Unspoken: The Lynburn Legacy (37 page)

“Looks like an octopus made of smoke,” she said, and gave him a sliver of a smile.

“I was feeling like a pretty badass sorcerer until you said that,” Jared told her. He could feel something else in the air hunting through the forest. For a moment, he thought that the searching thing was what they were looking for, but then he glanced at Aunt Lillian’s face, intent as his mother’s when she was reading a book. The cool, searching air felt like Aunt Lillian looked.

Holly’s hand gripped Jared’s arm, startling him. Her fingernails dug into his skin. “Can you please hurry?” Holly said tensely. “We have to
find
her.”

Lillian nodded in unexpected agreement. “It has to be us who find her.”

Jared nodded and tried to concentrate. Holly’s hand on his arm was anchoring him to his body, and airy messengers were coursing through the woods because of his power, but Kami’s thoughts were the most important thing of all.

Jared
, Kami said in his head, and he could tell she was wary.
Ask Lillian why
.

“Why—” Jared said aloud, and then caught up with Kami’s thought. “
Why
do you want it to be us who find her?”
He glanced at his aunt, her restrained profile that should have looked out of place in the woods and yet did not.

She regarded Jared with a considering air. “Rob wants to be the one to do it,” she answered slowly. “If a sorcerer goes rogue, turns vicious—it’s the responsibility of the Lynburns at the manor to deal with it. It’s the responsibility of the Lynburn heir, and that’s me. Rob would want to spare me.”

Spare you …
, Kami prompted.

Spare her from killing Ash
, Jared thought bleakly back to her.
Isn’t it obvious?

There was a sense of urgency in Kami’s fear, a cold current in the stream of her thoughts.

“Spare you …,” Jared prompted, echoing Kami.

“Spare me from executing Ash and Rosalind,” Lillian said. “Rob knows what I’ll have to do. There’s a place outside Sorry-in-the-Vale called Monkshood Abbey. Rob’s parents used to live there. You might call them the cadet branch of the Lynburns.”

Jared knew all this, but he tried to look encouraging and repeated Kami’s thoughts: “What happened to them?” he asked quietly.

“They wanted more power,” Lillian answered, just as quietly. “They broke the law Aurimere made and started killing people in the cellar of their house. My parents had to go and fight them to the death to stop them. My father died a year later; my mother was never the same again. But they had to do it. It’s our duty to protect the town. Nobody else can.”

Jared thought about the crest of the Lynburns fastened in a cellar floor, covered in dried blood. He thought of Uncle Rob saying that his parents had displeased the Lynburns
of Aurimere, and not mentioning that they had done so by slaughtering people. He’d called the Lynburns of Aurimere judges and executioners.

“Rob would know what has to be done,” said Lillian. “He’s been there before. He understood then.”

The Lynburns of Aurimere had come to Monkshood and killed his parents, Uncle Rob had said, and taken him “as sorcerer breeding stock for one or the other of their daughters.” It didn’t sound to Jared like Rob had understood all that well. Horror pierced Jared as he thought of what that meant, and who he had trusted with Kami.

Kami!
he said.
Run!

A wall between them fell. Jared saw what she had been concealing from him, what explained the urgency she had been feeling and why she had been forced to interrogate Lillian through him.

Rob’s not here
, she told him.
I turned around and he was gone. I don’t know where he is
.

Kami was alone in the woods. Of course, she told herself firmly, that was a great deal better than being in the woods with the man who might have killed Nicola. This was absolutely fine, in fact.

A rustle to her left made her spin around, and she saw a bird burst from the trees in a flurry of wings. Her heart felt as if it was trying to copy the bird. Kami pressed a hand to her chest and told herself to calm down. She could feel Jared coming, Holly and Lillian with him.

Kami reminded herself that she was a source and could
send shadows away on her own. But just because she could do it by herself did not mean she wanted to be by herself. She saw light sifting and sparkling through the autumn leaves, and thought of Nicola Prendergast’s eyes, staring blindly up at a different sky.

