Chapter 29 #2
When the whipping began, I turned away. I didn’t want to see.
But I heard each slap of leather against skin, heard the mutters and screams of onlookers fill the square until my eyes locked on young Steeler—how he strained and pushed against an older man’s arms, sobbing, reaching out for his friend he could not help.
And maybe it was because I was in Steeler’s mind and could taste his thoughts and knowledge like fog settling on my tongue, but I knew the man was his adoptive father, knew this adoptive father was a branded Mind Manipulator and had wiped Mattheus’s memories…
when I chanced the smallest glance upward to inspect the teenage boy on the stake again, I realized his eyes had smoothed over with glossy nothingness. He was already mentally gone.
Even as his skin hung in bloody strips over his bones.
With a guttural scream that tore through my chest, Steeler ripped through his father’s arms.
Only to collapse to the cobblestone a second later.
Another thing I knew instinctively: his father had just ordered him to go to sleep so that he could not interfere. Could not get hurt.
The mist changed.
Teenage Steeler was on a boat by himself, an oar clutched in each hand. The churning milkiness of the dome hovered just ahead of him, where another vessel bobbed toward him from the other side.
Was it the Fated General? I couldn’t tell, but whoever it was, they must have chosen to meet Steeler on a night when the ocean rose and fell in waves soft enough for the both of them to row themselves out here without magic.
Finally, this other vessel stopped right before the border. It wasn’t the Fated General, after all, but a beautiful, silver-haired faerie in a rowboat on the other side of the shield.
“You came,” Steeler called through the dome.
Something fundamental had broken in his voice. It was no longer hard and cold, but… fractured.
“Barberro and I promised you that if you ever needed anything, all you’d have to do is call.
” This faerie’s voice was smooth and soft, like strips of fluttering satin.
“Still,” she said, “we were shocked when a seagull dropped a letter from you right into my lap. How did you convince a Wild Whisperer to help you fraternize with your supposed enemy?”
Steeler’s shoulders tensed.
“M-Mattheus’s adoptive mother… she’s great with birds, and wanted to help me in whatever way she could because… well, it doesn’t matter. I need you to make me something with your Alchemy magic. A way to hide our immature power.”
The silver-haired faerie narrowed her eyes at him.
I didn’t know what the conversion from human to faerie years was, but in the sudden spill of moonlight that highlighted the faintest lines around her eyes as some clouds shifted overhead, she looked like a late-thirty-year-old.
Delicate lines of ink spiraled around her neck and up her jaw to the tips of her ears.
“What happened to Mattheus?”
Steeler gave her a few surprised blinks.
“I know grief when I see it,” the faerie said quietly.
Steeler exhaled, nodded, and relayed what had happened to his friend in the quietest of shaking murmurs. “So when we go to the Institute next year,” he finished, “it will happen to all of us when we are Branded. And I cannot…” He swallowed thickly. “I cannot lose another one.”
The faerie stared at him through the dome for several long minutes, and I found myself wanting to change the mist. To make her simply drag Steeler back through, return him and his remaining friends to the ships where they could forgo the Esholian Institute entirely.
But she only said in a voice as soft as a falling feather, “The only thing that can suppress power is power. You know that, Coen.”
“Please, Nara.” He gripped his oars in tighter fists. “I don’t care how you do it. Please find a way. Or convince the queen to let the others come back before it’s too late. I can stay here, but let them go.”
The faerie named Nara sighed and stared up the arc of the dome, the tips of her tattooed ears reflecting its milky glow.
“I will do my best. Meet me back here in a week.”
The mist didn’t change, but the tension in the air did.
It was a week later. Nara was holding out a tin canister… which Steeler reached through the dome to take. Nothing but the smallest of winces passed over his face when he did so. Truly just a tingle, then.
“Pills?” he asked, screwing open the lid to survey the small heap of pearl-like capsules inside.
Nara nodded and seemed to hold her breath.
She let it out again in a tone that sounded a lot like admittance.
“I took a microscopic amount of substance from the dome itself. Don’t worry,” she added when Steeler’s eyes flashed open.
“There is not enough in each pill to disintegrate anyone, least of all yourselves. But there will be enough to subdue any magic if something were to cause a flare-up again. I altered the chemical composition of it so that it will latch onto shapeless power as well as formed power.”
