5. Chapter 5
Lunette
Tomorrow came too quickly. The hollowness had healed slightly overnight, but it felt dull and empty inside my chest. But Selmont still needed its protections, whether I had anything left to give or not.
The wardstone felt cold and almost hostile against my palm, nearly as unfriendly as the villagers who would be watching me soon. Sometimes, I wondered if all the magic that had been poured into these border stones had given them enough life to bite back against my touch.
I supposed the fight was fair. It had always seemed to me that nature had no choice but to defy any person, man, woman, or Fae who attempted to change it.
At least four generations of mages had etched a message into the craggy surface of each stone set in a circle around the village.
Every line was a comforting reminder of why I kept pouring myself into them.
I could make out a few words of my great-grandmother’s writing, but lichen and weathering had erased the oldest records of my family’s legacy.
I was what was left. Now, my power imbued a single message aimed at outsiders that generations of my family had whispered into the stone: Look away.
The craggy surface glowed faintly as I wove magic into it.
I’d done this so many times that I no longer fainted from the effort, but occasionally, it was a close thing.
My mother had been far stronger at warding.
My grandmother stronger still. Both could make a protective aegis appear out of thin air that would’ve stopped a flying arrow.
I’d never managed such a feat. But I’d do my best to carry on their life’s work until my body gave out.
My breath clouded the chilly afternoon air as my bare hands froze to the icy stone.
The bone-deep drain began in my chest. At each stone, my trembling grew worse. My magic wove through the network to spill across the frost-hardened fields below Selmont, past the crooked fence posts and sleeping livestock, unfurling in unseen lines.
No one could see me yet, so I allowed my shoulders to slump and my head to dip as I worked.
I remained high on the densely treed ridge, between the space where the riot of orange and yellow leaves clashed with the green of the hardier pines, out of sight from those on the main road winding past our hidden village.
With the pass soon to close for the winter, the road was usually quiet, especially this close to nightfall. But today, the sound of many hurried hooves echoed from below—probably a traveling trader racing against the fading light to reach the pass where his caravan could make camp for the night.
I ignored it. Only a true mage would sense the weave I was working, and few of those would travel toward magic-intolerant Gelida. Those that wore purple or black robes of the Assembly only traveled to claim or silence someone.
My stubborn certainty of my safety was dashed as a jolt of pure energy shot up the lines I’d woven, so sudden and violent that I gasped. I clutched the stone to steady myself as my knees nearly buckled from the impact that struck straight at the core of my magic.
At first, it was blinding in its shocking intensity, but after only a heartbeat, everything changed. For the second time this week, the fine hairs on my arms and neck rose all at once. My exhausted magic jolted awake, snapping to attention along with every nerve in my body.
Can this mage track me? Will they forcefully breach the wards?
But even as the fear took hold, something beneath it gave me pause. This felt nothing like an assault. Underneath the shock of it was that same unfamiliar, unbidden comfort. Unsettling in entirely new ways.
The fear and the strange comfort were tangled together now, and I couldn’t separate them.
Scenarios of what I could do to get the children out of the village played through my mind as I walked the circuit closest to the ridgeline on unsteady feet.
I had to keep going, to shore up our only defense, just in case.
Eventually, the sound of hoofbeats and wagon wheels faded into the distance. Surely whatever this was would fade along with them—it had to, or we were doomed.
But then my heart stumbled. And a second pulse found its way to me. This time it felt less shocking and more deliberate, like whoever had sent it was searching and expecting an answer.
Like it was personal. The sensation skimmed down my back like the caress of warm, rough hands. Like someone had reached across the ward’s magic to touch me. It was unlike any touch I’d known. It reached deep within, almost as if it was caressing my very soul.
For a fleeting moment, I indulged in the strange warmth, enjoying and dreading whatever it might mean, while trying to make sense of the terrifying thought that whatever it was recognized me in some way.
How? I’d never know magic could feel so…intimate. What was this?
“Who are you?” My voice cracked as my breath misted out into the cold air. Whatever this was, it was too distinctly human to be purely a side effect of magic use.
Then without warning, pain, so sharp and sudden that it nearly knocked me off my feet, flared through the connection. My hands flew to my chest as if they would protect me from whatever this was. I staggered, breath ragged, mind racing.
Then my link to the faraway mage was severed.
The pain disappeared like snowflakes meeting fire—there and then not.
In the absence of connection and pain, I was left shivering and utterly alone.
As the wind nudged the fallen leaves around me, their hushed whispers on the ground mingled with the dull throb of my heart.
I swallowed, throat suddenly dry. The caravan must have had a mage guard surveying the area for threats. That was the only logical explanation. I didn’t know how mages behaved, but I suspected that the exchange was some sort of warning.
Still, that caress….
Foolish, pathetic thought. I was clearly unwell. And yet my magic was becoming restless, vibrating under my skin, as if it were reaching back out for that warmth, hoping it would return.
“Get a hold of yourself, Lunette,” I muttered.