A crack of wood made Kami spin again, waves of heat and cold breaking over her. Sweat prickled at her temples. Leaves played in the wind over her head, mocking her in soft whispers. She did not know where the magical threat might be coming from. The only thing being a source did for her was let her know it was near.

Panicking would not help. What might help, Kami thought, laying out her thoughts in a logical process, was finding a weapon. She knelt down amid the dry leaves and the snake-coils of tree roots and reached for a fallen branch. Her fingers did not get the chance to close on it, as someone grabbed her hair, pulling her head back.

She felt the sharp, shocking cold of a knife edge along her throat.

Kami gasped and tried to bite the gasp back. Suddenly nothing seemed as important as being terribly still.

The scrape of the blade against her skin felt hungry. The voice scraping in her ear sounded hungry too. “Not so brave now, source.”

Kami’s breathing was as shallow as she could make it. All she could see was the canopy of leaves. All she could feel was the touch of that knife. She reached out desperately for Jared, but she could only feel his stark fear for her. Rob Lynburn’s breath was hot against her cheek, a Lynburn knife cold
against her neck, and if she did not control her own terror and Jared’s as well, she was going to die.

“Don’t even think of trying any magic, or I’ll cut your throat,” Rob instructed, and illustrated the point: she felt the knife slice in.

For a moment, all she felt was shock and a flare of heat, and then the pain came. She couldn’t move. She felt the burning sensation of blood, blotting out the chill of the knife, running down her skin. She felt Rob’s chest rumble against her back with a laugh and knew that her blood was giving him power.

Kami focused on a point directly above her head, on amber-colored leaves like gold lace in the sky. She disobeyed the madman with the knife to her throat and used magic. Above them, leaves rustled, clouds chased each other through the sky, and boughs creaked as if they might break and come tumbling down on both their heads.

Kami felt the jerk of Rob’s body as he looked upward, and felt him go slightly off-balance. Then she acted, because all the magic had been was a diversion. Kami reached up and seized his arm, digging her nails hard into a pressure point. She leaned into him, using her body and his weight to flip him over her shoulder and into the leaves.

A handful of her hair went with him, ripped out of her scalp. The pain made her vision blur, but she didn’t hesitate. She scrambled to her feet, lurching. Rob grabbed for her leg but she evaded his grasp and ran.

We’re coming
. Jared urged her to keep running, pouring encouragement into her veins as she blundered through
the woods. She had to find a safe place until they were here. She had to hide. Kami dashed toward the sound of the river. Twigs grabbed at her clothes and stabbed at her eyes. The woods were turning against her, doing the sorcerer’s will, fueled by her own blood.

Kami struck back in her mind, all of Jared’s rage behind hers. She heard Rob Lynburn cry out. It bought Kami time to reach the quarry and climb down, shoving her feet into the hollows and handholds she knew from childhood. Even this playground had been tainted.

At the bottom of the quarry was Angela.

She lay under a morning-bright blue sky, the tree above her dropping autumn leaves in shining drifts, like a shower of coins every time the breeze changed. Her hair was spread in a black pool on the stone around her, and her face was very pale. She was wrapped from head to foot in iron chains.

Kami ran toward her, and Angela opened her eyes.

“Angela,” Kami gasped out, fear and love closing up her throat so she could barely breathe. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”

“Don’t,” said Angela.

Kami stared. “What?”

“Don’t help her,” said another voice.

Kami turned to see who was in the quarry with them.

Ash sat with his legs drawn up to his chest, hands hanging empty between his knees, and his eyes wide and staring, fixed on Angela and not blinking. He looked as if he was in the grip of a nightmare. He also looked resigned: his face as set as it was gray, as if he had accepted he was not going to wake up.

“What are you doing here?” Kami asked very quietly. She didn’t want to hear it; she didn’t want to believe it.

Ash said, “I’m supposed to kill her.”

