The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil (51 page)

Charles’s head was starting to hurt. “So don’t send things into the Void.”

“Only if you pull them back out again and if you keep track of where you put it. But this is very advanced magic, Charles. Do not try it yet, for it is more difficult than you think.”

He nodded, but he thought it was much easier than she made it out to be. He could see it in his mind, and he realized, in fact, that he had done it when he had taken Madeline and Jonathan there from the lake. He had thought it was all the guides, but then he remembered the black and his hand. He felt dizzy.
I did that. Not the guides. They carried me, but I did it…

He realized Madeline was watching him. Charles stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared hard at the rock. He just had to move it. He just had to move it from this place to that place. He just had to move it, to move it, to move—

He blinked, then smiled, then laughed. “I did it!” he cried, unable to believe it, and yet the rock that had been in the center of the room was now, as if it had always been there, on the other side of the room. “I did it!” he cried again and turned to Madeline. But she was staring at him strangely, and he faltered. “What have I done?”

“You didn’t even cast,” she whispered. “It should have floated, but… How?”

Charles paused. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. Apologetically. He looked at the rock again, trying to remember.

“You shifted it into the Void,” she said.

Charles blanched. She’d told him
not
to do that. “I’m sorry, I—”

She shook her head and held up a hand. She looked both wary and impressed. “You sent it into the Void and then out again.” Madeline exhaled a long breath. “With no guide, no cast, and no anchor. You are a wonder, Charles.” She ran a hand through her hair and surveyed the room. “But you must stop failing to ground. It will be your death, especially if you are flirting with the Void.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, feeling stupid.

“Don’t be sorry. But listen.” She reached for his hands, taking them both in hers. “When you cast a spell, you must think always both of your body and your mind. Your body is your house, the temple that keeps you safe. Your mind is the power, but it is dust in the Void without your body, no matter how concentrated it is. That is why everything wants to come out of the Void. That is why there are so many layers between it and us. We are only real when we are in our bodies. And yet our bodies limit us. We are great in the Void, but real in our bodies. Remember your body. Always remember your body.”

Charles felt very lost. He had no idea what she was talking about, and he was starting to panic. Then he remembered being in the Void with the guides.
“He grounds to earth,”
they had said.

“I want you to try to cast,” Madeline said. “I want you to ground yourself and try to send your mind onto the Plane. Do
not
go to the Void. One step beyond your body and no more. Reach for the guides. If they came to you in the Void, they will come to you now.”

“He grounds to earth.”

He tried to imagine the gray shapes, then remembered they were white, but his mind kept remembering the feel of that deep, cold earth in his hands as he had flown through the Void.

“He grounds to earth. He is a good Lord.”

Charles took a deep breath, reached deep into the soil, and stepped forward into his mind.

It was beautiful. It was soft and sparkling, like a rainbow over falling water. He saw the room, the rock—he even saw the tendrils of magic around it, showing he had moved it. He saw the birds that had flown over here, the ones that had nested, and the ones that had died. He saw the rats and wild animals that roamed the rocks, looking for food. He took another step, and he saw light, so much light.

He saw the people from his dreams, the pale people who died so many times, but in this place in his mind, they were whole, and they were dancing and laughing—oh, how they were laughing.

“
Charles. You have stepped too far
.”

He turned to Madeline, still holding to the earth, and he gasped when he saw her. She shimmered like stars, but there was something wrong with her. Her edges were pointy and jagged. He could see her forcing herself to stay stable. It hurt her to step out to the place where he was, but she was trying to save him. But she stood there like a thousand shards of broken glass forcing themselves to stay together.

“You are not grounded,” he said.

“I cannot,” she said. “The guides will not come to me.”

“But I’m not grounding to a guide,” he told her.

She frowned at him and started to speak, but then she started to shimmer too hard. She was breaking up.

Before he could even think, he reached for her.

“Ground with me,” he said. “Ground to the earth. You do not need a guide.”

