Page 19 of Fortress of Ambrose (House of Marionne #3)

Fourteen

Jordan

The world is falling apart, and I’m hiding in a barn. Coming here might have been a mistake.

The stench of this place makes me dizzy. I walk the length of the metal building, past a dozen stalls. And in the last one there is a broody mare. Black and sleek with eyes the color of the ocean at night. A Fresian. It’s been years. The horse stares.

Yags and I were boys when we did the circuit.

He jumped, and I failed miserably at dressage.

My father insisted a man could keep even the unruliest horse in hand.

Yags said something at the time that got him backhanded.

I broke my arm after a bad fall, trying to show Father I could do just as he expected.

That I could be the son he wanted. That was the last time I rode as a boy.

I spit on the ground and turn my back to the horse. She whinnies, but I keep walking until the sound grows distant. There is no sign of Quell. I clench my fist. Then pound it into the wall.

It blackens under my touch.

Toushana moves through me swifter than instinct.

I glare at my hands and assault the wall again.

But the faint toushana bleeding from them dissolves.

So I beat my fists raw. Remembering how toushana bled out of me suddenly, hurting Quell.

I’ll never hold her again. I reach for the feel of warmth blustering around inside me, looking for the magic I was born with.

But the thread of heat that livens in my body is heavier and stronger than anything I’ve ever felt.

The magic that made me who I am is gone.

My heart turns like a stone in my chest. Then it thrums as a grainy sensation races underneath my skin, buzzing through me, gathering near my heart, then spreading to my limbs as the Sphere’s proper magic answers fiercely.

With my eyes closed, I focus on the sounds in the air.

The gentle sensation of Audior magic, reminiscent of how my own magic used to feel, grows hotter until the hum of magic burns my ears.

Faint whinnies morph into the soft crash of rushing waves. I release the magic, and the scalding feeling that has spread to my face begins to cool. But I smile at the Sphere’s proper magic answering at first call. Maybe I’m not completely done for.

My side aches where the flesh has begun to waste away.

Despite it, I pull at the jolt of magic again, wondering if I can use the Sphere’s magic to do the kinds of magic I used to have.

It answers. I urge the earthy feeling up through my chest and into my head, holding my breath, until I feel like an inflated balloon.

My lips lose feeling first. Then the Anatomer magic sends a rush of heat across my cheeks, and they numb.

My hands find my face, following the curve of my shifting cheekbones, then my hairline.

The pain in my body intensifies. Despite the loss, this is the most I’ve felt like myself in months.

I tighten my fist and dig harder for the parts of myself that feel familiar.

My eyes shift farther apart and thin as my Anatomer magic takes over. When I’ve transformed, I exhale.

When the numbness fades, I collapse against the barn wall, half-worried using magic is making things worse and half-relieved I can still reach proper magic, despite the toushana feeling so much stronger.

An idea strikes me, and it twists like a dagger in my gut.

I was an Audior, an Anatomer, and a Shifter.

But with the Sphere’s magic, could I do any magic?

I peel myself off the wall. Retentor magic requires an imbued stone, which I don’t have.

But I could try the other one: Cultivating.

Cultivators augment magic in others, using rings with stones full of magic.

I shouldn’t need rings. The magic is inside me.

I am the stone. I stare again at my hands, blinking.

Cultivators grow magic in others.

Retentors remove magic.

Is there some way to combine them to get this magic inside me out and into something else? Is reverse-Cultivating a possibility? I bite my lip, my mind racing. I would have to be able to do both kinds of magic first.

“Jordan?” Quell appears between the barn doors like a dream, holding a sandwich wrapped in a napkin. Her forehead wrinkles in the way it does when she’s stressed.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“I’m fine.” She hands me the food, and I set it aside. The lull of my heart has slowed to a steady beat, but the ache from using magic hasn’t.

Quell holds her own heart, feeling the tracer bond we share, where we feel each other’s deepest emotions. “You’re clearly not.”

“Are they going to get a Healer?” I ask.

“I’m still working on that.” With a tentative hand, she reaches to push my hair out of my face.

I dodge her touch.

“Your lips have no color, and you’re covered in sweat.”

Her words unfurl something hot in my chest that’s not magic, and I almost wish I’d let her touch me just then. To feel something other than pain. “You’re looking at my lips?”

Her chuckle doesn’t melt her annoyance.

I sigh. “I am frustrated with the way things are between us. And how helpless I feel. I’m alright now. What else happened in there?” It is written all over her face.

“Willam mentioned some things that have me thinking.”

“Like?” I follow her, allured by the notes of honey and jasmine in the air but more concerned about how hard she is pulling at the thread of her clothes.

