Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (4 page)

“She’s been here over three centuries and she’s a guest?”

A small, unsmiling look at him. “Dragons live a long time.”

Something to remember if he was, indeed, to meet a dragon. To this Morag, he and Gina had mayfly lives. Were they as inconsequential to a dragon as mayflies were to a human?

“You can leave your overnight bag here,” Gina said. “Morag and I worked out a means of translocation that I can trigger. It’s a cliché, but you need to follow me into the closet under the stairs.”

The staircase was substantial, suited to a house that was the sort of grand home a successful sea captain might have built. Lewis didn’t even have to duck his head to enter the closet doorway.

Gina went first.

The door closed itself behind him and the closet fell away. Between one heartbeat and the next, a new locale created itself around them.

The dragon’s den was vast. It had walls of white opal that seemed to provide their own light. They also moved, not obviously, but when he squinted, one second they were close and the next, they were far, far away. There were no windows and no obvious walls. Only the floor was distinct, a different, darker opal color, with more red than the blue and green that predominated on the walls and ceiling. Cathedrals weren’t so vast or so belittling.

“Overwhelming, isn’t it?” Gina touched his arm. “This way. You need something to serve as a reference point. It’ll steady you.”

He followed her direction and saw an island of human habitation in the alien chamber. A low bookcase and table were arranged in an L-shape with a kitchen chair tucked into the table, and in the rectangular empty space, an armchair stood on a dark brown and forest-green rug. His senses, which had been reaching for and failing to find reliable markers, focused on the ordinariness of that tiny patch of human habitation.

“Come on.” Gina urged him forward.

The chairs seemed a football field away. Yet three steps brought him and Gina to the edge of the rug.

“Good afternoon.” The unfamiliar voice sounded human.

Lewis whirled around, reaching instinctively for his magic, and finding the emptiness at his center. His gaze found the dragon.

Imagine a slender gecko grown to the size of a giraffe. Now, color it a shiny iridescent black with its skin reflecting palely the white opal colors of the chamber. Around its neck are fist-wide tentacles, slightly swaying, seemingly of their own accord, and as long as a man’s arm. There’s an impression that the tentacles move independently. Prehensile tentacles?

“Morag, Lewis Bennett, president of the Collegium, as requested. Lewis, Morag.” Gina’s introductions were brief, reasonably enough: who else could they be?

“Good afternoon, Morag,” Lewis said.

Abruptly, the dragon was in front of him as the floor did that weird trick of swallowing space. Warm, pale orange smoke issued from the dragon’s nostrils and momentarily obscured his vision. He breathed some in, and it was pumpkin spice in both scent and taste.

“There, now,” Morag said. “That dispenses with those latent spells.”

“You carried spells to my home and here?” Gina scowled an accusation at him.

“No.” Betrayal had a metallic coldness, one that froze his relaxed mood of wonder. Curiosity shriveled under the frost of rage. Kora had done this. Possibly with the connivance of other senior mages. The new commander of the guardians would not accept that whilst he lacked magic, Lewis still had the right to decide which magics touched him. “I carried no spells of my own volition. Some among the Collegium think that my lack of magic entitles them to ‘protect’ me with spells of their own.”

“Spells that they can trigger to track him, among other things,” Morag said.

Anger beat a heavy pulse in his blood. “What other things?”

“There was a compulsion spell on you that could be triggered so you couldn’t answer questions. Another would lock you in a bubble of air and push poison out around you. Lethal poison.”

He swore.

“It seems, Lewis, that you need the power I can show you to protect yourself from those who claim to be allies.”

He fought down his anger to stare at the dragon. He had only this alien creature’s word that he’d been bespelled, but the knowledge rang true. His instincts and quiet investigation had warned him that others in the Collegium were playing at the borders of ethical magical. The demon’s infiltration had tarnished many things. Fay might have banished it, but its stench remained. Panicked people didn’t always behave nobly.

He looked up into the dragon’s large circular eyes with pupils like starbursts in the midnight blue. “I’m listening. Teach me.”

Gina hitched herself up to sit on the table she’d used to create a human space in Morag’s vast home. Lewis’s meeting with Morag hadn’t gone at all the way she’d foreseen. She’d anticipated some shock or rejection on his part when he first viewed Morag, but he’d barely blinked. The news that he’d been secretly bespelled exercised him far more.

But then, how would she feel to learn herself powerless and unknowingly constrained?

Dear heaven.
When Lewis returned to the Collegium, tomorrow, he’d be out for blood.

Morag had been characteristically clever to open with that ploy. From reluctance, Lewis was now a motivated student.

