Chapter 7
Rosabel La Rouge
Madeline Rogan sat about five feet to my side with her eyes on my lap where I held Taland’s hand between mine tightly. We were sitting together, all of us. Selem and the Council, Madeline and me, in her mansion.
Impossible seemed like a small word just now, but here we were.
“You are certain that this is the Script of Perria,” said Flora the Redfire as she looked down at the piece of paper in the middle of the coffee table that they’d put back in place again. Madeline had called up for more empty glasses from the liquor cabinet with her magic, which had been another shock.
Then Taland had asked me, in front of all of them, if I wanted them to have the script, and I said yes. Not because I cared about any of them, but because we all had to work together, unfortunately. Just like Radock said.
Nicholas had given Taland a pad and a pen for him to write down exactly what he’d memorized from that script the Devil had sent him to steal.
“I am,” Taland said.
“Why didn’t you give this to the Devil?” I whispered under my breath, though there was a good chance that others would hear, too. I didn’t really care.
“I tried. That’s why I turned myself in. He wasn’t interested,” Taland told me without batting an eye, completely at ease now that I was sitting next to him.
“It is a search spell, all right,” said Radock as he, too, analyzed the letters on that piece of paper.
“A very specific one,” said Zach as he drank his wine slowly, savoring every sip. “Very old, too. We haven’t created or used eighteen-line spells for finding things since…”
“Five or six centuries ago,” George the Bluefire finished.
“Because we’ve learned how to simplify the use of magic,” said Helen. “But just because this spell is old doesn’t mean that it’s what we’re looking for.”
Her cold, almost white eyes fell on Taland. She, out of everyone else, was the most suspicious of him.
“I had the script in my hands. I read it twenty times. Memorized it. Then I lost it,” Taland told her. “ This was what the Devil sent me to steal.”
“And the fact that it’s not there anymore, this script, is proof enough. That means that this is what we’re looking for,” Aurelia told her. She, Taland, and I were the only ones not drinking alcohol right now.
“Exactly. Why would he take it with him if he didn’t need it or if he didn’t care if you could find it?” asked Kaid.
Meanwhile Seth stood by the wall and played with his feather and drank his white wine like it was water. Any time I looked up at him, he grinned and winked, and I was tempted to smile back. I would have if we hadn’t been in this situation because I was really glad to see that he was okay, that he’d made it out of the ruins in one piece.
“ You do it, then,” said Natasha the Greenfire. “Do this spell and give us a location. Wasn’t that the deal?”
“The deal was to work together to stop him,” said Aurelia. “And if we do the spell, we’ll do it together.”
“Are you assuming we trust that the boy hasn’t hidden a curse in there somewhere?” asked Flora.
“Why would he bother to hide a curse in there when he wants Hill found as much as you do?” Kaid.
“Together. We chant the spell together,” said Radock. “ That will be your guarantee. Unless my brother wants to kill us all, I trust this is exactly what he says it is.”
“And you trust him after he betrayed you—what am I supposed to make of that?” said Helen.
“Make of it whatever you like,” Radock said, and he didn’t sound happy in the least. “But we either do this together or not at all.”
Suddenly, everyone started to speak at the same time. Everyone had something to say:
Hill is your guy—he operated under your nose this whole time!
And you assume we’re stupid to trust in anything you say! Have you no idea who we are?
If this goes south, which it will, who will take responsibility?
If we chant this spell and we find nothing, what happens then? Are you really ready to die here, now?
On and on they went.
“Look at me, sweetness.”
Taland’s voice snaked its way into my mind and took hold of all my thoughts, all the fear and the panic. I looked up at his wide eyes that were alive.
“You pulled me out.”
“I didn’t even have to walk over bones to do it. Just a couple of unconscious guys,” I muttered, reaching out a hand to touch his cheek. “Are you okay?”
“Perfect. You?”
“I could use some food, to be honest.”
He put his hand over mine and turned his head just slightly to kiss my palm. “Soon, baby. Soon.” Then he took my hand down, and while he held my eyes, he put the bracelet around my wrist so fast, I doubted anybody had seen it—they were still bickering, all at the same time. I didn’t see him moving either, only felt the cold of the metal against my skin.
“You should keep it,” I said, though to have that thing around my wrist made me feel like I could fly again. With it, I was safe—perfectly safe. With it, I didn’t fear for my life or Taland’s for a second. Not after a single spell with it ruined that screen—and the entire neighborhood, apparently.
