Chapter Twenty-Five
Iend up spending the entire day with Claude, getting to know the castle’s live-in witch doctor. Apparently, a hybrid of his brand is in short supply these days. As an offspring of a strangely chosen fated match between a male wolf shifter and female witch-wolf hybrid, Claude made it clear that he understood a thing or two about odd and seemingly conflicting pairings as soon as I met him while we walked to the perimeter of the castle’s lands.
While he was teaching me warding sigils of a much higher caliber than those I’ve learned from my books, he offered to give me a few pieces of advice learned from his parents, and I declined as diplomatically and politely as I could because I currently have zero interest in getting along with Camden. I’m pissed off by his manipulation last night and this morning, so I’ll gladly leave him miserable for life. I had ranted to him about how much I despise shifters and gave him all the reasons why, and his response was to kiss me in places I had never dreamed of, thereby strengthening our bond. I’d admire that level of cunning if I wasn’t so vexed.
After I learned how to create the necessary wards from Claude—an intricate conglomerate of sigils to be placed around the premise of the castle grounds and activated with various spells—it takes the better part of an hour for me to create and activate the first sequence of sigils. The incantations are in Latin, which Claude was surprised to learn I’m already fluent in. That doesn’t make the spell work any easier; the only thing I’ve ever been able to do with my magic—other than summon a very destructive fire that I much prefer to keep locked up—is some minor mending, warding, and odd-out spells taken from the text of ancient books. Suddenly, I’m practicing the highest forms of magic with none of the necessary education, and doing so successfully, albeit with a great deal of effort.
It takes hundreds of individual sigils to create a wide enough shield to protect the vast land the castle and other royal buildings sit on, and each sigil requires an extensive magical ritual, as well as my blood. The symbols themselves need to be drawn in my blood, activated with a spell, put into the proper place in accordance with the other sigils using yet another spell, and then reinforced with a final incantation.
By the time I’m putting the final ward in place, night has fallen over the castle grounds. Claude has decided that standing is overrated and is sitting on a nearby log with a small fire he created crackling in front of him, and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost at least a third of my blood in the last hours.
“His majesty will not be pleased when he sees you,” Claude says, though his voice is resigned.
He’s spent half the day trying to get me to slow down, with very little success on his end. Evidently, Claude is worried that Camden will rip out his throat if I return to the castle in a worse state than I was when I left. Several hours ago, he insisted we stop for the day so I could rest; I asked him if he believed the vampires were spending their time resting after losing one of their royal family members. The arguments stopped after that.
“Aren’t there some rules of etiquette that say you shouldn’t speak to someone of my station with such insolence?” I respond mildly.
Claude lets out a soft snort. “If there’s anything today has taught me, it is that you, child, could not care less about royal etiquette.”
Considering I spent our first hour of casting cursing a blue streak every time I made a mistake, I can’t really blame his assumption. I don’t bother telling him not to call me child; compared to Claude’s many centuries of life, I’m essentially still an embryo to him.
“Quite the contrary. In fact, I spent the morning convincing Leisel’s nanny to give me etiquette lessons—fuck.”
My hands, shaky from the amount of blood I’ve doled out, falter in the intricate tactile gestures that go in tandem with the incantation required to transfer the sigil from its place on my arm and to the air, where it will complete the net of warding that’ll keep the castle safe from any and all types of intrusion. The other sigils I’ve created thus far are visible, glowing a faint white, and suspended in a large, interconnected web of glowing white threads made of pure protective magic.
“What were you saying about etiquette lessons?” Claude asks dryly.
I flex my hands, shaking out my fingers as quickly as possible. If I don’t move the sigil from my skin to the net before the blood dries, I’ll have to redo it, as the ritual requires fresh blood.
“If you were powerful enough to cast an effective warding, we wouldn’t be here,” I snap, before cringing at my own words. They’re unnecessarily cruel. The castle has obviously stood for quite some time with Claude’s protection; it isn’t his fault that the opposition’s heating up.
I turn to look at Claude, ready to apologize, but pause when I see his expression isn’t angry or pained; it’s thoughtful.
