Chapter 5
Evie
“And now he wants me to summarize all of it!” Lo exclaimed.
He had been lamenting ever since Kael had asked him to turn the notes from the monthly assembly of magisters into a report for the king a week ago.
“Can you imagine? Condensing that carnival of egos into something His Majesty can actually read?” His hazel eyes flicked toward me.
“You were there. You know how interminable that council was.”
“Hmhm,” I murmured. It must have been the fifteenth hum I’d given since we had started walking to the farming village.
The day was gentler than any in weeks, the first true breath of spring after endless rain.
We had strolled out of the castle walls and into the city, weaving past markets, shopfronts and the grander residential quarters before passing through the northern gates onto the road that led to the village.
Trees lined the path, their branches still bare from winter, tipped with tiny budding jewels that would soon burst into white blossom.
Lo walked beside me in his blue robe, the official outside-the-castle tabard draped over his shoulders. His black hair was pulled back into a short, bristling tail, baring slightly pointed ears where red rubies hung from silver rings.
During the plague, my whole world had been confined to the halls of the Magi Academy of Hauvia.
I’d kept myself sane with the endless shelves of the library and with Loren Vey, who’d become my closest friend and the support I’d needed most. Neither of us could see our families across the ocean, so we’d built our own, two souls sharing a narrow life of quarters, classrooms, and the inner gardens.
Lo knew my secret. He’d never thought much of seerlings, but he did enjoy that my powers could tell him when someone fancied him.
“You know what Kael said?” Lo asked, and the name alone froze me. “What’s with that look?”
“What look?”
“Those eyes. You’ve gone pale as parchment, like you’ve just seen a ghost in bad robes.”
“Tell me what he said!” My poor attempt at diversion.
“Well,” Lo drew the word out like a stage cue, “he has an audience with the king this afternoon. And he told me—this towering, terrifying block of stone we call a court wizard—that he wants my notes turned into something concise. Objective.” Lo lifted a hand and waggled his fingers as though casting an invisible spell.
“How am I going to do that when magisters are anything but objective! Honestly, Evie, I should be paid in gold and roses for making sense of it.”
I snorted. “You’re already paid in gold.”
“Not enough gold,” he said with mock solemnity, then softened. “And certainly not enough roses.”
He adjusted the tabard on his shoulders, rubies catching a glint of the sun. “Still, I’ll do it. Someone has to translate wizard-speak into words His Majesty can bear over supper. And I’m really good with words.”
“Come on, admit it,” I teased. “You enjoy it.”
He gave an exaggerated sigh. “I suppose I do. Kael may be terrifying, but he’s also terrifyingly nice to look at—hey! There’s that look again.”
Note to self, I am terrible at hiding my emotions.
“There is no look!” I lied.
“Oh my gods, Evie, darling! You think he’s nice to look at, too…”
Heat rushed to my cheeks. There was no getting out of this now.
“Kael is attractive, yes,” I admitted, guilty as charged. “But he’s the Court Wizard, and I want to keep my post. You know how hard it was finding work after the plague.”
“All too well, darling,” he said, his lips thinning, voice softening. We’d both been lucky to land a post. Some of our academy acquaintances hadn’t. “But Evie, let me warn you, Kael is no gentleman. I’ve seen the women he brings to his chambers. They never come out quite right.”
The women? His words twisted around me. How many had there been? My mind, traitorous and vivid, began to paint pictures of them, beautiful women in Kael Forloren’s arms, gasps and hitched breaths against red satin sheets. I didn’t know my imagination could be so sinful.
And what did Lo mean by never quite right? What did Kael do to them?
And why was I suddenly so curious? Something bloomed in my chest, dark and eager.
The heartbeat of intrigue.
I wanted to ask more, but the words tangled in my throat. How could I pry without baring that hunger coiled low in my belly? How could I keep from sounding like some girl desperate for a glimpse at the Court Wizard?
And Kael’s reputation with women was, at least, a shield I could raise between us.
A reason to hold back. I wasn’t built for fleeting touches and single nights.
The only man who had ever touched me that way, I’d thought I would marry.
And so I stayed quiet until the village came into view, letting the picture of Kael fade as fields and fences unrolled before us.
The farming village north of the city lay tucked against the mountain, a scatter of stone houses, low windmills, and broad fields that fed the capital. The soil at the mountain’s foot was dark and rich, coaxing crops to grow thick and plentiful.
Usually, I spent my time in the farming village reading the skies, telling the farmers where and when to set seed, when to keep the soil resting.
I spoke to their animals, eased their fretful minds, listened to the churn of their bellies, the twitch of their ears, the quiet secrets they kept.
The farmers knew me, and most liked me. It helped that I was young and small and looked as harmless as a hedge-witch with a basket of herbs.
I had the unwilling gift of seeming completely harmless.
Other magisters would have had a harder time telling peasants how to feed the kingdom.
Tomas and Joyce Brack had been goat-farming for twenty years. Their cheese, the Befesticht, a dry goat cheese with red berries, was praised all over Vanhaui. Their farmhouse sat at the foot of a hill, fences tangled around it like thorn-hedges.
Tomas wore a sun-worn brown tunic with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, a cracked leather apron thrown over it and boots thick with dung and mud from the pens.
