Torn: Bound Trilogy Book Two (15 page)

“I wanted you to come to the city, to see the people at the university who have been working on your problem. They’re close to having a cure that doesn’t involve binding magic, but removing it completely. In the meantime, we could control it. It’s the beginning of a new era.”

He said it as though he were offering hope instead of insulting me and everyone like me. I felt myself hardening to him again.
This was a mistake. He’ll never listen.

I stood and gathered my cloak close around me. “I don’t need a cure. It’s been nice to see you, Callum, and I hope this ends things for you. I’m going to leave now. I can find my way to Renton on my own.”

“Please sit down,” he said. Not threatening, but his voice had gone flat. “I’m not finished. I was going to say that I see you now, and I understand what you are. The life you and I were going to have together would have been good, but it’s not the right thing for you anymore. I’m not going to try to convince you that it is.” He rubbed a hand over the light stubble on his jaw. “You’re not the woman I asked to marry me, are you?”

“No,” I said, softly.

He nodded. “I’ll be happy to take you to meet your parents, and I’ll tell you on the way what’s happening with your brother. If you really don’t want any more help, if you want to go back to that other place, I’ll even see you back to the border. Now that we’ve talked things through, I think I can move on. I want what’s best for you.”

He sounded like he meant it, but the words came too easily. I still didn’t trust him. He couldn’t help what he was any more than I could. “Thank you,” I said, “but I’m not sure you know what’s best for me.”

Or anyone,
I added to myself. A feeling of fairy-wings fluttered in my stomach, and my legs ached to run. If Florizel and I flew now and kept out of sight, perhaps I could find my family on the road before Callum did.

He looked down at his hands and tapped his thumbs together. “I hope we can forgive each other for everything that’s happened, in light of our past together.”

“Callum, did you hear what I said? I can’t go with you.”

“I heard. I’ll walk you out. Dinner’s on me.” He put a few coins on the bar as we passed, and held the door open for me. “Rowan?”

“Yes?”

“I really am sorry.”

A semi-circle of ten men stood outside of the door, soldiers in their blue uniforms among them, weapons drawn, blocking escape. I called on my magic, and felt it filling me. It grew stronger, ready to act, if only I knew how to let it out.
I don’t care what you do
, I told it.
Just get me out of here
. The magic seemed to agree as it burned brighter and hotter than I’d ever felt it before. I lifted my hands, unsure of what I was doing.

A flash of pain flared at the back of my head, and the world disappeared.

T
he barmaid’s
screams sounded far away at first, coming to me as they did through a wall of black fog that muffled everything. I wished she’d shut up. My head throbbed, and as the sound drew nearer it pierced my brain like shards of glass.
Just let me sleep...

But I wasn’t sleeping. Not really. Even with my eyes closed the world came into focus around me, the feel of a hard bench under me and my cheek pressed against it. They’d tied my hands behind me, and my shoulders were stiff and sore. Someone walked by, close enough that the breeze of their passing made a loose lock of my hair tickle my nose, and I held back a sneeze. We were still in the tavern. The air smelled of spilled ale and old wood polish, and faintly of vomit. I didn’t think the latter was mine, but it was a possibility. I remembered nothing after I saw those hunters.

Though I tried, I couldn’t think of a magical solution to the problem. Any other Sorceress would surely have been out of the ropes by now and in the woods, calling for her trusty steed and making a dramatic exit. Anything I tried left me with the risk of burning the place down around me, and I assumed Callum would leave me there to die.

I settled for trying to undo the knots without drawing attention to myself.

If only the damned noise would stop. The screams faded to sobs, with Callum’s reassuring voice interspersed.

“She’s fine,” he said. I opened my eyes slightly. He stood next to the bar, behind which the young woman stood, trembling. “She’ll wake up soon, and we’ll get her out of your way.”

“I need a new job,” the barmaid whimpered. She wiped her face with a bar rag and squared her shoulders. Callum placed a small bag on the bar which clinked as the coins inside rubbed together. My coins. The barmaid picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of her dress. “The hell with this place.”

Callum crouched beside me. “Good morning, sunbeam.” He brushed my hair back from my face, frowning at the bright strands that tangled between his fingers. I winced as he pulled back, taking several with him.

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth when I tried to speak, and I found my voice had left me.

Callum pulled the hairs free from his hand and let them drift to the floor with a look of disgust. “It’s so obvious now, but God, you hid it well. Even my father didn’t sense magic in you. I still don’t know how that Tyrean knew what you were. But he did, didn’t he?”

I didn’t say anything, and he reached out again and gave my hair a sharp tug.

“He did,” I croaked, and cleared my throat. “Before I knew, myself. He saved me.”

“Did he?” He sneered. “I’d like to see him try that again. Come on, we’re leaving.” He grabbed my wrists, holding both between the fingers of one hand, and pulled me to my feet. I stumbled, and he jerked me up before my knees could hit the floor.

