Chapter Fourteen

When I recovered, I was once again taken by the hand and led from the garden. I could not see the one that led me, but I knew that her appearance didn’t matter. The little girl had been an illusion just as the moths were an illusion, and the flowers. Faeries didn’t have physical bodies; the shapes they assume were for the benefit of humans. We see what we expect and want to see. Their true selves are harder to pin down.

But the sorcerers had pinned them.

The garden was silent and still as I returned to the iron gates. The wild conflagration of colors was no longer raging. The fires had all been snuffed. I could almost hear the faerie song, the music without word or sound. They would be mourning until the end of time.

The gates opened at my touch, not even needing to prick my finger again. The barriers that trapped the faeries had no effect on me. Even though I knew nothing about sorcery, it was in my blood, and to magic it was the blood that counted.

I crossed the red moss corridor without seeing it and flung open the white on white door at the end of the passage. It brought me back to the landing and the stairwell without any trouble. I didn’t have it left in me to be afraid of where the door might lead. I think it responded to that daring even more willingly than it had to my earlier concentration.

Dad, I thought, is this why you pushed them away? Is this why you pretended magic didn’t exist, because what the sorcerers did was so horrible--murder and worse than murder. The faeries may not have the shape of a person, but they have souls. They are souls. You could not treat them like animals or worse than animals and still be good. Timothy, how could you do this?

I was torn from my thoughts by a scream. Coming from outside, but so loud it could have been beside me, I covered my ears. It had sounded like a woman, or ten women, terror distorting their voices beyond humanity.

When it ended, I ran. Was someone here? Had the golems caught someone? Were they doing to her what one had tried to do to me? If they were, I wouldn’t have any chance of stopping them, but I had to see. I had to try.

Bursting out of the house in a rush, not noticing how I had reached the front door without having to cross the usual intervening rooms, I stopped dead in my tracks.

It was the golems, all eight of them, but it was Timothy and Milton too. They were all working together in some awful ritual, surrounding a creature I had never imagined.

Black as the jungle night, it was like a panther but its coat was spattered with white points like fabric cut from a starry sky. Its eyes were molten jade, and it was crying. The feline face was streaked with fiery green tears. The scream I had heard, the whole host of screams, had issued from its gaping, fanged jaws.

Whatever I had thought, it was not this.

Heavy chains wrapped its heaving chest, and manacles bound its paws as they dug into the clay. All eight golems struggled against it, holding the ends of steel links coiled around their arms and waists. The whole of their combined strength was bent toward matching this one creature, succeeding by a hair.

Milton stood with his back to me, facing the creature and commanding the golems in what I recognized as one of the lesser magic languages. Timothy was absorbed in a different work; he appeared to be tracing symbols in the soil.

Only the panther noticed me, jade cauldrons flaring.

“Come,” she said. “Come.” It was a woman’s voice, a sultry contralto that evidenced none of the effort I could plainly see in the cording of its muscles.

Helpless, horrified, my body answered the call. Milton turned, fury contorting his face when he saw me walking jerkily toward the combat.

“Get her out!” he bellowed, and Timothy leapt from his task. Beside me in a blink, he lifted me off my feet without a word and barreled into the house as if I weighed no more than a thought. An electric glow enveloped me within his arms, radiating from him, and lightning danced in the blue glaze of his eyes. They were drawing me upward, endlessly deeper into the sky, but then I was set down, deposited on a stool in the kitchen as the strange avatar Timothy had become stepped away.

“Stay” he commanded and was gone.

For a while I sat very still, stunned. There no more screams. When I heard footsteps approaching, I did not move. Timothy, looking almost like a regular person again, squeezed my shoulder on the way to the fridge.

He poured the last of the Soma and set it in front of me. I knocked it away, not even thinking about what I was doing, and the dreadfully costly liquid fanned out over the dark glass of the table. Timothy appeared genuinely at a loss.

