“George,” said Freyah. “Do a good job. These are likely to be our last guests.” She sat back with a sigh and looked about the ruins of her comfortable abode, her own bit of a haven. George sidled up between Bailey and Jason, its tray filled with a steaming pot of hot chocolate and two big empty mugs waiting to be filled and a small bowl of marshmallows. The hamper, pouting a bit, bumped Jason's knee as it popped its lid, releasing delicious smells of freshly baked muffins.
He did as expected, dishing out the muffins to everyone while Bailey poured the hot chocolate. Freyah had a steaming cup of café au lait by her chair, which she'd evidently been drinking before they'd arrived. Time sometimes got muddled that way in Freyah's home. As politely as he could, he bolted the blueberry muffin down to its last crumb before starting on business. Bailey was at least half a muffin behind him, even with Lacey's help, when he said, “Aunt Freyah, you can't stay here. It's why we came. I thought something might be wrong.”
A ceiling tile hanging by one corner crashed down at his feet, covering his boots in dust and debris. Jason looked down at it and cleared his throat.
“Whatever makes you say that, dear?” asked Aunt Freyah.
Bailey finished her muffin, folding the paper cup it had come in, and dusting the last crumbs onto her knee for Lacey. “We really want you to come to the academy. It's dangerous here for you and George and everybody.”
Freyah gave her a piercing but not unkind look. “I am touched that you both have come. But I can't leave. This is, or was, my life. As you two are keenly aware, I've been at odds for many years with Gavan about finding and educating you younger Magickers. It's left me out here, alone and isolated. It's only fair that I'm hoist with my own petard, isn't it?”
Bailey's mouth opened and she looked sideways at Jason. “She means,” he interpreted, “she's suffering the consequences of her action.”
“Aha. And people think
I
talk funny.”
Freyah laughed, and waved a hand at the two of them, but her smile faded, and she looked as if she were almost in tears. “I can't come with you. I'd ask you how you knew I was in trouble, Jason, dear boy, but since you are responsible, we both know howâ”
“Me? Responsible? I couldn't have done this!”
“It's all right. I don't blame you. It's all in the training.” Freyah sat up straighter, holding her coffee cup and saucer on her knee. George tiptoed back to her side as if worried. “You've done very well, all things considering.”
“I would never, could never . . .” He stopped in mid sentence, thinking of how his Dragon Gate had brought disaster to Haven. “Not on purpose, anyway,” he finished lamely.
“You really don't know, do you?” Freyah tilted her plump face at him curiously.
“Not really.”
“When you manipulate great energies, Jason, there can be great backlashes. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.”
“Elementary physics,” put in Bailey.
“Exactly.” Freyah pointed her chin at Jason. “This . . .” and she glanced around at the wreckage of her cottage, “began about a day and a half ago, by my reckoning.”
He drew in his breath sharply. The attack on the convoy and Jonnard's actions! “That wasn't me, but that was Magick. Jonnard did something, we're still not sure what. It was like a bomb blast.”
She looked sharply at him. “No other effects?”
“One we're investigating. Like an abyss or something that opened, we don't know if it's related yet or not, but it feels like it.”
Freyah shuddered. She dropped her coffee cup onto George, his tray ringing as he caught it. “So it begins.” She stood. “You absolutely can't stay, then, children. Not for another moment. There won't be but a smidgen left of this place soon, and I . . . have things to do.”
“You're coming with us. You and George and the hamper and anything else we can carry!” Bailey leaped to her feet.
Freyah shook her head. “No, dear. It's too late for that.”
“We've lots of room. There is no way the academy couldn't use you for a teacher, and if you disagree with Gavan, so much the better. We're all different, and we need a lot of different teachers,” Jason told her.
“It's not just that.” She hesitated. “If you didn't cause this power surge, then how did you wonder about me?”
“This.” Jason lifted his lavender crystal.
Freyah's mouth lighted into a sad curve, for she knew her brother's magical gemstone well. “I see.”