“But…” Steeler’s frown was as deep as my own right now. “When the time comes for our Branding, won’t it subdue the Good Council-given magic, too, then? I don’t think they’d be too happy if we didn’t react during their precious ceremony.”
Enough ire simmered in his voice for me to know that he did more than loathe the Good Council now. He wanted to destroy them. For what they’d done to Mattheus.
Nara closed her eyes for a brief moment.
When she opened them again, a decision seemed to settle over her face.
“I’m going to tell you a little secret they don’t want you to know about, Coen.” She leaned in dangerously close to the milky substance that would kill her on contact. “This dome is… conscious. Or, rather, it stems from a consciousness.”
Both Steeler and I froze. Both of us seemed to arrive at the same conclusion, judging from the taste of inherent knowledge on my tongue. There was only one consciousness who could control the dome, and she lived within it.
Dyonisia Reeve.
But that meant… that meant the leader of the island was a faerie.
Of course she was a faerie. I should have known from the beginning.
Dyonisia didn’t have any of the five powers branded on her shoulder because she had a power of her own.
The dome itself. And she wasn’t immortal because of some Shape Shifter renewal magic.
She was immortal because she wasn’t human.
Her ears and fangs were what Shape Shifter elites probably controlled—hid—with their magic.
The taste of mist on my tongue told me Steeler had known all of these revelations all along.
What this young teenage version of Steeler didn’t understand, however, was the nature of her power.
“What do you mean Dyonisia’s magic is conscious?” he asked slowly, holding the canister of pills in a vice-like grip.
“I mean,” Nara sighed out, “that her dome will disintegrate any full-fledged faeries with powers of their own, yes… but she does not seem to want to hurt the humans of this island with their Branded magic. Anyone with Wild Whispering, Mind Manipulating, Element Wielding, Shape Shifting, or Object Summoning can go in and out of the dome without harm.”
I felt my heart begin to hammer somewhere in my real body in the outside world, because this… this didn’t make any sense. Dyonisia Reeve was keeping the original Good Council locked away in here. Why would she grant their magic—or clones of it—immunity?
“But that means that any of the Branded humans could leave this island with their children if they choose to,” Steeler said slowly.
Nara dipped her head.
“Indeed. In fact, there have been a few families over the years who have escaped unharmed—and not because they were exiled, but of their own free will. We picked them up and had Old Veracious scan them to test their true identities, of course, make sure they weren’t Dyonisia or her elites in disguise… but then we let them go.”
Let them go. My head reeled at the thought that some Esholian families had fled the island on boat, encountered the pirates they’d always been taught to fear, and been released again—only to face what? An endless expanse of ocean and no idea of where to go from there?
I could only hope they’d found land before they perished.
Nara pointed at the canister in Steeler’s hand.
“You and the others will need to take those pills once a week. They will not touch your Branded magic; they will simply prevent your innate faerie power from bursting into shape. But be warned…” She leaned forward. “There is a price to pay for such a thing.”
Steeler stiffened. “I’ll pay you anything you ask. I can get—”
Nara shook her head. “I’m not talking about coin.
” Here, her gaze lowered as if ashamed. “If we are to keep meeting each other in secret so that I can give you a new stash every month, you must give me inside information about the island. Those are the stipulations I was given. I am not allowed to help you for free.”
“Oh.” Steeler blew out a disgusted breath, one that I echoed at the thought of the Fated General holding something like a life-saving medication over his head like this. “Well, I assumed she’d find a way to make sure I followed through with my spying anyway. It’s a deal.”
Nara nodded, but then her gaze lifted again.
“You must remember that these pills are only temporary, Coen. You and the others can’t take them forever.
As soon as you graduate from that wretched Institute, I want you to come back, okay?
” A hidden message seemed to be lurking beneath her words.
“I want you to come back and let yourself explode.”
The mist changed.
Steeler was older, lined with the muscles I’d grown accustomed to, patrolling the pentaball arena with his hands behind his back.
It was strange to see him walking so openly about campus, no stalking or sneaking or Walking required.
And even stranger when I heard my own scream pierce through one of the tents a few rows down from him.