Chapter 30 Absence
Absence
Damien
Iwake to a throbbing temple and a cold bed. It’s late. Eloise is gone. My obstinately greedy fingers search the other side of the bed for her, as if she might be hiding in the rumpled blankets, but come up empty. My body stiffens. Perhaps I was too hard on her. I’d consented to the spell after all.
I rise from the bed and dress for the day, ready to search the compound for her and do whatever I must to make things right between us. But I find a note in the bathroom and realize I needn’t have worried.
Damien,
Went to meet Tempest for breakfast. I’ll tell Thane you needed to sleep off the effects of the spell. Find me when you get a break from training. I love you.
Eloise
I lift the piece of paper to my nose and inhale her scent. Not a hint of bitterness or anger lingers on the page. Only the soft, heady scent of her.
We are as we always have been.
I will never find it comfortable to fight with Eloise.
My entire role as her mate is to please her.
This isn’t our first argument and likely won’t be our last, but it’s getting easier.
Every disagreement is a lesson in her. After all this time, I am still learning how to function with half of my heart disconnected from my body, with another soul existing in the ripple of my own, staying in sync even when we disagree, like planets in rotation around the same sun.
We are different; we are one. I would rather fight a thousand battles with her than enjoy a single peaceful day without her.
I find her in the war room, with Tempest at her side.
“Damien, how nice of you to join us,” Tempest says. “I hope you’ve fully recovered from the side effects of your endeavors yesterday.” The way she says endeavors gives me the impression that she knows that mine included smoking a field’s worth of feoral root.
“Happy to say I’m as good as new.”
I make my way to Eloise’s side and lean down to whisper in her ear. “Are we okay?”
She smiles softly up at me. “I am, if you are.”
“I am.”
Her hand finds mine and squeezes. “Good, because Tempest and I have received some new information from our spies that could greatly improve our odds.”
I examine the table in front of us. More pegs have been added to the typography in the Borderlands to represent our soldiers. Our troops now form an “H” with Blackspire and Entrydal’s troops to the north and the silver coats of New Stygarde to the south.
I slant a smile in my mate’s direction. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
Tempest smooths her dark chestnut hair and gestures toward the troops that represent New Stygarde.
“As we’ve discussed in the past, a major barrier to us winning this war is that New Stygarde’s troops are augmented with Stygarde’s own children.
The young ones are drugged with Nevina’s magic to fight to the death on her behalf.
We’ve never been able to capture one of these children because the same magic that keeps them under her control can also be used to track them. ”
“It’s the same reason that I can’t develop a cure for the spell that controls them.
In the time it would take me to study one of the children, the silver coats could find me five times over.
Even using my magic, I can’t guarantee I could conceal my work.
Elven magic is foreign to me. A concealment charm might not be enough.
It’s very possible I’d be too busy running from advancing troops to actually find the antidote to Nevina’s poison. ”
Tempest walks around the side of the table, to the portion of the map depicting Stygarde Castle. “Last night, our spies returned with some very interesting information, however. It seems that New Stygarde is keeping the children in a cluster of tents on the grounds.”
“Tents?” I growl. “Why?”
“Simple,” Tempest says. “As they’ve grown their army, they’ve run out of room inside the castle and the servants’ quarters.
The grounds are the only place they have space.
And since the children are nothing but her pawns, they get the most meager accommodations.
Our spies tell us they are fed only basic blood stew and water. ”
I shake my head. “Keeping them alive to die fighting,” I say through my teeth.
“That’s the general consensus,” Tempest says. “But it does afford us an opportunity.”
“If we could develop an antidote, we could efficiently administer it because they are all in the same place. We could break the spell over the children,” Eloise says.
“You just said you couldn’t develop an antidote because there’s no way to study the children.”
“Lucky for us, we don’t need to develop our own. The witches of Dimhollow already have one,” Eloise says.
“What do you mean?” I ask. How could they have the cure? They’ve been hiding at the top of their mountain for generations.
“It was you who reminded me of it,” Eloise says.
“When you told me about the night you rescued me from Entrydal, you reminded me that Catarina had detected Nevina’s tracker in me.
I was so out of it that night, I’d completely forgotten the incident.
