CHAPTER 5: DAUGHTER OF THE BLADE
Autumn, 1993
Agnes
Agnes deflected the wooden sword and stepped back. The follow-up cut went wide, and Agnes shot back in, the slightest burst of her Physic’s speed blurring her forward and into her student’s space. Diana’s brown eyes widened, and she nearly stumbled. The nineteen-year-old woman’s sword snapped back at Agnes along the same line as it had departed, and Agnes sheathed her hand in magic, turning aside the wooden thing with a swat. Her own point stopped an inch from Diana’s face, and she simply said, “dead.”
Diana stepped back. Not quite grown into herself yet, the girl was tall and straight, her limbs lean and strong. The future Retainer breathed hard from an exertion that came from a youth that didn’t yet know how to regulate her physical or mental energy. She was going to be very good, when she was ready. Already she was better than Agnes had been at the same age, but she was also that unique blend of cocky and earnest. Eager to prove herself and fierce enough for that urge to breed mistakes.
Mistakes as a Retainer—especially to the Schwan family—could be deadly. At fifty-five years, Agnes had lived through enough to more than gasp what her protege needed to avoid. And this one was important. It was her future to guard George Schwan’s heir. There was no room for error.
Diana brushed black hair out of her face and breathed “I thought we weren’t using magic today.”
Agnes shrugged. “I lied.”
Diana’s brows drew together. “You cheated.”
“There is no fairness in battle, Sparrow,” Agnes said, laying her training sword aside. “Soon you will be blooded, bladed, and pinned. Then your life will guard the Prince’s own blood, and there will be no room for assuming an enemy will fight fairly.”
Diana’s eyebrows raised. “You want me to throw sand in your eyes, Baba?”
The term for ‘grandmother’ that Diana had picked up from her Romani mother. Agnes wasn’t Diana’s blood kin, but she might as well have become such in the past several years of training the girl. The elder retainer barked out a laugh. “I will not kill you if you try it, Sparrow.”
They broke for lunch, eating under a tree at the edge of the grounds of Lohengrin Hall, the ancestral Schwan mansion rising from the distance, grey and gothic.
“The Prince’s heir,” Agnes asked abruptly. “Do you trust him?”
Diana looked up with a mouthful of sandwich. “Whaph?”
Agnes watched her. There was respect between herself and her student, yes. Perhaps even love, but every moment had to be a test. Every word a lesson. There was no time for anything purposeless. She was still too easily off-footed by the unexpected and that would have to change.
“Matthew Schwan,” Agnes said. “Do you trust him?”
Diana looked back at her. Her face had gone the placid sort of expressionless that said she was guarded. That was good. Any question about her future liege should’ve been met with opaqueness, that no secret be betrayed. At the same time, Agnes was her teacher, to whom she owed absolute obedience until such time as that obedience was passed to the Prince they would both serve. What then will you say, Sparrow? How will you thread this needle?
Diana paused, then said “He keeps many secrets.”
Clever, Agnes nodded. A complaint without the seeming. “He is a Seer,” Agnes said. “Not a Physic like his younger brother.”
“Michael is honest to a fault,” Diana said. “I am not sure if Matthew knows how to speak plainly.”
Best grow accustomed. Agnes nodded. “And how would you protect someone like that?”
“With my life,” Diana bristled. Defensive.
“I asked about your method, Sparrow,” Agnes said. “Not your devotion.”
That calmed her. “I—” she paused. Agnes was about to press her for stumbling when Diana finished “—I would ask him.”
Agnes paused. “Ask him what?”
“To speak plainly.”
Agnes arched an eyebrow. “No small thing to ask of a future prince.”
Diana straightened, then she said “I cannot protect a man who will not be honest with me. At some point, he will have to tell me the truth, at least where it will matter.”
Agnes caught the implied words and gave them voice. “Or else?”
Diana sighed. “Or else, eventually, I will fail.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of Agnes’s next trainee. Hesitant and smaller than most, Jason Tucker was nonetheless quick-eyed and perceptive. He cleared his throat as he stepped into view, though Agnes had sensed him a moment earlier. “Um, my pardons,” he said. “Agnes, you asked me to be here at one o’clock?”
“I did,” she said, waving him off, then turning back to Diana. “Go and work on your exercises at the pell. We will train again later.”