“It's not just etched with his likeness. Sometimes I get feelings from it.”
“It sent you this way?”
“It made me think I should see you, yes.”
Freyah let her breath out, then shook her head. “What's done is done.”
The far wall of the cottage began to creak and groan. It leaned away from them all, slowly, and then began to topple as if some great weight pushed it over, and it crashed to the garden grounds. They all stood in amazement for a moment. Only one exterior wall and the door remained at the front. Jason had never seen anything like it outside of his stepfather's construction business. He had seen something remotely similar with a great demolition down to one last wall which would be kept so that, technically, the new building could be called a “remodel.” McIntire didn't like bending rules like that, but he'd done it that time because the remaining wall had a hand-painted mural on it that was irreplaceable by any means, and worth saving. The wall then had been propped up to keep it in place. There was no way a few timbers could prop up what was left of Freyah's cottage.
He picked up George under one arm, and the hamper under the other. “Freyah,” he said firmly, in his deep-sounding new voice. “You are coming with us. There's no time to take no for an answer.”
Freyah raised her hand, ring sparkling, her chin up. “Jason. Put my things down, and step away, or I will send you away, and with as much power as I have left, I am not exactly sure where you'll end up.”
“Aunt Freyah!” Bailey took a step toward her, hands outstretched to block any crystal beam, and Lacey took off squeaking, across the floor, through the rubble and down the hall, headed toward Freyah's wine cellar. “Not again!” Bailey twisted about.
“Leave her.” Jason stood rooted in place, determination running through every fiber of his being. The last remaining wall groaned and shivered a bit. “Please come with us.”
“I can't.” Freyah's voice dropped to a strained whisper, and she swayed as well, as if time and strength were a wind that moved her body, at last.
“What is it?”
Bailey let out a yip. “It's not a what. . . it's a who! Jason!” She grabbed at his hands, enveloping the lavender crystal. “Isn't it, Aunt Freyah? Tell him!”
The elder Magicker swayed again, and her shoulders drooped. “I'm so tired.” She fell into her chair and gestured weakly.
“Come with me!” Bailey tugged on Jason. “Drop that.”
He set George and the hamper down carefully, and shot a glance at Freyah. “Don't move.”
“As if I could.”
“Well, if something is going to fall on you, move then, but wait for us!”
Freyah nodded slowly.
Bailey shot through the dusty inner hallway, after the little rodent hopping and making running tracks in the plaster dust. She pointed. “There . . . the wine cellar stairs.”
“And . . .”
“Look for yourself. You'll never believe me. I saw it last time she ran away, but it didn't hit home. And then I kind of forgot about it, although I imagine Freyah made me forget, I don't know. But go down and look. That's why Freyah won't leave.”
Carefully, Jason moved down the old, worn wooden stairs. It would have been rather dark, but with most of the ground floor above it disintegrating, light from the crystal sconces above found its way through in streaks and rays. There, in the corner behind a nearly empty wine rack, was a long, long heavy wooden table and on top of it, a sarcophagus. A crystal window revealed the face of the occupant, and Jason came to a halt, wordless.
He looked at Gregory the Gray.
Footsteps paused behind him. “When Lacey finds a treasure, she finds a treasure,” Bailey commented.
“I don't think he's dead,” whispered Jason.
She shook her head. “If he were, I don't think Freyah would insist on staying. She means to move him somewhere safe.”
“He can't be awakened. He's told me that. I don't know why, but he can't be. Not yet.” He looked around the wine cellar and thought of the cottage and its gardens, the pocket of safety Freyah had spent an entire lifetime guarding. He took Bailey by the elbow and guided her back upstairs. She paused long enough to sweep up Lacey who had found something in a corner and stuffed it in her cheek pouch, instead of eluding capture.
Freyah had her face in her hands as they approached. She looked up.
“So,” Jason said cheerfully. “We'll have more to move than I thought we would.” He glanced at the hamper. “How much can you pack in that?”
“Almost everything important.”
