The Fire Mages (39 page)

It was good to be alone, to be alive, to feel my heart pumping and the blood coursing through my veins and my magic swirling, to be able to wriggle my fingers and toes without that terrifying numbness. Into that quiet moment of contentment, another awareness, a tiny pinprick of insistence. My daughter was still alive! Tears prickled behind my eyelids, and I rested my hand on my belly. She responded with a hard kick and I laughed out loud for joy.

“Well, little one, we made it, didn’t we? Someone wanted us both dead, but here we are, safe and well.”

I didn’t voice the thought that perhaps it was her father who wanted us dead. Yet who else could it be but Drei? Who else would think to send me poisoned cakes? Well, if I was honest, half the Keep probably knew of my fondness for cakes, but surely only Drei would put poison in them. I’d thought I was safe at least until the baby arrived, but apparently not. Why? It was a good question. He’d seemed quite affectionate towards her, and fiercely protective of her drusse-born status. What was it he’d called himself? A disregarded drusse-born child, that was it, and he’d sworn she wouldn’t be neglected as he was. Would he now kill her, just to rid himself of me? Did he hate me so much? Or fear me... I had the same power as him, I could resist his charms, I knew when he lied. I was just too dangerous to him.

Hunger and exhaustion were catching up with me, and I must have slept for a while. When I woke, I was aware of a mage walking briskly through the city. Cal! He’d come for me at last. I struggled off the long chair – by the Gods, I’d be glad to get back to some sort of practical shape – and waddled into the corridor to surprise him when he opened the door. I still wasn’t at all sure what I felt for him, but I was always glad to see him, and this morning more than ever before. With Cal I always felt safe.

The door opened, he strode into the dark corridor, the courtyard behind him brilliant with sunlight so that at first he was only a silhouette. I started forward with a cry of pleasure.

“You came!”

Then stopped, fear twisting my gut.

“Drei?”

“Kyra?” He sounded as confused as I was.

“I thought you were at the coast,” I burst out.

He smirked. “Sorted out already. They caved in. But what are
you
doing here? I thought—”

“You thought I was dead?” It was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Well, I’m not.”

“I can see that.” He recovered his poise quickly, looking me up and down speculatively. “In fact, you are positively blooming, a very long way from dead.”

“No thanks to you,” I spat. My shock at finding him here instead of Cal sparked anger in me.

“Really, Kyra! You were such a placid little thing when I first knew you. Pregnancy may have put colour in your cheeks, but it hasn’t improved your temper.”

“My
temper
? By the Moon Gods, Drei, you tried to poison me!”

He licked his lips. “Why would I do that?” He was having to think carefully about his words; one slip and I’d see the lie.

“You tell me. You’re the one who sent me poisoned cakes.”

“No, I didn’t. Truly I didn’t.” His eyes were fixed on my face.

There was no obvious blue flare, but there was something, some haze of blue around him. It was the merest shimmer, but it was there. “Ha! There’s a lie in there somewhere. You told someone else to send them, maybe. Oh – your mother?” He exhaled sharply. “And you killed Lakkan.”

“Lakkan?”

“He was a wild mage, too, I found him at a river town. And you shot him.” He was silent. “You can’t deny it. Just tell me why.”

“By the—! He lifted your skirts, all right? No one touches my drusse and gets away with it.”

“Oh, for the Gods’ sake, Drei, grow up! I wasn’t bound to you by then, remember?”

“You were still my drusse, and he boasted about it! It made me mad as fire, and I couldn’t touch him any other way, so I shot him. And then I realised I was better off without any other mages around. No one to rival me, no one to know when I tell a little lie. You should have stayed down south, Kyra. I thought you’d stay on in Ardamurkan, have the baby there, maybe, then you’d have been safe. But no, you have to come back here and stir up all the mages against me. So yes, I asked my mother to deal with you. I imagined she’d find something a bit more subtle, though. Stupid woman.”

He paced across the room, his hands running through his hair. Such a fine looking man, and yet evil to the core. Such a pity.

“Didn’t you even care about the baby?”

His face softened. “I – of course! My first child... I didn’t want to hurt her, no. If there were any other way... But you have to die, Kyra. There’s no way round it, and I can’t wait.”

That chilled me to the bone.

“You were a good man once, Drei. You were kind to me for a while, until you got ambitious. At least tell me that Yannassia is safe from you.”

“What a question! She’s my wife, I—” He paused, choosing his words. “I have no reason to want Yannassia dead.”