Diana’s words lingered with her for hours after.
Autumn, 2013
“…Or else, eventually, I will fail.”
Agnes stood in the kitchen, hands gripping the sink in a rare moment of solitude, Get it together, old girl, went the mental refrain. Two days had passed since Gabe’s magic had apparently awoken and put him and Aaron both in a coma. Two of her charges were unconscious, the Cerement was falling, and now Michael wasn’t answering his phone. Her hands clenched the old sink while the light from the stained-glass swan reflected off her fingers through the kitchen window. Diana, the swell of impossible grief welled up, fresh despite her former pupil being thirteen years dead. Your son lies unconscious. I’ve failed you completely.
A hand brushed her shoulder—soft, questioning. John. The Cerement was still strong enough that Agnes’s Sixth Sense couldn’t detect him, but that touch was too familiar not to recognize.
“It wasn’t your fault,” John’s voice, weakened by the cancer eating away at him, was frailer than it used to be. Yet still, it soothed her demons. “I know you’re going to blame yourself, and I can’t stop you—” he paused “—but try at least to set it aside when you can.”
“Easy for you to say,” she said. “You weren’t responsible for keeping everything afloat. She leaned her head into his hand and slowly turned. “We keep this place together, daragaya, but its protection, their protection, is my burden.”
“You’re not the one,” he muttered, pained, “whose body has failed when it’s needed most.”
“Don’t,” she cut him off. “If I can’t blame myself for things I’m actually responsible for, then I won’t let you deride yourself for something you can’t control.”
The illness was kept between the two of them, though she was certain Michael knew. At the beginning, they’d thought it was merely an ailment of the body, and John had stepped outside the boundaries of the Cerement to heal himself, only for the act to worsen it. That was how they’d discovered that it wasn’t just mortal cancer, but a rare illness unique to Wielders, exacerbated by his healing magic. The more John used his gifts, the faster the sickness would eat away at him.
It was a cruel irony that the very enchantment that suppressed the powers of everyone in the Gentle House, long-sustained by John’s life-force, was now keeping him alive past his time, slowing the illness. It would not hold, though. Eventually the flame of his life would grow too weak to sustain the magic, and when that happened, when it fell, he would have only days to live.
John’s eyes were gentle. He was possibly the kindest soul she’d ever met. The most forgiving. So, when his eyes closed in pain, it broke her heart.
“I know,” he muttered. A cough wracked him. It was getting worse, and they’d exhausted their options. “We’re not going to be able to keep it from them much longer.”
“Now isn’t the time for that old argument,” Agnes countered. She didn’t want to go over it now. Not again.
A sad smile crossed his face. “Well, I did warn you.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “You did.”
Aside from the two of them, only little Lina knew, from whom Agnes could hide nothing. For once in her life, Agnes was in a place of no recourse. She’d done what she’d always advised her students never to do: she’d put all her eggs in one basket.
“How are they?” she asked at last.
“The same, kept alive and sustained by whatever magic put them that way. Merlin hasn’t left their sides. He wanders back and forth between the boys.” John answered.
“He’s a good boy,” Agnes said with a faint smile.
“Aaron will take longer to wake,” John said with a sigh, “He was hurt badly by Gabe’s gifts. He would have died, but the boy gave back some of what he took, somehow.” For a moment, the old man looked almost frightened. “I never believed in the pact we made, not until I saw what happened yesterday. Guides,” he swore, “I can’t imagine if he’d grown up with it unsuppressed…”
“Don’t,” Agnes answered. “Don’t think of things that didn’t happen. Think of what is. Help me figure a way out of this mess.” She cursed. “Guides, they were never supposed to find the Circle.”
John’s expression grew pained. “Perhaps they would’ve eventually. We were all so clever, you and Michael and I, but when we forged it, we should’ve known that no cleverness can account for the ingenuity of teenagers.”
“And now I must keep the rest of them away from it. Goddamn.” Agnes cursed.
“We’ll need to think quickly,” John said, before a cough disrupted his words. He rallied. “There’s not much time left.”
Agnes put a hand on her husband’s shoulder, squeezing softly. “You need to get back to bed. There are still things I need to do.”