“There are more Darkbearer attacks in other cities, Unmarked neighborhoods.”

I scowl. More death, more destruction by magic, means more fear of magic. This is my duty to fix. I glare at where the Dragunheart pendant used to hang against my chest.

“But…” She stops. So do I, careful to keep a pace between us. She tangles her long brown coils around her fingers. When she finally meets my eyes, hers are all worry.

“What happens with magic and the Order is sort of up to—”

“Me.” I shift on my feet. The Order has always dictated who can use magic and who cannot.

It wields access to magical training, like a bargaining chip.

Sign over your soul to us, and the world is yours.

The Order gives power to some and rips it from others.

But the worst part is that it destroys people in the process.

Whatever I do with this magic, I won’t let it be weaponized like it was.

“Us,” she says.

“You’ve never cared about the Order before.”

“I’m realizing I need to care.”

Need. Not want.

“Who better to decide how this all should look than someone with your past and my present? You have lived in the ugliest parts of the Order at Hartsboro. I am in the world but not seduced by its glamour anymore. We could work with the people here, who’ve been forced to the margins. Three valuable perspectives.”

The warmth drains from my body, the toushana inside me writhing. “You, me, and…Willam?”

“The safe houses.”

Now I’m pacing. Each step feels heavier than the one before it. My hands are slick with sweat. I want to reassure her, but I can’t. When I absorbed the Sphere’s magic into my body as a last resort, it was because deep down I don’t trust anyone else to handle magic’s future.

“Quell, we can’t pretend that just because you met a few nice people in safe houses, they’re all that way. I’ve seen things that would give you nightmares.” Willam is one of hundreds, maybe thousands.

“What Knox has lived through would give you nightmares.” Her burgeoning frustration burns in my chest. I don’t like this divide between us. I can’t hold her, stroke her hair, assure her that I am in this, with her and for her. Whatever it takes.

“We need to take things one step at a time. My wound healed first. The Sphere’s magic out of me. Then we rebuild.”

“Agreed.” Her voice is softer, and it settles my pulse. “I did allude to the idea with Willam already, trying to get him to help us.”

“You did not.” Cold lurches in my chest. I stagger, it hits me so sharply. “And what did he say?”

“He said he had to think about it.”

“We should have talked about this first.”

“There was no time. It just occurred to me. And it feels right.” She is getting worked up again.

Hasn’t he caused her enough heartache for a lifetime?

I plop down beside a bale of hay. It takes a moment to situate my body in a way that doesn’t exacerbate the pain pinching my side.

Quell grabs my bag from the ground and joins me, keeping an arm’s length of space between us.

She digs around inside my satchel with a mischievous smirk and grins when she pulls out a bag of candy.

“Thief!”

I swipe at her with minimal effort, not willing to actually chance touching her.

Her eyes are wild with mirth, and it lights up the darkest part of me convinced this won’t work.

Then she rips the candy open, tosses me a few green ones, and tips one end of the bag into her mouth.

The curve of her lips assaults me with memories of being near her. Touching her. I look away.

“Where do you see yourself after all this is behind us?”

“Wherever you are.”

She pushes the rest of the candy bag my way. “Promise me.” I can feel her sadness. “I don’t have anyone else.” Her lips tighten as she fights to hold back tears. Grief has a mind of its own.

“Do you want to talk about her? Your mom.”

“Just promise me.”

“I’m here.” My fingers crawl to the bag of candy. I grab it. She doesn’t let go of her end. “But you have yourself, too. You have to be enough for yourself.” Beaulah showed me that’s a hole no one else can fill.

“I still want you.”

“You have all of me.”

“And yet I feel so far from you.” She hovers her hand over mine. I don’t move, daring to believe a stolen moment could be okay. When she brushes her fingertips across my knuckles, it sets my soul on fire. Her touch is a promise. I savor it as I pull away.

“When this is all behind us, we will lie on the beach in the shallow waves until our fingers prune.” Not hiding or running.

“It sounds like a dream.”

“I will make it real. It’s the least I could do to deserve you.”

She wrinkles her nose. “You deserve all the happiness, freedom, and love in the world without having to earn it, Jordan.”

My jaw hardens. I take the candy bag and finish eating the rest. Quell doesn’t understand.

She can’t. With all I’ve done as a Dragun, the horrible things Beaulah made me do, the people I’ve hurt, the bodies I’ve racked up, I deserve nothing.

Certainly not her. We sit for a long time in silence.

So long, Quell dozes, and I watch her sleep, attuned to the slow cadence of her heart.

Then a gunshot wakes her up.