“You’re right,” he agrees, surprising me. “Perhaps that’s why Camden found you when he did, just in time for an attack that could’ve ended in several royal deaths. Fate does like her tricks.”
I frown, sensing something more to what he’s saying. “What do you mean?”
Claude’s gaze falls to the flames. “In shifter culture, it’s bad form to use magic to find one’s mate. Doing so is considered a snub to the gods—as if we don’t trust that events will unfold as they’re intended to. Many believe it brings bad fortune. A few days before he found you, Camden requested I perform a ritual to locate his fated mate; my compliance was reluctant at best because I’ve seen the fates punish shifters for impatience. Instead, your arrival—though by no means simple—has already proved a blessing.”
“To you,” I say under my breath, because being here has by no means been a blessing to me. I miss Aesara desperately, miss having a simpler life free of the many current complications. I had my fair share of difficulties, but they were difficulties I knew how to handle.
“In time I think you’ll find it’s a blessing to you as well,” Claude replies, apparently having heard me.
“Perhaps,” I murmur doubtfully.
“Finish up so we can head back,” Claude says. “Camden will already have my head in a basket for commandeering your entire day. I won’t dare make you late for dinner.”
Noticing that my blood’s gone dry on my arm, I sigh, reach for the knife resting in my pocket, and cut into my palm again. I let out a small hiss at the pain of renewing the wound I’ve been using as my blood source all day before using it to retrace the sigil on my arm, which is barely visible with the firelight.
Then, holding my hands out in front of me, I begin speaking in Latin while going through various tactile gestures. The sigil starts to glow red before peeling off my arm, delicately floating through the air, and finding its home in the center of several other sigils. The strands of the glowing white net that connect the other sigils reach for the new sigil, twining around it and turning its red glow to white, mirroring the others.
“You might want to shield your eyes for this part,” Claude says, just as a ripple travels through the entire net that encapsulates the palace grounds, stretching far out of sight.
The ripple stills just as the white glow brightens until it turns positively blinding, making me shut my eyes and turn away with a grimace. A moment later, the glow subsides, and I turn back to see that the net has turned into a solid single shield rather than a web, and all the sigils have fused into it. After a moment the shield’s glow disappears, turning invisible, but I can still feel a strong hum of power radiating from it.
“The brighter it glows, the more powerful it is,” Claude says faintly. “In all my years I’ve never seen a shield create such an explosion of light. Not here, and not in any of the realms I’ve visited.”
His voice sounds more shocked than praising, so I turn to look at him apprehensively. He’s staring at me with wide eyes and raised brows, the wrinkles on his forehead deepened under the weight of his surprise.
“That’s a good thing, right?” I ask slowly. When he doesn’t respond, instead continuing to stare at me, I press, “Did I do it correctly? Is it good enough? Am I good enough?”
I’m not quite sure why I ask the last question, considering I shouldn’t care less about Claude’s opinion, but despite being above him on the power spectrum, he’s half a millennium of knowledge, wisdom, and experience ahead of me—which is as valuable as raw magical ability. He’s the only other witch-adjacent being in this castle and possibly in this city, so he’s probably who I’ll be turning to for all things magical.
Claude lets out a soft puff of laughter. “To tell you the truth of it, child, you are remarkable.”
“Fucking gods, I just nearly went blind,” a voice calls out to my far left, in the direction of the castle. I swivel my head, barely able to make out the silhouette of someone walking in our direction through the darkness of night. Although I can’t see who it is, I quickly place the voice as belonging to Wyatt.
“And here comes another foul-mouthed royal,” Claude comments wryly. “I expect the two of you should get along famously.”
“Considering he intends to claim my sister in a matter of years, not to mention his species and position, there is no reality in which we will ever get along,” I say quietly so only Claude can hear,
Claude stands abruptly and walks to me, clasping my arm tightly. “You should,” he says seriously. He snaps his fingers together with his free hand, and a small shockwave of power flows out from him, making me tense. When I look around, my eyes land on the fire, and I’m shocked to see its flames appear frozen in time, not fluctuating or flickering in the least.