The call went straight to voicemail, and Agnes tried not to grind her teeth. This was the third time she’d tried to reach him, and it appeared that Michael had gone completely dark. “Dammit Michael,” she swore into the receiver, “whatever the hell you’re up to, I need you to get your ass back here as fast as you can.”
The phone was in a small alcove off the kitchen, cast in the swan’s light from the window. She was running out of time, and the emptiness on the other end of the line felt like a brick wall.
“Your nephew needs you. It’s started, Michael. The Cerement is weakening more every day. He hasn’t woken up since my last messages, but when he does, he’ll need answers—answers I’m not allowed to give him, thanks to you.”
A stream of Russian curse words flowed from her mouth, culminating in a final “call me back, or barring that, get your fucking ass back here.”
Agnes slammed the phone back on its cradle a little too hard. When she looked up, Cody was standing a few feet away, shocked and scared. “Sorry,” he said with a swallow. “I… I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
Agnes sighed, forced the tension out of her shoulders, and reached out to touch Cody’s face. “It’s not a problem,” she said, making herself smile. “I’ve known Michael a long, long time. I can yell at him.”
A small smile appeared on Cody’s face at that. “Is that why you took him and Gabe in?”
A pause. They were closer to the truth now. Careful. “Something like that,” Agnes said with a sigh. “I owed a favor. And once, a long time ago, I made a promise I dare not break.”
“Dare not break?” Cody’s eyes widened. “That sounds frightening.”
“It was, once upon a time,” Agnes said. “Some days it still is. But we are responsible for keeping the promises we make, even when they cause us pain.”
Cody looked at her and suddenly, like a dam breaking under immense, incredible pressure, his face split into a look of anguish. “Baba it’s my fault.”
“What are you talking about? Of course it’s not your fault,” she said, pressing a hand to his cheek.
It didn’t stop the tears. They ran freely down Cody’s kind face, cutting rivulets through the dirt that stained it from stall-mucking chores. “If—if I had stayed with him,” his shoulders shook. “If I had stayed close, he wouldn’t have wandered into the woods, and then Aaron wouldn’t have wandered after him and neither of them would’ve gotten hurt. Baba, it’s my fault!”
Agnes sighed, taking his face between her wrinkled, callused hands. “My kind, stupid boy. Will you take all the hurts of the world and decide they are yours? This is wrong. You did nothing, but the guilt inside you gnaws away because you think that if you say ‘this is my fault’ you can tell yourself that surely there was something you could’ve done to stop it. You imagine that there is control you could have had, and the world becomes less frightening. There was none, good-hearted, idiot boy. Understand this now: there are some things in this world for which nothing can be done. That there is no controlling, and no escaping. This is one of those things. You hear me, yes?”
Cody took a deep, shaking breath, closing his eyes and eventually nodding his head.
“Good,” Agnes said quietly, “now go wash your face. You’ll get pinkeye from all that dust. Dinner is in two hours. Leftovers.”
As his footsteps receded, Agnes breathed a quiet sigh alone in the kitchen. Kind. She had to remind herself that the boy was kind and loyal above all other things. The latter she understood intuitively, as a wolf stalking through the woods by night knew every branch and every errant root by habit and sense. The former was, if not foreign to her, at least suppressed by years of training and service that had beaten her heart flat, except when it came to those she allowed herself to love.
Not for the first time in her seventy-five years, a distant piece of the girl she’d once been wondered at the woman she had become.
Hours later, Agnes stared at Gabe in his bed. The rise and fall of his chest was faint but present. Time had come and gone, and he did not wake. Neither did Aaron. Stirring in her seat, the old woman raised a hand to brush hair away from the narrow face that looked so like his mother’s. He had a fair amount of his father in him too, when you looked at the eyes, and Michael. But when the boy opened his mouth, she thought with a smile, it was Michael that came out.
She could feel the breath coming from his nose, and that was some small comfort.
Once upon a time, they’d called her Agnes the Green. Few could have stood against her and lived, and she’d served a wise bloodline that had been—if not always just—at least well intentioned. “For such a legend,” she murmured, “I’ve never been there when it mattered.”
Merlin looked up at her from the unconscious boy’s side. How was it, Agnes wondered, that her friend, easily half the age of the children in this house, could feel wiser in these moments than she was? She scratched the mutt behind the ears. “Good boy.”