Catarina gave me a potion that caused me to expel the tracker. ”
“Yes. A potion that almost killed you.”
“Almost, but it didn’t. And I was a vampire then, much more fragile than I am now. If I can survive it, so can the shade children. All we have to do is get Catarina to share her potion with us.”
I have to admit, it’s a good idea. “So, have you sent a raven to Catarina, asking her for it?”
Tempest releases a heavy sigh. “I haven’t been able to send a raven anywhere for months.
Aendor is teeming with silver coats. They’re like cockroaches around the Palace of Dawn.
Our aviary is in the top spire, but they watch it now around the clock.
It will do us no good if they shoot our bird out of the air. ”
“Besides, I need to talk to Catarina to learn the nature of the antidote and how best to administer it to the victims. I have to go to Dimhollow. If I ride Phantom, I can get there in a fraction of the time it would take me to go by rabble beast or on foot, and I won’t have to face the guardians.
” Eloise says. The two of them look almost smug about this idea, as if it’s the solution to all our problems.
“This idea of yours has promise, but what evidence do you have that Dimhollow isn’t protected from the sky as well as the ground, little bird? Do you remember the dome the mages cast over the village to protect it from New Stygarde?”
She waves her hand. “If I run into trouble, Phantom will help me navigate it. The moment Catarina sees it’s me, she’ll let me through.”
“Maybe. If she sees it’s you. But without a raven, she won’t know you’re coming.”
She shakes her head. “We have to risk it.”
My head throbs. What a conversation to have when I’m hungover and desperately in need of blood. Thoughts, like restless birds, cyclone in my head as I massage my temples. Restless birds. “Why don’t you take the raven with you and release it before you reach Dimhollow?”
“Oh,” Tempest says. “That’s a wickedly good idea. Eloise, you can make yourself and Phantom invisible. Why not the raven?”
“Can we retrieve it from the aviary?” she asks.
“Absolutely. The problem is not reaching the bird in the Palace of Dawn, it’s in releasing it when the palace is under constant observation. But we can retrieve it through our system of tunnels.”
Eloise takes a deep breath. “Then it’s settled. I will carry the raven with me and release it over Wickham Wood, where it’s safe. It’s the perfect solution.”
I cross my arms and groan at her maddening level of optimism. “Say you make it into Dimhollow and you are lucky enough to woo Catarina into helping you manufacture buckets of this antidote. How do you intend to get the children to drink it? We don’t have an exact count, but it must be thousands.”
Eloise glances at Tempest and back at me, her lashes blinking like anxious butterflies trying to escape a hurricane. “We thought one of us…most likely me because I can leverage Phantom…could sneak into the children’s camp and add it to their drinking water.”
Goddess, she has a death wish. “Little dragon, the likelihood of Nevina not having magical trip wires set up to capture you is zero. She is waiting for you to take that bait. There is no way you will successfully gain access to those children. Even before we left the castle, she was setting up a magical boundary for protection. No way will you slip past her guards and her magic. That’s a suicide mission. ”
Tempest laughs. “I told her the same thing.”
Eloise huffs and turns back to the map. “Then who? She can’t have accounted for everyone. You turn into shadows. Her spell has to be specific, or every swaying branch would set it off. What we need is someone Nevina won’t expect. Someone she won’t be looking for.”
“One of the Rivertoads?” Tempest suggests.
Eloise shakes her head. “Jaqual told me that he’s gone rounds with Brahm. They can no longer pass as friends of the crown.” We all groan in unison. “Maybe one of the vampires?”
“They can’t shift into shadow. They would be at a distinct disadvantage sneaking into the camp and be more susceptible to capture.”
“What we need is a ghost. Someone neither Brahm nor Nevina views as a threat,” Eloise says.
“I know of no such person who would act on our behalf,” I say. “It might be time to investigate Plan B.”
We all stare at the map. This late in the game, all the pieces are on the table. I doubt there’s a single person in Tenebris who wouldn’t risk everything for this cause, but sacrificing a single player will only hurt us.
The door opens, and we all look up as Cassius slips silently into the room. “I was hoping to find you here. Damien, we need your help leading exercises.”
Every eye locks on the former umbrae. Eloise darts a glance between Cassius and me. “I think we found our ghost.”