I turn to Claude, wide-eyed. Before I can ask for an explanation, he says curtly, “That time-freezing spell buys us a few minutes of guaranteed privacy. I’m going to give you advice, and you are going to listen for the good of yourself and your sister. Are we in accord?”
Shocked at his sudden bluntness, I can’t do anything other than nod mutely.
His grip on my arm tightens. “It’s time for you to open your eyes, Sierra, because you’re in shark-infested waters, and if you want to survive, you don’t stand a chance of doing it alone. You need connections in high places. Connections that you already have the sort of access to that others would kill for. Besides being a prime candidate to protect the young Princess from any harm that might befall her, Wyatt could be your best ally. He loves his brother, but he doesn’t agree with some of the segregation shifters impose between species—he thinks that cultural restrictions and prejudices are the reason we’re at war with the vampires in the first place.”
Claude releases my arm as though I’ve burned him, and proceeds to walk around me in a circle, appraising me with a newly critical eye. “You’re young. You’re sharp as a tack. You’re powerful beyond comprehension. If you should wish to, Sierra, you could change the world—not just for humans, but for everyone—and destiny has given you the perfect way to do it. Yet you spend time wallowing in resentment and anger because Camden’s grandfather did things that resulted in a chain of events that ended with the death of your parents. Have you considered that Camden himself is not at fault? He’s done nothing to earn your wrath other than try to keep a kingdom running under enormous pressure. I’ve gathered you fault him for the injustices humans experience, yes?”
I nod tersely, unsure how to respond to this version of Claude. So far today he’s been fairly quiet and task-oriented, and now I’m getting the sense that he presented himself that way so he could have an opportunity to study me without my being on guard. Clever.
“Have you stopped for a moment to think on the possibility that Camden quite simply does not have time to focus on anything outside his own kingdom? Shifters are by no means easy to rule—they’re mercurial, prone to violence, and only bow down to the strongest and most dominant of all. There are packs scattered across three separate continents, packs made up of three factions of shifters—wolves, felines, and dragons—which makes keeping them all in line a logistical nightmare. In the little time Camden isn’t traveling between packs on royal business, he is attending to the countless other duties that befall a king. Finding you has set him weeks behind in work, and yet he carves out time for you in a full schedule. You can’t stomach the thought of him yet—I see it will take time to change that. In the interim, get to know his brother. You may find the two of you have much in common and could accomplish a great deal together. Get yourself an ally, Sierra, or you’ll sink.”
He snaps his fingers again, and I feel whatever power he let out recede back into him as time around us resumes. The fire once again crackles and pops, and Wyatt steadily treks closer until he’s visible within the light of the flames. All the while I’m mulling over Claude’s words, deciding how much merit they have.
He’s right that Camden himself hasn’t actively inflicted harm on humanity, but he has passively turned a blind eye, or so I assumed. The fact of the matter might well be that he didn’t have time to turn an eye on them at all—I learned from my lady’s maid that he never really got a childhood; he’s been wrapped up in serious royal duties from a young age. A youth in which he lost his mother, something we have in common. Still, even though I might’ve unfairly assigned the blame for human suffering to him, he’s caused me plenty of suffering that’s reaped resentment.
Wyatt, however, hasn’t. My interactions with him can be summed up to my trying to keep him away from Leisel—I haven’t bothered to get to know him as an individual, mostly because I assumed there’s absolutely nothing we have in common, but that might not be true.
“Cam was getting ready to send out a search party for you two since you’ve been out here over ten hours; I offered to come instead,” Wyatt says, stopping beside the fire and looking between Claude and me. “Judging from the flash that nearly cost me my eyes, I assume the new shield is functional?”
“Very,” Claude responds. “I’d even go as far as to say its impenetrable. No living being could make it past the barrier and into the castle unless they were invited. Usually, anyone who tries to penetrate such shields would run into it face-first and get sent back a few steps, but I think with this one…contact with the shield alone could kill enemies.”
I nod in approval, pleased at the protection that now surrounds Leisel, while Wyatt whistles. “Nice. That’ll come in handy. Sierra, you’re scheduled for dinner with my brother in fifteen minutes, and the walk back takes about twenty, so you should probably go straight to his wing once we’re back. I’m here to walk you.”
Lovely.