Dockalfar (45 page)

“He took it from me,” Victoria said softly. “He blocked the magic and I can’t get through to it again. If I could, I would help you. I want to help you.”

Ashara turned away again with a sigh. “I know.”

“There are very few spells,” Neira’sha said sagely, “that cannot be broken. Dealings within the mind are particularly easy if worked at from both sides.”

There was hope there, in Neira’sha’s confidence. Hope that she might be able to hold her own again in this world.

~~~

The night had all but fled. Dawn’s light cut through the drape shrouded balcony and cast filtered rays of sun onto the floor. The sleeping chamber was finally a place of solitude and peace.

Ashara had chased the healers away, content to tend her mate alone. She was tired and scared, her frustration worn down to a weary acceptance that what was…was. There was no changing things now. The human girl was back among them, no worse for wear. The fates only knew what might descend upon them to retrieve her.

She did not understand the intricacies of the situation and that ignorance was a seething agitation. Azeral was never so rash. He did nothing without purpose and yet he very apparently had lost his control over a situation of his own making. And for what gain? A mere flicker of human power?

The girl was powerful, granted, but no more so than Azeral himself. Why so much risk for what he already possessed?

Why an interest in humanity after so long an absence from their world? It was for no one’s benefit, surely, but his own. What Victoria said about the overflow of human-bound magic was irrelevant. The humans had never made proper use of their earth power. It had always been a volatile mass waiting across the void. It did no more harm when one really got down to it, to Elkhavah and its domains, than a mid-summer’s storm.

There was something else. Something the lord of the Unseelie court chose not to reveal. It had been long since she had dissected the dark lord’s intentions. It was as unnerving a task as ever it was.

Okar moved slightly on the bed of pillows. Ashara’s tired thoughts snapped instantly to her mate. Hours of intensive healing of the mind wound had only begun the recovery. He had received a traumatic blow. A dagger wound might have been cleaner and certainly easier to tend.

She sank onto the pillows beside him, brushing back sweat-laden tendrils of golden hair. He was cool to the touch. The struggle was a mental one, not physical. It had been a long time since she had tended wounds of such a nature. Wounds dealt in a battle of magic and mental prowess.

Reprising her skill on her mate was not a thing she found comfortable.

Damn Aloe and Alkar for hatching this scheme. And damn Okar for going in place of his younger sibling. His was not a power to trifle with, but he was a fool to test it when he was outnumbered and facing the Great Hunt.

His lids flickered. She held her breath. Blue eyes, clouded with hurt and disorientation stared ceilingward. Reflexive tears leaked from the corner of his eye. Gently, she wiped the trail away. With effort he turned his head to look at her. The confusion on his face made her heart ache.

“Foolish man,” she whispered. “Do you wish to see Annwn so badly?”

He blinked, not quite wincing.

Delicately, she probed the mental scabs left behind from his wounding. His shield was a poor, shaky device, cruelly shattered. Even had he willed it, he could not have kept her out. The healing was a successful one though, progressing to her satisfaction. She pulled away, giving him his mental privacy, physically snuggling against his side.

“I hope you gave as good as you got. You against two. I thought you sharper than that.”

A hoarse breath escaped him. “Not them. Azeral.”

She stiffened.

“Aloe said there were only two.”

He closed his eyes, pain behind his lids. “He used them to get to me. Broke my shield. I was… not prepared… for him.”

She put a hand to his lips, sensing the effort it took to enunciate this information.

The exhaustion was telling. The tremors ran through his body and into her own. Or was it the other way around?

“Shush, love. Later. All that matters is your safety.”

He pushed her hand away weakly.

“No. He’s not behaving as he should, Ashara. He’ll follow her. Me. He wanted me dead.”

“He holds grudges,” she whispered.

Azeral never forgave. How well she knew that.

“For me, yes. But his anger is fresh. I was unlucky enough to be in his path.”

“He is massing forces,” she said dully, feeling her comfortable world slipping away. Feeling suddenly young and inexperienced, as she had been too many seasons ago. Back when she had believed in the unattainable and had it snatched so cruelly from her grasp.

Okar clutched her arm. “By the Four! He’ll come here. We’ve no defenses.”

“No worry,” she soothed. “I’m seeing to it.”

“We cannot defend against him,” Okar protested. “Not here.” He tried to sit up. She pushed him down.

“Sleep,” she suggested. In his state, he had no defenses against her. She slipped inside his mind and sapped his conscious will.

For a long time after his body had gone limp and his breathing calm, she lay and held him. Finally, with determination, she rose. He was right. This keep had not been built with defense in mind. It was up to her to see that it might have some hope of holding out against whatever Azeral chose to throw at it.

