On Wings of Bone and Glass Page 3

  I imagined losing me to the madmen who’d imprisoned me had galled her as well. Her sacred duty had been to protect the returning elves, and a group of untrained academics had taken one of her charges? That it had been treachery had hardly mattered.

  “Shall I fetch Mistress Ivy?” Almond asked.

  “Please.”

  Ivy’s arrival brought everyone else, perhaps unavoidably; hovering this close to Vigil, knowing that the people in it wanted to kill me and had the numbers to make good on that threat, had agitated us all. After hearing Almond’s tentative suggestion and Eyre’s consequent explication, Ivy tilted her head and said, “That would seem a straightforward task.” She sat behind me and produced a handkerchief. “The Vessel has been teaching us that magic is a thing primarily of language. But I like this notion of magic as symbol. And if that’s so, then I should be able to wipe you clean.”

  “I don’t think it’s a wiping,” Serendipity whispered, hesitant. When everyone glanced at her, she flicked her ears back and said, “You are a woman, Mistress. You call the blood to you.”

  “Right,” Ivy murmured.

  I could not see her face, but I could sense her concentration, and with it the intensifying of the magic in her. For several minutes nothing happened… and then she gasped. My head felt lighter; when I looked over my shoulder, I found her framing in cupped hands a quivering crimson globe.

  “Well!” Eyre exclaimed. “That certainly goes a long way toward proving that blood is a thing of life magics!”

  “But what do I do with it!” Ivy looked at me, startled. “Shall I give it back?”

  “I don’t need it.” I reached over and touched the ball, came away with a finger streaked in red. “Perhaps…” I looked at the genets, but even Kelu shook her head.

  “I’ve had my fill,” she said. “And I’d rather have it out of your vein, anyway.”

  “Obviously we take it with us,” Guy said. He opened his canteen and poured it out, then handed it to me. “Hold it under the blob there. Ivy, can you guide it in?”

  “I think so.” She rolled her lower lip between her teeth and concentrated, and the sphere deformed. It reached toward the mouth of the canteen as if it had developed a questing arm, and I was not the only one who shuddered at the sight. But with the abruptness of a popped bubble, the ball emptied itself into the canteen, and I screwed the top back on quickly and handed it over.

  “Well done!” Radburn said. “You have much better control over it than I do!”

  “Thank you,” Ivy said. “But now perhaps Guy can tell us why we should keep it?”

  “If blood is power, then we’ll find some use for it.” Guy grinned. “The way things are going, sooner rather than later.”

  “Give it to me,” Kelu said. “I’ll probably need it before any of you remember we have it.”

  “Sound reasoning,” Guy said, and handed it over to her.

  “I’ll get some clothes for you now that you can wear them,” Ivy said. She looked down at herself. “And perhaps I should change as well, if we are to meet the king.”

  “He’ll be here soon,” I said, quiet, because I could feel him like the sun on my face. “Not long now.”

  “And then we can move,” Radburn said. “Before someone finds us that we don’t want finding us.”

  “Soon,” I said again.

  But the next person we saw on the road was not Amhric, and not alone. Three horsemen darted from the ruined city, pounding down the bridge, hooves kicking up sprays of dirt. They were heading south, and they had remounts behind them with supplies.

  “Sending away for help?” Chester said, frowning. “After the Vessel promised her aid already? Have they decided not to trust her?”

  “Perhaps they are sending warnings,” Samuel said. The Vessel’s ebon-skinned second in command, who’d been left with the knights she’d designated as our protection, had kept his distance from us. I’d assumed it to be the same reserve Last showed: he was on duty, and interruptions to that duty were not welcome. Seeing his face, I thought it the right assumption, and felt sympathy for his frustration. “There are more countries represented here than just Troth. The others might want to tell their nations what has passed here, alert them to the possibility of invasion. Or they might be heading for the capital, with similar news.”

  “Should we stop them?”

  Samuel bared his teeth. “We could ride them down, yes. But that would leave you with even fewer of us as safeguard. And they can’t come back with reinforcements in time to stop us.”

