4. Darkness
Darkness
They released me roughly two hours later.
I didn’t go to my dormitory at Valarian, even though I knew I probably should.
I’d gone directly to Bones’s tower, and told myself I’d talk to Miranda, Jolie, and Draken tomorrow, after I’d gotten some sleep and after they’d had some time to talk with one another and maybe calm down.
I had my own reasons for wanting to be alone.
Forsooth had forced me to think about yet another reason why the authorities might not be particularly eager to go after Bones. Whether they truly believed it or not, or if it was just another excuse to avoid confronting Malefic directly almost didn’t matter, or mattered very little.
Forsooth had been diplomatic in bringing it up, but it still shocked me.
“I think,” he’d said carefully, at one point in our discussion.
“We should wait on trying to obtain help from official sources. At least until we know exactly what story they intend to tell about the events of this morning.” He’d cleared his throat, exchanging looks with Blackstone.
“It might be prudent to wait on sharing any information with them, as well, in the interests of your husband’s safety. ”
I’d fought to make sense of that mouthful.
It took a few seconds before the meaning of his words clicked.
“You think they won’t see it as a kidnapping?” I couldn’t hide my incredulity. “You think they’ll view what happened today as Bones joining up?”
“I think it’s very possible, yes.” Forsooth met my gaze seriously. “I understand why this seems incredible to you, and I sympathize. But Caelum is Malefic’s son.”
He cleared his throat, making his voice more diplomatic.
“He has also been seen to operate in Dark Cathedral spaces before this… including in threatening ways, particularly towards royal families who refused to pledge their allegiance to his father.” Forsooth paused, gauging my eyes.
“Some of the royals you saw in the Palace of the Lions today have experienced your husband’s magic firsthand.
They have seen loved ones experience it, as well.
Those individuals are not likely to feel overly sympathetic to his plight.
Nor are they likely to trust he wasn’t fully complicit in the attack today. ”
I stared at him, speechless.
I fought with the part of me that wanted to argue with him.
But I’d known, hadn’t I? Even if I’d never pressed Bones for details, I’d known.
I’ve killed people, Leda… do you really not understand that?
“Everyone saw Caelum get knocked out.” My voice shook slightly. “They saw Bones dragged, unconscious. How could that be interpreted as anything other than taking him against his will?”
But I remembered the disgust of the Praecuri soldier who’d brought me upstairs.
I remembered the things he’d said about both of us.
If he’d witnessed everything that happened and still thought we were responsible, others would believe the same.
There’d be Magicals who thought I was in on it, simply by association.
Me throwing magic at Malefic and other Dark Cathedral fanatics wouldn’t matter. Once it came out that Bones and I were married, I’d be hated by both sides.
And how much worse would they view Caelum?
They’d either worship him or want him dead. Many students at the school already saw him exactly like his father.
Then there were those who wouldn’t want to cross anyone in the Bones family at all. They would use Caelum’s so-called “complicity” to say he didn’t require rescuing, that he’d merely been reunited with his blood.
Malefic Bones was still immensely powerful, rich, feared, admired, even idolized by elements within Magical society, and not only the royals.
The King and the Ethnarch might sense the politics shifting in Malefic’s favor following his escape, especially with an army of infamous, powerful, resurrected royals standing behind him.
Would dead Magical children make them more determined to fight him, or less?
Opportunists within both governments would likely be calculating along pragmatic, power-based lines, rethinking how to position themselves if Malefic won.
Whatever Malefic had done, however determined the Ethnarch and the King had been to quash him after his arrest, the fact that the Bones family appeared so high up on the succession order would give many of them pause.
Most would want to be on the side of the winner in the end.
Likely some of them now wondered if that winner might be Malefic.
Forsooth had delicately cleared his throat before throwing another wrench at my mind.
“Your… well, the younger Mr. Bones… certainly seemed to have some awareness of the connection between the two of you,” he’d ventured next. “He might not want you anywhere near his father for that reason.”
My eyes had closed, outside my will.
“However much he may have been fighting the implications,” Forsooth went on to add carefully. “He asked me a number of pointed questions that suggested he’d done some research since he found a name for his condition…”
Implications, my mind repeated numbly. Fighting it.
