Authors: Alicia Buck
I wanted to look away, to hide, but Kelteon made me watch until the furor of the battle died down. Those still in a drugged stupor were dragged together and bound. My steps carried me toward the king’s tent where I found Kelteon waiting.
“It’s so much nicer to be with you in person, my dear. Come, let’s say a final good-bye to your father.” Kelteon reached out his arm in a courtly gesture to escort me within.
We brushed through the tent flap to the inside where the silken hangings were bathed in a bright blue magelight. It was too bright, making the hangings appear garish. The light accented the haggard bags beneath Mom’s unconscious eyes. She hadn’t been tied, but next to her the king lay bound and sleeping unnaturally. The training general had been tossed against the king and tied like baggage. To see the two men who’d always been so in control, so strong, and so assuring look so vulnerable made me crash and rage against the cage where Kelteon held my consciousness. Nothing happened.
Kelteon turned me to the far corner where Breeohan also lay tied and drugged. But even as I watched, his head twitched.
“Your friend is waking. He must not have eaten much, probably pining for you, as usual. I have to tell you, Mary, it was quite amusing to watch him through Rafan’s eyes as we traveled together. He was such a sad little smitten pup, and you were so oblivious. It’s funny really. I courted you through Rafan to keep you from getting too attached to the heir here, but I could have done nothing and still had the same result. You’re quite cold toward men. What was that Earth term? A feminist man-hater?” Kelteon taunted. Breeohan twitched again.
“I know. Let’s have a little fun before you kill him.” He smiled with the terrible crooked hook at the corners of his mouth. My mouth felt dry at the thought of killing Breeohan, and despite Kelteon’s hold over me, I felt my heart wrench and skip a beat before it painfully pumped blood through my veins once more.
Kelteon slipped a knife in the waist of my pants at my back and exited the tent, leaving me to kneel in front of a reviving Breeohan, my face a mask of concern.
“Breeohan,” I whispered, shaking him lightly. “Wake up.” His lids blinked slowly as if he was having trouble emerging from deep sleep.
“Mary?” he slurred groggily.
“Yes, it’s me,” Kelteon said through my lips, while I yelled
No, it’s not!
and scratched at my mental prison looking for a weakness, a dent, anything that would give me a chance to break Kelteon’s possession of my voice and actions.
“Something’s wrong with me,” he said, trying to lift his heavy eyelids.
“You were drugged. But everything’s going to be okay now.” My voice was pitched low, smooth and enticing. In my head I continued to mentally attack the bounds of my prison with vicious jabs. I felt a whip of pain as Kelteon gave me a psychic lash of chastisement. My thoughts went white with agony, but I fought the blankness and caught the end of his lash so I could follow it to its source.
“I’m tied,” Breeohan pointed out with less of a slur to his speech.
“Let me help.” Kelteon made me move around and pretend to work at the knots binding Breeohan. “There’s something I need to tell you, Breeohan,” I whispered softly, my face centimeters from his ear. Kelteon had my hand reach behind my back and grip the knife. Inside, I fought to hold the mental lashing of power as it bucked and crept painfully past my cerebral barriers to the power’s nexus.
“Despite Rafan’s betrayal, I still can’t help but care for him.” Breeohan stiffened, and I shrieked in silence, still pursuing the psychic whip. Kelteon made me lean until my breath gently touched Breeohan’s face and bounced back to mine. “In fact, I think I’ve loved him since the first time I saw him clean and dressed for court.”
The knife lifted and began its descent. I dug my psychic claws deep into the source of the mental lash and hung on, unable to do more than keep hold and watch as the knife started to descend toward Breeohan. It was going to pierce him. I was going to kill the kindest, noblest, most trustworthy man I’d ever known.
Something deep inside me snapped. A knowledge that had been hidden came into focus for the first time. The certainty of my love for Breeohan hit me in a surge of wonder. My doubt fled, and the fear that had held me constantly at a distance from realizing my feelings disappeared. A will more powerful than anything I’d ever felt before gripped me. In my mind I tore out the nexus of Kelteon’s psychic lash with a fierce and desperate frenzy. There was a blinding flash of blue light. Then my mind slammed into my body as it too flew backwards, crashing into canvas. The knife jerked out of my nerveless hand at the moment of whiplash and arched in a deadly parallel to my body before puncturing the tent fabric an inch from my face.