  Stop us from doing what, though? That part, I didn’t know.

  “I suppose this is the end of your secret society,” I told Eyre. “If those riders make it all the way to Evertrue, they will indubitably tell someone that elves live.”

  “And are the servants of demons!” Ivy said. “Ridiculous!”

  “Hopefully by the time we speak to them we will have ample evidence otherwise,” I said. Though how we’d manage that without the library guiding us, I had not the first notion. All I knew was that Amhric’s coming would make a great number of things clear to me, and how I knew that…

  Magic, perhaps. Royal magic. But I trusted the instinct all the same. Amhric would arrive, we would confer, and between the two of us we would win ourselves and the elves clear of their curse. After that… who knew? Perhaps we could ride to Evertrue in state and introduce ourselves formally.

  “Stay under the bridge,” Samuel said. “They probably won’t turn back, but they might send out more riders.”

  For how long we remained, tense and attentive, I could not say. But long after our nerves had begun to fray, we heard the scuff of someone’s passage. Not horses this time, but people on foot. Samuel held out a hand to stay us—as if we would think of breaking cover, when footsteps suggested someone had been sent in search of us! I held my breath, stretching my senses out, feel the cool earth of the embankment, the hard stone of the bridge... the slight weight of those passing overhead. We waited, watched, hoped to count our opponents.

  And found only three. Three figures, furtively hurrying from Vigil, bent low under packs. I squinted into the dark at them and would not have known them at all had not the person leading them whispered, “Hurry, we don’t know how much time we have.”

  Startled, I said, hushed, “It’s Doctor Carrington.”

  Eyre said, “What?”

  Samuel gestured for quiet and Eyre leaned closer to breathe against my ear. “What’s she saying?”

  I strained my hearing, but Carrington spoke no more. “She wants them to make haste.”

  “She’s running?” Eyre said. “Is she in trouble?”

  Even in the dark I could sense the looks Guy, Radburn, and Chester were exchanging. As one they started to rise, but Eyre was already moving. Samuel hissed and grabbed for the back of his coat, but fell short. All we could do was watch as Eyre scrabbled out from beneath the embankment and started up the narrow path leading to the bridge.

  “Mary!”

  A long, far too long pause. Then, hesitant: “John?”

  “Mary, what are you doing?”

  I started up after him, and this time Samuel’s fingers didn’t miss. “What do you think you’re doing, my lord?”

  “I’ll stay in the shadow of the bridge,” I said. “But I’m going after him. What if the other two are armed?”

  “Yes, what if they are—”

  “Then they can kill him,” I said. “But they can’t kill me.”

  That, at last, pierced the knight’s intransigence. His grip relaxed. “You will betray our position to everyone.”

  “Eyre’s already done that,” I said. “Now release me.” When he hesitated, I said dryly, “Don’t worry. If they kill me, you’ve still got an elven king to do the work of the Church for you.”

  “You wrong me if you think I have so little honor,” Samuel said, quietly.

  I looked away until the burn on my cheeks faded, then said, “You’re right, and I apologize
. But I must go.”

  He searched my gaze, and found in it... something. My desperation? My determination? I had both in equal measure. Whatever the case, he released me, and I scrambled up after my mentor.

  Eyre was already on the surface of the bridge, tensely facing his former colleague. She was followed by two striplings, a youth and a maiden, both burdened with heavy packs; like them, Carrington carried a pack, along with several books tucked into the crook of an arm.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Carrington said at last.

  “Hang that,” Eyre replied. “Where are you going? Did they cast you out?” When she didn’t reply, he said, irritated, “For God’s sake, Mary. Do you truly distrust me? Should I prick myself and bleed red to prove there’s no demon blood coursing my arteries?”

  Alongside me, Ivy whispered, “There’s Eyre’s hidden flame.”

  I glanced at her. She’d inched up alongside me and was watching the tableau intently.

  “Your compatriot didn’t bleed black either.”

  “And she’d know it,” I muttered.