“It’s yours,” Taland said. “It belongs to you.”
“But you can use it, too.”
“I prefer it when you do,” Taland said and slowly touched the tip of my nose the way he always did— small I-love-yous to carry around, Seth said. That’s what that touch meant to Taland and his brothers because of their mother who’d always done the same to them.
“We’ll make it out of here,” I said, and I sounded so sure.
“Sweetness, we made it out of the Iris Roe and the Blackrealm. Mansions don’t really scare me.”
Laughter burst out of me for a second, and to my horror, it did so in the same second that everybody stopped speaking, so they all heard it. The sound echoed in Madeline’s office, and now every one of them was looking at us.
I suddenly felt like I was sitting on hot coals as I straightened in my chair.
Taland didn’t let go of my hand, though.
“Something funny?” Helen asked in that tone of voice that meant to humiliate us. And she thought she could—of course she did. She’d just been about to kill me not an hour ago, and I’d just sat there and waited, had been perfectly defenseless against her, and my own grandmother would have allowed her to go through with it without a word of complaint. Of course, she thought she could humiliate me—except I was not the same girl as I was when I was sitting on that couch before, confused and scared and helpless.
I had the bracelet around my wrist now, and my magic had already connected to it without my even having to think about it at all. But most importantly Taland was here. And I didn’t blame them for not knowing the kind of impact his presence had on me. Even I didn’t understand myself how my entire view of the world changed when he was near, but that was okay. I’d show her exactly what she was dealing with now.
“ You are,” I said, and her brows shot up, but if she planned to say something, I didn’t give her the chance. “You’re funny—all of you. The whole world turns to you in times of crises because you’re supposed to be calm and rational and work toward a solution. Well, we are in a crisis, even if the world doesn’t know it yet, and what are you doing?”
I wasn’t looking at her only, but at the Mergenbachs, too, and finally at Radock who had that small smile on his face like he was thinking inappropriate things—like how to skin me alive.
“You’re sitting here arguing about who to trust. Trust has nothing to do with this—we have a common enemy. After we’re done with it, by all means, go back to being enemies or whatever you are, but right now, let’s find Hill and let’s stop him. Calmly.”
I expected them to start laughing at me, at least half of them.
Nobody did.
“Very well, then,” said Aurelia, and she pulled the piece of paper toward her. “I’ll start and you can tag along, whoever feels like it.” She looked up at Helen. “Save the bickering for later, like Rosabel said. Shall we?”
She didn’t wait. She didn’t let anybody make a single sound before she began to chant the long spell exactly as Taland had written it.
Which made every single person in the room hold their breath.
I looked at Taland. He winked at me. We were okay.
He didn’t let go of my hand when we stood up and went closer to Aurelia so we could read the spell, too. I might have been weak, but my magic was still there, and after we did the spell, we could eat and rest and do whatever. For now, we began together, joining Aurelia as she read through the second sentence slowly, to make sure we didn’t miss a single letter.
Magic in the air.
The others came closer, too, one by one. Zach and Flora and George and Helen, Radock and Kaid and Natasha, too. Meanwhile Nicholas and my grandmother remained in their seats, and Ferid kept looking at us, unsure whether to panic or stop us or join us.
He chose to do nothing.
The spell lasted a while indeed, and when the magic of each and every one of us began to come out of our skins, I was afraid.
Afraid that it would work and afraid that it wouldn’t. Afraid of what either of those options meant.
Colorful magic burst out of my hand as I raised it in the air together with all of them. My flames were brighter than the rest, and I was sweating by the time we started on the last paragraph.
Slowly. Steadily. We chanted every single word, and our magic, in so many beautiful colors, stretched and stretched until we couldn’t see through it, until it became a thick box of colors hovering in the air.
Then the last word of the spell left our lips at the same time, and the colors of our magic faded.
A golden dot remained in the middle of the room, so bright it could have been a miniature sun, but none of us looked away from it. None of us could —I felt that light as if it was inside my veins. I felt it and it held my attention and it took the air out of my lungs and it forced me to follow it.
To someone watching, it remained in the same place, burning there a couple of feet over the coffee table.
To me, and to the others who brought the spell to life, it moved at the speed of light.