~~~

Victoria ceased to be for what seemed a very long while. She sat in Neira’sha’s private chambers, on that lady’s very own sleeping pillows and allowed the shields she had held firm so long to drop bit by bit. She let Neira’sha into her mind. With words of trust echoing in her thoughts she sank into a conscious oblivion. On a deeper level, one she hardly knew existed, there were the whispers of awareness. There were hints of a vaguely familiar entity carefully maneuvering about the foreign web of magic that entrapped her. Occasionally it told her things. To use the force of her will here or there. To probe the foundations of something she could not quite fathom, but knew existed nonetheless. The inner awareness grew.

Her physical senses were blunted to the point of nonexistence, but she found with a gradual awakening amazement, that there were senses that surpassed those of eyes and ears. Senses that traveled the byways of thought and the essence of self.

There was a bright and shining thing within her that she slowly realized was herself. Her soul light, as the sidhe might put it. Its vitality was amazing, its complexity bewildering. It was the unknown weakness that she built her shields around. In her fumbling journey into magic, she had glimpsed bits of sidhe’s interior selves. The outer facade of their most private parts. Never would she have guessed how complex that inner self could be.

She fluttered about in introspection, dazzled by her own energy. Became gradually aware of that other entity encroaching the edges of her self. She reflexively sought to bring her shields up.

A gentle, soothing plea stilled the action.

She knew the intruder. Neira’sha.

Neira’sha who picked at the edges of the imprisoning spell, peeling it back, piece by piece until some small bit of the magic hovering all around them spilled in and widened the gap.

Victoria embraced it. She sucked it in like water, using it to forcefully dissemble the already unraveling spell. Neira’sha guided her erratic power. Victoria let her.

“Open your eyes, child,” the soft voice suggested.

“They are,” Victoria murmured, lids still closed. Freedom washed over her like an uncontrollable deluge. She could not help herself from touching lightly on a hundred other awarenesses.

“Victoria,” the voice urged again, more sternly. A dampening will wrapped it’s fingers about her own. It was not imprisonment, not like before. Merely an older, wiser power reining back on a newborn, ecstatic one. Victoria opened her eyes and looked into Neira’sha’s pale face. There was age there. The weariness and the circles under the eyes made it apparent. The tremor in the body attested to just how long the sidhe woman had sat across from her, working at freeing her mind from the bonds Azeral had placed upon it. The night sky confirmed the fact.

Another day had passed.

“It’s gone,” Victoria whispered needlessly. Neira’sha smiled.

“It was well crafted. Never deny Azeral has skill. No amount of power could have broken it. It was not designed to withhold force, but to divert it and use it to strengthen its own walls. So, so ingenious. Nothing else would have held the power at your beckon.”

“I’d almost forgotten the feel of it. It was like I’d never tasted it.”

“The memory of magic fades quickly in human minds. But in yours it burns brightly now. Too brightly. You, my dear child, are in serious need of tutoring in the ways of using what you command.”

“But I already know. I was taught so much before I left.”

Neira’sha frowned, uncrossing her legs and stretching cramped muscles. The fey light brightened, casting a rosy pallor over the woman’s features.

“You were taught no more than any child learning to use his newfound power.

The basics. The remedial spells and skills that any young sidhe must master. The path to proper mastery of power must come slowly. It must be learned with time so it may be tempered with wisdom.