  “Because he’s no demon-servitor, but a victim. You’ve known me for over two decades, Mary. Do you think I would let myself be taken in by a fair face?”

  Her sigh was just audible in the dark. “I’d like not to think it, no. But I’ve seen ambition do worse things to men.”

  “And my ambition is... what? To make the breakthrough that Hugh was hoping for?”

  Carrington’s breath hissed from beneath her teeth. “Now is not the time, John. I have too little of it to disinter old hurts.”

  “My old ones, you mean.” Eyre folded his arms. “So what errand is so urgent that you need sneak out before dawn?”

  “We’re hiding books,” the youth behind her said unexpectedly.

  “Books?” Eyre repeated.

  “Because they want to burn them!” the maiden finished urgently.

  “Burn them!” Eyre cried.

  “Burn them,” I whispered, horrified. I joined him, unable to rein in my dismay. “They are going to do what?”

  At the sight of me Carrington’s two followers backpedaled, eyes wide. Fear? No, perhaps merely weathering the brunt of my unearthly presence.

  Carrington though. She paled. “You... you....”

  “Should be bleeding to death in the cell where I was impaled with every sword you and your companions could scour from the elven palace?” I said with asperity. “What’s this now about the books?”

  Cheeks flushed, Carrington hugged the ones in her arm to her chest. “Hugh and Emery have decided that the library is too dangerous to be allowed to fall into enemy hands, particularly if—” Her eyes darted to me, then back to Eyre, “—if there really is an elven nation coming on the heels of their outrider. They’re debating whether to destroy the whole library or to select only some number of works to consign to the flames along with the elf they think is still in a cell at this moment.”

  The disaster was so inconceivable that I saw nothing but fire, and with it, the ash of all my hopes for the liberation of the elves.

  “It’s patently ridiculous,” Carrington continued. “But they’re not going to listen to me about it. So while they’re off discussing whatever preposterous thing it is they’re planning, I’ve decided to rescue at least some of the treasure they’re plotting to destroy. Eliza and Oliver were the only two I knew I could trust, so I enlisted their aid. We were planning to find someplace to bury these....”

  “God in the firmament,” Eyre said. “Mary! Can’t you see what they’ve become? In what universe is it a virtue to burn books?”

  “In a universe where there are demons, apparently,” Ivy said from behind me. “Do you believe in demons, ma’am?”

  “Maybe the question is whether we can afford not to,” the young woman accompanying Carrington said. “Though... I would have thought demons would seem... overripe.”

  We all stared at her now. I found my tongue first. “Overripe. Like a rotting apple.”

  “Exactly like that, actually,” Eliza replied, nodding. “Like something delicious and beautiful, but you can tell, somehow, that it’s off.”

  “He can fall from ten stories and not die,” Carrington said, acid. “Surely that is enough.”

  “I’d guess if God’s messiah fell off a balcony, she would survive too.” Eliza stepped toward me, curious. “Are you a demon?”

  “No,” I said. “I am, however, demon-cursed.”

  “Now that’s a good story!” the youth behind her exclaimed. He joined her, and standing alongside her one could see the stamp of some mutual relation. Not in anything as obvious as their hair color or eyes, for she was a brunette with gray eyes, and he was fair with dark. But something in the hairline, and the shape of their wrists, and the way their collarbones formed at the base of their throats. “Is it true?”

  “Happily, I am no messiah,” I replied. “You are as divine as I am.”

  They glanced at one another, and I saw the pulse leap in their necks. “We are?”

  “I can even show you,” I said. Looking past them. “And you also, Doctor.”

  “I’d thank you to keep your uncanny magics away from me, thank you,” she replied stiffly. “Eliza, Oliver, I strongly suggest—”

  “Yes, please,” Eliza said, heedless of Carrington’s protest. “I want to know.” She added to her professor, “You’ve always said that there’s no substitute for direct experience.”

  “If we’re going to do this,” came Samuel’s voice, “Can you at least bring them off the road, my lord!”

  Bringing them off the road would require us to trust them with our location... or to hold them fast until we ourselves left. Either way, I was certain we could handle them. “As you say. Come.”

