper level than even I understand. There’s a very good chance that I’ll be able to separate myself from them without any major changes to me, but I don’t know for sure. Not right now.” He turned to me, took my face in his hands. “Hey, look at me. It’s going to be fine.”
He was serious, too, but I didn’t have it in me to laugh right now. “Then we’re not going to do this.”
“We talked about it,” he whispered.
“Yes— before I knew that you were in any kind of danger!” I said— shouted the words out. “Taland, we are not going to risk your life for anything.” That I even had to say this was absurd to me.
“It’s the only way. I’ll be careful. I’ll?—”
“No,” I cut him off. “No, no, no—just no. ”
“I have to try,” he insisted.
“You don’t.”
“I have to.”
“You really don’t!”
“I can’t live like this, damn it!” he said, and this time he shouted, too. It was like he put his hand inside my chest and pulled my heart out.
Closing his eyes, he let go of me and turned around with his hands on his head.
“I can’t…I can’t live like this. I will not shut them out—I won’t do it. And I can’t live with the weight of them on my shoulders.”
Goddess, it was like he was slicing me wide open with those words.
Tears in my eyes. I wrapped my arms around his waist from behind and hugged him, cheek against his shoulder blade. Fuck, I wanted to break something, make something disappear—preferably his pain. I wanted to take it somehow, pull it out of him, carry it in my own body so he didn’t have to suffer another second.
All of this was because of me. Because he’d wanted to save me. Because he couldn’t stand the idea of me being hurt, and now I was in this position. Now I had to stand back and watch him potentially kill himself trying to set free these soldiers. These strangers that he’d tied himself to— for me.
Taland spun around between my arms and hugged me to his chest, kissed the top of my head and promised me that we were going to be okay, that he really didn’t think that he was going to die doing this. Maybe he’d be wounded, but it would not kill him. He’d recover, he said.
And after what felt like hours to me, I finally forced myself to come to terms with it.
This was Taland we were talking about. It was Taland, and if he said he couldn’t live with this burden, then he really couldn’t. If this was too much for him, then it really was too much—so much that it would have probably driven another man insane already. I had to suck it up and deal with it and stand by his side and make sure that he made it out alive no matter what.
He wasn’t alone, damn it—he had me and that meant something. That meant a great deal. I would not give up on him no matter what. I’d first give up on the whole damn world.
“I’ll be right here,” I said, both for his benefit and mine. “I’ll have the bracelet. I’ll use it. You will be fine.” I knew spells—I knew a lot of spells. Fourth degree ones, so powerful they came this close to healing death itself as if it were a disease. That bracelet was my superpower.
It would be perfectly fine. We’d make it out of this just as we made it out of everything else.
“We will,” Taland said, leaning back to look at my face, wipe the tears from my cheeks. No more of them were coming though. Old tears—and I wouldn’t cry again until we were on the other side of this. “I trust you, baby.”
“And I trust you.”
He smiled, kissed my lips gently. “When we’re done, we leave. We won’t get more than twenty-four hours before they find out the soldiers are gone.”
“Through the waterfall. We leave through the waterfall trail.” There was a trail that we hadn’t explored, but it led to the bigger waterfall pool down the mountain, and we’d take it from there.
“It’s a plan,” Taland said.
I kissed him with my everything, locked my arms around his neck and held him to me for a little while. A part of me thought this might be the last kiss we ever shared, but I drowned that thought with all my strength because it was a liar. This was not our last kiss—not even close. We both knew it and that’s why we were smiling.
“We got this,” I said.
“We got this,” he said.
Then we let go and stepped back—and one of the soldiers standing in line behind us broke formation and started to walk down the mountain as fast as he could without running.