I caught the barmaid’s eye on the way out, and she looked away. She wouldn’t want to help someone like me. No one in my country would.

The world seemed to move around me rather than me through it, though I felt my legs and Callum’s force pushing me forward. I felt the sun warm on my shoulders and breathed the forest-scented breeze, and took no comfort from either.

Stupid
, I thought. Too trusting, just as Aren had always warned me. I had felt guilty over leaving my family and Callum behind, and had so desperately wanted to make things right with them that I had actually believed it was possible. I had remembered Callum as I knew him before, kind and trustworthy, ambitious and clever, and had trusted my hopes over my instincts. In my excitement over the idea that he might learn from my experiences, I had forgotten one thing that was now perfectly clear.

The moment he learned what I was, Callum had stopped thinking of me as Rowan, the woman he’d once wished to marry, and had started seeing me as a monster to be brought down.

What have I done?

Callum untied my hands so I could ride the plodding gray mare he provided for me. Six soldiers in royal blue uniforms surrounded me, accompanied by four more men in dark grey clothing, each wearing a copper medallion on his chest. Magic hunters. I’d only seen them dressed that way when on official business such as bringing a prisoner to court, never while hunting. I supposed they wore them now to warn folk not to approach us.

Callum rode slightly ahead, with my horse tied to his. Florizel had disappeared. I hoped she’d taken off as soon as she caught wind of trouble. She wouldn’t have been able to do anything against these men.

As we rode, I fought to pull myself from the shocked daze that had clouded my thoughts since I woke in the tavern. I studied my captors, watching for some sign of sympathy, and found none. They wouldn’t even look at me. Not until I let my magic well up in me again. The moment I turned my attention to it, Callum rode closer. I didn’t have a chance to do more before he quietly said, “I can feel that.”

“What?”

“Trust me,” he muttered, “you don’t want to try anything. You’re surrounded by magic hunters, and the best ones in Darmid at that. We’re trained to know when there’s magic about, when you’re going to use it. If these boys so much as get a hint that you’re about to attack, I’ve given them permission to kill you.”

I straightened my shoulders. “How do you know I don’t have skills to protect me?”

He chuckled, and the sound turned my blood to ice. “Try something, and we’ll find out.”

My magic might help me heal if I were badly injured, might even create a diversion to help me escape, but here on the open road I’d have an arrow in my back or a dagger through my throat before I could make it more than a few paces. I wouldn’t survive that. I forced my magic back inside me as I had so many times before.

Callum smirked. “Good choice.”

Maybe it’s not too late
, I thought.
If I can just make him see me as the person he used to care for, make him see that I didn’t choose this…

The landscape of my home country unfolded as we descended from the mountain pass. The borderlands were as I remembered, though I’d never passed this way before, tiny towns embracing the road every so often, each of them huddled around a crossroads and surrounded by farmland that held the dark and dangerous forests at bay. We didn’t stop, and were not permitted to speak. Callum refused to even look at me. I tried to calm my racing heart and mind, to organize my thoughts into a rational escape plan, but my mind had been rattled. I reached up to the back of my skull and felt a lump there, covered in dried blood that caked in my hair.

At least it’s a different type of headache
, I thought, and fought to keep myself from dissolving into lunatic laughter. I’d escaped this dragon’s cave only to run directly into its jaws, and not for the first time.

We went left at a sign indicating that we were turning toward Ardare, capital city of Darmid and home of the king and his magic hunters. My stomach turned. Though I’d visited the city a few times, I’d only heard the vaguest rumors about the prisons there. Certainly I’d never heard anything from anyone convicted of using magic. They never got a chance to talk about them.

I tried not to think about how right Aren had been. I was too naïve about the darkness in people I thought I knew.
I’m sorry
, I thought. He’d have accepted an apology this time. I’d certainly failed badly enough.

So fix it
, I told myself.
You still have your life, your wits, and your magic if you keep your eyes open and spot a chance to use it. Don’t give up yet.

The sun broke through the clouds that afternoon, bathing a green-dotted field in golden light. “Lovely weather for persecuting innocent people,” I commented to the soldier beside me. He didn’t look over, but frowned.

“Rowan,” Callum muttered, and shot me a dark look over his shoulder. “Don’t make this worse.”

“It can get worse?”

He didn’t respond, but untied my horse from his and dropped back, still holding the rope, so that I rode beside him. He looked over at me, and the muscles in his jaw flexed as he clenched his teeth. He waved a hand at the hunters riding beside us, and they fell back, leaving the two of us alone.

“You could have let me be,” I said. “None of this had to happen. I was in Belleisle, for God’s sake. I wasn’t hurting you or anyone else in Darmid. You made the effort to write to me, to trick me, to gather this crew to meet me. Why?”