Again, the faintest haze of blue. True, but not the whole truth.

“Yet,” I said.

“Fire and lightning, Kyra, this is the trouble with you! You’re too – too
perceptive
for your own good. You see far too much. You know those stupid tests the mages gave us? It drove me insane, the number of times they said, oh yes, very good but
Kyra
did so much
better
than you. Pah! Kyra this and Kyra that, even from the Drashon! I should have dealt with you a long time ago, before you dragged me into your stupid messes and got me
this
!” He pointed to the mage mark on his forehead. “You’ve no idea how much more difficult life is when everyone knows what I can do. Come on, time to go.”

He grabbed my wrist and gripped it so hard that I cried out with pain.

“Go where?”

“A nice cosy place where you can rest.”

“I can rest here.” But he was pulling me along, and I was powerless to stop him. How was Cal going to find me if Drei took me away somewhere? “No! I have to stay here!”

He let go abruptly and I banged into his shoulder, a more solid obstacle than cloth-covered flesh. I remembered that he wore chain mail under his clothes.

“You’re waiting for
him
aren’t you? Your mage lover? How you must have laughed at me, the two of you. There I was, putting silk on your back and the finest fish and game in your belly, and he was keeping you warm at night. Poor Drei, such a fool – was that what you told each other? And thinking yourselves so clever, with your little secrets, your bedroom whispers and your mage conspiracies. Oh yes, I know everything you do. You may be better at detecting lies, my love, but I’m far better at secrets and conspiracies.”

“If you mean Cal, he’s not my lover.” He looked at me closely, but I knew he’d not see any blue.

“Stop talking,” he grunted, taking my wrist again. This time there was no delaying him. He took me into one of the side rooms in the house, a kitchen, perhaps, although there was no range. A door in the far side led down steep stairs. Not another cellar! It seemed it was my fate in life to be tossed into cellars by Drei.

But he didn’t linger, pulling me straight through to another door in the far side, then down more stairs, a long flight with no lamps. We both lit glow balls to light the way, his large and pulsing yellow, like the sun, mine small and pale, almost transparent. Eventually we came out into another cellar, wide and echoing, cut into rough red stone. The floor was grainy under my bare feet.

“I’ve never seen this place before,” I said, my voice bouncing around the emptiness.

“It’s much older than the rest of the city,” he said, lapsing disconcertingly into the genial teacher of our early time together. “Look, there are engravings all over the walls. I don’t know what they mean, though.”

We floated our glow balls around the room, lighting up one stretch of wall after another. There were whole panels filled with meticulous lines of etched symbols, a neat kind of writing, although unintelligible now. Other patches of wall were daubed with seemingly random scratchings, or crude drawings, or nothing at all. It was cold, too, unlike everywhere else in the city which was a uniformly pleasant temperature.

“Right, that’s enough history for now,” he said, for all the world as though we were in the library, studying together. “Come on.”

He turned towards me, his hand already out to reclaim my wrist, when he stopped. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, then a blurry shape appeared, something swung round and made a loud thunk, and Drei collapsed in a heap, his fiery glow ball popping out of existence.

I spun round, fear thickening my throat, then laughed out loud in relief.

“Cal! You found me!”

“You weren’t keeping your voices down, and the glow balls are easy to follow. Are you all right? The baby—?”

“We’re both fine.”

He exhaled loudly, then tossed the piece of wood aside – it looked like a table leg – and knelt down beside Drei, placing a hand on his forehead. There was a small pool of blood spreading from his temple. “He’s out cold, but we may not have much time. We need to get his magic out of him before he comes round.”

“We could just kill him.”

He looked up at me. “What? When did you get so ruthless, Kyra?”

“He’s kidnapped me, forced me to become pregnant and tried to poison me. D’you expect me to feel sorry for him?
And
he’s murdering his way to the Drashon’s throne.”

“His crimes should be dealt with properly, through the law,” he said coldly. “All we need to do is take his magic and lock him in the warded cell. It’s not far from here. He’ll never recover his magic then.”

“Why not just lock him up first? He can’t use his magic inside the cell, can he?”

“He’ll still have it available, though, if he does manage to escape. Stop arguing, we don’t have much time.”

“Right.” I pulled my stone vessel from my shoulder bag, and eased myself down next to Drei. “We’ll need more vessels, I expect. This won’t be enough.”

