Chapter 12
Elias had been quiet.
There was an entire wing of the mansion where only his grandfather was allowed to go. There were guards at the entrance of that wing. Lesya watched Clive Bane and Elias walk past the guards toward Eldric’s study.
Cassian grabbed her by the arm and took her upstairs to their room. Theo had taken Freya to the medical room, where a healer had been called to take a look at her.
“What do you mean you brought her back from the dead?!” Cassian hissed. “Were you hiding something from me all along?!”
“Me?! I told you everything as it happened! You’re the only one I told!” Lesya said, wringing her arm free from his grip. He had only ever been gentle with her, but now he had grabbed her arm forcefully.
“Lesya,” Cassian said, pacing around the room frantically. “That is no small matter. I thought your dreams and everything that you were telling me, it was more ominous than anything given everything that’s been happening. I…”
“You mean when I told you that Aeterna made me her champion, you thought I was lying?!” Lesya shouted.
“Not lying,” Cassian said. There was a lot of sweat on his forehead. His hands were shaking. He sat down on the lawn-facing chair. “I just thought that it was…abstract.”
“I’m not the kind of person to go about drinking calming potions over abstract shit,” Lesya said, standing her ground, crossing her arms.
“You can, under no circumstances, tell anyone of this,” Cassian said, shooting her a dark look.
“Elias cast the death curse. He knows. Freya knows, seeing as how I brought her back from the dead,” she said, her heart unrelenting in its panicked arrhythmia. “The others saw.”
“I can silence them,” Cassian said, getting up from the chair and knocking it down. He pulled his sleeves up to his elbows. “A silencing spell ought to do the trick.”
“There’s no silencing spell,” Lesya said. “Not in regular craft or profane. What are you on about?”
“There is,” Cassian said, taking his spellblade out. He held it up in the light of the room, raised his forearm in the air. He looked at Lesya. “In Hell-craft.”
Lesya’s mouth turned dry.
Profane magic was terrible as it was.
Aeternumancy was banned all over Aladria.
Performing Hell-craft was an immediate death sentence.
Every drop of your blood spilled was a payment to a demon of Hell, invoking them to perform the unspeakable, achieve what was unachievable by other means and branches of magic.
“Cassian,” Lesya said, reaching forward to stop him. It was not so much a branch of magic as it was the antithesis of it. Magic required skill, focus, mana, knowledge.
Hell-craft was pure warlockry, requiring little to no skill, involving deals exclusively with demons. Demons who were reckless, devious, and extremely unreliable.
“I’d do anything to save you, Les,” Cassian said. “I’m not letting anyone know you’re an Aeternumancer.”
“Wait!” she said.
Before Cassian could split his own skin and draw blood, the door to their room burst open. Cassian quickly hid the spellblade and stood up, facing Headmaster Eldric Solwyn and Clive Bane.
“Cassian, out. I have a pressing need to have a conversation with Lesya Rosefield alone,” Eldric said. He was not negotiating. His voice dripped with venom.
Clive Bane advanced to take Cassian out, but Cassian went out on his own, raising his hands as if to say, I know my way out, thanks.
Les, Cassian said. Not a word to him. He’ll kill you if he finds out. There’s things about him you don’t know. Whatever you do, don’t confess.
The door closed, leaving Eldric standing there with her.
“This is the second time we’re meeting because of something my grandson did.
If I’m being very candid, it would work out very well for me and the Covenant if he were to die tomorrow.
Spare me that look. He’s not the prophet of Sol, no matter how much he tries to tell others about his dreams. I discerned his dreams. He lies through his teeth. He puts others in harm’s way.”
“I’m really not in the mood for this conversation,” she said. “I’m so done with his bullshit.”
“As am I,” he said, standing in front of her. “But you showed remarkable aptitude in healing Ms. Drummond. She’s petrified. Won’t say a word. Neither would Elias. Shell-shocked, the nurse says. Shell-shocked from a training session in a garden. I don’t buy it. What happened down there?”
“I saw that she was injured,” Lesya said, not taking her eyes off the headmaster. “I healed her.”
“Yes, well, of course you did. But what was the nature of her injury?”
“I don’t remember. My friend Trisha taught me a general spell to use. Her parents are healers,” Lesya said.
“Naturally,” he said, then cleared his throat.
“In any case, tomorrow draws near. And I must say that I am glad that you’re going with them.
