The Golden Apple (13 page)

She slammed the door in their faces.

* * *

“I have to go in.” Kayla looked at the door, then back at Rane.

A bird called, just above them, and Rane twisted his head to look up at it. It stared back, and he had the uncomfortable sense of being watched.

“Come.” He drew her down the path, and even the immediate press of the enchantment at their retreat was nothing to the thought of her going into the cottage where he could not protect her.

They stopped just out of sight of Ylana’s house. He didn’t release his hold on her arm, and she did not pull it away. He drew her closer and they stood, touching, the lazy light of afternoon warming them. Kayla’s breath was warm on his skin through the cotton of his shirt, and he tightened his hold.

She lifted her face to his. “Eric might have been lying about my being a witch, but Ylana isn’t. If things were different, she might help me understand what I am. About what it means to be a witch.”

“If things were different.” He spoke softly, his lips almost touching her ear. He heard the trace of bitterness in his words, and closed his eyes.

He’d never had time for bitterness, before. He’d tried to change things instead. Soren was the one who’d held a grudge. His brother accepted their father was gone and sought retribution. Rane had never given up hope—he’d pursued knowledge, the key to reversing what had been done.

He didn’t know which of them was better off.

He opened his eyes again, pressed a kiss against Kayla’s hair. A flash of movement caught his eye. A squirrel was watching them from a branch. It had the same intelligent, focused stare as the robin.

Kayla stirred in his arms. “What—”

He placed a finger on her lips. Nothing they said was safe.

Kayla turned her head and stiffened at the sight of the squirrel. There was a strange crackle in the air. She stepped away from him and faced it.

Rane blinked. The air danced with flickers of purple and green.

“Go.” Kayla pointed at the squirrel and it ran, leaping fluid as water through the trees, until it stopped, just in view.

“How do you do that?”

She turned, and he saw the strain on her face. “I don’t like being spied on. It was the same when I forced Jisuel to apologize. I think when I’m angry, I can use wild magic.”

“I can’t go in to the cottage with you and be of any use.” Rane watched the squirrel coming back, cautiously moving from tree to tree. “There is too much magic in there, it pulls me in a thousand directions at once.”

“I’ll do everything I can to find the gem. Eric described what it looked like well enough.” Kayla looked over her shoulder and lifted her hands. The squirrel stopped short.

Rane caught her chin. “I’ll be as close as I can be. Even if you can’t see me.” He touched his lips to hers, drew back.

She nodded, set her shoulders and spun in the direction of the cottage. Strode towards it.

The squirrel raced her back.

Chapter Eighteen

K
ayla stood before the door and looked over her shoulder, met Rane’s gaze for the last time before he stepped back into the trees. She lifted her hand and knocked.

The door swung open, and as it did she felt the light brush of fingers on her nape, felt the warmth of Rane’s invisible body behind hers. A final promise he was just outside. Watching through the windows, through whichever crack he could find.

“Where is De’Villier?” Ylana was suddenly there, half-shadowed in the doorway, and Kayla stiffened.

“Waiting along the path for me. He’s too sensitive to your collection.” Her voice was breathless.

Ylana stepped back and allowed her entrance.

Rane’s hand touched her shoulder and slipped off as she stepped within. Fear rose in her, in tandem with the high-pitched creak of the door shutting.

She was alone.

Rane may be outside, but she was face to face with a woman who could become a man with the lift of her hands, whose power radiated from her in tangible waves, green and brown.

The gloom darkened as the door swung shut, and Kayla smelled the sweet, dusty scent of dried lavender and rosemary, the dark, nutty flavor of burnt butter.

A candle flickered on a rough wooden table, then settled to a steady light as the door clicked shut.

In the half-light, the shelves glowed with their burden of magic trinkets. Some looked ordinary—pedestrian objects she would not have glanced at twice—and others shone with a beautiful light.

Despair draped chains over her shoulders as she took in the sheer number. How would she find Eric’s gem in this without Ylana realizing she was looking for something specific?

“Why are you here?” Ylana was watching her, bright and sharp as a robin.

Kayla turned from her and looked down at her hands. “I am here because you invited me.”

She had no reason for being in the forest. No possible reason other than the truth. And the truth would doom her. Would doom Rane and his brother, too.

“Don’t play games. Why would Kayla of Gaynor come into the Great Forest with a woodsman?”

Kayla lifted her head. There is was. The derisive thread in Ylana’s voice. That disrespect for Rane.

She felt the shimmer of anger again. “He may be a woodsman, but he is also my betrothed.”

“De’Villier? The future king of Gaynor?” Ylana laughed.

“Why do you think so little of him?”

“I cannot stand his kind. They sell wild magic treasure to the highest bidder. Without a thought to what it could do. Or who they sell it to.”

“You want them to only sell to you?” Kayla felt her anger growing.

“Sorcerers shouldn’t benefit from wild magic by being offered its treasure. They should be forced to think twice about creating it.” The words were hissed, furious.

“Rane is honorable. He doesn’t deserve your contempt.”

“Yes, he does.” Her voice was bitter. “He is hatching a plot. He asks too many questions about wild magic. Finds more treasure than anyone else.”

“You saw for yourself, he’s sensitive to the objects wild magic creates, he finds them easily. As for asking questions, he has his reasons, and they are nothing to do with you.” Kayla reached out a hand and picked up a ring lying on the shelf in front of her. The square-cut gem glinting on the heavy gold band was purple, holding an inner light.

“Don’t touch.” Ylana’s voice was a whip crack, and with a gasp, Kayla let the ring clatter to the floor.

She lifted her gaze to Ylana. “Why are you collecting everything you can? Store-housing all the magic objects of the Forest?”