He watched Madeline shimmer, falter, then slowly come into focus. Charles took one step back, then another, and the visions faded. He was simply standing in the ruined solar, holding tight to Madeline’s hand.

She was staring at him openmouthed.
I’m sorry
, he started to say, feeling self-conscious, but he didn’t. He just waited.

She shook her head. “I cannot teach you. And you are more than an Apprentice.”

“I’m barely a novice, Madeline. I need your help.” He tightened his grip on her hand. “I need my sister.”

She said nothing for a moment. Then, with a strange look on her face, she leaned forward and kissed him near his ear, lingering with her cheek against the side of his face. Then she withdrew, reclaimed her hands, and smoothed them over her dress.

“Let us try again,” she said.

And they did.

* * *

Jonathan felt like a coiled spring.

He tried to tell himself that Madeline would not be harmed by working with Charles. He tried to reassure himself that she would monitor herself and not go too far, that she was intelligent and competent and much more informed about these matters than he was. He tried to remember this, but he remembered too how she had thrown herself over him during the spell and how she had reached down so hard to ground that she hurt herself to cast the dome.

With nothing else to do, he wandered the abbey, desperately looking for some way to unleash himself. When he spied Timothy in the shadows of the foyer, pacing like a caged tiger in front of the main windows, the Catalian glanced at him, and in that brief look Jonathan saw a mirror of his own frustration. And he knew in that same instant what he needed. What they both needed.

Timothy grinned. He knew too.

They said nothing, only moved as one down the halls together to the courtyard.

Once there, they stripped down, Jonathan to his shirtwaist, Timothy to his bare chest. There was no verbal sparring this time, and they were both bouncing on their feet as they picked up their foils.

Jonathan watched Timothy twitching, then seized an inspiration. “Moria’s circle,” he said and trailed the tip of his foil in echo of the shape. “What do you think?”

Timothy flexed his shoulders, nodding. “Perfect. You in the center first.”

Jonathan stepped forward, whipping his foil about in a way that would have made his Catalian fencing master roll her eyes, but which felt satisfyingly juvenile. He had to get rid of this rage somehow, or Timothy was going to best him without even trying.

But when Timothy came to face him in the First Form, Jonathan found his partner to be fighting his emotions as much as he was. They struggled together through the formal moves of the exercise, contracting and expanding the circle in the way that was supposed to relieve their tensions and focus their self-discipline, a method that had kept them sane through the darkest parts of the war but was now not doing anything at all except frustrating them further. Still, they pressed through the Twelve Forms, making it all the way to the ninth before they fumbled.

Timothy swore, and Jonathan did too. “Fuck this.” He grinned a dark, bleak grin and raised his foil above his head like a saber. “How about an old-fashioned brawl?”

Timothy’s answer was the flash of his teeth before he launched himself pub-style at Jonathan’s middle.

Jonathan brought down the foil and smacked the hilt against the side of Timothy’s head—or tried to. Timothy raised his own foil at the last second and beat him back, cursing at him in Catalian as he swung his foil around and made for a sloppy, dirty lunge, which very nearly caught Jonathan in the groin. He parried but spun away instead of recovering, leaping onto a pile of rubble to escape a new attack while he caught his breath and regrouped. Then he leaped and lunged at once, clipping Timothy against the ear before taking a sharp hit against his shoulder.

They knocked each other around the courtyard, shouting and crowing and grunting as they beat and poked and shoved each other in a combination of classic moves and go-for-the-throat barroom fighting and some maneuvers they made up on the spot. They shouted with every thrust, even if there was no hit, but whenever they did hit, they almost groaned, it was such a release. They fought like demons, bruising each other, battering each other, scuffling in a way that only friends could, because only friends would know how to hurt one another so exquisitely.

Timothy tired first, blocking too late, failing to counter; Jonathan tried to give him quarter, not wanting the game to end, but when Timothy began to flag with intensity, he ended it, knocking the Catalian into the dirt and leaping on him, pinning him to the ground as he held the edge of the foil against his neck. But before he could shout “yield,” Jonathan caught Timothy’s eyes, and he said nothing then, only remained frozen with the blade at his neck, breathing hard and fast, waiting.

