19. Nineteen
Chapter 19
The strange tug started nearly a mile from the stone.
“Do you feel that?” I asked. One look at Kalcedon’s tight, drawn face was confirmation enough.
“It’s the Ward,” he croaked.
The ground in northern Sable-Pall was lightly forested with oleander and conifers, obscuring the view along the rocky shore. Ten minutes later I saw movement ahead: distant armored figures in Temple robes.
Kalcedon grabbed me by the upper arm and dragged me back ten paces, to where a low-boughed tree sheltered our forms. He peered intently through the foliage, eyes narrowed.
“What are you doing?” I asked softly.
“I can’t go over there.”
“Whyever not ?”
The Ward’s pull was beginning to nauseate me. It felt like all the magic in my body was standing up on edge, quivering as a magnet pulled at it. Like everything inside me wanted to tumble into the Ward, even though doing so would mean my death. Still: that way lay answers.
He gave me a wide-eyed look, forehead creased. Then he gestured broadly to all of him, pointed ears and inhumanly beautiful, storm-gray features.
“Faerie,” he reminded me. “At the edge of the Ward? Unless you want me to be attacked and have to start killing them…”
I peered back through the trees again. Whatever the Cachians there were doing, they didn’t seem to have noticed us. But perhaps Kalcedon was right. If I didn’t know who he was, I might assume he’d come through while the Ward was down.
“Fine. Wait here, then.”
He grabbed my sleeve yet again as I took a step forward.
“You can’t go alone.”
“I’ll be fine. Let go of me.”
“The Ward’s dangerous. All they have to do is push you into it, and you’re gone .”
I rolled my eyes.
“Nobody from the Temple is going to hurt me. Let go.”
His hand stayed tight on my arm, splayed fingers equal parts possessive and protecting.
“Kalcedon,” I said warningly.
He stared ahead through the trees for one tense moment, his lips pressed tight and flat. At last Kalcedon let go of my arm.
And then he began to draw, sketching phrasings swiftly into the air. As I tracked them, my eyebrows lifted.
“Really?” I asked. He kept going, fingers reciting a work from Odson’s book. For a moment his hands slowed, as if he’d forgotten what came next. I watched Kalcedon bite his lower lip, brow furrowed, then draw a shaky Rhunen . “Ninth of Pleaidas ,” I reminded him softly. He scowled at me but added the final phrasings.
And then he shrank in on himself, a flash of compression that made my uneasy stomach lurch and my head spin.
He was rather large for a domestic cat, not so much broad or heavy as simply big . I stifled a laugh as the storm-gray cat glared up at me. There was nothing funny about Kalcedon once again working a spell beyond what anybody else could achieve, but the displeasure the half-fae man often carried with him was so perfectly at home in feline form.
He lifted a paw, tongue out as if to groom himself, then slowly forced it down. I watched his tail lash in annoyance as he struggled against cat-instincts.
“Can you hold the form long enough?” I asked. Kalcedon opened his mouth and meowed angrily. “Well, you’d better stay close to me,” I informed him, crossing my arms against the urge to pat his tiny head. “If any of them are witches, they’ll wonder why a cat’s spitting so much heat.”
He meowed again. I sucked my lips in against a laugh and began to walk towards the Ward’s aggressive pull. Kalcedon stalked next to me.
“It is sort of impressive,” I told him. “You managed to remember two spells from a book. Well, mostly.”
He hissed.
By then the figures were growing clearer as the trees parted. Eight of the Nameless; some standing attentively at guard while others relaxed. One, human and unbothered by the sickening pull, sat on a folding chair beside a small fire, grilling skewered peppers and toasting flatbread.
Two witches from the Temple Order were with them. One inspected the stone itself while the other drew deep breaths at the edge of the clearing, looking seasick.
One of the guards called a warning. The witch inspecting the stone turned. I ought to have said hello, but my attention was captured by the brutal ruin in front of me.
The Sable-Pall stone was twice my height, a wide base tapering up to a curved point. A jagged crack like lightning split the stone in two. Ash darkened the broken surface. Around it, where the guards milled, blackened ground and stumps of trees showed evidence of a fire that had not claimed the whole wood.
Fire and ruin. I’d had enough of that.
“Mistress,” the witch who’d been inspecting the stone said. She bowed low. Sweat glistened on her forehead.
“I’ve come to look at the phrasings.” My skin prickled with unease, fascination warring against the wrongness in front of me. The sick tug of the Ward; the uneasy memories that the sight of a burned tree unearthed.
“Of course,” she said, and bowed again. “But I warn you it’s indecipherable.” I was confused at the honor shown for a moment, before it hit me that she thought Kalcedon’s power was my own; was according me the respect given to a great witch, without realizing I was only a weakling, and the true power was crouched beside me, cautiously sniffing at the singed earth with his pink nose.
“What happened here?” I asked, and then covered my mouth as another surge of nausea roiled through me. Had the fire come from the Ward’s break, or had fire somehow been used to break the stone?
“Terrible feeling, isn’t it?” the other Temple witch at the edge of the clearing muttered.
“We aren’t sure yet, mistress,” the first witch said. She bent to offer a hand to Kalcedon. He hissed, fur standing up, and scrabbled back.
“He’s not friendly,” I apologized, as my eyes hungrily traveled over the surface of the broken stone.
“Does he go everywhere with you?” the woman asked curiously.
“Just a stray I made the mistake of feeding,” I lied. Kalcedon glared at me, ears tucked back. Then he walked up against me, sleek fur brushing against the skin of my calf. A flood of magic seared into me. I gritted my teeth against showing any reaction. “He thinks he’s smarter than he is,” I told the woman.
“Cats,” she agreed.
Kalcedon’s tail lashed.
I ignored him and stepped forward. My blood roared as I leaned cautiously towards the stone, every nerve aware of where the Ward began. To touch it would mean death.
But inside—inside the break. There was writing on the inside of the obelisk. A long enchantment, one that would fill more than a page in a book, the sigils as complicated—more complicated, even—than those in Minor Works .
It was so risky to put new phrases together. It was too easy for the result that happened to not be the one you’d meant . To say ‘unfixed air, movement, swift, forward’ and mean for a nice sailing-wind, and instead get a miniature cyclone, or have all the air expelled from your lungs. It was hard to imagine Tarelay risking not just a few alterations here and there, but in hundreds of places, in every sigil, and still have the Ward succeed.
How deep an understanding of magic he must have had. In that moment, I felt certain that the Ward had failed on its own; had reached its natural end. How could any living being but the enchanter himself understand the Ward well enough to break it apart?
I focused on the first phrasing, holding up a hand in front of my eyes to block off the others, and tried to puzzle it out. Cycle, Renewal. Protection. Hunger?
This was going to take all day, and then some.
“I have to write this down,” I said to nobody in particular as my hands inched towards the flap of my satchel. My transfixed eyes didn’t leave the stone.