Chapter Twenty-Six
M y attempt to hide didn’t work, as the soldiers followed us in, and there were a lot of them. First came a bunch of Nimue’s impossible-to-miss peacock guards, their distinctive armor looking even stranger outside a watery setting. And then the purple-dipped guys, with the shiny, breathtakingly expensive armor and the velvet cloaks hanging from their shoulders. And finally, Nimue herself, her long, dark hair floating around her head in defiance of gravity, as if born outwards on the tide.
Damn, I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. She didn’t seem real, with the uncanny valley effect kicking in hard whenever my eyes tried to look at her, making them want to slip off the other side. Only to come immediately back because beauty like that attracted as much as it repelled.
Her face was a pale oval without a flaw, her lips red as coral, her body clothed in what looked like liquid seafoam. It may have been that amazing fey silk or, knowing her, the real thing magicked up to swirl around her. But either way, it made all the ridiculous pretensions of her court seem like what they were—bad copies of her effortless perfection.
Yet it was the eyes that stunned.
They were blue, but that description totally misses the point. They were blue— and green and gray and all the colors of the ocean. And right now, they were angry, so much so that I could swear I saw the colors change and slur like the ones in waves that the light was shining through.
A storm was coming, only I didn’t know at who.
Until I turned my neck and saw who Nimue was looking at. She was standing on the opposite side of the room behind us, holding a baby in her arms. A baby . . .
Who I recognized immediately.
It was the hair that did it. Pritkin’s hair could lay flat as an adult if he wasn’t messing with it and his magic wasn’t surging. But if it was . . . well, I’d often wondered if that was why he favored spiky hairstyles, because they covered up what happened when he got mad.
Like that, I thought, watching as the baby’s scant blond whisps suddenly started wafting about like Nimue’s. Or like Jonas Masden’s, the most powerful mage I knew, who had white tresses that drifted about his head like a sea anemone’s tentacles. And got progressively more spiky as he became more annoyed.
The baby’s short strands were almost perpendicular because he’d recognized danger, even if he didn’t know the word for it yet.
“What is this?” the incubus asked, his voice suddenly quiet.
“Shhh,” I told him, even though I was pretty sure no one could hear us. No one had even glanced our way, and there was nowhere to hide. So, this was either the Common or—
Okay, that would be interesting.
“Morgaine,” Nimue’s voice, often as melodious as a babbling brook, was flat today.
The woman holding the baby looked up, and strangely enough, considering all the soldiers, she smiled. “I suppose I should be flattered,” she said. “You sent so many of your best soldiers to fetch me from Earth that I wondered if they were meant as an honor guard for your grandson.”
“He is no grandson of mine!”
“Great-grandson, then, if you wish to be precise. And as everyone knows, you are always precise. . .”
Amazingly, she sounded amused.
I remembered that about Pritkin’s mother, how she’d even gone into battle laughing. And how much she’d favored Nimue, especially now when dressed like a fey. But while she was beautiful, with long dark hair highlighted by a dress the color of sunlight, it wasn’t half so active as her grandmother’s, and her blue eyes were lovely enough but merely . . . blue.
You could really see the human in her, and it made me like her more.
“Give me the child,” Nimue said, never one to beat around the bush.
“No.” It was mild, and the sunny smile on Morgaine’s face never wavered.
“I will not play these games with you,” Nimue snapped. And there was power behind the words, enough that I could feel it ripple over my skin all these years later.
Power that Morgaine turned aside with a gesture as casual as brushing a speck of lint off her pretty yellow skirt.
“Do not test me!” Nimue thundered, and the room shook. But Morgaine ignored that, too, with an insouciance that felt foolhardy under the circumstances.
“I’m beginning to see where he gets it,” the incubus said, his words light but his expression. . .
Because yeah. I supposed seeing yourself as a baby would be attention-getting. Only he was looking far more interested than even that would warrant.
And he wasn’t looking at the baby.
“She’s beautiful,” he whispered, staring at Morgaine.
Because she was his mother, too, wasn’t she? He’d known her back in old Wales, or rather, Pritkin had when they were more intertwined. But neither had known who she was to them. That had been kept quiet to protect them, as plenty of people in Wales hated the fey and Nimue’s line in particular.
So she’d died there as nothing but a passing acquaintance. I’d told Pritkin the truth after that little adventure, but this was his first time seeing her as his mother. And he was soaking her in.
“Give me the child!” And okay, that command had felt less like a ripple and more like the storm I’d been expecting. Nimue had seemed fond enough of Morgaine when the woman was doing as she was told, which was basically never. But she had not enjoyed being crossed.
But to my surprise, Morgaine didn’t crumple to the floor or even noticeably react—other than to broaden that cheeky grin slightly. Something that did not falter even when the array of guards lunged for her at a gesture from their mistress, only to run into something halfway across the room. Judging by how hard they hit, it may as well have been an invisible wall.
Nimue began to frown.
“How are you—” she began and then stopped herself. Maybe because Morgaine had gestured to something that had appeared hovering in the air between them.