“I hate that I cannot help him,” Timothy whispered.

Jonathan’s shoulders sagged. He lowered his foil and nodded.

“I want to tear the fog apart.” Timothy clutched at the ground beneath him, digging his fingers into it. “I want to kick that demon in the teeth. I thought I was so strong. I survived so much, but this—” He shut his eyes and let go a shuddering breath. “I hate this country.”

“It’s beyond Etsey now,” Jonathan said, but his voice was gruff. “I think this darkness would follow us wherever we went. The only way to be rid of it is to finish it.”

“I swear I would if I knew how.” Timothy tightened his hand into a fist and pushed it tight against the ground. “I would do anything.
Anything
.”

Jonathan crouched beside him and took his friend’s hand from the dirt, closing it tightly in his own. “We have swallowed darkness many times, mira.” He squeezed the hand in his tighter. “We will find the way through this together. As we have always done.”

Timothy swallowed hard, his emotion moving in a great visible lump down his throat. With shining eyes, he reached up with his other hand, using Jonathan and his abdominal muscles to keep himself above the ground, his strength reverberating through Jonathan as Timothy reached up, put his hand against the back of Jonathan’s head, and pulled him forward for a swift, hard kiss. Then, in a cheeky afterthought, he kissed him again, openmouthed and bold, drawing sharply on Jonathan’s lip before he let him go.

“
Teos
, Jonathan,” he whispered.

Jonathan closed his eyes and kissed him back, a hard, lingering press against Timothy’s forehead. Then he laughed. Timothy laughed too, then beat him once against the chest before he let go and rolled away to rise.

Jonathan rose too, reaching for his foil. He backed away and raised the foil before him, curling his other hand back behind his head.

“On your guard,” he said, and they began again.

* * *

As Madeline and Charles practiced magic and Timothy and Jonathan dueled, Emily did the only thing she could think of to keep herself from dissolving into hysterics: she cooked and she cleaned.

She washed the teacups in a basin in the study, set a stew over the hob Timothy had helped her fashion beside the hearth, and then she tidied the room, blushing a little as she found scraps of her clothing and Stephen’s and the much-emptied bottle of oil. But she kept cleaning, and when she finished in the study, she went to the master bedroom and made the bed, picked up stray clothes, and even dusted the mantel. When she opened Jonathan’s trunk and saw what was inside, she let out a small, “Hmph!” and continued on to the turret.

Timothy had already done his own straightening up here, but she gave the room a once-over all the same. When she finished, she went back down to the study to check on her stew, but her mind was already racing ahead, gathering more activities to do. If she stopped, she might remember. She would think of the kitchen at the cottage, of all her things turned to ash. She would think of her garden and her lavender and Nancy, whom she wanted to believe had gotten away, but her heart told her that no one had bothered to think of the cranky mule in the barn. But Emily did, and her eyes filled with tears and her heart grew heavy at the thought of how she must have died.

Keep busy. Keep busy, do not think of it, and you will be fine.

When she returned to the study, Stephen was there.

He was standing in the middle of the room as if he had been waiting for her, his hands in his pockets. “With the way the morning began, we did not get a chance to talk.”

Emily’s heart lurched, and she used the momentum it gave her to launch herself at the hearth. “There’s too much to do.”

He followed her but did not touch her. “Emily.”

Emily swallowed hard and shut her eyes.
He will tell me it was a mistake, that it was the heat of the moment. He will tell me not to make too much of it
. The thought made her want to sob and laugh at once. She had begun her seduction that way. She had intended it to be just what Timothy suggested, a healing, a lightening of their hearts. And it had been that, at first. It had been fun, watching Stephen blush, making his eyes go dark with passion, hearing him hiss as she spread the oil across his skin, feeling the rush as he clutched her and dragged her higher to take her breast in his mouth. It had been everything she had wanted.