28. Chapter 28
twenty-eight
Rye turned back toward Jack, regarding him with confusion—an expression he seldom wore.
“I was waiting for Mom to get here,” Jack explained, which only made Rye tilt his head.
Silence pulsed. Uncertainty tangled my thoughts, too.
Of course, this request of Jack’s must tie back to what Jack had said that morning. About needing to show me something. Something about Rye. Proof, Jack had said, that Rye loved me.
“I can’t fight you, Jack,” said Rye.
“You can,” Jack assured him, his tone both calm and certain. “You will.”
“You’ve proven yourself beyond expectations,” said Rye. “I have admitted and will admit again that I was wrong about you. If it is an apology you seek, consider it granted.”
I traded my gaze between Jack and Rye, waiting for the right moment to jump in, and interrupt. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure which outcome I wanted. Did I want to see whatever Jack had to show me, or did I want to believe this was a terrible idea?
“This isn’t about that,” said Jack who, with a slow scrape of metal, drew his sword.
“Then what is this about?” Rye approached us again, coming to a halt beside me.
“It’s about me,” said Jack. “And Mom. And…you.”
To that, Rye made no response. Instead, his gaze shifted once again to me.
“Jack has proven himself capable of much,” said Rye. “He seems to seek to prove himself capable of more. But, so far as I know, this is the only head he has left. I’m not willing to gamble his life.”
I laid a hand on Rye’s arm. Because clearly, he was now deferring to me. Would this trend continue? Was he really trusting me, or would he wrench back control at the first opportunity?
“One round,” said Jack. “First to land a body strike is the winner. Neither of us can be killed that way.”
“I’ll play along with this if you wish,” said Rye, speaking to me. “But I don’t know what this is meant to accomplish.”
“It’s meant to prove that you don’t know everything,” said Jack as he assumed a fighting stance, “or even half of what you pretend to.”
Anger flashed on Rye’s face. But then, as he brushed past me, slipping out from under my hand, his expression morphed to determination.
“Be careful, Rye,” I couldn’t help calling as Rye, in a practiced, liquid motion, unleashed his own sword. “I just got him back. I just got you both back.”
“This ought to be good,” called Pae who, arms folded, returned to my side.
“We’re wasting time,” grumbled Nick, footsteps clanking on the marble as he also retraced a path back toward the medallion, which Rye and Jack stood on opposite ends of, with Rye positioned at North and Jack at South.
“Agreed,” said Rye. “But Jack has earned the right to a request—even a frivolous one. And given that our meeting revolves around his research, it will likely go more smoothly if I indulge him.”
“You’re always so sure,” said Jack. “But you were wrong about Langwidere.”
“I didn’t know about Langwidere,” growled Rye. “How she worked or who she was working with.”
“You were wrong about me,” said Jack.
“I was wrong about Tip,” argued Rye.
“Which was your biggest misstep.”
In an instant, Rye closed the distance between himself and Jack, his sword lashing out viper fast. Jack parried the strike with ease, then returned the attack. Rye deflected Jack’s blade with his, resulting in a clash of metal, which reverberated off the walls.
Scowling, Rye swooped in again, but Jack deflected a second time, and a third. When Jack sought to land another strike, their roles reversed, and Rye dodged and deflected.
Then came a break in the match, with Rye taking back some distance. Jack, though, remained where he was.
“How are you doing that?” Rye asked.
“Doing what?” I asked Pae. “What is he talking about?”
“You’re not seeing it yet,” said Pae, his tone hushed, surprised—entertained. “But watch. You will.”
I frowned, knotting the skirts of my dress into my hands. This fight might not have been real, but on some deeper level…it also was.
Jack had engaged Rye in a battle of wits. This physical manifestation of that battle was only just that. A mask for what was really happening beneath the surface between them. A contest I couldn’t quite grasp until, suddenly, as Pae promised, I did see it.
Rye dashed in again to make a bolder strike, no longer holding back. Jack evaded him with an agile dance-like sidestep. I had seen that sidestep before in the not-so-distant past. In that instance, it had been a movement worn by someone else. By the same person who, as Jack attacked, repeated the movement exactly.
“Oh my God.” My shock prompted me to grab Pae by the arm.
“It’s like watching the image in a mirror try to fight itself,” said Pae, a mixture of awe, appreciation, and intrigue underscoring his tone.
And truly, I couldn’t have described what I was observing any better.
Rye and Jack’s match wore on, with the two taking turns advancing on and retreating from one another. There was no difference, however—none at all—in the way both parties moved. The only difference between the two seemed to be the energies they exuded.
While Jack’s movements remained relaxed—almost rote—Rye’s growing agitation had him striking with extra force and exploiting every opportunity to land even a grazing hit.
Rye’s glower intensified with each failed onslaught. At the same time, Jack never managed to land a single strike either, though not for lack of trying.
Calmer and cooler in his advances and withdrawals, Jack attacked, sidestepped, and parried with the same precision as Rye. He made rapid calculations and followed through. Rye always evaded his swipes, caught his hits, and fended off his slashes, but the King of Oz also never caught Jack unawares or unguarded.