That definitely tracked from what I’d seen of Bones these past few weeks.
“…I am thinking that if you can locate him,” Forsooth ventured next.
“And if you can actually communicate with Mr. Bones through the connection you share, it might make sense to speak with him before we attempt any sort of rescue. Perhaps you could ask him what options he thinks we have to retrieve him? Just so we don’t exacerbate the situation.
Or give his father an even more powerful weapon to use against him. ”
I’d struggled with the truth I’d heard in those words.
I didn’t agree with them, of course, but I knew Bones, and I knew Forsooth was probably right how Bones would see this.
By the time I got to the top of his tower, I had everything mapped out, from the exact runes I’d need to copy to which incantations I’d recite.
I’d tested the dragon ring a few times before I gave it to him.
I’d played with a few different tracking and shielding spells before I found a combination I liked.
I hadn’t entirely told Bones the truth about the ring itself.
I hadn’t actually bought it for him as a Yule present.
I’d found the ring in Bonescastle toward the end of summer term the previous year.
I bought it, telling myself it was for me, knowing it wasn’t even though Bones hadn’t spoken to me in months at that point.
The dragon design made me think of him, and after I’d spent a few minutes staring at the intricate gold carvings, I found myself motioning over the shop clerk before I’d really let myself think about why.
I hadn’t worn it.
I didn’t tinker with spelling it until those weeks after Bones got hurt by his father, before he came back and invited me to Yule with his mother.
I think it was partly to reassure myself he would be coming back.
Maybe it was a control thing, some small way of trying to keep him safe after his father tried to murder him right in front of me.
Whatever had been going on in my subconscious, I tinkered with it for days.
I didn’t manage to do even half of what Bones accomplished with the snake bracelet he’d given me, not in terms of dramatic effects, but I made it so the dragon breathed fire in the exact shade of his eyes when they glowed with gold and green magic.
That, and I fashioned it into a pretty complicated homing device.
I wasn’t sure exactly what Bones had done to it in the time since, but I knew he’d modified the shape, and where he wore it. I hoped whatever he’d done, he hadn’t tampered with the homing spell, or weakened it in any other way.
He’d promised he wouldn’t take it off.
Of course, there was the possibility his father would have picked up on the spell and removed it himself.
I supposed I’d find out which of those things was true in the next few minutes.
Closing my eyes, I adjusted my body where I sat cross-legged in the middle of a circle I’d drawn on the floor of Bones’s stone tower floor.
I drew it with chalk runes, amethyst powder, gold filings, wyrmloc scales, cobra venom, powdered monocerus horn, powdered bone from a dragon and the hair of a sphinx.
Oh, and my own blood.
The ritual shouldn’t be necessary of course, not if all I wanted was to find him. I was hoping to find him without being seen, and so we could talk privately.
Around that inner circle, I carefully poured an outer ring of salt.
As far as protections went, it was pretty meager given the types of sorcerers and witches Forsooth described to me as being in the Resurrected. Not to mention Malefic was magically bound to Bones, and now Bones was bound to me.
I didn’t know exactly what that meant, either.
I supposed this might be one way to find out.
I fought to breathe, to focus.
When I first arrived in the northwest tower, and after I’d assessed everything I could see about what the Praecuri had done to the tower’s chimaeras, I’d built a fire in Bones’s enormous fireplace.
I also used magic to make his entire living space warmer, including the lavatory and the kitchen, both of which had a tendency to stay cold even with a roaring fire.
Even though my magic did a surprisingly effective job, I shivered inside my knit jumper, even wearing thick pants and fuzzy socks.
Apart from the moments before I passed out in the Palace of the Lions, I’d been freezing and shivering since the end of the battle that morning.
I didn’t honestly remember much of the very end of that battle.
I remembered throwing myself on the mirror Bones and Sirena disappeared through.
I remember trying to get through, and eventually cracking the glass with my fist, right before the whole thing shattered and my face and hands and arms got cut with tiny slivers of glass.
Then a bolt of magic hit me from one side, and I’d been thrown into a nearby tree.
Of course, I’d been certain that the bolt came from a Dark Cathedral.