My head felt like it was splitting open with the worst headache of my entire life. I reached a hand up to rub my forehead and then I stopped. I waved my arm around and stretched out my legs. I would have shouted with joy, but a groan was the closest I could manage with my head pounding like it’d been on the receiving end of a club swing. The blue light that had illuminated the tent was gone, leaving the tent shadowed but for cracks of light showing through seams and the flap.
I was still trying to convince myself to sit up, when a hand reached past me, grabbed the knife, and held it to my throat. I looked up to find Breeohan hovering menacingly over me.
“Kelteon. Give her back,” he snarled.
“Wait, it’s me. I got myself back.” I winced. Talking hurt.
“How can I believe that it’s really Mary speaking and not Kelteon?” Breeohan asked suspiciously.
“Kelteon controlled my body, but he could never hear my thoughts. He never knew you told me you loved me. But I guess you can’t believe that either, not ever having been stupid enough to let someone enchant you. There is seriously something wrong with a world where someone can take over your body, but there’s no cars, no electricity, and no chocolate!” I thought of the weeks of dirt and pain I’d endured with no chance to fix everything, and now to have Breeohan looking at me full of distrust was the last straw.
Tears leaked from the corner of my eyes and my head pounded with the rhythm of my heartbeat. “The story he told you about being tortured but resisting wasn’t true. I’m such a wimp. I should’ve just burned to death. I almost killed you. It was so close. I’m so sorry, Breeohan. You were right. I’m like a walking curse, bringing pain wherever I go.” I tried to keep from sobbing so that my head wouldn’t explode.
“I didn’t say that. I said you always seemed to get yourself into trouble,” he replied softly, the knife still at my throat.
“Well, you were wrong. What you said was too mild. When I tore that blue ball of fire apart and broke the connection with Kelteon, I got slammed back into my own head with the force of lightning. You can tie me up or whatever you do to magicians—I don’t care anymore. But would you just heal my head, please? I understand if you never trust me again. I wish I could prove that I’m me, but my head hurts too much. Stupid third world . . . world.” My tears ran down my cheeks and dripped onto the hand that held the knife at my throat.
“You pulled apart a blue ball of fire?” he inquired.
“Yes. When I was trying to get my body back, Kelteon hit me with something, so I followed it and ripped it up, which seems to have worked, but I think death would be preferable to talking right now.” I tried to concentrate on something other than the pulsating in my brain and the fact that Breeohan still had a knife against my neck.
“Where is Kelteon now?” he asked.
“I don’t know. He left the tent so he could have some fun with you through me, but—” I jerked in surprise, and the knife nicked my throat. “Breeohan, you’ve got to get the king and training general and my mother out of here. The whole camp has been taken over by Kelteon’s men. I don’t know where Kelteon is right now.”
I hope he has a whopper headache too
, I thought fiercely.
A purple lacing flashed through my mind, and then relief from the hammering pain washed through me like cool water. Another lacing and the cut at my throat vanished. Breeohan slowly withdrew the knife. “I choose to hope that you are telling the truth. If what you say about Kelteon’s mercenaries is true, I’ll need your help.”
We scrambled over to the king, Sogran, and Mom and untied them. They were still unconscious, and I didn’t know what drug was used so I couldn’t figure out a way to heal them.
“What can we do? We can’t drag them through camp.” Breeohan paced through the tent’s murky shadows.
I looked around and was struck with an idea. Reaching up I pulled down several swaths of the silk hangings that hid the tent’s plainness, and performed the chameleon lacing on them, then I draped the cloth over the three sleeping forms on the ground. They vanished completely in the tent’s dim light.
The tent flap folded back, illuminating the dark and catching Breeohan and me in its wide beam. Kelteon staggered in, clutching his head with one hand and pointing feebly at me with the other. Several armed men followed until the tent was crowded. Breeohan and I stood in front of the king, training general, and Mom so they wouldn’t be stepped on accidentally.
“You wretched girl. What did you do to me? What did you do?” Kelteon snarled, his face a satisfying picture of miserable fury.