“Your court wasn’t impressed by my new abilities,” she pouted. “But they do come in handy, at times. Times like these, to be precise.”
“Take it down.” And, for the first time, there was real menace in Nimue’s lovely voice.
“Oh, you don’t like people using magic you don’t know against you? Fancy that.”
“Take it down!”
I was starting to worry about the room’s integrity, as that last thunderous command had caused little siftings of dust to shake down from the rafters. They highlighted Morgaine’s creation in the center—a ward, I assumed, although not one I’d ever seen. It looked vaguely like a compass, being round, with symbols at each cardinal point, and was starting to glow a bright, almost electric blue.
Probably with the magic that Nimue had started throwing at it.
“You can do that all day and only exhaust yourself,” Morgaine said casually, picking up a fuzzy yellow blanket and wrapping it securely about her bundle. “It’s like a key, you know. You only have three tumblers, grandmother.
“And it takes all four.”
“Stop this immediately!” Nimue thundered.
“Or what? Will you come after me? Or send your guards to jerk me and your grandson back again? You’re going to do that anyway, but this time, I’ve made plans. I made a deal with the devil, you might say—”
“Traitor!”
“You’re not going to kill my son, Nimue.”
“Your abomination, you mean! Do you realize what you’ve done? Do you have any idea—”
“Made someone amazing?” Morgaine asked, bouncing her baby slightly. And looking at him with such love that I felt a pang under my breastbone. Had my mother ever looked at me that way?
Why didn’t I think so?
“You put our power—all our power, including that of the gods—into the hands of the demons!” Nimue raged. “Do you not think they’ll use it?”
“I think Emrys will use it,” Morgaine said. “But not on their behalf.”
“Then you’re even more of a fool than I thought! They care for nothing but power. They are selfish, self-aggrandizing, cowardly animals, every one—”
“Not cowardly, surely,” Morgaine said, sounding amused again.
Which, yeah. Not the time, I thought, as her grandmother flushed puce. And somehow made it look good.
“Yes, cowards!” Nimue spat. “They fled deeper to the hells when the gods pursued them, refusing our offers of alliance. They left whole worlds to burn—their worlds—rather than defend them. They died by the hundreds of millions, by the billions for all I know, fighting and scrapping among themselves like wolves over meat—”
“Instead of what? Cooperating with their overlords as we did?” Morgaine hiked an eyebrow and, for a minute, looked so like her son that I blinked. “You act like it would have changed anything to stand together. They’d have died all the same.”
“No, not the same!” Nimue hissed. “Our people died fighting them, as you seem to have forgotten—”
“Some did. In time, when it became obvious what our fate was to be otherwise.”
“—and we did it facing them, not fleeing into the night! We did it on our feet, like fey, not on our knees, like vermin! There is a difference in how we face death, Morgaine, and it says everything about who we are as a people.”
“Perhaps,” Morgaine cradled her son, who had calmed down and was giggling as his mother tickled his tummy. “Fortunately, my boy has fey blood, too, doesn’t he? Your blood. Do you think that someone with your blood could be less than courageous?
“If so, you don’t know yourself half so well as I do.”
“Have a care, Morgaine. For I will find him.”
“I don’t think so. Not this time. But if you do, hopefully, it will be when you've had a chance to cool down. And your decency has overtaken your panic, as it always does. And you have thought on the fact that the worth of a man isn’t entirely down to bloodlines. Who he is and what he does with his life is up to—”
The room wavered again, but not because of Nimue this time. She was suddenly as frozen as if I’d cast a time spell or a TV had been paused. The whole scene was.
“What is it?” the incubus demanded, looking around. “What did you do?”
“I don’t run the Common,” I reminded him. “Faerie does.”
“Then why did she pause it? If she brought us here to see this—”
“Lover’s Knot,” I said, wincing slightly.
“It’s not on you!”
“Yes, that’s the problem.” I staggered slightly before I caught myself. “Without access to Pritkin’s fey blood, I keep . . . coming unstuck. . .” I gasped, and the room darkened slightly. “That’s why she had to . . . drop me out of it . . . the first time. . .”
“But we went back in after that,” he said, sounding almost panicked. He really wanted to see this. “And you were fine!”
“I wasn’t fine. Nothing changed on my end, but I think she . . . compensated . . . by pushing more power into the spell. . . But she's carrying two of us . . . and it’s getting . . . tiring. . .”
“She’s a goddess! They don’t get tired!” I shot him a look and didn’t say anything because I didn’t have to. My bedraggled state said it for me. “Then put it back!”
“What?”I gasped.
“Lover’s Knot!”
“I can’t. I don’t know the spell and . . . don’t have the power . . . anyway. And I think . . . we’re about to get thrown . . .
“Out,” I finished, just as a wave of magic hit me.
It was as refreshing as a drink of water in the desert, as powerful as blood rushing back into half-collapsed veins, and as comforting as warmth after bitter cold. I almost gasped in shock, not having really expected this to work. Because Pritkin was smarter than me, but right now, he was also distracted.
