Magisterium (29 page)

“She doesn’t look the way I remember, either,” Glenn said.

The floor creaked as Kevin took a step closer. “I shouldn’t have lied to you,” he said. “That night at the inn, with Farrick … Opal didn’t tell me who the Magistra was. I didn’t know until Aamon told me.”

“Would it have mattered?”

“Yes,” Kevin said quietly. “Maybe that’s wrong, but it would have. Doesn’t it matter to you?”

Does it?
Glenn wondered. Could the woman her mother had been for a few years make up for what she had become? For all the people she had hurt and killed? Glenn tried to hold the image of her mother from when she was a girl and the monstrous thing she had become in Glenn’s head at the same time, but the effort left her reeling.

Kevin followed as she left the house and went out into the yard.

Once they made it down the slate path, she could see the dark rush of the river going by. Glenn could feel its chill and the swarm of life moving in it. Glenn untied the laces on her boots and slipped them off so she could feel the damp grass and the earth below. In the distance the air shuddered with the booms and flares of fighting. Throughout the woods, terrified animals sprinted away, their small hearts pounding.

The nightshade was fading. Glenn clenched her hand into a fist and held the voices at bay.

“Is he still there?”

“Who?” Kevin asked.

“Cort.”

Kevin said nothing for a moment, his face clouding as he stared out into the dark.

“I’m still me,” he said. “But there are times when I remember parts of his life better than I remember my own.”

“You remember what he died for.”

“I do.”

Glenn didn’t take her eyes off the sweep of the dark water below.

“I want you to make me a promise,” she said. “If I lose myself, if I become what she did, you’ll stop me.”

“That’s not going to happen. Opal can help you.”

“Promise me,” Glenn insisted.

Kevin relented. “I promise,” he said. “Now come on. We should

—”

Glenn pulled Kevin into her arms and found his lips with hers.

One of his hands pressed against her lower back and drew her body close while the other rose up until his fingers were tangled in her hair.

Their breath passed hot and fast between them. They had been this close before, but now that the nightshade was nearly gone, there was no

barrier between them at all. No thoughts, no fears, just tides of warmth radiating off of him and enveloping her. He flowed into her and she into him.

When they parted, there was only a sliver of space between them filled with the white steam of their breath. Glenn brushed her fingertips along the stubble on the side of his head.

“That night on the train platform,” Glenn said. “I guess I just wanted to have something that didn’t change. You know?”

Kevin leaned in so his forehead touched hers. “Yeah,” he said, his voice husky.

“But you never really did,” Glenn said. “Did you?”

Their eyes met.

“You were stalwart.”

Glenn kissed him again and then her arms fell from his shoulders as she took a step away.

“Glenn.” Kevin reached out to her, but Glenn faded backward and slipped up into the air. “What are you …”

“Take them and go,” she said as she rose into the trees. “I’ll buy what time I can. Just remember what you promised!”

“Glenn!” Kevin shouted. But it was too late. She was gone.

Kevin’s cries faded as Glenn climbed above the trees, lost in the whipping wind and the sounds of battle that seemed closer all the time.

The air was thick with smoke and the million jumbled impressions of the armies and their victims, a maze of feelings all competing for her attention. Glenn had never felt anything like it. Her head spun and she pushed herself higher to get away from it.

She swept the clouds aside and there were the stars, the glittering violence of their explosions turned beautiful and still with distance and time. Glenn traced their patterns, leaping from one to the other, seeing the constellations rise in the pathways. All of the confusion of the place below — the struggle between meaningless distinctions — seemed foreign up in the speckled black, inconsequential.

A line of blue-white stars stood out before Glenn. She settled on them, transfixed with their familiarity. As she watched them, three words, whispers at first, slowly grew louder until Glenn could finally make them out.

“Alnitak. Alnilam. Mintaka.”

Glenn gritted her teeth and fought the urge to rise higher. There was something she had to do and there wasn’t much time. The nightshade was giving her a bit of control, but soon it would be gone.

She had to push Sturges and his people out before she lost herself completely.

The stars slipped away as she descended. Below her was a scene of almost complete devastation. A band of ground extending a mile or more from the border had been bombarded nearly flat by Sturges’s trebuchet and other war machines whose function Glenn could only guess at. It was a wasteland of fallen trees, wrecked homes, and raging fires.

The leading edge of the invasion was now west of the border, marked out in blooms of flame that sprang from the ruins of villages and ate into the forest. Thousands of troops followed behind the fires, dark silhouettes relentlessly pushing forward against the orange flames.

Every now and then they would stop, blocked by some hasty collection of farmers or remnants of the Magisterium’s army. The battles were brief and terrible, screams quickly silenced, and then the Colloquium forces marched on.

The air was choked with the misery and pain of the people of the Magisterium. The incalculable loss. A steady rage began to build within Glenn.

She remembered what Opal had told her. Voices in a crowded

room. She shut her eyes, trying to focus past the din of blood and fear.

Amidst the voices she singled out the gusts of wind that swirled over and through her. She breathed in and out, urging them forward. As she did, the wind built to a low howl, bending the trees and blowing in ranks of thick clouds. Soon the stars and the moon were blocked out and it grew bitterly dark.