Time to move on. Back toward the village, away from the fantasy my mind had created.
The hollow feeling slowly spread down my belly as I continued filling the loop of wards.
Navigating downhill toward the next stone, I sensed the protection net around our village.
To my sixth sense, it felt like a fragile, living thing—each strand a piece of myself I would never get back, and none of them enough.
Always at the edges, even in this.
The toll it took on my body, and the stares as I got closer to the village, made a bitter, depressing humor bubble up in my mind.
Nothing inspires community spirit quite like watching the Fae spinster exhaust herself.
As expected, a handful of villagers had gathered to see the proof of my work.
The miller’s wife watched my hands tremble and looked satisfied, as if my weakness counted as proof of her own virtue.
She and her two companions were magic-sensitive.
And the only thing that stood between me and starvation this winter was this group’s grudging acknowledgment that I’d done my job, that I was still useful.
The wind shifted again, carrying smoke and ash from the direction of the road.
That much smoke billowing up the forested slopes could only signal tragedy—a house burning or people falling under the ax blows of prowling raiders yet again.
I worried about the traveling party and their mage. Had they been attacked?
The offensive smell was a painful reminder of my greatest failure, one that would haunt me until the day I died.
I’d been fevered that night, my skin burning while the world around me blurred.
Still, I’d stumbled into the fields and clearings, determined to pour what little I had left into the stones.
The wards had flared to life, but illness and strain had thinned my magic to only a whisper.
After that, I only remembered the frost biting my skin as I collapsed beside the last stone.
At dawn, I’d staggered, still fevered, skin blistered, back into Selmont and learned what had happened: a single raider had slipped through. One of our men lay dead in his doorway and another was left crippled. A farmer’s scythe had finally cut the intruder down.
But no one forgot that I’d failed in my one task. No one had asked why I was frost-burned and barely able to speak in my own defense. They only muttered that I’d been asleep while blood stained our soil.
I could’ve told them I had crawled half-frozen to the last wardstone with a fever burning holes in my thoughts. I could’ve shown them the blisters. But grief had needed a culprit, and I had already learned that lonely girls made convenient sacrifices.
Since my parents died, I’d dreamed of finding my way to Tir Larethia or even Caervorn to find work as a healer. But for a single woman with no friends or family in the borderlands, getting to either of those cities would take living through a nightmare to achieve.
And the living part wasn’t guaranteed.
I would continue to do this for the children if nothing else. They, at least, hadn’t learned what they were supposed to think of me. Yet, came the traitorous voice inside my head. Their parents’ poisonous whispers would fix that.
I could endure the isolation and jeers. The wards I wove across the fields and slopes would make the raiders’ eyes slide past all the roads leading into the village.
It was fortunate that Selmont was protected in its small valley at the foot of the mountains that served as the border between Larethia and Gelida, or the task might’ve been impossible.
I finally made my way to the last stone. I was dizzy, too dizzy. But I had only one more push.
To anyone watching who wasn’t a mage, the only proof I was doing anything at all was a tiny flash of blue each time I recharged a ward.
None of my watchers said a thing when the last bit of blue light disappeared into the air.
Even though my knees were trembling, I stood straight, trying to hide my weakness.
They already whispered enough—untrustworthy, dangerous, other—I didn’t want to give them more fuel for the fire of hatred.
Even knowing what they thought of me, the human weakness in me strained toward them, against all reason, listening for two words I knew would never come.
It was even more foolish to hope for an invitation to conversation.
But at my core, there was the tiniest fragment of optimism that the past years of rejection couldn’t seem to smash.
They fed and clothed me in exchange for this. That had to be enough. It was a tidy arrangement, if one ignored the loneliness.
I shuffled toward my minders, my heart and lungs sluggish from the magic I’d spent.
They scattered as though they feared my heritage might be catching.
A hundred times I’d imagined yelling at them, screaming that they were mistaken, that I wasn’t to blame for the raiders, but the words always died in my throat.
Not having to say a word meant I could get back to my cabin sooner.
Whether I’d collapse onto my bed, snoring with my boots still on, was another question entirely.
I never knew when Muffin would squeeze his way back inside after frolicking in the piles of leaves surrounding my house this time of year.
Knowing my little seska, he would probably choose tonight to gnaw through my bootlaces as I lay there insensate again, just for the fun of it.
He wasn’t completely domesticated—much like me.
Opening my front door, I thanked the gods that the embers in the hearth hadn’t gone out because I didn’t have the energy or magic to start another fire.
At least I wouldn’t freeze to death. I clumsily tossed two more logs on the hearth, gulped down a glass of water, and undid the knot I’d tied my red hair back in before I collapsed onto my bed.
As my head hit the pillow, I heard the scratching of Muffin’s claws on the floorboards. His small form settled beside me, warm and alive and utterly unafraid.
He gave back what I offered without conditions. I didn’t have to prove my worth to him. I just wished he wasn’t the only one who felt that way.