Which gave me a minute to act, or however long this vision had left. Because that’s what we were in; not the Common, but a vision of my own, like the ones I used to have all the time growing up. But which I’d had very few of since becoming Pythia.
The Pythian power sought formidable seers to work with because our union was a symbiosis. It gave me the ability to shift and use its godly power in various ways, while I . . . gave it my eyes. At least, my metaphysical ones.
It used my ability to peer through the centuries to patrol the timeline. And in doing so relieved me of all those nasty visions I used to get, very few of which had ever been positive. And neither was this, I thought, as the vision slowly restarted, showing Morgaine finishing her sentence with a defiant “—him!”
Then she made a gesture, and her compass flew through the air to hit the wall. And a moment later, there was no wall. A tunnel opened up for her, spiraling out from the middle of her compass as I’d seen the stones at Aeslinn’s court do for his fey, creating an exit where none had been before.
Earth magic, I thought, something that Nimue didn’t have. And although she sent her fey leaping across the room after Morgaine, they only ran into what was once again solid stone. Just that fast, Morgaine was gone.
Meanwhile, I had barely kept up with what was happening because I was focused on something else, specifically the black claws biting into Pritkin’s flesh. They weren’t inside it, not yet, but they were bleeding him dry spiritually. I could see the weeping wounds now, trace the tiny streams of power leeching out into the air, and almost feel his pain as I hadn’t been able to a moment ago.
Because a moment ago, I’d been powerless, almost bone dry. Before tricking a demon into giving me access to the vast reserves he held from draining all those fey. Because putting Lover’s Knot on me to steady the vision had steadied something else, hadn’t it?
Like my hands, which had been trembling a moment ago and were now rock steady as I started to unwind all those horrible barbs.
He was going to notice, just any time now, which was why I was careful. And not just about the incubus. But also about my safety because there was no way I wanted to experience Zeus’s power again!
That was why I’d wrapped my hands in triple levels of protection before starting this, layering ward on top of ward. And it was lucky I had, because the barbs on all those strands, like thorns on a vine, bit deep. But not deep enough, and I used the leverage they gave me to pull them slowly out of Pritkin’s metaphysical flesh, freeing him by degrees.
But the main event was over now, with nothing but an empty nursery to hold the incubus’s attention. And some of the thorns were buried deep, having had plenty of time to work their way into Pritkin’s spirit, getting a good grip. I was almost out of time and hadn’t managed to free enough—
Until Nimue saved me.
She’d had her eyes closed while her men beat uselessly on stone, standing as still as a statue. Then those amazing gray-blue orbs opened, and her finger pointed. “The Myrgard! She’s made her way out of the tower!”
The soldiers, their knuckles bloody from their useless fight, turned gratefully toward the window. And the incubus’s attention focused, as did everyone’s, on the tiny, fleeing figure of a woman, her dark hair flying out behind her as she ran easily over the top of the marshland, as I’d seen her do to plain water back on Earth. Because Pritkin’s mother held all four elements, didn’t she?
But she was on Alorestri turf this time, and they tore after her. Like I took the reprieve and ripped the remaining barbs out of Pritkin’s flesh. Enough of them, at least, that it was too late when the incubus finally caught a clue.
I jerked them free, like pulling a heavy, stubborn vine off a house that it had been growing on for decades, and it required an alarming amount of power. The incubus’s power, to be exact, something he realized when he saw those dark barbs dissipate in the air, letting go with a hissing sizzle. And then he started fighting me.
And he wasn’t just grappling metaphysically. We crashed back into our cell and went rolling across the floor, kicking and screaming and hair-pulling—at least I was—until the incubus scrambled up my body and pinned me to the floor, panting and furious. “What did you do?” he screamed in my face. “What did you do ?”
“What you should have!” I stared up at him defiantly. Which was not bright as he already looked like he could have strangled me. But he settled for shaking me instead.
“You mugged me!”
“Yeah. Sucks to be you.”
That, of course, prompted some more shaking. “ How ?”
“Lover’s Knot. You put it back on us—”
“To steady you!”
“I didn’t need steadying. That wasn’t the Common. It was a vision—one of mine.”
“But it dimmed . It flickered—”
“Yeah, because I dimmed it.”
He stared at me for a moment, but then his head shook violently. “Why are you lying to me? I can’t see your visions! ”
“Yeah, that stumped me for a minute, too. But you, Mircea, and I . . . got close . . . in London, back when we were battling Zeus. And in the incubus version of sex, sometimes traits get passed over.” I saw his eyes widen. “My guess is that you absorbed some of Mircea’s mental powers and kept them. I don’t know how many, but I didn’t bring you into that vision, so you must have brought yourself.”
“I was trying to calm you,” he said slowly, those pale lashes blinking. “To reassure you, when the vision hit—”
“And sucked you in alongside me. I just let you think it was the Common because I needed access to your power. And because you were the only one with enough juice to put Lover’s Knot back in place.”
I saw when it truly hit him—that he’d been played, and by a human no less. And for a second, he looked more surprised than outraged. “What the hell . . . do you call that?” he asked in wonder.
“Demon practicality,” I said, and sucked down the rest of his power.