The clouds were heavy with the storms brewing inside them.

Glenn left the winds and listened to them instead. A light rain began to fall — finger taps on her shoulders at first, but the more Glenn concentrated, the stronger they grew, from a whisper to a torrent. Soon sheets of water, blown nearly sideways by hurricane-force gales, assaulted the ground. The sky filled with a gray blur of wind and water.

One by one, the fires winked out and then the earth, made

unstable by the attacks, began to shift. Mudslides formed all along the Colloquium’s line. Men marched on, nearly blind, to what they thought was solid ground, only to have it vanish in an instant, transformed into waves of mud and fallen trees. An entire company was mounting a lone hillside when it was washed away in a boiling rush of earth, the red-armored bodies tumbling away like ants. Glenn bore down hard, reaching into the earth and shaking it beneath their feet, opening great rents in the rock.

Still, it wasn’t enough. After the initial surprise, more soldiers swarmed across the border and crashed into the first wave, urging them onward. Sturges’s bombardment began again from a line of trebuchets behind the advance. Shards of metal whistled through the air and crashed into the earth in front of the marching soldiers, destroying anything that stood in their way. Glenn looked down at the wind-and rain-swept land and cursed herself for thinking she could be some kind of hero.

She hung there, helpless. It was all so much and moving so fast.

The voices grew louder and more confused. Glenn couldn’t keep them separate any longer. A projectile ripped through the air only feet from Glenn’s shoulder before smashing to earth. At the moment of its crash, there was a brief burst of greenish light amidst the destruction. It was a pulse and then it was gone, but there was something in it. Something familiar.

Glenn scanned the area below and saw more and more of them: bursts of green light appearing across the entire face of the landscape like a net. Glenn lowered herself and reached out to them. The light moved through the air and flowed across her. There was a presence buried within the light. And then it hit her.

These were created by my mother.

Her essence was coursing through them. It was as clear as if she had signed her name on them. But what were they?

Another projectile crashed through the sky but Glenn ignored it, concentrating on the web of lights she saw, crisscrossed like the bars of a cell. Everything in Glenn went still.

We’re prisoners….

The soldiers were pushing even farther into the Magisterium. A string of villages lay just within their reach. Glenn could feel the people cowering inside them.

Glenn shut everything else out and opened herself up to the complex of lights. They pulsed around her and through her, unbearably heavy, eager to drag her down out of the sky. Glenn fought them as hard as she could, wrestling against their exhausting weight. Still, she fell. The sounds of the soldiers and explosions were louder now. The smell of smoke and blood was nauseating. Glenn was above the treetops and sinking fast when she felt the power in the lights slip. She landed hard in a small forest clearing. There was movement in the trees around her. A swarm of soldiers emerged and surrounded her. Their malice and the thrill that rose in their chests, knowing they were so close to victory, washed over Glenn.

Glenn struggled to stay focused. She pushed again, and the

complex of power that coursed across the land began to give way. The walls of the prison were cracking. Glenn threw all of herself into it, and in one immense tear, it was ripped apart. There was a howl of pain and rage, and when Glenn opened her eyes, she and the soldiers were not the only ones standing amongst the trees.

The forest was alight with the Miel Pan, their glittering bodies cutting through the darkness like daggers. There were three to Glenn’s right: a man and two women. To her left were five more. The lightning flashed, shadowing the lean muscles of their nearly naked bodies.

Surrounding all of them were their animals, glowing wolves and birds of prey and strange and enormous things that Glenn had no names for.

One of the Miel Pan women, with skin the color of tree bark and shimmering green eyes, turned to Glenn.

“You’ve freed us, Glennora Amantine,” she said, revealing rows and rows of needlelike teeth. “What do you ask in return?”

One of the soldiers at the head of the company turned the shaft of the spear she carried in her hand, ready to throw. The soldier to her left drew an arrow into his bow and leveled it at the Miel Pan woman.

Glenn turned to the woman with the green eyes.

“Remove the invaders,” she said.

The woman’s barbed smile rose impossibly wide and then, with a

scream, the Miel Pan launched themselves at the soldiers.

Battles raged everywhere Glenn looked as she flew over the

borderlands. The Magisterium came alive as hordes of Miel Pan appeared from every rock, tree, and hillside and threw themselves, with years of bottled-up rage, into the fight. Glenn wished she could close herself off to it, the cries and violence and the sudden darkness that rolled over the land when the soldiers died, but there was no stopping it.

Every death, every injury, every prayer to be back home and away from this rose up and hung from her like a chain.

It was getting harder to stay in the air. The effort to break her mother’s spell and release the Miel Pan almost finished her. She had to end this as fast as possible. And she knew only one way to do it. Glenn reached out, searching, until she felt a familiar presence miles away on a strip of ruined earth. He was alone and out in the open.

Michael Sturges.

Lightning crackled around her, dancing over her fingertips. The hunger to release it was undeniable. She could destroy him with a thought and end all of this.

No
, she thought, wrestling with that dark, mindless part of her as she pushed forward.

She found Michael Sturges on a flat expanse of mud, his blue suit soaked and heavy, his hair plastered to his skull.