Page 110 of Renegade Kingdom
“Yes. But they know what they’re doing now.” I looked at the map, at the arrows someone had drawn tracking Arik’s movements. “Scared people with a task are easier to keep together than scared people without one.”
She was quiet for a moment. “He’s coming here, isn’t he? Not waiting for us to go to him.”
“I think so.”
She nodded, once, like she’d already known it and just needed to hear it confirmed. Then she straightened and the composure settled back into place, not a mask, just the shape of her now, strength worn on the outside because there was no longer any reason to hide it.
“Then we’ll be ready,” she said, her gaze moving to the window as she blankly stared outside before her face hardened. “Let him come. It’s fitting that the Spring Court should be the place I end him.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Damon
“Again,” Fizzle said, perched on a low branch with his tail curled around it like a cat who’d decided to supervise the world from above. “And this time, try not to destroy my demonstration.”
I looked at the shattered remnants of what had been a perfectly formed sphere of Autumn magic, now scattered across the training ground in fading gold sparks. Fizzle’s guardian magic was unlike anything the rest of us had, and now he was done pretending to be something he wasn’t, he seemed to find any excuse he could to use it. It couldn’t blame him. It felt good to be freed from your chains, even if they were ones of your own making.
The shadows at my feet rippled with something that might have been sheepishness, if shadows could feel embarrassed.
“I didn’t mean to break it.”
“You didn’t mean to break the last four either.” Fizzle’s small face conveyed an impressive amount of disdain for something that was roughly the size of a rabbit. “And yet they are all equally destroyed.”
This was the rhythm we’d fallen into over the past two days. Fizzle would create something with his magic, a construct, a barrier, a tether of woven energy, even something as simple as a ball of wind and lightning, and instruct me to interact with it using the shadows. Study it. Move around it. Understand its structure.
And then my shadows would tear through it like paper.
“The problem,” Fizzle said, hopping along the branch with irritable little movements that made leaves shower to the ground, “is that I cannot teach you what youare. No one can. This magic has not been wielded by any living creature in this realm other than Nymeria herself, and she was not especially forthcoming about her methods.”
“You knew her.”
“Iservedher. There is a difference.” He fixed me with one bright eye. “She was vast, Damon. A consciousness that stretched across the entire realm. She didn’t use shadow magic the way you use your hands. She used it the way the sky uses clouds. It simply was.”
“That’s not very helpful.”
“No,” he agreed, “it is not. Which is why I am attempting to teach you conventional magical technique and your shadows are refusing to cooperate.”
I sat on the grass and let the shadows settle around me. They moved constantly, flowing across the ground like dark water, responding to my mood. When I was calm they drifted. When I was focused they sharpened. Right now they were somewhere in between, curious and restless, exploring the training ground the way a dog explores a new park. Nosing into corners. Testing surfaces. Reaching toward things that interested them and retreating when nothing held their attention. They acted with an awareness that none of the others had experienced with their different branches of magic.
The wolf watched the shadows with a lazy attentiveness. He was still young, still figuring himself out, but the wariness he’d shown in the first hours after the nightmare’s expulsion had given way to something calmer. He’d accepted the shadows as part of us. Not a threat. A companion. Sometimes I felt him press against my consciousness and the shadows would respond, thickening around my body in a protective layer, and I’d understand that the wolf was trying to build armour out of darkness.
“Let’s try something different,” Fizzle said. He dropped from the branch and landed on the grass with a sound so soft it barely registered. For a creature who spent most of his time complaining, he moved with a grace that reminded you he was old beyond reckoning. “I’m going to create a bond. A magical tether between two objects. And instead of destroying it, I want you to simply touch it. Feel its structure. Tell me what you sense.”
He raised one small paw and a line of golden Autumn magic stretched between two stones on the ground. It hummed faintly, a thin beam of light no thicker than a hair. Simple. Clean.
I reached for the shadows.
They responded before I’d finished forming the thought, flowing up from the ground and extending toward the golden tether in a dark tendril. I tried to hold them back, to slow the approach, to make them gentle. The shadow touched the tether and I felt it. A buzz of information flowing up through the darkness and into my mind. The tether was a connection. Two points linked by a stream of magical energy. The structure was elegant in its simplicity, point A feeding into point B through a channel maintained by Fizzle’s will.
“Good,” Fizzle murmured. “What do you feel?”
“It’s a conduit. Energy flowing from one point to the other. Maintained by your concentration.” I frowned. “And there’s a...signature? Something that marks it as yours. Like a fingerprint in the magic.”
“Yes.” Fizzle’s voice had shifted. Still careful, still measured, but with an undercurrent of something I hadn’t heard before. Anticipation. “That signature is what identifies the caster. Every magical bond carries the mark of its creator, but I’ve never known anyone who can sense it so easily. Now try to follow the signature to its source.”
I let the shadow spread along the tether. It moved like water flowing down a wire, following the channel of golden energy toward Fizzle. I could feel his magic now, the deep ancient core of it, far vaster than his small form suggested. The Autumn Court’s power was old and layered, seasons upon seasons of accumulated magic, and at its centre was Fizzle himself. The guardian. The source.
And then the shadows did something I hadn’t told them to do.
