Chapter 17

Rosabel La Rouge

I’d always found it fascinating the way he moved. With such ease, such confidence, like he knew he had this and nothing could possibly go wrong. Fluid, I’d once thought. His every movement was fluid, and he made everything look easy—when he carried me in his arms to the second floor, up the narrowest set of stairs I had ever seen in my life. I honestly have no idea how he even managed to fit us through. When he took us to the first of the only two doors in the small corridor, inside a bedroom that was about the same size as my room at Vuvu’s Inn in Night City. When he put me down on my feet and used his magic to clean the room—pulled the drapes apart and opened the window to let the air suck away the dust and the cobwebs and anything else that wasn’t the furniture. Not that there was much—barely any dust hung in the air, and it smelled clean in there, too, but he was very thorough anyway.

Then he took us to the bathroom next door, smaller than the one at the inn. He heated up the air and took my clothes off, cleaned me up. He let me watch while he cleaned himself up, too, and then we went back to the bedroom—all of this without saying a single word, just looking at one another, smiling. Connecting.

The room smelled even better now that the window had been open, and when Taland closed it, he heated up the air again with his magic.

At first, when he started doing those ordinary spells, I didn’t notice—I was too overwhelmed by so many emotions at once and I was still struggling to come to terms with the fact that everything had changed again so drastically for me. So suddenly. But when he leaned down to warm the bed for me, too, I noticed the flinch. It was just barely there, and maybe he got tired from using his magic so much in such a short amount of time, but it wasn’t anything that would drain his energy, to be honest. Minor first-degree spells that his raven feather, wherever he kept it, shouldn’t have even noticed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked because something inside, this voice I’d ignored all night was trying to get through just as the sun outside the window began to turn the sky grey with light.

“Nothing,” Taland said. “That’s nice and warm. Lie down, sweetness.”

“That’s not nothing. I saw you flinch. Are you hurt?” I looked down at his body when he took his shirt off and threw it over an armchair by the window. Right now, I wasn’t even turned on at the sight of him—I was looking for bruises.

“No, I’m perfectly fine,” he insisted, sitting on the small bed, then pulling me to sit on his lap.

“Were you hurt at Headquarters? Did the guards hit you?” I hadn’t noticed if they had, but Taland shook his head.

“They certainly tried.”

He was tired, though, now that I noticed. Not too tired, just…tired. More than usual. And he must have realized that I wasn’t going to just drop it because he sighed, kissing my chin, and said, “It’s my magic.”

My stomach turned.

Could it be?

“What about your magic?”

“Ever since the Iris Roe, the Drainage, it…it’s a bit painful when I use it.”

He could have slapped me right now and I would have been less panicked. My eyes closed and my mind spun and every single time I’d had to use magic since I came out of the Iris Roe came back to me fast, viciously, all at once.

“Baby, I’m okay, I swear it. It’s just pain,” he said.

“It’s not that.”

“It’s not?”

I shook my head without opening my eyes.

“So, you don’t care that I’m in pain?” he teased.

“Not even a little bit,” I muttered, focusing on the air going down my lungs.

“Sweetness, what’s wrong?” he said because he knew something was.

But how in the world could I tell him when it sounded so absurd?

I’d believe you if you said the sky was green, the sea red.

Goddess, I never knew how badly I’d needed to hear those words. Those exact words.

“That’s…it’s painful for me, too,” I finally said, and Taland’s smile dropped immediately—because he believed me.

“What do you mean?” he asked, pulling me to sit up straighter.

“It just hurts . When I use magic, it hurts me. It feels like it’s cutting me wide open, and it’s red, Taland. You never saw my magic, but it used to be orange, not red, and now…”

I raised my hand and whispered the spell, that same harmless spell that gathered light into a ball over my palm. Red flames sprung to existence, and the pain followed like it was slicing my flesh. I held back from even flinching, of course—I didn’t want him to worry.

But he saw.

“It never looked like this before. The color, it’s…it’s wrong.” The feel of it, too.