“Please, sit down,” Morag invited him. “I’ll begin with a story.”

Gina nodded to Lewis to take the armchair.

“I could begin with the story of myself and my presence on Earth, but Gina can tell you that, human to human, and I will answer any questions you have, later. For now, let us begin with you.” She settled on the floor, curling her tail around her front legs as a cat might. “Eleven months ago I sensed your fight with the weather mage not so many miles distant from here.”

Lewis leaned forward sharply. “You sensed a weather mage?”

“Yes.”

“And you sensed the storm itself, the lives lost, my magic burning out…but you didn’t act.”

“Earth is for the Earth-born to determine. I am bound by guest law, forbidden from intervening.” The tip of her tail beat the floor gently twice. “I can only make you aware of the capacity in yourselves. Your choices must shape your world.”

Gina couldn’t see Lewis’s face. She slipped off the table and pulled its chair around and slightly away from the rug so that she could see his reaction. It was hardly worth the effort.

He was expressionless. “A harsh rule. To have the power to do good and not use it is not a neutral choice.”

“But what is good and what is ill? What are the consequences of even the best-intentioned act?” Morag was unoffended by his criticism. If anything she sounded sad and sympathetic. “We had terrible wars. Sapient species were destroyed before we learned to be non-interventionist. We cannot live another’s life for them, no matter how much standing by hurts us.”

In the silence, the low hum of Morag’s home vibrated reassurance. Gina wasn’t sure if Lewis could perceive it, or whether that comfort was something time and house witchery instincts had attuned her to.

Lewis nodded once, apparently accepting Morag’s words. Or at least, accepting that she wouldn’t change her mind or policy. “You said the ice storm occurred not far from here, so we’re in northern Canada?”

“Yes. My kind likes the cold. We do not have snow on our home world, but it is a delight and plaything for us. I choose to make my home in a pleasant place.”

“And an isolated one,” he observed.

“Isolation depends on how one travels,” Morag said gently. “Which brings us back to my story.”

Her wings lifted and settled. She’d told Gina once that they were vestigial limbs, remnants of when dragons had once soared via muscular power and aerodynamics. Now, her kind had other ways of moving through the world. The Deeper Path.

Lewis watched the transparent wings fold and appear to vanish against the blackness of Morag’s hide. He frowned.

“How we view the world determines how we interact with it,” she said. “When you had magic, you saw the world as lit and influenced by that power. You could change things in ways that the majority of humans, those you call mundanes, could not imagine. They are limited by their ordinary sight. You had mage sight. But to me, your mage sight was itself a limitation. Describe to me how you saw magic.”

Gina called up her own mage sight, letting it overlay the physical reality of Morag’s chamber. A pale shimmer of translucent gold spread over all of Morag’s home, but thickened and shifted into strands of magic where Gina herself had used house witchery skills on her small corner of human habitation where she now sat with Lewis.

He was a blank space in the world of gold, as a mundane would be. Magic didn’t avoid him, but it didn’t flow to him or coil around him as it did for a magic user.

Gina summoned her own magic, letting it coat her right hand and slide off to form a glowing ball of light that she tossed up into the air and, with a thought, allowed to dissipate. It disintegrated in a shower of rose scent.

Lewis turned his head, apparently sensing the rose oil if not the magic. He turned back to Morag without commenting on it. “I used to see magic as golden light. It was diffused through the world, with strands of different thicknesses indicating a purposeful shaping of it or the presence of a powerful magic user. Mostly I saw it as cords in every thickness from silk thread to anchor rope. When I cast spells, those cords wove into new patterns.”

“Power and control,” Morag said. “Useful, if crude. Wasteful, though.”

Gina gathered in her magic. It came with a rush of warmth and comfort. What Morag described was an introduction to the concept of clarity of sight. Gina was haunted by her repeated failure to acquire it.

Morag’s large head swung in her direction. “But human, very human. Magic is part of humans’ shaping of your Earth. It is not to be despised. It is to be valued. It provides many things.”

That was definitely for her, not Lewis.

He’d picked up on it, too, and looked at her.

She tilted her chin. She didn’t want reassurance or pity.

Morag’s head dipped. A faint puff of lemon-yellow smoke drifted from her nostrils. A sigh. “Lewis, human magic is a way of seeing and manipulating possibilities in your world. It is a broad brushstroke. Yes, even your finest silk threads are clumsy beside what clarity of sight shows. But to see the deeper patterns that your mage sight hides, you have to erode it. You called it burn out. In fact, you channeled so much power through your mage sight structures that you burst them. They couldn’t contain it.