Unfortunately time may not be a convenience we have. This keep may be in danger and every advantage we can win ourselves must be utilized. It is time, Victoria, to teach you magics of a more potent nature.”

Victoria relaxed her own taught muscles, collected her thoughts and met Neira’sha eye for eye.

“I’m ready.”

~~~

There was little awareness on Victoria’s part of what the rest of Ashara’s folk were up to. What measures were being taken to prepare a peaceful keep for the possibility of hostility. She forgot everything but the singing crescendo of power within her. And it did sing. It was like music to her. She had equated it so the very first time it had answered her need. She found controlling it was much like orchestrating a musical piece. Neira’sha encouraged the analogy.

They all, the sidhe woman told her, had certain affinities linked to their individual powers.

Her human magic was an especially volatile power. It responded to whim and fancy as Sidhe power did not. Sidhe worked to refine their magic, worked to create intricacies and patterns in their power, thus birthing spells to accomplish goals that uncontrolled power could not fathom. Every outcome required thought out direction of power, or it might backfire on the caster. Human magic was different. Human magic was wild-spirited and presumptuous. Victoria had but to think of a thing and the power strived to make it so. Little things, like light and fire and creating moisture on the side of glass went unnoticed. She craved and things happened. Larger things took more effort.

They expanded energy, either emotional or physical. She did not have to think of all the steps and implications of her magic, she simply concentrated on what she wished and the human power strived to change the face of nature or the structure of what already was. The magic, however did not understand the toll it took on its wielder. Her body was the link between will and power. There was only so much she could accomplish before exhaustion took over.

Neira’sha was intrigued by the patterns she made in the usage of her world’s power. Neira’sha who was all skill and wisdom found the undisciplined methods curious.

“I suppose it is nature’s way of matching power to wielder,” the elder surmised when they took a well-needed break. The sky was just clearing from the flash storm Victoria had summoned at Neira’sha’s command. “In human terms, it takes sidhe centuries to master the power of magic, but we have countless centuries at our disposal to learn. What I consider brief may be tedious and over drawn to you. You do not have the centuries I did to gain skill.”

“True,” Victoria agreed. “I suppose it equals out that a year for you is a day for me. Being human, I adapt at mastering the power in what seems to you a very quick education.”

“The power is different. You affect things I do not. Reality changes itself to suit you, did you know? It takes the easiest path to appease your will. This is not a power of this world. Our magics are well prepared, well mapped you might say, to work around the boundaries of nature. To work with it in harmony. You batter your way through any strictures to get your way.”

“Is it harmful? To nature, I mean.”

Neira’sha shrugged. “Nature bends. Nature adapts to what is thrown its way. You no more harm nature than the winds harm the trees.”

Victoria chewed her lip in thought, remembering some of her more destructive accomplishments.

“But I have,” she told the elder about Black Annis and the cancerous decay she had in her panic initiated. “I couldn’t control it. The magic had me in its thrall and I could not reason out what I was doing. Do you know I thought I was losing my mind? Really. Everything I did, I felt the power goading me. I thought I could have taken on the world. And I would have for the slightest offense.”

“Biologically, humans are more fertile than sidhe. Than creatures of this land period. You breed like flies, my dear. Power senses the well and the ebb of your being. The female in particular goes through a massive change every cycle, human women quite a bit more frequently than Sidhe ones. During this period of instability while your body, both physical and mental, fights for equilibrium, you are in less control of the power while at the same time, more powerful in its usage. In our heads there are built in defenses against overload. Defenses that keep us from channeling more power than our minds can handle. Those defenses are weaker at some points than others.”

“There’s a difference between male and female power. Male power is always stable. It never fluctuates. The power stays the same. In the female it is always changing. We will have times of weakness and times of great power. It can be as much a burden as a boon.”

“Are you saying there are times when the magic won’t come to me?”

“No, the magic will always respond. It just will not respond as strongly during certain periods of your physical cycle.”