Taland grabbed my hand and brought it up, closer to his face to inspect it, even though the flames were already gone.

“It works,” he whispered in awe. “It’s back, sweetness. It’s really back.”

I nodded—yeah, that was the most important thing, the reason why my grandmother had put me in the Iris Roe in the first place.

“It is thanks to you.” With my eyes closed, I rested my forehead on his temple. “You saved me—I can’t even count how many times now. You also gave me my magic back.”

“Hmm,” Taland said. “Defective, though.”

I fisted my hand and the light disappeared. “It actually works fine. It’s just the pain…”

My voice trailed off. I swear, it was like another slap right across my face when I remembered why I’d gone to the Vault last night, when I remembered what was still inside the pocket of my jacket—the jacket that was hanging over the armrest of that armchair near the window.

Holy fuck, the bracelet.

“I’ve been trying to find an explanation for it. For the whole thing—why I would be in pain all of a sudden, and why I could see into your mind. Why my magic is more powerful than before.”

I looked at him again. “It is?”

He nodded.

“My grandmother says that my flames are now red because I have more magic,” I said. “Because the Rainbow gave me more power than I’ve ever had before.”

His brows shot up. “Except I’ve confirmed that more power doesn’t mean more pain when using magic—in fact, the opposite is true. The more powerful the Iridian, the easier the flow of magic out of his body.”

“Fuck, Taland,” I whispered because I had no clue how to go about telling him…well, everything.

“I wish I could go get us popcorn, sweetness, but I am not about to leave your side right now. We’re just going to have to get in bed and talk without eating,” he said, pulling my head up and kissing me gently. “What do you say, huh? Because you were Mud and then you came out in front of the whole world and said you weren’t. There’s gotta be a story there, I’m sure.”

I smiled, though it wasn’t a happy memory. “The Council decided what I’d say.”

Every inch of his body froze for a second, and I could tell because I was sitting on his lap. “You met the Council.”

“I did. If I ever see them again, it will be too soon.” And I meant it with all my heart. Those were some of the most dangerous, bad people I’d ever had the misfortune of meeting—and I lived with Madeline Rogan. “Let’s just lie down, okay? Let me tell you everything from the beginning.”

“Of course,” Taland whispered.

He didn’t let me move at all. He lay us down, put the covers over us, wrapped me in his arms and pulled me to him until I was half lying on his chest—my favorite place in the world to be.

With my eyes half closed and focused on the window, watching the rising sun giving more and more light to the world, I told him everything that had happened, before and after I woke up from the Iris Roe. I told him everything up until I went to the Vault with Cassie that first night.

And when I stopped, I only did so to take a deep breath and figure out how to better explain, but Taland continued to talk.

“So, they were going to kill you if you couldn’t perform magic,” he whispered, and I could see his mind working, wheels turning in his head as he stared at the ceiling and drew circles with his fingertip on my bare shoulders. His other hand was on my cheek, just resting there, just keeping me grounded. Panic-free.

“No, they knew I could do magic. They were more concerned about what kind of magic I could do,” I explained, as the memory of that Whitefire woman—Helen Paine—with the sword made of bones tried to freak me out but couldn’t. Not here. “They expected me to…I don’t know, do something that they considered dangerous, I guess. That’s why she was waiting right there with her sword drawn and ready. They were expecting it to be different.”

“Different, how?”

“No clue, just different. When they saw my magic, they were all at ease. They didn’t kill me—obviously—but they do have a Mud council-member, and he was fascinated by me.” I looked up at Taland, never moving my hand from his chest because his heartbeat was my favorite sound in the world. “I keep wondering, why didn’t he do it himself? Why didn’t he just take the Rainbow for himself, or even make one from scratch? He’s the Council—he absolutely could.” It had bothered me since that day Madeline took me to the Council. If one of the most powerful people in the world was Mud, why wouldn’t he undo what was done to him? Why wouldn’t he want to take his magic back?

“Tell me something, sweetness. Have you ever heard the term Laetus ?”

