Swift Magic (The Swift Codex Book 2) (5 page)

“Stay quiet and still and I'll let you go,” said the man who held me.

Even with my heart thudding and flashes of hot and cold zipping through my veins, I could think enough to recognize Lyall's voice. He didn't seem to have a blade pressed against me and I didn't feel the threat of a spell pressing against my skin. There was a low key of concern in his voice, though, a warning of danger.

Silent, I nodded.

Lyall released me, his hands not far at first, then they left me completely when he was reassured that I wasn't going to scream or bolt. In the darkness, I saw that he had a swollen eye and at his temple was a trickle of slow-seeping blood.

“I'm looking for my companion,” I said.

He frowned, then said, “You'll find them. Not now, though. There are more important matters now.”

A thought struck me.

“Did the Blackwings come through with us?” I asked, speaking softly the way he had done.

Lyall's eyes brightened and dimmed with the waving of a branch overshadowing and revealing his face, so it was hard to read his expression. He pointed to the clearing and said, “A few, yes. We have tended to the intruders as needed, but there was one who kept himself occupied while we were distracted.”

Before us was a clearing, a meadow which smelled faintly of stagnant water and was dotted with blue larkspur and yellow toadflax. Not far from us there was a man in a black hood, bearing a knife.

“Think he's fey?” I asked, but Lyall didn't reply. I thought I knew the reason.

That reason was, it was impossible to tell. He might have been a hair tall, average frame, no distinct deformities in his hands or legs. In the right clothes he could blend into any crowd anywhere—the difference was in the way he felt. Like an intruder. But what was he doing here?

Lyall advanced, glancing about the clearing. I followed. Off to the other side, I caught a glimpse of Lyall's female companion, but then she was gone. One day, I aspired to move like this pair, a flicker of sight then disappearance, like the bob of seaweed in a muddy lake. Here one instant, gone the next, only to appear again in another place.

A crow cawed, startling me, his black wings shining as he flew through the air. He landed in the tree above the man and ruffled his feathers, staring down at the hooded figure below. A threat or a challenge? The crow's appearance warmed me from the inside, not a good sort of heat, the sort which turned into claws and wound themselves around intestines in sickened anticipation.

The man dragged his knife across the bark of the tree then stepped back and looked up at the bird. I knew what was going to happen, and the bird knew it, too, but he was in the line of duty. Lyall pressed his finger to his lips, telling me that we were not to interfere. Not just yet.

As the man lifted his hand there was a shout which seemed to come from a hundred voices from all sides. The crow cried out, he fell backwards, and the bushes rustled as he fell through them. Leaves shuffled with tiny convulsions.

Then all was quiet.

The man who had killed the bird reached for his knife again. I watched, wordless, as the man sized up the tree. As his knife scraped shallowly across the thick bark, I wondered what he was making. The symbol was a faint trace, standing out enough for me to see it, yet I did not recognize it. The man changed his grip, and when he dug into the tree next the bark fell away and exposed the pale wood beneath.

With a hushed voice, I asked Lyall, “Do you know what he's doing?”

Squinting, Lyall tried to make out the symbol. From his expression, the answer was
no,
he didn't know
. Before he said anything, I realized that we weren't anonymous any longer—the hooded man had seen me. The expected chill did not fall over my skin, just a zing that stiffened my spine and made me stand upright. Lyall stayed crouched in his hiding place, and I was careful to not look at him and draw attention towards him. The wind stirred the grasses at the edge of the clearing, bringing up puffs of pollen which looked like glistening clouds whisking this way and that in the empty air between us.

Gradually the man lowered his knife.

A dreaded unease turned my stomach over. We said nothing to each other. Though I was new to the woods and a stranger myself, I was fey—and I knew now this person was not. Whatever he was doing, the Wildwoods didn't like it. He was a criminal and I was a voyeur, and this was that pause which would determine if I would become a fellow criminal or a victim. We both knew it.

My heart started to race.

“What are you doing?” The sound was from my own throat, but I didn't feel connected to the question.

He held his knife as though he wasn't sure if he wanted to sheath it or turn it on me. In the end he just traced his thumb over the handle, contemplating my question. “Would you like to see?”

To refuse would be to shatter this game we were playing, to break the pretense that he was innocent and I was a passer-by. We both knew the gilding would rub off soon, but to do so now would be to not allow a chance for the alchemy between us to change lead into gold. Slowly, I felt my feet lift and cross over ground, leaving waving heads of tall grasses to close behind my hips. Mud sucked at my feet as I went from one clump of sod to the next, until at long last I stood before him.

His was a face often seen and soon forgotten, an indistinct mesh of features which would look perfectly normal everywhere. His hair was darkish, but that was all the moonlight allowed me to see. As he invited me nearer to his work, I wobbled. He reached for me. I grasped his arm and balanced, then our eyes met and we realized what we were doing.

It made no sense.

None of it made sense.

But instead of questioning it, I stood tall and faced the tree the way a critic faces streaks of paint on a canvas. That the slices were surgically precise was not lost on me, but to admire the pattern would be to admire lashes drawn across skin.

