Chapter 23 #2
“Brint.” She raised the poker in a way she hoped was menacing. Weapons handling hadn’t been a focus area for her. “You’ve been a busy boy.”
“It’s not what you think,” he said. “I can—”
“I think you’re growing the fucking Eyllic poison in Graelynd for the Coalition. I think you’re committing treason,” she hissed. “I just can’t imagine why.”
“Patriotism. This is for Graelynd, Calya.”
“For Graelynd? I didn’t get that impression, what with you poisoning mages and keeping people in magic shackles and”—she jerked her head in the direction of the pit—“your nightmare bubble. How many people have you fed to that—”
“No one has died. We haven’t had any casualties.” An ugly pause followed as his mouth worked but no sound emerged, the yet held back on the tip of his tongue. “Not one,” he finished weakly.
“What happened? Things have been going bad here for months, Brint. Gods, or has it reached years? If this is for Graelynd, why didn’t you fix—”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” Brint snapped. He took a step closer, raising his hands in a placating manner when she waved the poker. “The containment measures Eylle promised weren’t enough. People got sick. I tried to get restoration efforts here.”
“What efforts? You mean, when you were trying to scam Sylveren grovetenders into consulting on your ‘harmless’ project”—she sneered the word—“or do you mean how you’ve graduated to just kidnapping people and forcing them to salvage your fuckups?”
“It’s not my fault!” he cried. “If that paranoid bitch had just told me more of her plan, I would’ve known the next step. I would’ve known how she meant to fix this.”
“You’re incompetent.” Calya gave a bitter laugh. “What were you going to do, throw me in the hold while you escaped? Or just leave us in that cell and hope maybe someone found us before we died?”
“It was never meant to be lasting harm.”
“Was that before or after your goon threw me into a wall and you magicked me, you asshole?”
“You’re one to talk.” Brint indicated the gash on his head. “I tried, Calya. I tried to talk to you, to see if I could trust you, and then we could’ve worked together.”
“To do what? There’s no fixing this mess.”
“Try again. We were so close here, and the Coalition is committed, even without Bioon,” Brint said. “We’ll have better protections. Think of what it’ll mean!”
Calya pointed at the Coalition mages caught in creepy stasis in the glass ball. “All the mages here think the project is fucked.”
“The Coalition has resources everywhere. They have lines in at Sylveren, in the Restorers. We’re going to be more prepared this time.”
His eyes gleamed in the firelight, something zealous and imploring blurring together in the way he looked at her. Anadae had only scratched the surface with her warning of the changes in Brint. Calya saw not the arrogant, mostly harmless dipshit she’d always known but a Coalition fanatic.
A prickle of fear ran down her spine.
She tightened her grip on the poker, trying to draw comfort from its weight in her hand. “Why, Brint? Why would you get involved in this? You’re stupid, but I didn’t think you were this stupid. You’ve got to know this can’t end well.”
The last vestiges of anything friendly between them faded from his expression.
He dropped his cajoling tone, meeting her words with a disdainful scoff.
“Graelynd will have a wellspring, and we don’t need the Eyllic Empire to get it,” he growled.
“They thought they were the only ones, but we’ve already begun.
And who’s the stupid one, Calya? We’ve been tapping the ley lines from the Valley runoff for years. Years! They’ve never even noticed.”
“If you’re making a wellspring, what do you need poison for?” Calya shouted. “Isn’t that what’s trying to kill Rhell? That’s all the poison does, and you want to grow them side-by-side.”
“No, no! They lied to us, to the delegation,” Brint said, his head whipping back and forth with the vehemence of his denial. “You need the power from the poison. You need enough to seed the well.”
Calya’s eyebrows rose toward her scalp. “You’ve been huffing too much of your own poison.”
Brint let out an exasperated sigh, some of the annoying, shitty weasel she remembered creeping back in. “You’re not a mage. What do you know?” he said, dismissing her with a wave of his hand.
“Yeah, I keep hearing that. But I don’t need magic to see that you’ve lost it.
” Calya gestured at the brazier. “You see it, too. Destroying evidence? You’re fucked.
The Sentinels know what you’ve done here.
Rhell knows. You’re going to be lucky if Sor’vahl doesn’t chop you into little pieces of meat and cook you. ”
A spasm of emotion twitched across his face. Uncertainty, maybe even a good dose of fear.
“I’m immaterial at this point, Brint. Give it up.”
The apprehension on his face faded, pushed away by conviction. By a sureness edged by panic and tinged with pity. He smiled at Calya, his expression a mix of regret and resignation that had her instinct to run shrieking past her reckless bravado.
“Immaterial,” Brint said. “You don’t have to be. You can be a part of this.” He went to the desk, raising his hands in a non-threatening manner when Calya brandished the poker. She took a step back, not letting him narrow the distance between them.
He pushed the half-filled leather pack containing Matthias’s journals aside and revealed what looked like a clear stone brick that had been propping the bag up.
She’d thought it some kind of paperweight or similar frippery.
An odd choice for a desk ornament, but there was no accounting for Brint’s lack of taste.
But with the bag out of the way, Calya saw the brick held a small, vaguely cube-shaped object suspended in its center.
The brick appeared more like a block of ice than the glass sphere down in the pit, but the same opaque yellowish curls of smoke wafted within.
The cube at the heart, no larger than a grape, had an oily look, like it was comprised of thousands of tiny grains of wet sand.