I thought about it for a second. The word was kind of familiar, but… “No, I don’t think I have.” Even though it felt like I had, didn’t it?

“They are what we call Mud today. What you were. What…what I think I became in the Drainage,” Taland said.

My stomach fell. I rose on my elbow to look at his face. “You’re not Mud, Taland. Believe me, you wouldn’t have been able to do any kind of spell with or without pain if you were.”

I’d been Mud and I had tried to call for my magic, but it hadn’t responded. Not for a second.

“I know,” Taland said. “But something else happened there, I think.” He grabbed my face in his hands and held me in front of him. “What did you do when I was carrying you through the Drainage?”

Blood rushed to my cheeks at the reminder— no, no, no, don’t take me there, please…

It was one of the worst memories of my life.

“Nothing,” I muttered. “I… nothing.” I couldn’t do anything because I was paralyzed in those moments. If I could have moved, I’d have done the impossible to keep him from stepping on those bones.

“What were you thinking then?” Taland said, and he could tell I was uncomfortable with this subject, but he asked anyway, which meant he really needed to know. The sorry in his eyes reflected clearly back to me, and the way he held me spoke volumes.

I was thinking that I kept costing the people I love everything. I was thinking that Madeline was right, I thought.

“I was thinking I wanted you to take all that energy, that magic. I was trying to open myself up so it could…I don’t know, cling to you instead,” I said. I was trying to give you my life.

Taland kissed me slowly, and by the time he was done, every inch of my flesh was raised in goose bumps.

“I think it worked, though I’m not sure. I think the power of the Rainbow slipped into me, too. Why else would we both suddenly hurt when using magic?” he finally said.

I shook my head—could it be? Because it didn’t sound very possible.

“Except I wasn’t thinking about giving you the Rainbow specifically—just my magic so you wouldn’t turn Mud. So you would survive. I thought you…” I closed my eyes, unable to finish that sentence. “You looked on the brink of collapse while you carried me.”

“I was,” he confirmed with a nod, and he was smiling, the asshole, while my eyes filled up with tears at the memory of his face, skin white, eyes dark, the way he’d rocked to the sides as he walked but never once let go of me.

“Here I thought you betrayed me and put me in prison.” He chuckled. “To realize I can be this big of a fool is quite…humbling.”

I smiled—how could I not? But a couple of tears still escaped, and he caught them both with his thumbs. “I’m a very good actress. I made it believable.”

He laughed. “You’re a lot of things, baby, but a good actress is not one of them. Your eyes have subtitles on them.”

Laughter burst out of me. Subtitles, he said. “Only to you. My ability to play a rock was what got me in this mess in the first place. Poppy was supposed to be chosen for that mission, not me. But then my face…”

My voice trailed off and I was right back in Madeline’s office again, looking at disturbing images moving on a screen made of magic.

“Who’s Poppy?” Taland asked.

“My cousin.” And she was not going to like my choosing to become a fugitive at all. If I ever saw her again, she was going to make sure I knew it.

At the thought of her, my heart ached.

“She’s, uhm…she’s two months younger than me. Our mothers were sisters. Our grandmother was sort of grooming her to become a spy, and she was supposed to come to that school to spy on you. But then she showed too much emotion, I guess, and I didn’t. So, despite Madeline’s insistence, he picked me.”

Taland moved us, put me down on the bed, and rose on his elbow right over me. “Sweetness, who picked you? Who gave you that mission?”

A lump in my throat. “David Hill, the director of the IDD.”

No expression on his face when he said, “Impossible.”

And I knew exactly how it sounded, but he had to believe me. He had to because it was the truth.

“He…he always comes to my grandmother for a lot of things still. She was his mentor, in a way. And that night when they came to her office, I was supposed to be there just as a sign of respect, but then he sat down with Poppy and he made this large screen out of thin air and began to show us these… disturbing things. There was a man jumping off the rooftop of a very tall building, and a woman being eaten by a large snake slowly—stuff like that. I looked because I couldn’t help it, and Poppy reacted. I didn’t. When he was done, Hill said that I was the one, that I would make the perfect agent.”