His gray hair, thick as rope, was tied back in a rough tail, and his hands were lined with cuts and calluses from years of hooves and wire.
Joyce stood at his side in a faded green kirtle laced snug at the waist, a strip of linen showing at her throat and wrists.
A moss-coloured shawl hung from her shoulders, and a kerchief kept back hair streaked with silver and straw dust. Her palms were stained with whey and nettle from curdling milk.
She carried herself with the quiet pride of someone who knew exactly what her work was worth and exactly how much blood it had cost.
They recognized me at once, eyes lighting as though I might carry a blessing with me.
“Magister Corvo, you’re here!” Joyce dipped. “Good day. Thank you for coming.”
“My pleasure.” I smiled, awkward at the formality. “Please call me Evie.” I still had not grown accustomed to being called Magister Corvo.
“Good day, Magister Corvo,” Tomas said anyway, and I sighed inside.
“Loren Vey, scribe of the Court Wizard,” Lo announced with his usual flourish. His title was grand enough to make them wary.
“He’s also my friend,” I added quickly. “And he’s enjoying his day off shadowing me.” They smiled. Good. “Was there something you wished to discuss?”
They exchanged a look, concern flickering between them like crows.
“It’s better if we show you,” Joyce said at last.
They led us behind the farmhouse with its red-framed windows to the garden where leafy greens, carrots, and beetroots should have been sprouting.
Instead, we found blackness. Leaves drooped, their veins swollen, oozing an oily, iridescent liquid I did not recognise.
The earth itself looked bruised, as though something had crawled up from below and sucked the colour out of it.
The sight was bad enough. The stench was worse, rank and sweet, like meat left to rot in a warm cellar with spilled honey. My stomach turned. Lo winced and looked away, his elven senses flinching. It was the same smell the city had carried for days after the riots.
“It happened overnight,” Joyce whispered. She pointed at the black tendrils creeping from the beds. “Follow the vines. They crawl out of the garden and sink into the soil.”
“We don’t know where it came from, but I’ll wager the mountain,” Tomas added, voice low. “And it… killed one of our goats.” His voice cracked, a sound that squeezed my heart.
The goats were their life. After the Breath of Death had separated them from their children in another town, they had only each other and their herd.
I met Lo’s eyes. We were both already building theories. Diseased crops happened every year. This felt cursed.
They brought us inside to a secluded pen at the end of the building.
There lay the corpse of a white goat. It had fallen onto its side, legs twisted as though it had tried to flee even in death.
Its mouth gaped wide, lips peeled back from its teeth in a silent scream, a blackened tongue swollen and stiff.
Vines of pitch-dark rot mapped its hide, and from those vines arms of tar had torn through the skin and rooted themselves into the soil.
The ooze pulsed faintly, like a heart still beating, and each slow drip made a wet, sucking sound as it bled into the earth.
Flies clung to the slick patches of fur, their wings humming low like a prayer.
I raised my sleeve to cover my mouth and nose, but the reek still slid through. My powers brushed against it before I could stop them. Pain, dread, despair. A flicker of the goat’s last moments stabbed through me. Blind terror, something pressing in its lungs, the sense of being hollowed.
Tomas and Joyce covered their mouths too. Lo stayed back, one hand pressed hard over his face. From a few paces away he watched me, knowing I felt the same foul magic as he did, and perhaps, with my gifts, even deeper.
I crouched near the carcass, studying its scars of darkness. The magic inside it coiled against mine, cold and unforgiving. This goat had not died a natural death.
And to find out how, I needed to speak to the living.
“Where are the others?” I asked, voice muffled.
“In the field by the hillside,” Tomas replied.
“Take me to them.”
They led us to the field where the goats—seventeen horn-curled, white-furred creatures—waited for us, as if eager to share whatever they knew.
Speaking with animals had been one of the first spells I’d ever learned.
And, contrary to what most people liked to believe, casting it didn’t mean trading words with them.
Animals had no tongues for speech, no grammar, no names.
They spoke in pulses of emotion, in flashes of need, want and warning, in scents and pictures that slid into their thoughts.
I closed my eyes and reached inward, feeling for the pulse of power coursing through my veins.
The arcane shifted like a serpent beneath my skin, sliding through me in threads of heat and chill, rising until it pressed against my forehead.
I drew a slow breath to steady it and let the current gather, humming at the edge of thought, until it was ready to spill outward and touch the minds of the animals.
The goats flooded me with fear. They showed me the dark outline of the mountain, a shape pressed heavy on their minds.
They wanted to stay here at the farm. They warned to stay far from whatever prowled those slopes.
Once they had longed for the cliffs, for leaping from stone to stone, for grazing at the edge of the sky.
Now this place sparked only terror and pain.
As Tomas had said, I would wager the mountain too.
My gaze settled on the dark woodland rising at its base, climbing higher until it thinned into cliffs of jagged rock, rising like broken teeth against the clouds.
The vines in their garden were not reaching for it but spilling out from it.
Something at the root of that mountain moved, and something deep in my gut whispered that I should go there and investigate.
I would have to report to Bram. And we would have to act quickly. The sense crawling under my skin was not just dread. It was the certainty of a beginning. The beginning of something far worse.
And I prayed to the gods we did not have another plague on our hands.