"
Beyond the vale, where the Wild prevails, lies death for you and for me
," Valeda whispered the rhyme and shivered. "Fates alive. I hope you know what you're doing, Elsie Delgora."
"Why would you promise that woman something you know you can't give her?" Dorian half chased Elsie around the western perimeter of the ark, thoroughly annoyed that he'd been forced to hunt her down again.
"Who says I can't give her what she wants?" Elsie kept a brisk pace, lithely avoiding the overgrowth of jungle around them. Her black hair was pinned up in a tight bun, making the exotic, angular curves of her face more prominent. If he hadn't been suppressing the desire to strangle her, Dorian might have given her a compliment.
"The Council says you can't." He had to catch himself on a fallen bit of tree when she abruptly stopped. The moist ground slid away from his left foot and he quickly found a better standing spot.
The ark was built precariously close to the edge of the ridgeline, its entire circumference taking up a four-mile wide, three-and-a-quarter-mile long declivity in the mountain range. The egg-shaped monolith of iron and steel was far enough from any towns that it looked like a shadowed lump of hillside at a distance. Up close, however, it was big and bulky and looked quite impenetrable.
Which is the point,
he thought with a frown.
Elsie turned to an iron ladder built into the side of the wall and prepared to climb. Dorian grabbed her elbow to stop her. There would be people wherever she was heading and they needed to have this conversation in private.
"You promised, Elsie."
"No," she said. "As I recall it, you are the one who promised silence, not me. I stood there like an idiot, trying to remind myself why I didn't kill them all where they stood."
"Elsie. Think of the hysteria that would happen if word got out." Dorian moved closer to her, glancing at her gloved hand and preparing himself for the battle he'd just stepped into. "If Valeda Quinlan publishes the fact that Magic is dead, the Untalented will panic. There will be riots and mayhem and a lot of innocent lives will be lost."
"Even the Witch-Born will panic, Dorian. Talented or not, all of Magnellum's fate rests on the Warding Pillars. Panic is exactly how the people should be reacting." Elsie scowled at him but didn't move, still poised to climb the ladder. "The Wild is coming, Dorian. It's coming and there's very little we can do about it."
"The Wild has been 'coming' for eight years now, Elsie!" Exasperated, he let go of her and shoved his fingers through his hair. "By Fates! I've been listening to you for eight long years. I've watched you build this . . . this . . ." He waved at the side of the ark in frustration, "this insanity, using resources you shouldn't have. Don't try to deny it, either. Delgora was rich when you ascended to House Witch, but it wasn't this rich. You've been spending more money than we've got, insistent that the world is about to end, and for what?"
Elsie blinked up at him, her caramel-colored eyes glimmering with an emotion he couldn't recognize.
"The Warding Pillars haven't failed, Elsie. There's peace in Magnellum right now. You cannot overturn society on a whim." Self-conscious at his own rant, Dorian sighed and looked away from her.
Deep jungle green cast dark shadows over the landscape, interrupted by bright pink and yellow flowers here and there. Vibrantly colored birds streaked past the horizon, calling out to each other in a beautiful and vociferous sort of way. It had taken Dorian a surprisingly small amount of time to acclimatize to the tropics. The lands of his youth were rugged and tall, dry during the summer and cold during the winter, an impressively stark contrast to the year-round humid press of Delgora.
And yet, he loved it here. He loved Delgora almost as much as he loved the infuriating woman beside him.
"My whim did not kill Magic, our god," Elsie said after a moment. "And Magic is dead. His human form is lost to us and our time is running out. Perhaps peace has lulled you into a sense of complacency, Dorian, but I would prefer to be broke and prepared than wealthy and dead."
He turned back to her, clenching his fists and barely holding onto his temper. "Complacency? By Fates, Elsie, I haven't known a single day of peace since I met you. First there was the fight against Vicaress Reonne and her Dellidus creature, and then the fight against the Council . . ."
"I fought the Council so that I could marry you. Are you wishing I hadn't?"
"That's not what I'm saying."
"Then what
are
you saying?"