Images popped in my head. It was like watching a movie, except the movie held me prisoner, frozen in place, my muscles locked, my lungs empty, my eyes unable to blink. The only thing that was moving inside me, that could move and was being forced to, was my magic.
It was tearing itself out of me and rushing down my arm, and the pain was even more intense than when I used my ring after draining the Rainbow. I gritted my teeth to keep the scream inside, but it was no use—the whole room heard it.
And I heard the screams of most of the people who’d been chanting with me.
A curse, said a voice in my head. It was really a curse. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t do anything to stop the magic that was being dragged out of me with such force.
But…
Taland wrote this spell. Taland memorized it from that script. Taland would have never let me chant if he even suspected that this wasn’t what we thought it was.
No, that wasn’t it. The tiny sun that was pulling my magic out of me— all our magic out of each and every one of us—was not a curse, but it was powerful. And the heat of the colorful flames that sprouted on the palm of my hand without my say-so almost burned my skin.
Another scream ripped out of me because I was holding that light in my palm now, and it was just as hot as it had looked from a distance. The others screamed, too, until I couldn’t tell my voice apart from theirs.
Pain. So much fucking pain.
Then I touched it.
Just when I thought I was never going to feel cold again, I did. Just when I thought I was never going to get my body to obey my commands again, I did. Just when I thought that I was dying once more, I breathed. My lungs worked and I was alive.
The ball of light in my hand was gone, and inside my fist was something hard, something cold, something that I had never seen before.
A parchment scroll with dark wooden handles on the sides.
I blinked, half of me focused on the air going down my throat to convince myself that it was real, that I wasn’t dying. Nobody was screaming anymore, and…they all had those same scrolls in their hands, too. Everybody was holding onto their chests and breathing deeply, heavily, and Taland’s hand was on my cheek as he looked at me. He’d been in that same pain, too. He was breathing like he’d been racing, and his eyes were bloodshot, his hair all over the place.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” I said, and we could all see that we were okay, but it took us a little while to get our heartbeat to slow down and our breathing under control.
Meanwhile, the others who hadn’t chanted with us were standing on the other side of the room, watching us with wide eyes, curious, concerned.
“What the hell happened?”
“What kind of a spell was that?”
“I swear it felt like it ripped my arm off…”
“But it worked .”
We all stopped.
We looked at Radock who had already opened his scroll and was smiling at the brownish parchment he held in front of his face, though it was empty.
“It worked,” said Helen from my other side, and she, too, was rushing to open her scroll, so we did the same. Maybe Perria’s location would be in these. We had nine—one of them was bound to contain that map.
And mine did.
“It worked!” I repeated in awe as I watched the shimmering silver on the brownish parchment slowly reveal to me a shape—what could have been a valley between two mountains.
“Holy shit, it actually worked,” said Zachary. “Are you guys seeing this?! We have it! We?—”
I looked at his scroll as he held it up for us with a big smile on his face, and I saw that it was empty just a second before Radock said…
“Empty.”
Zachary stopped.
“Yours is empty—mine isn’t.” And Radock showed us his. His scroll that was also empty, which I’d seen the moment I came to my senses.
“ Yours is empty, not mine,” Zachary insisted, and then we were all turning our scrolls so everyone could see, only to realize…
“We can’t see them,” said Flora from behind me, raising every inch of my skin in goose bumps. “I can only see mine, and you can only see yours—nobody else’s.”
“Fuck,” Kaid said, leaning to look at Taland’s scroll, and I did, too. Empty.
All of theirs were empty except mine—to my eyes.
“It’s a puzzle,” Radock said. “It’s a puzzle spell—of course. An extra layer of protection.”
“Does that mean I should have done it by myself?” asked Aurelia.
“It wouldn’t have opened to you,” said Helen. “This was created by the original Council. It requires at least five people to work.” She was looking at her parchment and shaking her head.
“We should be able to read it, though. When the parchments are together…” Natasha said, bringing her parchment closer to Helen’s. “Anything?”
“No. Yours remains empty to me,” the woman said.
Everybody sighed at the same time. We all folded the scrolls and took a moment to gather ourselves—that spell had been intense. The magic that had come out of me, had been forced out of me by that burning sun…
It was gone now. I looked up and I expected to find it there still, hovering in the air, but it was gone. It had disappeared as soon as those scrolls had materialized in our hands.