“And I can get the sleeper downstairs, and between the three of us, we should be able to Crystal out of here easily.”
“I'd be bringing Gavan a world of trouble.” Freyah stood and dusted herself off. A window frame off the front wall had gone while they were in the cellar, its paint flakes falling like snow.
“As if he doesn't already have one!” Bailey scoffed. “Besides. We need you, Aunt Freyah.”
“You need me.”
“You bet we do,” Jason reinforced Bailey's statement. “We always have.”
“Well, then. George and I never refuse a challenge.” She fluffed out her hair. “Quickly, then! Pack up the essentials.” She tapped George and the hamper. “You know who to gather. I'll get a satchel for my clothes. You two. Finish the muffins.”
The hamper spit out a plate of muffins which Jason leaped for and caught in midair, George's job usually, but the tray was scampering off to the corners of the ruined cottage, doing Freyah's bidding.
Before the two of them had finished their cherry crisp muffins, everyone had come back. The hamper waddled laboriously as if weighed down, and George's surface was stacked with books and picture frames. His legs bowed under the burden.
“All right. You two be ready. I'll be downstairs with Gregory. On the count of twenty, we're headed for the academy kitchen. Right?” He stared at Bailey.
“Absolutely.”
As Jason made his way down the creaking wine cellar stairs a second time, he could hear Bailey saying, “Now the main thing you have to do is convince my mom it's okay to have a casket with an almost-dead-looking man in it lying around. Other than that, it'll be a piece of cake.”
It struck him as funny and he was still laughing when they landed in the academy.
37
Isabella's Fury
T
HE SHRILL SCREAM echoed throughout the fortress, beating at his eardrums. Jonnard took the dungeon stairs at breakneck pace, letting gravity give him speed that his tired, aching body could not. Every fiber of his being screamed in echo as he skidded to a halt, the dungeon doors thrown open, framing Isabella by torchlight.
She swung on him, her hand clawing the air. “The Leucators! My Leucators, gone, all gone. What have you done?”
Jonnard stared into the filthy, stinking depths of the cavern. Not a being could be seen, although the debris of their presence littered the area. Scraps of bone and food here and there, dirty strands of clothing. But the Leucators had vanished, their chains and shackles with them, and he shut his jaw quickly lest his mother see his own surprise.
He leaned a shoulder against the wall. “Well, of course. Did you expect anything different?”
“You fool. You idiot. Do you have any idea what you've condemned me to?”
“Mother.” He kept his voice mild, even as hers strained higher and higher in rage and despair, while his thoughts raced ahead for an answer. He thought he found one. “I've condemned you to nothing. I showed you the Gate, did you not see?”
“I saw a miasma of Chaos.” Isabella turned her head then, away from him, away from the stink of the dungeon. Her shoulders slumped. Her voice lowered to a hoarse whisper. “Oh, Jonnard. What have you done?”
“Nothing.” He reached out and took her hand. “Nothing but good in the long run. Come upstairs, and sit.”
She shook her head.
“You must,” he said firmly. “Listen to me. You formed the Leucators out of the Chaos of a would-be Gate. It is a Gate my father almost dared open, but could never quite finish, but he taught you how to manipulate its energies and create the soul hunters we call Leucators. Now the Gate is opened, and the Leucators have returned to their elements. You can still draw on them. Even better,” and he stroked her hand in his as he began to lead her upstairs, although she shrank back from him a little. “Even better, you can draw on the stuff of the Gate itself. This place has been draining us, slowly, and now we're invincible.”
She stared up at him, the torches on the stone walls reflecting her face in harsh, strong planes. “You don't know what you dare.”
“No, I don't. Not yet.” He spoke not another word till he had her in her apartments, where the walls had been soundproofed, and no one could hear their voices. He sat her down at her desk, her place of power.
She seemed to regain her composure in the brightly lit room, its paneled walls and furniture a world away from the dungeon. “The Leucators are no longer bound, and we're all in danger here.”