She heard the footsteps and knew at once who they belonged to. Over the years, in the absence of identifying other Wielders by her Sixth Sense that the Cerement repressed, she’d grown to know everyone in the house by the sound of their footfalls. Lina was always quiet, always unobtrusive, doing her best to make herself a person that would not trouble others. It worried Agnes, sometimes, to see a person with such a mind make herself small. I must see to that, and soon, she thought before turning. “You can come in, girl. There’s been no change.”
The door behind her creaked, and the tall, short-haired girl paused, as though momentarily unsure whether coming in here was okay, then Lina took a few halting steps forward. Merlin looked up from the bed and made the quit chuffing noise he did when any of them came close. Lina’s hands were still dirt-stained from the garden beds she loved rooting around in, and her eyes were red-rimmed, though whether from tiredness or tears the old woman couldn’t say. “How are you feeling?” Agnes asked, sitting in a chair beside the battered dresser.
Lina sat down at the foot of the bed, looking at Gabe where he lay. “He’ll wake up,” Lina said. Her voice was certain. “I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but he will.”
“You dreamed it?”
“I did,” Lina confirmed. Her eyes were heavy, weighted with things the old woman knew that she’d seen. The Cerement that had guarded the Gentle House for so long had kept most of the children’s gifts—and Gabe’s in particular—suppressed. But not Lina’s. No power, no matter how great, could blind the eyes of a Seer. The dreams had started early. Agnes tried not to fall into relief at the words. Things could still change. The future was always shifting, always morphing with the choices of the present. Matthew Schwan had been perhaps the greatest Seer of his age and yet he’d failed to foresee his family’s violent end. Agnes looked back at Gabe, still unconscious. Diana.
“Are you alright?” she finally asked Lina, watching the girl as carefully as she could. Lina was, at turns, placid as a pond, or so anxious she’d throw up in the bathroom. Agnes tried not to worsen it with her questions; but cut off as they so often were from the broader Wielder world, and careful even in how they interacted with the mortal one, her dreams were far too valuable to go ignored. Questions had to be posed. Even ones that were painful and difficult.
Lina paused for a moment. Then she hugged her arms around her thin middle and gave an involuntary shudder. “It gets worse from here,” she said with quiet fear.
“Child,” Agnes started, reaching for her arm, but Lina pulled away.
“Don’t,” she said, not harsh but withdrawing. “I… just please don’t promise me that everything’s going to be alright, Baba. Because you don’t know that and you can’t control that.”
She turned and left the room. “Don’t make promises that you can’t keep.”
Agnes closed her eyes, her still-extended hand dropping after a moment. Then after a deep sigh, she resolved to do one last thing before dinner.
The rain picked up as Agnes stood at the circle’s edge. It sat inert, outside the edge of the Cerement yet inactive. She took in the scene, gaze sweeping over the clearing, and with every detail her eyes uncovered, the tingling fear pulled her skin tighter. Guides long lost, she thought. Did the boy do all this himself?
The moss that formed the lines of the intricate ritual circle was burned a black that had spread to stain the stones that ringed its edge. Past that, the grass was black and brown, drained of life, all the way to the edge of the trees, where the first ring around the entire clearing was dead, their needles and leaves shed to the ground and trunks and branches withered and bleached.
Merlin padded around the edge of the clearing, sniffing the dirt and occasionally raising his eyes to look at her. Dogs could sometimes sense strangeness, but he seemed not to smell anything amiss. A living person hadn’t caused this, then. There was no sign of an intruder that Merlin could detect. He would’ve made it clear to her.
Agnes turned in a circle, taking in the damage, and considered the possibilities. Had he drawn all the aether into himself? It fit with what she was looking at. But what had triggered it? This circle wasn’t meant for that. She knelt at its edge, her fingers brushing across the symbols she’d carved herself, in defiance of Council Law, the Threefold Pact, and all rules of good sense she’d ever been taught. Opening her Sixth Sense to the world she reached out for any power that felt out of place. No disruptions greeted her. Nothing odd or unusual. Nothing at all.
Absent any outward signs, she’d have to invoke the circle itself and speak to the ones it was made to talk to. She hesitated. The spirits of this place were assholes. They wouldn’t appreciate the contact.
Oh well. She needed answers.