“Let’s sit.” Taland took my hand in his again and led me back to the chairs we’d been sitting in a moment ago. Everybody sat, and everybody was still shaken, except for Radock and Helen, who seemed to be lost in their own minds as they stared at the tabletop. I could see the wheels turning in their heads as the others spoke, gave ideas.
How about only the Council tries it?
How about we do the spell over?
What if we said it wrong?
What if the boy remembered it wrong?
What if we mixed the spell—how are we going to get the whole picture?
We draw it, said someone—Kaid, I think, and he was already by Madeline’s desk, getting pads and pens, while she looked at him like she wanted to drink his blood for dinner.
Some thought it would be useless to draw out parts of the map, and some said it would work, but we all got a piece of paper and a pen to draw ours. It made sense at first to create the shape I was seeing on my parchment in detail on that blank piece of paper. It made sense, except…
I could also see what Taland was drawing beside me, and I couldn’t get any of the lines to make sense to me.
“I think it’s a river—do you see?” he asked when he was halfway done, but I saw no river. All I saw was a straight line.
And the others were looking at one another’s, too, but…a voice in my head was whispering. A voice that was almost coming from my bracelet.
I could have sworn it was coming from my bracelet, and the harder I tried to see what Natasha was showing me from the other side of the couch, the louder it got.
Dark. It was too dark to see the drawings in detail, wasn’t it? The drapes were drawn, and the lights overhead were very bright, but it still seemed too dark to me. That’s the word that voice whispered, dark.
My eyes closed.
“Sweetness, you okay?” asked Taland, but I was suddenly feeling… fatigued. Weak. I was feeling so damn weak, and I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to eat and sleep until I couldn’t keep my eyes closed anymore.
Dark.
“I’m fine,” I thought I said while the others continued to argue about who got what shape right and who sucked at drawing more.
“We’ll figure it out,” Taland said, bringing my hand to his lips and kissing my knuckles.
“I know,” I said, though I could have been lying. But when my eyes opened, I felt hers on me like sun rays.
Madeline stood at the corner of her desk with her hands crossed in front of her chest, watching me. She looked…unusual, a look I hadn’t seen on her before. Calm but furious. Unbothered but curious. Her eyes could melt the skin off my flesh, my flesh off my bones. And if I could somehow look inside her mind right now, I’d find out exactly how much she despised me, even if she sometimes looked like she didn’t. Even if she hid it well.
The others talked. Taland pulled at my hand, but I couldn’t turn, couldn’t look away.
Madeline reminded me of bad things, always had. She was synonymous with every ounce of pain I’d ever felt, and right now the pain of that spell was the most vivid in my mind. I couldn’t tell you why I was so caught up in the way she was looking at me, why I felt the heat of her hatred on me so perfectly, why my bracelet kept tugging at my arm and why that voice wouldn’t stop whispering, dark, dark dark.
It was dark outside, no doubt, even though the drapes wouldn’t let me see the sky.
It was dark outside, and that’s why we couldn’t see.
“The sun,” I said, and the word could have popped into my mind from that old voice, not mine, but my lips said it all the same.
Only when the others stopped talking did I realize how loud it had been in the room until now.
Madeline raised a brow at me.
“The sun?” Flora said, and I nodded.
“The sun. That light that gave us these looked like a little sun, don’t you think?”
A moment of silence.
Laughter—Natasha. “The oldest trick in the book,” she said. “The girl is right.”
“We’ll need sunlight to see the full picture,” said Radock, and Seth was already by the windows, pulling the drapes to the sides to reveal the dark sky with a million stars twinkling in the distance.
“We can’t see the map for another…six hours then, give or take,” said George, looking at his watch.
Six hours.
“Sweetness.”
I broke eye contact with Madeline to look at Taland. The heat of all that she felt for me disappeared into thin air instantly.
“Do you want to get out of here?”
I thought, more than anything in the world. I said, “I think we should stay.”
Taland nodded. “Then we’ll stay.”
Madeline continued to look at me. The others continued to talk about ideas—not bickering at the moment but talking. Exploring possibilities. Wondering how Hill would have gotten his own script to work, and if we would even find him wherever these scrolls said the Delaetus Army was.
But we would, I was sure of it. Hill was not a fool—on the contrary. He might be the smartest man any of us had ever met. He’d have figured out how to find the Army with or without that script.
As I rested my head on Taland’s shoulder for a moment, I just prayed to the goddess that he hadn’t brought them back to life already.