The Way Into Magic: Book Two of The Great Way (11 page)

Yes.
“No. That’s incredibly dangerous.” She remembered the spell that Doctor Warpoole had cast as they fled the Scholars’ Tower; that one hadn’t been derived from one of the thirteen Gifts.
Wizard
. Doctor Warpoole had not gone hollow, but where had she learned that spell? How many more wizard’s spells were out there in the world? Cazia would never know. “Making a spell any way you please is a sign of madness. At least, that’s what I was taught.”
 

“You are holding something back,” Kinz said.
 

“It’s hard to talk about this,” Cazia answered. “I’ve been trained to keep secrets and tell lies.”
 

“And when you told me so many days ago,” Kinz said, “that I would need the special ‘knack’ to learn magical spells, was that the lie as well?”

Yes.
“Yes.”

Kinz’s eyes narrowed. “That is what I expected. I thought you might be different from the others of your people, but no. You lie and you take and care only for yourself.”

“What? Have you forgotten the king’s ransom in raw iron I’ve already given you?”
 

“That was scavenge from this camp! By right of discovery, it belonged to all of us and was not yours to give!”

Cazia could have pointed out she had relinquished her share for Kinz’s sake, but her anger was rising and she wasn’t about to start quibbling. She’d lived her whole life as a hostage in the king’s court in Peradain; she knew better than to mince words when someone wanted to be her Enemy. “You have the
gall
to call me a liar!” Her voice echoed off the stone walls. Arguing with Kinz was awful, but letting her voice grow to a shout felt like righteousness. “You lied to me and to Ivy right from the first moment we met, so you and your brother could spy on us!”

“But you knew we were making to deceive you,” Kinz countered, “because of your translation stone! So,
you
were just as dishonest with us from the first!”

“And here we see it!” Cazia said scornfully. “The so-called logic and reason of the herding people! Do they teach you to
think
at all, or is everything you do completely justified because you’re such a victim?”
 

“YES!” Kinz screamed at her. “We are victims! Your people rob and murder us, and I will never apologize for anything I do to the Peradaini.”

“I”M NOT PERADAINI!” Cazia shouted. Kinz rolled her eyes. “My father is Surgish! Fire and Fury, Peradain is an
empire!
My people were farmers and woodcutters four generations ago when the Italgas
conquered
them. The empire is full of all different kinds of people! Do you know why I lived my whole life in the Palace?” Hadn’t Cazia said this already? Why did she have to keep saying it? “Because my father rebelled against the Italga family. That’s why King Ellifer kept me and my brother as hostages.”

For the first time, a hint of self-doubt appeared in Kinz’s expression. To Cazia, it looked like first blood, so she bulled forward. “And you know what? All those different kinds of people are
dying
right now, and we ought to help them. Fire and Fury, I’m sorry if that’s just too
complicated
for you, but that’s the way the world is, and if you think everything you do to me is completely justified...”

Whatever Cazia planned to say next vanished from her thoughts before the words could come together. She was done. There was nothing more to say.
 

“If you were the hostage,” Kinz said without a note of apology, “why were you trained to be the scholar? Why would they teach magic to the enemy?”
 

So I could be close to the prince and loyal to his family. So I would go hollow and be executed, creating trouble for the tyr my father.
“Yep,” Cazia said, squelching through the mud as she marched toward the low corridor. Great Way, but she wanted to be as far from Kinz as possible. “Yep, yep, yep. Too complicated for you. Sorry to hear you don’t understand
anything at all
.” Without turning around, she dropped low and crawled through the low corridor into the second tower.
 

Fire take her, why had she said those things? At the far end of the corridor, she crouched in the darkness and peered at the older girl.
 

Kinz did not seem troubled by their confrontation at all. She stood with her back to Cazia, arms folded, and watched another fish leap through the arch into the mud.
 

Cazia’s own hands were trembling. Why had she tried so hard to win Kinz over? Why had she spoken that way about her Fire-taken father?

Song knew, she had never heard anything good about her father her whole life, and King Ellifer, Queen Amlian, and Lar himself had always been incredibly kind to her. Yes, the palace had been filled with people who hated her because of the rebellion, the death of Ellifer’s first wife among so many others, but the royal family themselves had looked out for her, and Lar was her friend. Her best friend after Pagesh Simblin, another traitor’s daughter.
 

And yet, she had just talked about his family as though she approved of her father’s rebellion. She’d never even met her father that she could remember. To talk about him as if he was a hero felt like a betrayal of her entire life. Still, in that moment, it had been the clever argument to make, and even worse, there was a tiny part of her that believed it.
 

The Italgas were dead. Lar himself had been bitten by a grunt; unless someone out there in the real world had devised a cure for him—which was extremely unlikely—he was either dead or a monster, which was practically the same thing.
 

However, her father was probably still alive in his tiny holdfast on the western frontier. It didn’t seem possible that the grunts could have gotten that far already.
 

She felt an inexplicable pang of regret that she hadn’t immediately set out to the west to join him. Maybe--probably--he would have thrown her in a dungeon or had her tortured for information, or... Or something. Something awful like in all the stories she’d grown up with.
 

But maybe he would have welcomed her. Maybe she would have been safe among people who didn’t treat her like an enemy of everything decent and honorable in the world. Maybe she wouldn’t have ended up here.
 

There was no hiding the fact that this daydreaming was a betrayal. Lar, his parents, and Doctor Twofin as well had been kind to her, and she had just denounced them to win a stupid argument with a girl from a herding clan.
I’m not Peradaini
? Did she really believe that?