Perhaps you’ll be able to save them should the need arise.
Perhaps I should have kept you in my notice from the beginning.
Yet you are to blame somewhat for escaping my notice. ”
“I was a street urchin growing up,” she said flatly. “It was kind of my entire thing.”
He nodded.
Before he left the room, he stopped with his hand on the doorknob and looked back at her.
“If there’s something you wish to tell me, now would be the time,” he said.
She was sure that if he were a telepath or a mind traveler, he would have entered her mind, or Elias’s or Freya’s, and seen the events for what they were.
But despite his many talents and his magical abilities, Headmaster Eldric was just a dreamworker, not a telepath.
She thanked the gods for that, for the secrets well-hidden within the confines of her mind.
“I don’t think Elias is ready to go out into the field tomorrow. There’s something wrong with him,” Lesya said. “Something that can’t be fixed. It may well jeopardize the mission tomorrow.”
“Be that as it may, it is a lesson he needs to learn. I have seen men change when faced with adversity. It is my last hope for him. If seeing the war with his own eyes does not change him, nothing will.”
He left, and shortly after, Cassian came into the room.
“What did he say? Does he suspect anything?”
“He’s not a telepath, right? I mean, he can’t step into other people’s minds,” Lesya said.
“Of course not. You need years of training to be able to forge a bond with one mind, let alone many,” Cassian said. “He’s a gifted mage, but he’s not god.”
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten that you were about to dabble in Hell-craft,” Lesya said, raising her finger at him. “Are you crazy?”
“They swear by Hell-craft in Romania,” Cassian said. “Any time they get stuck with their alchemical research, they summon a demon. The demon asks them riddles, teases them, but in the end, he gives them an answer to their question. It’s kind of not that big of a deal over there.”
“It’s warlockry, Cass. I don’t want you to ever consider doing it,” she said.
“Now how’s that fair? You can ask me that, but I can’t ask you not to do Aeternumancy?
” Cassian scoffed. “Do you realize how dangerous it is? Eldric, the Covenant, everyone who surrounds us, they’re the ones who burned the temples, destroyed the books on Aeternumancy.
They renounced it as blasphemy. If they find out you’re an Aeternumancer, they’ll burn you at the stake. ”
“I’m tired of this conversation!” Lesya said, walking over to the window. The sun was beginning to descend behind the hills. Beneath, the hill station of Golgora lit up with its many lanterns and its smooth, reflective cobbled streets. “I’m going to go for a walk into town. You wanna come with?”
“No,” Cassian said hotly. “There’s something I need to do. I think it’s better if we give each other some space.”
“Are we fighting?” Lesya asked.
“No, Les. I just need to figure something out. Can you promise me not to do anymore Aeternumancy in the meantime? Please?”
“Okay, Cassian,” Lesya said, rolling her eyes. “If someone dies on my watch, I’ll just stand by passively and not do anything.”
“This is no laughing matter.”
The air in the room was becoming more and more obtrusive. She watched Cassian as he walked out the window and clicked his shoes, flying off into the night. She wondered where he was going and why he was being so mysterious.
Are we fighting? she asked again.
I love you, Lesya. I’m just going to do something that helps me protect you.
* * *
It drove a wedge of bitterness in her that there were great, big cities out there in the rest of the world, cities that she had never visited nor might ever get the chance to.
There was magic at her disposal, true, magic with which she could transport herself anywhere, but there was more to being a traveler than just going from one place to another.
You needed the freedom and the time to be able to explore.
Before Umbrveyl, she had never even dreamed of such an opportunity.
Now that she was going to graduate, the Grath Nomad had surfaced and it looked inevitable that a war might ravage Aladria.
When your country was at war, it was hardly the time to go about traveling to other cities.
So for now, this little hill station of Golgora had to suffice.
She walked along its sloping cobbled streets, taking in the cool, crisp evening air, paying attention to each of the buildings, the several shops with their windowpanes showing kitschy, touristy merchandise.
A baker had a whole window display of baked breads, cakes, muffins, and eclairs.
Tourists walked hand in hand, boyfriends with their girlfriends, husbands with their wives, partners, lovers, friends, all.
It made her feel even more bitter that on such a fine evening, she was out here alone.
She strolled through the entire hill station, bought a coffee from a cart, and then sat at the edge of the hill station on a bench overlooking the cascading hills. She sat deep in thought, trying to make sense of what had happened today, when someone came and sat beside her.