“My permission has been revoked. I guess I just needed a strong enough motivator to overcome your control.”
“You’ll pay for crossing me,” Kelteon growled. He flicked his finger. An arrow loosed, heading straight for Breeohan’s head. Time seemed to slow as I created a wind to knock the arrow off course.
“No. It’s your turn to pay, Kelteon!” I yelled.
Another arrow was loosed and thrown off course. The soldiers, realizing that arrows would be useless, drew their swords and ran forward to mow Breeohan and me down. In one swift movement, Breeohan unsheathed his sword, blocked the leading man’s sword and turned him into the other soldiers. The man behind the first accidentally skewered his companion, and three others were forced to swerve out of the way.
I used the distraction to grab the training general’s sword that lay near the camouflaged cloth. I brought the heavy weapon up just in time to connect with the metal descending toward my face. The training sets that Sogran had made me repeat over and over moved my muscles without my brain’s conscious thought, but I still barely held out against the much more seasoned soldiers that we faced.
The clash of sword on sword was loud in the tent. I blocked one man, only to find myself almost run through by another. Breeohan and I stood facing apart with the king, training general, and Mom between us. As more soldiers streamed into the tent, I started to worry about stepping on Mom and saw with tired desperation that we were losing. Already I had healed several severe cuts on my arms and legs. Then Breeohan cried out, and I turned to see him crumple to the floor, a man standing over him about to bring his sword down through Breeohan’s middle.
The man I’d been fighting used my distraction to slice my arm, but I hardly felt it. A growl burst from my throat, and I loosed a wind lacing with savage glee.
The tent’s stakes ripped from the ground, and canvas flew straight up so that we all stood in the open. Sand whipped around the soldiers who had forced their way inside as well as those who’d waited without. It thrashed around Kelteon and his men like a live thing but stopped short of the bubble of calm I kept around those I loved.
I focused, lacings flicking and activating through my head in a whirl as I freed each soldier’s head from the sand, then condensed the remaining sand into dense sandstone encasing each of them. Several cried in horror, and some tried to escape, but none had time to do more than take a step before all but their heads were trapped in stone.
The wind died to reveal about twenty blocks of vaguely people-shaped stone with bare heads screaming and shaking atop stone shoulders. Kelteon’s stone was planted in the middle of his men, trapped permanently in his position where the corner of the tent had been. He snarled, and I saw the flicker of a lacing begin to form, but before I could even warn him to stop, it winked out. Kelteon scowled and tried again, only to fail once more.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, Kelteon,” Breeohan panted painfully, “but from what Mary described to me, it sounds as if she tore the very center of your magic to pieces in order to escape you. It might take years for you to recover, if you do at all.” He looked savagely pleased. I was elated to hear him speak at all and stepped to his side but was stopped by more of Kelteon’s mercenaries running into the area, drawn by the sound of the screaming. When they saw the living statues, they halted fearfully.
“Don’t try anything stupid,” I said to them just in case. “I can encase you as easily as I did them.” I pointed to their frozen comrades. “Drop your weapons and surrender.”
“Attack them,” Kelteon screamed. “I order you to kill them.”
The free soldiers looked at each other uncertainly before dropping their bows and swords. I found rope and tied the remaining mercenaries securely while Kelteon yelled futile threats. I hurried toward Breeohan, but he waved me away.
“I’m fine. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t heal it myself,” he said reassuringly.
“You stupid girl. This stone won’t hold me for long. I’ll make you regret what you’ve done to me,” Kelteon snarled.
“It’s not so fun being the helpless one, is it?” I quipped with immense satisfaction as Breeohan and I dragged Verone, Mom, and Sogran away from the encased soldiers.
It took us most of the morning to round up and subdue all the mercenaries who hadn’t already fled. We also healed as many of the king’s conscious soldiers as we could. Untying the drugged soldiers, we lay them out more comfortably.
I freed all but Kelteon from the stone. We took away their weapons and tied them up instead, and I found myself receiving bizarre sobs of gratitude as the stone encasings fell away. The soldiers stopped me from helping with the few burials that were necessary, and I was guiltily relieved that I could avoid looking at the dead.