It suddenly occurred to her that Ivy was nowhere in sight and hadn’t been for a while. She had walked off with Cazia’s jacket and that butchered fish before the big argument and...

And she hadn’t come running toward them when the shouting had started. How could she not have heard them, unless she had left the tower?
 

Cazia raced up the stairs through the broad, open room full of beds, then through the other corridor into the stinking first tower. The sun wheel lay on the ground floor by the exit, but Ivy was not inside the buildings. Cazia crouched by the open tower door and peered out at the beach. The princess was nowhere to be seen, but there was a crude trail in the stones leading from the hill where they had first come in sight of the ocean to the tower. Someone else, maybe Kinz, would have been able to read the trail to know if there were three sets of footprints or if a fourth showed Ivy heading back out, but Cazia couldn’t do it.
 

Of course, Kinz was behind her, at the far end of the buildings, and she had their only weapon, that pointed stick. Was Cazia going to run all the way back there to ask her help in searching the beach for the princess?
 

She certainly was not. Cazia picked up a hefty sharp-edged stone and stepped out onto the exposed beach. She remembered all too well the sight of those servants, so long ago, dragged screaming out to sea. Of course, she and Kinz would have heard Ivy if that had happened to her, wouldn’t they? They would have heard over the sound of their stupid argument, right?

Every moment that passed convinced her even more that the girl had been killed and Cazia had let it happen. More, that venturing out in search of her was its own death sentence. She did it anyway, taking step after step away from the entrance.
 

First, she hurried to the left, checking behind the towers. Ivy wasn’t there, and she wasn’t on the oceanfront side, either. Cazia stalked up the beach, inwardly cringing at every crunch her footsteps made on the stony beach.
 

Before she was halfway up the hill, Ivy appeared over the crest. She was hunched over and walking backward as if dragging a body. “Ivy!” Cazia clamped her hand over her mouth and sprinted up the hill. The sun was low over the mountains in the west. Night would fall soon.

The little princess turned and waved briefly, then went back to what she was doing. As she came close, Cazia saw that she was trailing a tree branch behind her, obscuring her tracks. “Ivy,” she said, when she was close enough to be heard at a hiss. “What are you doing out here alone?”
 

“I thought we could throw the Tilkilit off our tracks,” she answered simply. “So I rubbed fish blood all over your jacket and left it near the lake shore. With luck--”
 

From the sea came the sound of a monstrous roar.

Chapter 7

Ivy dropped the branch and sprinted to the tower beside Cazia.
 

The bellowing had come from somewhere out beyond the waves, beyond the great black stones standing in the water. Cazia peered at the ocean as she ran, barely looking at where they were going. Somewhere out there was a creature that could make a sound like the end of the world, and if it was going to drag her beneath the waves and devour her, she wanted to see it first.

They reached the relative safety of the black stone tower before the thing appeared above the water. Ivy, being faster, bolted through the doorway first, nearly slipping on the stones inside. Cazia followed her up the tunnel stairs. They met Kinz at the top, and the terrified look on her face must have mirrored their own.

“This way,” Cazia said, even though she had no idea what to do. They ran together out of the stinking room, through the low tunnel, to the room with the flat beds. There, they crouched beside one of the windows and peered at the waves.
 

There was nothing to see. A second bellow came, then a third. As near as Cazia could tell, it was beyond the ridge of black stone that ran into the sea. Water suddenly splashed high into the air, glittering in the rays of the setting sun behind them. Churning white wakes washed into view, but the creature or creatures that caused them stayed out of sight.
 

Chills ran down Cazia’s back. Kinz and Ivy had both begun to sweat in the chilly sea air, and Cazia wiped beads from her own forehead. As terrified as she was that some great monster would come out of the sea, now that she could hear it, she wanted to see it, too. She was desperate to see it. That sound, that bellowing, made her imagination run wild.
 

On impulse, she grasped the blue jewel in her pocket. She herself had cast the translation spell on it, and not only had it made the Tilkilit’s odor-speech intelligible, it had translated the screaming of the giant eagles and the roaring of the grunts. The only thing grunts said was some form of the word “Blessing” over and over, but it was speech. She squeezed the little jewel in her fist while the beasts outside bellowed and roared.

There were no words, just animal noises.
 

The sun set over the mountain range and the shadow of falling night swept quickly across the tower and the ocean. Things seemed to settle down at sea, just a bit, while the darkness deepened.
 

Then they heard the noise of churning water, and it grew louder with each moment.
 

“It is coming,” Kinz said, her voice tight.
 

“What do we do?” Ivy squeaked. “What can we do?”

Cazia’s people came from the westernmost part of the empire, and although she had never been there herself, she had listened carefully when storytellers and singers told tales of sea giants.
 

“We hide. Sea giants only come out after the sun has set, because their eyes are sensitive to light. They’ll be able to see us if we stand at the windows.”
 

“Are you sure this is a sea giant?” Ivy asked.
 

“No. I’ve never seen one, but this matches the stories. I thought they were only in the west, but--” Another bellow echoed across the beach and through the tower. Cazia tried to make her voice calm, hoping the princess would be reassured. “This tower has stood here for a long time. Either they’ll leave it alone or they won’t be able to damage it.”
 

It turned out to be the latter. None of the girls raised their heads to look through the window, but throughout the night, they heard gigantic forms splashing through the shallows and stomping on the beach. The bellowing was painful to hear, and the thunderous blows to the side of the tower were even louder. Cazia wasn’t sure if they were punches or kicks, but the wet slaps against the black stone made the whole
 
structure tremble.