"I'm frightened, Elsie!" His voice raised more than he'd intended and he could hear a scuffle from high up on the wall. He ignored it. "You don't tell me anything. You keep repeating that the Wild is coming, you keep burning political bridges with other Houses. You send Winslow off to Fates knows where and spend nearly every waking moment confined to this damned ark. Now pardon me if I want some explanations."
For a long moment neither of them moved. Dorian felt a trifle foolish at the things he'd confessed, but he could at least admit to himself that they were necessary. Marriage required a brutal honesty, the ability to see not only your spouse, but yourself as well. By his estimation, he'd been more than fair, more than patient, waiting for the moment when she would finally open up to him and share the burden. He hadn't wanted to push her, but Fates help him, he couldn't take it anymore.
Slowly, quietly, Elsie turned to face him. She nodded slightly, as though deciding something for herself, and then started to remove her glove.
"What are you doing?" he asked, focusing on the glittering tattoos.
"I'm giving you an explanation." Elsie stripped the glove off completely and met his eyes.
She held up the tattooed hand, fingers splayed, and waited. Dorian hesitated for a heartbeat, then reached out to weave his hand through hers. The tattoos zapped him, they always did, but the jolts subsided after a moment.
"
Opawa Ayaatee,
" Elsie murmured the spell and the world around them shifted.
It was a common incantation, the vision spell that allowed all Witch-Born to see the unseen, to inspect the Warding Pillars around their domain. Dorian was a little confused by it, but then Elsie started a memory spell and he understood. Whatever she was going to show him, it existed in that realm and not the present.
Everything shifted again, their reality being overtaken by whatever memory Elsie had called forward. Rather than the ridgeline and the ark, Dorian found himself in Delgora Square, the wide circle of the marketplace bustling with activity. Merchants shouted to be heard above the crowd, venders waved their various wares at potential buyers, children zipped through the street, laughing. It looked quite normal. Dorian could even smell freshly baked bread coming from a nearby building.
And then someone screamed. It was the sort of scream that held terror and pain, as a large mass of gray fur barreled into a merchant. There was no time for a stunned silence as the creature bit into the ill-fated man. More screams rang out, several more wolf-like creatures started to emerge from the jungle, and then chaos erupted. People scattered, trying to flee, but the wolves kept coming.
A loud crack sounded just beside him as the closest building splintered, falling in on itself. Vines burst through shutters, curling around homes and yanking them from their foundations. The sight jarred him and Dorian blinked, still holding tight to Elsie's hand. In his mind he could hear her voice from eight years ago, demanding that her ark be made of steel and iron. She'd insisted that no wood be on the outside because it wouldn't hold up.
He looked to her, but she wasn't watching him. Elsie stared off to the left, to where the Manor was crushed beneath the weight of hundreds of vines. The impact rumbled through the ground, vibrating through his boots, and the deafening report of the defeated structure covered the screams of people scrambling to get away.
"Is this your premonition?" He whispered the question, fear fluttering in his gut.
"One of them."
"Fates have mercy." Dorian flinched, spotting a young man as he was tackled by one of the creatures. Blood stained the wolf's gray fur, its massive paws were slick and dark with it. Dorian watched, horrified, suddenly understanding Elsie's obsession with the ark, her sleepless nights and her irregular behavior. He'd known there were creatures beyond the Pillars, he'd just never seen one before.
The wolf let out a triumphant howl that seemed to crawl over Dorian's skin. Its counterparts echoed the call, drowning out the sounds of still crumbling buildings. There were no more screams.
Elsie's voice reached him, quiet and grim as she released the memory and returned them to their own place and time. "I think Fate is fresh out of mercy, Dorian."
***
Winslow woke up sometime in the night with a pleasant sort of numbness radiating from his shoulder. They hadn't moved him far from the scene of the attack and he knew he should be worried about that. The great cat hadn't been very wounded, just startled enough to run away. There was a good chance it would come back, but he had an odd sort of detachment about it. He wanted to be worried, yet he couldn't find the willpower to work up such an emotion.
He felt bubbly, as though he were floating on a soft surface, and curiously amused.