My eyes closed—those damn tears, angry ones now.

“Madeline accepted for me, but I had no complaints when I found out I’d be away from her for six months. It was…it was a dream come true, actually. I never knew…”

I never knew that I would end up costing Taland his freedom. If I had, I’d have run away before they took me to that school.

“You saw him,” said Taland, taking me by surprise for a moment because he was so pale, and he wasn’t smiling or hugging me or telling me that it was okay. Instead, he looked at me with a new urgency.

“Hill?” He nodded. “Yes, of course I did. A few times before I came to the school, and then I spoke to him every month while I was there. I had a special phone just for it.”

Hands on my face, Taland came closer. “Sweetness, are you absolutely sure it was David Hill who sent you on that mission?”

Now I was downright scared. The way he was looking at me…

“Yes,” I whispered. “It was Hill who sent me on the mission. It was Hill I spoke to on that phone every month. It was Hill who told me that you’d make a move at the Feast of Hope, and I think…” My eyes closed, squeezed tightly. “I think it was Hill who gave that agent the order to shoot the moment you walked into the Strongroom.”

Taland sat up.

Cold settled everywhere on my skin where he’d been touching me. I sat up, too, holding the cover to my chest.

“Taland, what’s wrong?”

“Impossible,” he repeated, shaking his head over and over.

“I swear, I’m not lying.” I was already thinking about how I could prove it to him, but Taland wrapped an arm around my shoulders the next second.

“I know that, baby. I know—I believe you, it’s not that.” He kissed my forehead.

“Then what it is? You’re scaring me, Taland.”

“Hill is our guy, sweetness,” he said, and I stopped breathing. “His mother was a Mergenbach, his grandfather one of the original founders of Selem. Hill is at the very head of the organization, together with his cousins and my brothers—Radock and Kaid.”

My ears whistled—loudly.

“I don’t…I don’t understand.”

“Hill put me in that school for the veler. Hill told me how to find the Strongroom and how to deactivate the wards. It was because of him that I made it that far.”

His voice echoed in my head. His words tried to stick to my brain, to make sense, but they couldn’t. They were just too absurd.

“No,” was all I could say for a moment. Just no.

“Selem has been after that veler for safekeeping since the beginning, but it wasn’t until I was old enough for high school that Hill thought it was time to take it into our own hands,” Taland continued.

“But…but he’s the director of the IDD. If he wanted the damn veler, he could have just gotten it! He could have made one, he could have…he…” I couldn’t speak. Words kept evading me.

“He is, but the Council still runs thing around here. Hill couldn’t just take it for himself without them knowing about it. And the veler that was in our school is different, made of old magics, with spells that are not used for velers anymore. That’s why Selem wanted that one. It’s the most powerful veler in existence today—that we know of,” he explained.

“Taland, I…I’m pretty sure Hill gave the order to shoot you,” I choked. “I’m pretty, pretty-pretty-pretty sure.”

He shook his head, pale as a ghost still, his eyes dark even though the first sunlight of the day was falling on the side of his face.

“And he told you to follow me during the Feast?”

I nodded. “He called me when I left the party and told me to keep following you together with the agents he’d sent there.”

“ He sent the agents?”

“Yes, he did. He called me—on the phone that he gave me, and only he knew about. He called me and he said to keep my eyes on you, and then…and then that order…” I closed my eyes, breathed in deeply. The voice was there in my ears, the memory so fresh, so raw. It was Hill’s voice. I was ninety-nine percent certain of it. Hill had given that order.

“It was his idea to use the Feast of Hope as a disguise,” Taland mumbled. “His idea.”

“I swear I’m telling you the truth, Taland. I swear it. I don’t really have any proof, but?—”

“Sweetness, stop talking.” He took my face in his hand and came closer and closer until the tips of our noses touched. “You don’t need proof. You don’t need to swear. I know you’re not lying.”