“Figured I’d find you here,” Freya Drummond said.
“Are you supposed to be out of bed?” Lesya asked, not looking at Freya.
“The healer couldn’t find anything wrong with me.
Commended your work, as a matter of fact,” Freya said, chuckling.
“It’s strange though. I had a heart murmur before.
Nothing dangerous, but it’d show up from time to time.
Lately I’d been getting it twice a day. Know what’s funny?
My heart beats fine now. Haven’t had a murmur in over four hours. ”
“Give it a day, I’m sure it’ll be back,” Lesya said.
“I know what you did,” Freya said, looking at Lesya with a plain look that revealed nothing. “I’m guessing you’re thinking I’ll snitch to someone. I could have. The headmaster came to me. I told him nothing.”
Lesya exhaled slowly.
“Elias straight-up denied everything. He came to me, terrified of the thought of getting a life sentence at the Doldrum Isles. I?—”
“You can tell him to stop worrying if I’ll get him in trouble.
If I wanted to, I would have done so already,” Lesya said, finishing her coffee.
She’d meant to enjoy the view here. Instead, she was being forced to brood on everything that had happened.
“And if he was so worried about the Doldrum Isles, he should have thought so before sending a death curse my way. If I’d died… ”
“I know,” Freya said. “I know. I wish I could say something in his favor, something that’d explain why he acts the way he acts, but frankly, he’s gone off the deep end.
His grandfather doesn’t see it. Me and Theo, we’ve got our own life, but we stick around to make sure that he doesn’t end up doing something crazy.
Theo’s dumb. Whenever Elias pumps him up, he forgets that he’s supposed to keep a check on Elias, and instead ends up joining him. See what I’m dealing with here?”
“The shaft end of the deal, as we say in Lynsfeld,” Lesya said.
“I thought that was supposed to be the good end,” Freya said, giggling.
Lesya chuckled. If one could ignore the fact that for most of Lesya’s academic life, Freya had been a cocksure bully always rallying to Elias’s side, perhaps she wasn’t so terrible. After all, here she was, sitting with Lesya, talking calmly.
“How did you bring me back?” Freya asked, her voice beginning to tear.
“I was dead. I remember the void, and I remember thinking to myself of the tales my mother told me of our Norse forefathers and how they’d ascend to Valhalla if they died in battle—and all I could think was, I haven’t made it to Valhalla.
I’ve gone to the other place. The dark place.
I couldn’t see anything, and there was no light.
And then I saw you walking, and you reached for me and pulled me out. How did you do that?”
“I wish I could give you a simple answer,” Lesya said, getting up from the bench.
“But there is none. And as for old stories and beliefs, here’s one for you.
Long ago, Aladrians believed that if you saved someone’s life, they owed you a life debt.
It goes beyond being metaphorical. There’s a bond between you and me now.
You best remember that the next time your friend tries to put me in harm’s way. ”
* * *
Lesya walked back from the hill station and entered the silent manor. Lights were on, but there was no one walking in the halls. She went to her room, hoping Cassian would be there. But he hadn’t returned.
She roamed through the hallways until she came to the library. She hadn’t been in here just yet. She opened the door and stepped inside. Thankfully, at this late hour, the library was empty.
She walked through the aisles until she came to a pile of books that had toppled over from the shelves.
Lesya picked one up. It was called Ars Aeterna.
“So this must be where he’s keeping the Aeternumancy books,” she said, rifling through the pages. She hadn’t read this one before. And this was not mere theory.
She picked up the rest of the books, discovering that this entire pile were books on Aeternumancy. She was about to set them back on the shelf when a thought occurred to her.
She made an illusive spell, making it seem that the books were all back on their shelves, and stowed the original ones in her bag. She wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight. She might as well read what it was that Eldric Solwyn wanted to hide about Aeternumancy.
Despite the library seeming enormous, there was a science to it. She traveled from shelf to shelf, looking for more books on Aeternumancy, but found none. They were, all of them, located on that one shelf, the shelf that she’d emptied in her bag.
Lesya made sure that the illusive spell held on the shelf, and then she exited the library, wondering what could be in these books beyond the Aeternumancy she’d done today.
Was there more to it, something that Aeterna hadn’t told her? Something that could have warranted the destruction of temples, the burning of books?