This is very wrong
, he thought,
because there's little humor about being on the brink of death.
Winslow fought for coherency. He needed to wake up. He needed to heal himself again. The fact that this was the second time in a week where he'd been seriously injured was irritating. He'd gone through Winter Tournaments, sparring against other Witch-Born, and never had this much trouble.
And that,
he thought with a frown,
was decidedly more dangerous than riding a train or hiking the mountains.
Closing his eyes, he tried to summon his Talent. To his surprise, his magic didn't respond. It was still there, at his core, he could sense it. But there was a lazy sensation coming from it.
My magic,
he thought with amazement,
is sleeping.
He opened his eyes again and peered at the wounded shoulder. They had stripped him to the waist in order to tend the wound, but he was strangely comfortable. He should have been cold, he knew. If he had a fever, he would have noticed by now. But he was neither warm, nor cold, just comfortable.
If that wasn't strange enough, Winslow was baffled further by the dressing on his shoulder. No bandages, not even a makeshift one from clothing, just a strange, gooey green glob on the injury. Whatever it was, it covered all of the torn flesh and he had the sense it had been lathered inside the wound as well.
Something was different. Winslow frowned up at the leafy canopy and tried to discern what was bothering him. Well, what was bothering him beyond the wounded shoulder and threat of attack. The great cat was still nearby. Winslow could sense his presence, just beyond the Warding Pillars.
Which was, now that he thought about it, an oddity. He hadn't been able to sense the creature before, so why was he able to now?
No amount of urging or summoning could get his magic to wake, which heightened his anxiety considerably. If the great cat returned, Winslow would be unable to protect Mirabella and her mother.
Turning his head, Winslow sought out the girl and spotted her by the campfire. She was poking the embers with a stick, her chin propped in one hand. Winslow squinted at the glistening goo on his shoulder and wondered if he had the strength to sit up. It didn't feel like his shoulder or arm even existed. He could see them there, right where they should be, but when he prodded the appendage, he couldn't feel it.
Confused, Winslow searched the campsite for Fayree. He knew she was there, could sense her, but couldn't see her anywhere. Frowning, Winslow realized that the same sense he had for the great cat beyond the Pillars was what alerted him to Fayree's presence. He tried to concentrate, to define what was letting him know these things. It wasn't his Talent, he double-checked, but still only caught the sense of slumber from his magic.
He sighed and then stopped.
He could
smell
them.
Inhaling again just to test the theory, Winslow not only smelled the cats, he could taste them in the air.
"Mother, Maiden and Crone," he breathed.
Fayree was a great cat.
But that was impossible. He'd healed the woman. She had the same bone structure as any Untalented. True, he'd been a little disoriented at the time, what with having just survived a train wreck, but he was certain he would have noticed any discrepancies.
"Mr. Winslow?" Mirabella perked up at the sound of his voice. "Mr. Winslow, you're awake! Are you hungry?"
He shook his head. He probably was hungry; he was just too focused on being confused. "Where is your mother?"
"Here, Lord Agoston," Fayree called from the tree line.
Winslow had to crane his neck to see her approach. She was exactly as he remembered her, female parts all where they should be, but now that he watched he could see a litheness to her movements. As blocky and hard as her features were, Fayree was graceful. She had a shorter frame, built a bit stockier than the average female, but the difference wasn't so substantial as to be noticed at first glance. Her dark hair was down, curly locks flipping wildly around her shoulders, which only seemed to accent a sense of strangeness about her. For a second he thought he might be going crazy, but the look in her eyes told him otherwise.
She was different and they both knew it.
"I cannot summon my magic," he said. It seemed important that she know he was vulnerable, but he couldn't fathom why. If she wanted him dead, she could have killed him in his sleep, or just left him to bleed to death after the attack.
"I thought that might happen." Fayree stepped beside Mirabella. "The methods of the Tre`ow are unknown to your kind. I fear I may have traumatized your Talent."
"Madam," Winslow couldn't stop a wry laugh, "you are dangerously close to traumatizing me as a whole."