“I’m sorry,” I recovered, putting my hands in my lap. “It’s just out there, I was so frightened…”

“It’s fine,” he said genially. He slid his right hand over the table, herding the Soma, and it sloshed obediently into the glass, which promptly righted itself. “What is done can be undone, if magic wills it so.” He was smiling.

Not some things. Some things you can’t take back.

He pushed the glass toward me, but my hands remained in my lap. There was a tension building between us, and he obviously didn’t understand it. For him, nothing had changed.

“I am sorry you had to see that. There is no need for you to apologize. We underestimated how strong the Pard is, and it came awake before we had it properly sealed.”

“A Pard? Is that what that is?”

“Yes.” He seemed to take my question as a good sign. “A predator that is nearly extinct. We were lucky to find this one.”

“You said you were going for supplies.” My voice was flat.

“Listen, Abigail. Cows are kept for their milk and their meat.” He paused. “Animals are hunted for what they can give us. The only difference here is that when a sorcerer hunts he is not looking for meat or sport. He hunts for energy.”

“That isn’t an animal.”

“What?” He honestly looked confused.

“She spoke to me. Animals aren’t intelligent. That’s what makes them animals. They can’t speak.”

He frowned. “A Pard is not a person, Abigail. It is a very advanced sort of predator. It mimics human voices to disturb its prey, but it doesn’t really know what it is saying. It has magic, and that makes it seem to be more than it is, but it only seems.”

He was so earnest. I would have believed him, once.

“So you’re going to slaughter it for its magic? You’re going to turn it into Soma? Is that the ingredient you needed?”

“No.” He frowned, looking at the glass. “Is that what this was about?” He fixed me with that hurt stare he was so good at faking. “Soma is not like that. It is not like drinking blood.”

Worse than blood, I thought.

“This was necessary. It has to do with things you haven’t learned yet, but you will understand it all before long. The Pard is the best we could hope to find, plenty of power, and the world is better without them. They can acquire a taste for humans. They are dangerous, you will see.”

My mind raced. Did you really expect me to join you, to become one of you, when I found out about the Fae? Or did you never expect me to be a sorcerer at all? Are you just keeping me until I’m ripe, to be used like they are?

Looking at Timothy, I couldn’t believe that. I could see he felt something for me, even if Milton didn’t. But to him, the Fae weren’t people, they were plants. No one cries over apple juice. Why cry over Soma?

“All right,” I said. “It was just…the shock.” I don’t want to hate you, but how can you be this way?

“I understand,” he said solemnly, placating. “The magical world is not an easy or a simple place. It takes some getting used to.”

“You must have left early. I didn’t think you’d be back so quickly.” I wanted to shift the conversation so I didn’t sound so suspicious, but this was the wrong direction.

He gave me a quizzical look. “It wasn’t a long hunt, but we were gone all of yesterday.”

What? It was midmorning outside, just the time it should have been after visiting the Fae. But it was always day in the wizard’s garden. How long had they shared their minds with me? Had it been twenty- four hours?

Timothy stared at me, not understanding.

“That’s what I meant,” I said. “I thought it would take more than a day.” It was a slip, but how could I have guessed? I could tell he was considering what I had said, analyzing it behind his expression of confusion. The faeries didn’t have a concrete grasp on time; they wouldn’t have known to warn me. Could he realize what I knew?

“I’m just muddled,” I said, my heart chilling. What would he think of me once he knew I planned to betray him? Would I be a person in his mind, or would I become an object, another source of power. “I don’t think I want to study today.”

He nodded, pensive now. “That’s fine. Milton and I have more work to do, dealing with the Pard. I only came back in to see that you were all right.”

He stood, his gaze running over me as palpably as questioning fingers. “If you need anything, please call for me.” I nodded numbly, and he squeezed my shoulder again as he left the kitchen.

When it was perfectly clear that he was gone and would not be returning, I poured the Soma down the sink.

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