“Every piece I collect is a piece they cannot have.”

Kayla heard the weariness in the witch’s voice. Wondered how long Ylana had been racing about as Jisuel, collecting every item she could find.

“It’s important the sorcerers don’t have these things?” She had to force the question out, for wasn’t she there to steal one of Ylana’s hard-won treasures for a sorcerer?

“There is something brewing. A clash of sorcerers. They are so powerful now they rub up against each other, irritating each other. Wanting to show each other just how powerful they are. Every piece in my collection would give them some advantage. And at no cost.”

“No cost?” She understood so little.

Ylana took a spoon off the table, bent and fumbled under a chair. She straightened, the spoon handle through the band of the ring Kayla had dropped. She carried it like a dead rat back to its shelf.

“Every spell they cast costs something. They are creating magic and its creation comes at a price. It leaches their energy, weakens them. But wild magic has already been created. It already exists, so there is no further price to pay for it. It uses itself up, not the other way around. The cost is nothing but a weakening of the thing itself, until at last it cannot be used again.” Ylana watched her as she spoke, and Kayla had the sense she was being measured and weighed.

She took a deep breath. “And the magic you use? There is no price for using that?”

“Earth magic? The sorcerers dismiss earth magic, because it cannot create things not found in nature. But they have forgotten how powerful it is.” Ylana smiled. “And they are afraid of it because the price for using it is that the user is bound more tightly to it, is forced deeper and deeper into a guardianship of nature. Something that would not suit them. Not at all. But you should know this.”

“I have never used earth magic.” She met Ylana’s gaze at last.

“You’re a witch, even untutored you would have called it without thinking.” Ylana lifted her arm and pulled her sleeve up. In the half-light of the room, Kayla had to lean forward to see.

From Ylana’s wrist, up past her elbow, was an intricate pattern of leaves and flowers, birds and squirrels, a swirling, entwined rope of fecund nature.

“Pull up your sleeve.”

There was nothing there, but Kayla obliged, exposing her inner-wrist. She remembered how Eric had done the same when he’d grabbed her on the stairs in his dungeon.

Now she understood what he had been looking for. His talk of extraordinary control or total ineptitude.

As she pushed up the fine cotton of her sleeve, she wondered whether her father knew the price of earth magic. It might explain why she knew nothing of her heritage. A princess’s duty was to the kingdom. There could be no devotion stronger than that. Certainly not the kind of symbiosis Ylana was talking about with earth magic.

Could he have found a way to stop her calling it? A way to deny her nature? And what of her mother? If Eric was right, she had been a witch, too.

Surely an ill-fit with being the queen of Gaynor.

She held out her arm. There were no leaves, no tattoo to mark her use of earth magic, but there was something. She frowned, leaned closer, and Ylana reached out and grabbed her wrist, yanked it to the candle on the table.

There in the yellow light, clear as Ylana’s leaves, were three tiny circles.

Ylana pressed down on one circle. “When you drew power to you, to make me apologize.” She pressed the other. “And when you chased me off from your tryst with De’Villier, just now. I don’t know the third.” She released Kayla’s arm.

Kayla lifted her wrist closer to her face, rubbed a thumb over the marks. “Chased you?” As she looked up, Ylana’s features altered, formed the pointed ears, the sharp features of a squirrel, and in a blink, she was herself again.

“I have never heard of anyone calling wild magic. Or having it answer the call.” Ylana reached out for her arm again, but Kayla held it against her chest, her fist clenched.

“Perhaps I didn’t know any better.”

Ylana let out a surprised laugh. “Perhaps. There is more than a bit of truth in that.”

“Is there a way…A way my father or mother could have bespelled me so that I did not call earth magic? To keep me from becoming more connected to it than my duty to Gaynor?”

Ylana looked at her in horror. “Who would do such a thing? Which side is your magic from?”

Kayla recalled Eric’s words. “My mother, and my father’s mother.”

“Both sides.” Ylana began to move around her, looking at her from all angles. “That is the one thing they couldn’t hide. You were too strong, it shines out of you, and they are lucky the wrong people didn’t see…” She reached out and yanked a hair from Kayla’s head. Threw it on the candle’s flame. It flared up in a bright green spark.

“Oh, yes. You are bespelled. And if that spell is to prevent you from calling earth magic, it has been done by a witch more powerful than I.” She laughed. “Your grandmother, perhaps? But what she didn’t take into account was that because you are so strong, you have always been calling magic. Calling it, and calling it, and never having an answer. And when you stepped into the Great Forest you were calling it still.”

“And wild magic answered the call.”

Ylana laughed again. “It came to you, hungry for a connection.”

“I wonder if I can call it now.” Kayla held both hands in front of her, flexed her fingers. “How do you call earth magic?”

“You think of it, hidden in everything around you, and you think of what you want to do.”

Had she done that when she’d called wild magic before? She remembered her anger, both times she’d called wild magic today. When had she called it a third time?

She suddenly recalled walking along the path, thinking of Rane, of kissing him, of breaking down the walls between them. Recalled how they had fallen into each others arms, the wild magic just behind them. It had embraced her like a lover, afterward. Bathed her in its light, as if delighted to have a companion at last.

Could it be that she had really done that? Broken down the barriers between them?

She blushed. Rubbed her wrist again. “Do witches take lovers?”

Ylana looked startled. “Perhaps, in the beginning. But I’ve told you, the price of earth magic is being bound to it. It becomes everything, in the end. Family, lover, friend. There is no room for anything else.”

She did not think she would be happy in a life that had no room for anything but her calling. “I would not like that.”