“It is not an easy thing to do. It requires discipline and determination to overcome your human instinct to remain linked to your world in a thousand different ways. Each of those ties, though you didn’t realize it, had to be severed. If even one had held, you couldn’t have pushed your magic through to burn out. It would have stopped short, even if it had to render you unconscious to do so.”

Gina touched her face. In her five attempts at attaining clarity of sight, she’d gone unconscious twice, suffered nose bleeds and agony throughout her body.

Lewis had suffered when he eroded his magic to save the people on the stricken cruise ship. But he had pushed through every pain and through the final hurdle she couldn’t overcome.

Morag’s voice was gentle, a nanny telling a bedtime story to a scared five-year-old. “In your determination to save the people on that boat, you sacrificed your own humanity.”

“I’m still me.”

“Yes,” Morag agreed. “Your sacrifice was a natural progression of your years of training and discipline. You have sacrificed much to serve your Collegium. You were never the strongest mage in your training group, not by innate magic. But you became stronger than all of them via the rigor with which you used your magic. None was wasted. You cut away all distractions. You devoted your life to serving the Collegium, to saving the innocent. Only Faith Olwen was a stronger mage within the Collegium, and she left it.”

“You watch happenings in the Collegium closely.”

“They have been exciting lately, and before then, it is wise for me to observe the state of human magic.”

“Does Gina spy for you?”

“Me?” Gina blinked. She’d pulled a leg up while she listened, wrapping her arms around it and resting her chin on her knee. Now, in shock, her leg dropped to the ground. “Morag can learn far more than I ever could. And I’m not a spy!”

“Your computer skills would assist you,” Lewis said.

“Good grief.” She was silenced. Did he really live his life in such a state of suspicion?

“No, Gina doesn’t spy for me.” Three tiny puffs of azure-blue smoke indicated Morag’s amusement. They drifted up to merge with the complex, shifting pattern of the opal roof. “I can learn anything I need to know myself. Earth has been my home for many centuries. Gina provides companionship and a link to humanity. I value her friendship and her house witchery comforts.”

Gina smiled, acknowledging and reciprocating Morag’s claim of friendship. However, there was more to their relationship than Morag implied. Gina had inherited the role of dragon knight from her aunt Deborah, who had achieved clarity of sight and journeyed now on the Deeper Path. Aunt Deborah had been blunt. “We serve Morag, and all humanity, by reminding her of who we are, our needs, hopes and vulnerabilities. She is a guest here, but if she had no contact with humans, how long would it be before she forgot her guest status? We remind her that humanity’s needs must come before her desires.”

“And so we become distracted,” Morag said. “It is something humans do. You have many interests and many ties on your emotions. My hypothesis is that these distractions are why what you call magic is revealed to you as cords of golden light. It must be substantial to your vision or you wouldn’t be able to focus on it.”

It wasn’t the first time Morag had implied or flat out told Gina that as a human she had many competing interests in her life. Gina struggled with the notion. Family were essential. She couldn’t—and wouldn’t—weaken her ties to them. Nor did she want to let go of her house. Her home needed to be maintained. Old houses took a lot of work and she loved her garden. She loved the sensual pleasure of working in it. Even the soreness of tired muscles after turning over dirt for new planting had a rightness to it.

“If I understand you,” Lewis said. “You’re saying that I have burned out a barrier to seeing magic differently because I’ve had years of cutting away anything that distracted me from serving the Collegium?”

“You have understood.”

“It is a message I’ve heard before,” he said evenly.

Both Morag and Gina stared at him. The stars in the dragon’s eyes swirled in surprise. “You have heard of the Deeper Path before?”

“No, I have heard that I’ve sacrificed my humanity to serving the Collegium before.” The faintest trace of pain in his low voice. “From my parents, from former partners, from those I’ve served with and those I’ve brought to justice.”

Had everyone told Lewis he was inhuman?

Were they blind?

She hadn’t been drowning in lust for a cold machine. Lewis was so devastatingly attractive because he unconsciously challenged a woman to unlock all the passion she could sense he controlled. But perhaps other women had tried and failed to answer that challenge? Gina ought to take it as a warning.

She straightened on her chair. Not that she wanted to get involved with a man setting out on the Deeper Path. He’d be living her dream and leaving her behind.

No, she had more sense than to choose that self-destructive route.

“Very well,” Morag was brusque, perhaps to hide her sympathy. “It is time to show you what your discipline has earned you. Clarity of sight is within you. I’ll simply teach you a technique for awakening it. If you’re ready?”

A long pause. “Begin.”