15. Saying Too Much
Saying Too Much
“Ithink I was somewhere in here,” I said, pointing to the place on the map. “Somewhere in that enormous storage and archive area below the main tower.”
I closed my eyes, trying again to reconstruct every detail, to recall the smallest, most insignificant things I’d noticed while I was there.
In the end, I looked at Alaric in frustration.
“Any idea where the entrance to the dungeons would be from there?” I asked. “I think I was pretty far from the public area of the crypt. I was well past where Bones would go inside that protective bubble, looking through the family’s birth records and journals.”
“You mean the forbidden part?” Nyx commented drily. “The place you told us no one could go apart from Malefic?” Nyx looked around at everyone but me. “Didn’t she say even Bones’s mother risked death by going in there? I’m not remembering that wrong, am I?”
“You’re not,” Alaric affirmed.
“Well, obviously that’s changed,” I said dismissively.
Nyx snorted, clearly disagreeing.
“Does that mean Bones still has control over the money?” Jolie asked, glancing up from where she’d been poring over the map. “If you can get in there, Leda, that must mean Malefic hasn’t yet figured out how to take it all back. Not legally, anyway, whatever he’s managed to coerce out of Bones.”
I glanced at Alaric, who met my gaze just long enough to nod to Jolie’s words.
I knew I should probably care about that, if only because it had repercussions for Bones’s safety and mine, but it was difficult right then.
I could tell Alaric, Luc, and Nyx felt the same.
Whatever they thought about Bones’s leverage as the family patriarch, they obviously didn’t find that to be the most fascinating part of the story I’d told them.
Luc, Alaric, and I sat on the couch in Bones’s tower, knees pressed to the edge of the low coffee table.
Jolie and Nyx sat on the floor on the table’s other side, their backs to the fire, cross-legged on the rug.
We all had wine glasses or mugs in our hands, having finished with dinner about an hour earlier.
The tension lines around Alaric’s eyes worsened when he looked over at me from the other side of Luc. “You phased into a corner behind… something… a wardrobe, you said?”
I nodded, and Nyx’s brow furrowed.
“Alaric’s right,” she said. “You didn’t even phase into a closet, which would’ve at least had a door.
You could’ve actually been trapped there indefinitely, or even died, if you hadn’t been able to phase back out again.
” She stared at me, like it was the first time that had occurred to her.
“I mean… how? Why? Why would your magic send you someplace like that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I looked between the four of them, warming my hands with my mug of tea. At their disbelieving stares, I felt myself getting defensive. “What? I didn’t aim myself there, you know. I didn’t aim anywhere at all. And no, I have no idea why my magic sent me where it did.”
As I watched them process my words, it struck me there were a lot of unanswered questions about what I’d done.
Bones had said that though, didn’t he?
He’d told me he’d phased to all sorts of strange places.
“I was seen,” I said numbly, although I’d told them that before.
“I’m wondering how worried we need to be about that.
The way that mage talked, he didn’t recognize me, and I didn’t know him.
But if I’m right and it was the Bones Estate, someone there most definitely will recognize me.
If he reports back to Malefic or Sirena or one of the other Dark Cathedrals, someone will want to look at his memories. ”
“Right,” Jolie followed along grimly. “I can’t imagine it’s normal to find a strange witch hiding behind a wardrobe in a restricted part of the castle. They’ll definitely want to know who it was. Leda’s right, someone will look at his memories––”
“But this is good news, isn’t it?” Luc blurted.
We all turned to stare at him, frowning.
He gestured a bit wildly with his hands.
“I mean, okay, it wasn’t ideal, the way it happened,” Luc conceded. “The fact it only worked because your life was in danger, and you had no control over where you ended up… or how and when you got back… but the point is, Leda, it worked! You can do it. You can phase!”
He shoved his glasses up higher on his nose, like he did when he was excited.
“Can we just take a second with that? We’ve spent months trying to figure out whether that was even possible!
” He looked at me, a smile still ghosting his lips.
“I admit, I’ve been pretty skeptical after so long with no progress, even with Forsooth and Blackstone believing it.
It just seemed so wildly improbable, even if Bones managed it.
The idea that you could learn it too, just because the two of you share magic, was starting to feel far-fetched. ”
I didn’t know how to answer that, so I didn’t.