Her left hand floated to her left hip and drew her glassblade from the void-sheath—the small pocket of nothing in which she stored her weapon. The green sword named Spring’s Breath shimmered in the gray daylight, and falling drops of rain chimed against its length in a chorus of soft bells. Merlin padded up to her left side and sat down, guarding her unarmed flank as he always did.
She took a step forward and plunged her weapon into the damp ground. “Earth and stone, a daughter of the blade calls.”
The wind rushed, and a warmth grew beneath her as her weapon glowed brighter. A groaning sound echoed in her ears, a shifting of the stone and rock, then she felt a presence that set her neck hairs standing on end.
Agnes opened her eyes. A large, moss-covered boulder stood in the center of the circle. A hairline crack split the rock and became a mouth set with rows on rows of crystalline chisel-teeth. It spoke, and the air smelled of damp soil.
“It is autumn, daughter of the blade. We are tired.”
“I have a need,” she answered. “I seldom invoke our bargain. Twice, in thirteen years, this will be.”
“You were just here.” The stone grunted. “But a bargain is a bargain. What do you want?”
Agnes sighed. The problem with earth spirits was they lived in geological time. Twice in her seventy-five years was pestering them incessantly. Twice in thirteen? She was like one of the children, knocking on the bedroom door every five seconds.
“One of my children activated this circle days ago,” she said. “The eruption of aether inflicted the damage you see around you and has rendered him and one other of the children unconscious. I need to know what was done here.”
The spirit didn’t answer at first. Then it said, “we do not know.”
Agnes’s heart clenched. “How is that possible? You perceive everything that happens in this space.”
The stone’s face was unreadable, mouth expressionless. “Something interfered with the power of this circle. How, or who, or what, we don’t know. The time when it happened is likewise hidden from us. That is troubling.”
You’re damn right it is.
Agnes’s blood ran cold. Settled, then. Nobody was to wander this path for the foreseeable future. Good luck enforcing that.
“Can you tell me what has happened to the aether in this place? The land?”
“All of it was drawn away,” the stone said. “We do not know how, or why. It will recover, but for the living things it hurt, only time will heal them. No magic can hasten their recovery. Not even the strongest of Menders.”
Agnes took a deep breath. Now for the harder ask. “The Cerement takes an increasing toll on my husband,” Agnes breathed. “He is very sick, and the pain of carrying it is sapping his strength. Your strength is infinite. I ask that you take some of its weight from his shoulders.”
She kept her tone as formal as she could. That was important, when speaking to the immortal spirits of the natural world. The things that embodied rock and stone and wind and water. That lived alongside Wielders, unseen by mortals.
Silence. The wind and rain swept and pelted around them. The stone’s mouth remained closed for a long time. It’s featureless face implacable and unreadable. Then, “No.”
Agnes felt her temper flaring. “Our bargain—"
“No!”
The ground under Agnes shuddered. She almost lost her balance. Dammit, she wasn’t as young as she used to be. Merlin growled at the spirit, showing his teeth.
“The Cerement and its dampening of the natural order was never a part of our accord,” the stone murmured. “It was imposed upon us. We endure, out of respect, but we have no obligation to uphold what should never have been done.”
She closed her eyes. At a younger age she would have fought, argued, kicked, screamed and threatened, but age had taught her to compromise. That door was closed, then.
“You’ve upheld every promise,” she murmured, calming her tone. “Kept our crops strong enough to feed all the children, staved off drought and flood. In return I’ve seen to it that the places on this land you named inviolate went untouched. I have but one thing more to ask, if you will heed me.”
“The Cerement will soon fall,” Agnes said. Fear knifed through her. Saying it out loud was admitting it was real. “I fear we will come under attack when that time comes. I ask that you aid us and thwart our enemies, should the need arise.”
“You are in danger from more than just the Council,” the stone said, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with her request.
The words chilled her. The wind rustled the branches of the dead trees around them. “What do you mean?”
“The ones who are Nothing,” the Stone said.
The sweat froze on Agnes’s neck. “The ones you speak of,” she said after a moment. “They’ve been gone for centuries.”
The stone’s mouth drew into a thin line, then it said “they are never gone. They will come again. We feel it.”
Swallowing, Agnes asked “When?”
The implacable line of the spirit’s mouth moved to form a single word.
“Soon.”