  “Don’t!” Carrington held out a hand. “For God’s sake, don’t go with him. If he’s a threat to you—”

  “Then it’s not like anyone’s going to find us in time, is it?” Oliver pointed out. “They’re still hiding in there.”

  “Plotting their empires,” Eliza muttered. “And leaving us out of them!”

  That, apparently, was sufficient for the two students. Whatever politics had ensnared their professor had left them far too cynical about the machinations of academia, and they plainly loved Carrington well. I walked off the road, and the twain followed me. Inevitably, Carrington did as well, and Eyre circled around her. Now that Ivy had made her comment I could see the friction between them, born of too long a knowing with too little consummation.

  “Here.” I stopped in the shadow of the bridge. “We’re not visible, but we’re not so far that you can’t run. Does that suit you, Doctor Carrington?”

  “I wish you’d—” She cut the words off, baring her teeth as she looked away.

  “Stop being polite to you though you hurt him?” Ivy said. At the other woman’s sharp glare, Ivy said, “Whether or not you were one of the ones who tortured him, you’re still responsible for letting other people torture him.”

  I rested a hand on Ivy’s arm and she quieted, though not without resentment. I considered Carrington’s two students. Young, I’d thought them, but they weren’t all that much more so than my friends. It was the callowness in their eyes that had fooled me: they had seen so little of life, and all of it apparently cloistered.

  Well, that would certainly change.

  “You are ready for your proof?” I asked them.

  “Proof that we have divine blood?” Eliza grinned. “Absolutely. This we want to see!”

  “Feel,” Eyre murmured. “You’ll feel it.”

  They looked over their shoulder at him, then turned to me in concert and said, “We’re ready.”

  I held my hand in front of me, open. Concentrated. And pulled gently, until I could feel the tender cores in them, just waiting for water to flower. They gasped when I tugged at them, and then again when I poured just a little into them, enough to wet the soil. “I am,” I said, soft, “a little dry...?”

  R
adburn said, “I’ll donate.” He stepped up alongside me and grinned. “No hard feelings, after all.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” I smiled at him, then pulled a thread of magic from him and fed it into the two students, until they held enough for use. “There. The gift of angels, bought for humanity by Saint Winifred and held in trust all these many years by the Church against our need.”

  “What... what did you do?” Eliza asked, shocked. She glanced down at her chest, rubbed it. “Am I glowing?”

  “And what did he do?” Oliver added, staring at Radburn.

  “Magic can be used up,” Radburn said. “I had some extra, so I let Morgan give it to you.”

  “We can’t give it directly,” Chester added, joining us. His voice was quiet. “Only the elven king and prince can do this. Usually.”

  Carrington had come closer, scowling. “Do what? What did you do to my students?”

  “Do it to her!” Oliver exclaimed.

  “Oh, ma’am, you must let him!” Eliza agreed.

  “You’re mad if you think I’ll let him touch me.” Carrington advanced on them, turned the youth to face her first and scrutinized him. “You don’t look any different.”

  “It’s not a ‘look’,” Eyre said behind her. “It’s a feel. You can feel it on the skin. Under your fingers, Mary. That’s where you’ll sense it.”

  “Preposterous,” she muttered, but I noticed her flexing her hands.

  “What can we do with it?” Eliza was asking, still looking at her chest as if to find visible evidence of her change. “Magic… that’s the stuff of stories.”

  “Folklore, certainly.” Ivy shared a warm glance with me, then returned her attention to the girl. “But as you’re a woman, you will command all that lives.”

  “Hey!” Oliver exclaimed. “How is that fair? What’s left over?”

  “Everything else!” Radburn said. “Seems a fair enough trade to me!”

  “I don’t see anything.” Carrington was frowning. “And I sense nothing. It’s nonsensical to think that I might.” She stepped away from her student—fortunately, for Oliver was already trying to hold a conversation over his shoulder with Radburn about the exciting new avenues open to him as a male practitioner of arcane arts. Folding her arms, she said, “It’s a trick.”