“Why?” He shook his head in something between anger and bemusement, and kept his gaze fixed on the road ahead. “Where shall we start? Perhaps it’s because I lost a lot of credibility when everyone found out what you are. Can you imagine what people thought? Dorset Langley’s son, on-track to become the next great magic hunter in the family, finds this wonderful girl and falls in love. Too bad he didn’t know she was exactly what he’s supposed to be hunting.”

“I didn’t know, either,” I said, careful to keep my tone soft and reasonable.

His lip twitched. “It doesn’t matter. There are still whispers about me. Gossip at parties. How funny that this should happen to Callum. How the mighty have fallen. He should have chosen someone from his own circle in the city to marry, not a girl from the borderlands.”

“If I’d known—”

“And you got away, that’s the other problem,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “In any case, I have orders. Even if I’d been willing to let all of this go, my father wouldn’t have been. He disliked you, you know. Didn’t trust you, though even he didn’t know why. You can imagine his rage when he found out what he’d let slip through his fingers.”

“Who.”

“Pardon?”

“
Who
he’d let slip through his fingers. I’m a person, not a monster.” He looked away, and my heart sank. “But you know that, don’t you? You asked me to come to explain this to you, and you already understand it perfectly. You know we’re born this way.” I looked back at the others, a few of whom watched us with great interest. “You all know.”

Not one acted like he’d heard me.

“I knew,” Callum whispered. “There’s a lot you don’t understand, Rowan. You think that because you are what you are, because we keep this secret, that you’re right and we’re wrong. There’s so much you don’t know.”

“Then explain it to me. Make me understand how what you’re doing is noble and good.”

He was silent for a few minutes, and I thought he was going to ignore my request. It hardly mattered, really. I had little hope that letting him say his piece would make him more open to hearing mine, but I wanted to know how they justified it to themselves. Perhaps he would hear in his own words the mistake he was making, or I would learn something helpful.

“You’re clever enough to remember your history lessons,” he said at last, “even if you’ve never had all the details. Hundreds of years ago our people lived under the boot-heels of Sorcerers and Sorceresses in Ferfelle.”

In fact, I’d never heard the name of that old land. We weren’t even allowed to know that much. I kept my silence and waited for him to continue.

“They used their power to control those without it. Those who had no magic, no matter how clever or strong or otherwise talented they were, lived as slaves or servants to those with magic. When they overthrew and destroyed the oppressors, they fled the land and vowed never to let such a thing happen again. They thought that as long as there was no magic among them, they would be safe.”

“But more magic-users were born?”

He frowned. “Things would have gone right back to the way they were if the magic-users were allowed to live. Our ancestors had to take precautions, rid their new land of magic however they could so that even if magic-users survived, they’d have less power. They said that magic was evil, that it was a sin, that it was a choice made at the cost of a person’s soul. They taught the children to fear magic and anyone who used it, to report friends, neighbors, even family who used it. And for hundreds of years and many generations, we’ve worked toward the complete elimination of magic. It’s the only way to protect those who don’t have it.”

He looked at me like I was a venomous spider in the shadow of his boot. “People like you are a threat to our freedom.”

“You truly believe that?” I asked. “You think that every poor farmer you’ve executed for raising crops by magic, every person who’s used his gift to locate water for a drought-stricken village, every innocent baby you’ve had killed for showing signs of magic was planning to overthrow the king?” My voice grew louder, harsher. I didn’t hold back. “What about the helpers? The Potioners who would heal the sick, the Sorcerers capable of doing the same? The farmers who could help prevent famine, the—”

“It’s too much of a risk. They’d have realized soon enough that they could take power if they banded together. Tell me, are things better in Tyrea? Do they not rule by magical force?”

I opened my mouth to answer and realized I didn’t know. Severn certainly didn’t sound opposed to using magic to get whatever he wanted, and their throne went to the strongest Sorcerer. It
could
happen. “I haven’t spent much time in Tyrea,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “but I think they’ve had good kings in the past who ruled fairly. Belleisle isn’t under anyone’s thumb. It’s not ruled by magic at all, and Sorcerers and non-magical folk live in peace. They have for centuries.”

He snorted. “It won’t last forever.”

I shook my head. His mind had been made up for him long ago. “So why not let everyone in on the secret? Gain support from the people instead of lying to them?”

“The regular folk don’t understand,” he said, and shot me a sideways glance before looking out over the massive pit-quarry we approached, an open wound on the land where a few men loaded squared-off blocks of stone into wagons. “You should know that as well as anyone. I saw your drawings of dragons and such when my father went through your things after your letter came. He had me help with the investigation. Let me try to prove myself. I saw your illustrations of those stories, and Felicia told me all about your obsession with forbidden things. Think of how easily you were swayed by the words of an enemy. Too many people might have that kind of sympathy toward magic, especially those who have lost children. It’s better this way. Fear is more effective than enlightenment. It’s for everyone’s own good.”