Kami placed herself in front of Angela. “And why is that, you
incredible asshole
?”

Ash looked away. “To get more magic,” he answered in a defensive voice. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“Good. Because I never will.”

“What’s the alternative?” Ash asked.

“Oooh, hard to say,” Angela sneered behind Kami. “Other than live without magic like everybody else, you loser.”

“We’re not like everyone else, though, are we?” Ash demanded. “You didn’t spend your life chasing some guy who my mother knew would hurt my aunt, because one of yours always ends up turning against one of ours. You didn’t spend your life being sick every fall, living in a different house every time, because we couldn’t come back home. We can be more powerless than your kind could ever be. We should be more powerful than your kind could ever be. And it’s not fair.”

It was Rob’s logic in Ash’s mouth, that sources should not be powerful, that nobody should be powerful except the sorcerers. Rob’s poison in Ash’s ears, and Rob’s rage that had sent Kami tumbling down a well, because she and Jared were better off dead than linked.

“Your father sent you to us, didn’t he?” Kami asked. “That very first day. Rosalind told you both everything about me and Jared as soon as you found her, and gave you the Lynburn knives. You came asking for Kami Glass.”

Even Ash’s feet looked restless and guilty, shifting on the
ground as if he was climbing and could not quite find purchase, as if he was going to fall. “He only told me to watch you,” Ash said, low. “I didn’t hurt you. I liked you. I didn’t hurt that girl Nicola either. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

Kami looked over her shoulder at Angela. She was still now, but Kami could see her wrists and how she had struggled against her chains, the skin raw and sore. “Oh, no?” Kami asked.

“I’m not the one who set the price for power,” Ash said softly. “I would never have made it blood. But that’s what it is.” Something about the way he said it was like the sound of the chill, turning-to-winter wind, running through leaves that were dying by turning to gold.

The hair on the back of Kami’s neck was standing up. Ash and Rob, and maybe Rosalind. Maybe three sorcerers. She did not know if she could fight them all, not when she felt so weak and strange since the Lynburn knife had shed her blood. But she had to.

Ash’s face was still turned away, his profile like something on a coin. Kami remembered what she had thought about him once, that he looked the part of a fairy-tale prince.

“You helped your father kill animals,” she said.

It was strange when Ash glanced at her and his face changed from picture-perfect to something human and guilty. “When you kill, power floods through you,” he said. “You feel like you’re finally, finally all right. That at last you are what you were always told you were supposed to be. It wipes away what came before, it makes everything right, and then it fades so fast. I know you don’t understand. I just want to explain to you—that I’m sorry.” Ash’s voice faded as he
spoke, passion dying into wistfulness, then silence and the sound of the river.

“Don’t be sorry,” Kami said. “Don’t do this.”

“But if he doesn’t kill me,” Angela murmured, sounding almost relaxed about the whole business, “someone else will.”

Ash moved then, and Kami saw what had been concealed by his body before: the other Lynburn knife, long and glittering gold in his hand.

“What do you want me to do?” Ash demanded, and his voice was as cold as the blade looked, light washing up and down the steel, as cold as the sweat that slicked Kami’s body.

“I want you to choose,” said Kami. “Stop being a coward and apologizing to me and act. Show me what you’re going to do, Ash. Show me who you’re going to be.”

“I’ve already chosen.”

“Kami!” said Angela, and her voice was fierce. It made Kami turn her back on Ash and his knife. “Kami, will you trust me? Promise me something. Will you please hide and stay hidden—no matter what?”

Kami looked down into Angela’s clear brown eyes. Angela did not look afraid, even now, when Kami felt so scared and so worn by terror it seemed like she had been scared for years.

Kami nodded.

She had hidden in the quarry before, more times than she could count, but it had been years ago. Sobo, Dad, or Mum would call for her to get out of the woods, and she would be curled up in one of the crevices in the quarry wall, giggling to herself and Jared in the small space.