Jack, for his part, exuded a grace I would never have thought him capable of—a grace that matched Rye’s. Their battle truly had evolved into a dance—a hypnotic one. One that any outsider would doubtless have branded a choreographed performance.
I risked a glance away from the bizarre fray to where Nick stood, watching along with me and Pae. Of course, there was no expression there to decipher. But I’d become accustomed to reading Nick anyway. Like Jack, he had an energy about him. An undercurrent that ebbed and flowed with the circumstances and his emotions. And currently, that undercurrent swirled with disturbance.
With a growl, Rye increased his efforts. Jack remained impassive, his stick-thin figure darting forward and back from Rye’s shorter though equally as thin frame. Clash, clang, clink their blades sang, the trading of assaults becoming frenzied with Rye’s growing fury.
Then Rye’s blade sliced upward, whistling a warning that, for anyone else, might have come too late to heed. Jack, though, bent backward just in time, quick enough to evade the swipe that had come so close to slashing cleanly through his head, his body contorting with an audible snick of wood.
“Oh!” I cried and darted forward but, catching me, Pae hauled me back.
“Bad idea,” grunted the demon. “Can’t you see your boyfriend’s half checked out?”
My heart banged in time with the echoing sword strikes, and though I tried to free myself from Pae, he refused to release me. “Rye!”
Rye darted toward Jack. Dropping to his knees, he slid past the chimera, the momentum sending him gliding over the marble as he sliced with his sword—a movement meant to cleave Jack’s legs out from under him.
I shrieked, even as Jack leaped to avoid the strike.
“Stop!” I called when Jack wheeled on Rye who, still on his knees, spun to lift his sword and halt a blow that would have split his head. “I said stop!” I shouted when the two of them stayed connected that way, with Jack bearing down on Rye, and Rye holding him at bay. Until the moment Rye shoved Jack back and, taking advantage of the chimera’s split-second disorientation, darted between his legs. Rye then popped up behind Jack who, glancing over his shoulder, spotted his opponent’s new whereabouts an instant before Rye struck.
Like all that had come before, however, the blow made no connection. Jack ducked and spun, his sword nearly grazing Rye’s chest. The moment echoed that episode in the clock tower, when Jack, who’d possessed no combat experience at all, had cut Rye.
Rye hadn’t been trying to fight Jack then. He’d been trying to defuse the chimera’s anger. Which was something I now needed to do with him.
“Pae, let me go!” I demanded, wheeling on the demon who still held me by my forearm.
“Roses can’t stop fights, Tipper. And green fire is, I think, a little too melty for this situation.”
I gritted my teeth. Because he had a point. I didn’t know how I’d killed the Nomes. Or how I’d grown the roses. Those things had just…happened. I had no control over my powers—or very little. I’d lost so much time while they’d been bound. And now that they were unbound? Well, I certainly didn’t know my strength.
“Enough,” barked Nick, stepping forward, closer to the pair.
Rye still wasn’t listening. As focused as he was on his target, he probably did not even hear us.
Only when Nick, facing Rye, his arms outspread, slid in between the two, did Rye halt.
Lowering his sword, Rye backed off, eyes locked now with Nick’s instead of Jack’s—as if his friend had somehow broken a spell that had bound him to his battle with Jack.
“The chimera isn’t your enemy,” said Nick.
“It makes no sense,” Rye hissed in return.
“Maybe not yet,” allowed Nick, “but you must admit that what Jack has shown us in here… Well, it isn’t anything he could have told us.”
“The magic,” said Rye. “That’s the only explanation.”
“It grows wild,” agreed Nick. “Unpredictable. Surprising. But also, beautiful. Like the roses the people of Winkie Country and, possibly by now, even all of Oz can’t stop talking about.”
The roses I had grown Nick meant. Were the people really that fixated on the phenomenon? And could the news of these displays of my power have spread as far as Nick suggested? Throughout all of Oz?
“The power is even greater than I thought it would be,” said Rye.
“You can’t hope to control it,” Nick replied.
“It was never my hope to do so,” Rye spat back.
“I’m not talking about the magic,” quipped Nick before at last relinquishing his role of referee to head once more for the door.
Rye’s eyes, in response, flew to me—so serious. And, deep down, beneath it all…afraid.
“What’s he talking about, Rye?” I asked. “If not the magic, my magic…what?”
“I don’t know,” said Rye, his attention diverting to Jack who, with sword now sheathed, approached the king.
“I’m glad,” said Jack, “that it’s you I fight like. Despite everything, I’m glad. You should be, too.”
Jack placed a hand on top of Rye’s head and rumpled his dark feathery hair, knocking that crown askew and prompting Rye’s expression to morph into one of shock. Which, in turn, broke the dam of my wound-too-tight nerves—inciting a small laugh.
Rye did not laugh. But some of the concern knitting his figure did ease.
Those cool wintry blue eyes returned to me, beaming some unspoken turmoil. I held my hand out to Rye.
The King of Oz only blinked at me. And then, his most stalwart expression renewed, he stalked forward—and past me—ignoring my offered hand as he went.
I gaped up at Jack who waited until Rye was gone before he spoke.
“I told you he was not together.”