Though overall gray in color, some spots were a patchier white; thin veins of moldy green appeared, spread, and then faded in a cyclical manner.
The starter culture the other mages had mentioned. Calya didn’t need Brint to confirm; even standing several feet away—and a mundane, to boot—she sensed the blob’s oppressive aura.
“We can start over, and this time we’ll finish the wellspring,” Brint said. “Help us, and HNE can—”
“Can what? It’s a wellspring. You don’t transport magic in buckets,” Calya said in a scathing tone.
“The Coalition will be your friend. Think of the business they can send your way. The deals. Your father wouldn’t be able to ignore that. No more Wembly getting the final say over your plans. HNE would finally be fully yours.”
“It will be anyway.” She gave him a grim smile. “I’ve found the root of all my problems. Daddy Avenor is finally going to cut you out of the family.”
His face darkened. “You’re making a mistake.”
Calya shook her head, chest stuttering with her wry laughter. “My mistake was—”
Brint dove at her. It was a rookie slip-up on her part, one for which Calya’s old training master would’ve berated her for hours. Letting her guard down, getting drawn into pointless arguments, distracted by the block of poison while Brint slowly angled closer.
She did manage to crack him across the shoulder with the poker, but his momentum had him crashing into her anyway, despite his bellow of pain. She might not have been able to stop him even if she’d managed to stab him with the poker, such was his bulk.
They fell to the floor, snarling and scrabbling at one another. Brint grabbed the poker, and instead of getting into a futile wrestling match, she let it go, jamming her elbow into his throat during the opening her lack of resistance created.
He recoiled, choking for breath. Calya shoved off him and struggled to her feet. She stamped on his hand to make him drop the poker, but her feet were faster than her hands—she kicked it away in her panicked haste, snatching at air.
No matter. Her old training master had been onto something about running.
Calya took a few wobbling steps, adrenaline surging, but her brain lagged behind.
Out to the pit, or back into the hallway?
The pit room might be a dead end, but what if she ran into Brint’s Coalition cronies?
If he was still here, surely, he must have co-conspirators hanging around to help him escape to wherever the supposed Wellspring Plan B was.
Brint took the decision out of her hands.
Light streaked past her, hitting the window and shattering the glass.
Calya screamed, her arms raised to ward off the falling glass as she ran for the door.
Gods fucking— She’d forgotten that, though he wasn’t a particularly good mage, Brint wielded light and had played at learning some of the combat moves of a lightwrath.
Another bolt of white-hot light smashed into the open doorway, making her hesitate.
The moment of indecision was enough for Brint to catch up, tackle her, and send them both to the ground again.
As Calya scrambled to get up, she hissed in pain, broken shards of glass biting into her hands.
The previous injury to her ribs roared back to life, making her gasp for breath.
More pain erupted along her scalp as Brint hauled her up by the hair. He dragged her back to the desk, grabbing one of her bloody hands.
“Sorry, Calya, but you’ve left me no choice,” Brint said through gritted teeth. “You get to be material now.”
He forced her palm against the poison’s brick enclosure. Calya screamed again as searing heat raced across her skin. A blinding light flashed up from the brick, and it felt like fiery needles stabbing into her hand.
When Brint finally released her, Calya ripped her hand back, expecting to leave a layer of skin behind. She heaved herself backward, only stopping when her shoulders thumped against the wall. She stared down at her palm cradled against her chest, preparing herself to see raw, burned flesh.
Her mind whirled, trying to reconcile the very real pain she’d just felt with the relatively normal skin of her palm. Sure, she had some cuts from the glass, but no extra damage.
Almost. Almost no extra damage. The last of the needle-like pain concentrated at the middle of her hand, fading—but not without leaving a thick, jagged line bisecting her palm. More than a simple scar. A brand, a marking like that on the glass sphere, only in miniature.
“What the fuck did you do to me?” The words fell from her lips in a horrified whisper.
“You asked me why. Why I got involved with this. Does it even matter anymore?” The fervor was gone from his tone.
He sounded… sad, with a bitterness not entirely directed at her anymore but inward.
“Money. Prestige to match my brother. Power. This far in, does it even matter?” He offered her a broken smile.
“Like you said, it can’t end well, not anymore. For either of us.”
“Brint.”
“Unless you help me. Help yourself.” He nodded at her branded palm, holding a hand up to show he had one to match.
“The Coalition would never let us out. Eylle’s bargain binds.
Even if I got away, what then? You called this treason—do you really think the Upper Council at home would see it differently? Would the Valley?”
“Am I poisoned now?” Calya demanded, ignoring his attempt to play the victim.
“Yes. No.” Brint shrugged. “You’re with me now either way.” He came toward her, his hand outstretched to help her up. An offer that felt like it would seal her fate.
The wind screamed through the room, whipping loose papers and lighter bits of broken glass into a frenzy.
Calya grabbed a shard of glass and swiped at Brint’s hand. He jerked back in time to avoid being shredded, but she still managed to catch a few fingers. He staggered away, cursing as he clutched his hand.
“You hateful bitch,” he snarled.
“You forget, Brint dearest,” Calya said, summoning her most heartless smile. “I already chose a partner for this business venture, and it was never going to be you.”
He started toward her—
But wind tore between them, crackling spots of blazing gold in the air keeping him at bay.
Calya looked to the office’s door in time to see Lowe come crashing through.