Truthfully, his words surprised me.
Why had he given up so many of his nights, if he hadn’t even believed it was possible?
True, we’d talked about other ways to get into the Black Tower, and we’d discussed other aspects of getting Bones free of his father, like the collar and how to get into the dungeon, but we’d all decided phasing was probably the only realistic way through the chimaeras.
Had Luc only been helping to keep me from doing something crazier?
I glanced at Nyx, Jolie, and Alaric, and wondered what they’d believed.
“You’ll need to be able to control it,” Luc said, reddening a little, which made me wonder how he’d interpreted my silence. When I continued to not speak, his expression and voice grew indignant. “I really don’t know how you don’t see this as good news, Leda?”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. “I do. I mean, yes… it is good news. Of course it is.”
I glanced at Alaric, who continued to look worried, and Nyx, who was staring at me in darkly amused disbelief.
“I guess I’d thought I would have some control,” I admitted, looking back at Luc. “Or really, that there’d be some rhyme or reason, some logic to where I landed. I thought I’d have some sense of how it all worked, so I’d know what to try next.”
I leaned on my palms where they rested on the leather couch.
I drummed my fingers against the leather.
“Bones told me he got dragged to places with a strong emotional resonance,” I added, thinking aloud.
“But what was my magic’s logic around that room, in particular?
It’s not like I have a particular attachment to being in a dusty, rat-infested crypt.
Pretty much any other part of the castle would have held more meaning for me. ”
Nyx snorted a half-laugh, in a way that sounded like she agreed with me.
“You thought you’d go to Bones,” Jolie reasoned.
I looked at her, hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“But you did, didn’t you?” Alaric asked.
When I glanced at Luc, he looked like he was barely suppressing annoyance.
I ignored it, turning to the others.
“Bones warned me how emotional the phasing is,” I explained.
“He said that, even now, if he doesn’t very consciously aim himself, he’ll end up wherever he feels the strongest emotional pull…
for good or bad reasons. That could be the one person or place where he most wants to be.
Or it might be the thing he dreads most. His phasing ability can’t distinguish between intense positive feelings and intense negative ones.
It simply sends him wherever those feelings are strongest.”
Thinking about that now, I fell silent. I didn’t bother to fill in the gaps for Luc or the others, but I had no doubt they understood me just fine.
There was no person or place I thought about more than Bones.
I dreamt about him every night.
I thought about him every day.
“Bones said it took him years to control it,” I went on, flushing a little. “So I expected that, frankly. I knew it would be unpredictable, and that it would be a long time before I could do it safely. But I also thought I’d be able to make better sense of where I landed.”
I opened my mouth, about to say more, then thought better of it, and closed it.
“Maybe it was the chimaeras,” Alaric offered quietly.
He perched on the edge of the couch on the other side of Luc, and peered around the red-haired mage to gaze at me, owl-like.
His centaur slept on the rug by his feet, and Alaric gripped a mug of hot chocolate between both hands, as if the fire wasn’t blazing hotly behind Jolie and Nyx, and he desperately needed the extra warmth.
“I got through the chimaeras,” I said to him, puzzled. “Isn’t that the whole point of phasing? That it bypasses all of that?”
Alaric’s expression remained serious.
“Yes,” he said frankly. “In theory. Possibly. I’m guessing that’s true of any decently-sized chimaeric boundary, particularly anything meant to act as general protection around a large perimeter, like, say, the entirety of the Bones Estate.
But what about chimaeras that aren’t simply boundary defense? What if they have some other purpose?”
Alaric cleared his throat, rearranging his fingers on the mug.
He glanced at the others, then back at me.
“It’s possible Malefic foresaw you trying something like this,” he went on, somewhat apologetically.
“If Forsooth guessed you’d be sharing parts of your magic with Bones, it stands to reason Malefic would have come to the same conclusion.
” He paused, giving me a pointed look. “Didn’t Bones tell you his father’s been positively obsessed with every aspect of his magic since he was a baby? ”
My hands tightened on the leather couch.
We were skirting uncomfortably close to the caelum ignis conversation.
Alaric’s point made a frustrating amount of sense, though.
If Malefic couldn’t keep me off his property entirely, given the sheer size of the boundary the chimaeras covered, that didn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t try to keep me out of certain areas that were significantly smaller.