“Shit, of course.” He jumped up and looked round wildly. “What can we use? There’s nothing here!”

“Anything stone or – or mineral. Jade. Crystal. Look in the scribery, there’s a lot of stuff lying around.”

“Will you be all right? With him?”

“Have to take that chance. Go.”

He ran, a glow ball bouncing in front of him. I held the stone vessel in one hand and rolled Drei’s sleeve up to place my other on his arm, since I really didn’t want to touch his head. I could see the injury very clearly, a pulsing mass of vivid red-brown, and I took a moment to heal him a little. No point in draining his magic if he then died of a broken skull. It interested me that he hadn’t healed himself at all. I’d assumed that automatic self-healing was the norm for all wild mages, but perhaps he could only heal himself when he was conscious.

There was something strange about his head. At first I couldn’t work it out, but then I realised – the two small purple blobs I’d seen in his head had grown to a dozen or more, larger and blending together into one angry blotch. But there was no time to wonder what it meant.

Then I began to pull his magic into the stone vessel. It was slow going, and long before it was full Cal returned with an armful of assorted objects – several stone lamp bases, a carved piece of marble, a matched pair of crystal paperweights, some diamond and amethyst jewelry.

“Will this be enough?”

“I don’t know. We’ll just have to see. Is there any rope around?”

“Rope?”

“To tie him up in case he comes round before we’re finished.”

“Shit! I should have thought of that.”

He dashed off again, but came back more quickly this time with a curtain cord. It was amazing how nothing rotted here. While Cal tied his hands, I switched to Drei’s forehead but to my horror he moved under my hand, uttering a low groan.

“This is too slow,” Cal said. “Shit, shit, shit! He’s waking up!”

“You can do this too. Try the marble.”

He tried, his face screwed up in concentration. “It’s not working.”

“Pull all the magic into your hand, and eventually it will just overflow.”

A long sigh of relief. “That’s got it. Can I do two at once?”

“Try it and see.” Drei moved again, and I gave a little scream, dropping my stone. “Here, you take this one, I’ll start another.”

We filled four vessels in panicky haste before we got all the magic out. It was strange to touch him and feel no shimmering energy inside his body. It was almost as if he were dead. Cal got the last of it out because towards the end I couldn’t stop my magic from flowing back in to fill the void.

We started to drag him towards the cell. Cal had found it on one of his many explorations, but he’d got so used to the jade belt and a constant supply of magic that entering a room where it was ineffective was a terrifying experience. He hadn’t seen the purpose of it until the Forum discussion, and realised it was the perfect place to confine Drei until a more permanent solution could be found.

We never made it. Drei was heavy and an awkward load with his hands tied, and we just couldn’t get him to the cell in time. He woke up and roared in anger. We dropped him and skittered away.

“Should we run?” I whispered.

“No, we have to get him locked up, somehow. He can’t hurt us now.”

We were very stupid to think so, but when you always have magic at your disposal, you can’t imagine how people manage without it.

Drei roared again, and began writhing on the floor. I quickly gathered up the vessels and stuffed them in my shoulder bag, in case he rolled near enough to touch one and undo all our efforts. Cal started prodding him with the table leg, which just enraged him more. What we really needed was five or six sturdy guards to pick him up bodily but one weedy mage and a pregnant woman were not enough.

“Sleep spell!” I hissed at Cal, and at once he held his hands out and began to chant. I almost groaned. I’d been sure he would have one prepared, so that he could just yell “Sleep!”, as Krayfon had once tried with me.

Drei writhed more violently, his face red with exertion. Then with a final twist his hands were free and he sprang up and tore across the cellar towards us. We jumped apart and back, as he held his hands out in front of him – and stopped, bewildered.

“What have you done to me?”

“We—” My voice was the merest squeak. I tried again. “We’ve taken your magic.”

“You—!” He switched direction to march directly towards me. “You little—”

Cal picked up the table leg. “Leave her alone!” He swung wildly, but with almost casual grace Drei stretched one arm and twisted it out of his grip. In one smooth movement he circled it round his head and brought it crashing down on the side of Cal’s jaw.

I screamed. Cal made a soft little mewing sound and dropped like a sack of flour.

Drei turned his attention on me next, and in a panic I hurled fire at him. I was a roiling mass of abject terror and anger by this time, and flames shot spectacularly across the room, nearly singeing Drei’s eyebrows. With an exclamation, he pitched the table leg in my general direction and tore off towards the stairs.