The meadow was perfectly still, no wind wove through branches, not a thing issued a single sound, yet I could scarcely draw a breath as though I were drowning within the quiescence. I closed the gap between me and the tree, let tentative fingers stroke down the rough bark and dip into the smooth crease where the cut had exposed her pale flesh. Behind me, he took in a breath and held it, waiting. My nail scraped a droplet of sticky sap. Who was
she
? I'd thought at first it was the tree, but that wasn't right. The tree was a thing connected to her. The more I tried to understand, the less I succeeded.

Awareness of the man behind me, of his magic and of this spell, of the hearing and Gregor Cole's death, collided with this moment. All at once it all became a tangle of phrases and symbols crisscrossed and knotted so that to pick up one thing was to grab them all. I shut my eyes and pushed the mess out of my mind.

I was posed in front of the tree, my fingers were numb and my right hand had seized into a painful fist. My feet were caked in mud and a stick scraped my ankle. Behind me a dangerous man was awaiting my response, waiting to see what I'd do when I realized he was unleashing another Unwritten into the world. Another spell so wrong it upset the very existence of being alive.

The ground seemed to pass beneath me. My eyes locked on the knife in his hand, suddenly not so far from me. Old instincts kicked in, the ones from facing a beast with nothing to use against him. The man just looked at me and angled his head to the side.

“Be gone from here,” I said.

The man said nothing, just wiped the bark chips and tree sap off his cuff, and slid his knife back into the sheath. I wondered how I'd ever gotten into this spot. Life resting on the mood of a forest. The man standing before me, out to achieve his own mysterious ends. I froze in place as long as I could—then it all happened at once.

Everything had stopped in the woods and animals were standing at the edge of their perches to see. There wasn't a sound. The man's cloak whipped in the breeze, thrashing loud in the silence, and a spell appeared in his hand.

A death spell.

Frantically I reached for my magic and found it all around. I organized it, just as the man took a step forward and extended a finger at me. I yanked my magic to the side, striking him across the side with all the force I could muster.

He buckled under the force, his spell still in hand.

A root tripped him. He landed on the sharp branch of a weather-worn log.

The spell went awry.

Something struck me a glancing blow, casting me against the trunk of the tree.

The man cried out in pain, the branch impaling him like a stake, a burst of crimson splattering the white as bone log beneath him. The forest echoed his scream, a softer cry which tore into my very chest and made me stagger.

I heard something move at the far end of the clearing. I squinted through tears, but the man did not even bother to look up. Hand against the tree, I narrowed my eyes against the unsteady shimmer of tears in the starlight.

I bit my lip. The Unwritten couldn't have possibly been activated. His spell had missed and hit me, hadn't it?

A drifting darkness rose up from the shadows, preceding a black shape that was forming from empty air, then the thing itself entered the clearing.

At first it was impossible to know if it was tall and intimidating or not, until it paused beside a boulder. It was short, but too gaunt. Too dead. Inhuman.

Then there were more of them, this time accompanied by distant, discordant sounds which couldn't decide if it wanted to fall together to form a rhythm or fall apart to a dissonant tumult. It seemed to come down from the trees and moon and stars themselves, to whirl in around on the faintly drifting fog, to rise up from the steaming mire of the meadow.

One of them swung down from the tree, a shrunken head grinning. White-hot energy bolting through my body, I backfisted it before I even realized what I was doing. The woods erupted with these things, swarming forward. Spells rolled from my left hand, easy defensive things, just as easily knocked aside as I escaped the meadow and reached the trail. The Vanguards were retreating, outnumbered, spells cutting through the fog and breaking the monsters into inky blackness, but one was replaced by three almost instantly. The dark shapes cut me off from joining the feys.

Remembering my illusion lessons, I duplicated the fog around me so it was so dense that the only way I could see was by feeling my way with magic. But my own movement must have triggered their senses because they were traveling with me. I wanted to stop, to feel the bruise on my chest, but I knew I couldn't. I reached for my magic. And I took every wisp of fog and transformed it, gave it a steady beat of flashing wings, then darting flight. My pursuers came nearer.

At last, I released the fog in a flurry of white moths, giving the illusions razor-tipped wings and long stingers, intended to terrify rather than damage.

It worked. I made it to Lyall, and we knew: my interference was done—we had to go. There was a scream, a very human scream. Female. Cut off too fast for any hope of rescuing her.

“This way,” I said. Lyall didn't object. I snared him by the hand and raced through the woods without slowing when branches whipped us. They bent aside and scarcely touched us with their leaves. Then we were well out of the clearing and still running.

“We are followed,” Lyall said.

When we looked back, there was an animal of some sort bearing down on us. High up in the trees, something the vague shape of a monkey moved about the branches, coming closer. Then another and another, the moon back lighting them so I could not see any details.

The closer the husks in the trees got to me, the more convinced I was that there was something very, very wrong with them. It started with the empty pits of their eye sockets and ended with the tufts of hair they left behind in the branches.

“What are they?”

“Husks,” Lyall said and there was no time for any more explanation than that.

As the husks darted forwards, I felt a whisper on the wind. It was the same tone that I'd listened to my whole life. A faint nagging breathed words into my ear. I grabbed Lyall and forced him to hold still, drawing up every last dredge of energy that I had.