I swallowed hard. “He took the phone when I went back to the mansion. I can’t?—”

“I don’t care.” He kissed me on the lips. “You’re not allowed to swear or try to prove anything about anything—do you understand me? I believe you more than I believe myself.”

I nodded and I smiled, like his words didn’t mean the absolute world to me. “Okay.”

“Good,” he said, and kissed me again. “Because this is much worse than I imagined.”

He lay down and brought me with him, put me on the pillow gently. Like that, we were face-to-face, eye level, our hands intertwined together between us, our legs tangled.

“The file doesn’t exist for real,” I said because now that I knew he believed me, I could think more clearly. “Radock said it didn’t—and of course he didn’t believe me when I said the IDD sent me! Of course, he didn’t!”

Now it made sense when his brothers had me chained to that basement and were questioning me. I said the IDD had sent me on that mission, and they didn’t believe me.

“Goddess, it was never the IDD—it was Hill. Just Hill.” And I’d been too blind to see it.

Taland brought my hands to his lips and kissed my fingers. “A double agent?” he wondered.

“Maybe. I had your file in my hands—a professor brought it to me the third day of the school. It had your picture and your information, and it said that you were part of this secret rebel organization. The name was not disclosed, but I saw that file. When I returned home, he asked my grandmother to take it from me together with the phone. I’ve been searching for that file since I came back from the Iris Roe, Taland. It doesn’t exist.”

“Oh, I never liked that guy. There’s something about him…I never liked that guy,” Taland whispered.

“Me, neither. My grandmother is…maybe not afraid, but wary of him. My grandmother is a monster , Taland. She’s not just wary of anyone. Hill must be awful.” And I meant that with my whole heart.

“I don’t understand his game, though. I don’t… I don’t get it. Why? Why put me there? Why put you there to stop me?” Taland wondered, and I did, too.

“Makes no sense.” No matter how I looked at it, from whichever angle, it just didn’t add up.

“I have to tell Radock about this,” he said, then flinched.

“What’s wrong?” Because telling his brother did sound like the right thing to do.

“Nothing. Just that Radock will definitely need proof,” he said.

“Then we’ll get him proof.” We could go back. We could still find that file.

“It’s fine,” Taland suddenly said, leaning in to kiss me. “It’s fine—let’s not think about that for now.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that telling Radock the truth was more important than anything, but… “There’s something else.” Something that was weighing so heavy on my shoulders.

Taland stopped moving. “What?” he whispered. “What happened?”

“I, um…” I shook my head, squeezed his hands tightly just to gather some energy.

“What is it, sweetness? Talk to me,” Taland said in that sweet voice of his that lured the words right out of me like a siren song.

“I went to the Vault with a friend of mine just to keep myself distracted a few nights ago. And I, um…I saw something. And then I went back and I kind of, sort of stole that something from the Vault.”

The look on Taland’s face.

The smile on Taland’s face.

“My beautiful little criminal,” he whispered, and my toes curled all the way. I fucking adored to be praised by him so much it wasn’t even funny.

“Well, your little criminal stole from the Vault, and last night when I saw you there, I was going back to return it.”

He raised a brow. “Why would you do that?”

I swallowed hard. Now came the… complicated part.

“I, um…I didn’t want to keep it because it’s dangerous. A very dangerous thing that somehow gave off no signal to the guards’ radars. They didn’t even catch it when I took it out, couldn’t even read its energy at all. Which struck me as odd, but then again, all kinds of things are locked up in the Vault so I thought maybe it was just an accident or something, but?—”

I hadn’t even realized how fast I was talking and how I wasn’t making any sense to him at all, until Taland brought his lips to mine. “Sweetness, calm down. Breathe for a moment.”

And he was right. I needed to breathe, put my thoughts in order, speak in a way that he’d understand me.

Except I couldn’t because the truth of it was so absurd that it was impossible to explain it properly, even if I tried. It was impossible to tell him what it meant, but…

I could show him.

“Remember when we said it hurts to do magic, Taland?”

“Yes? Sweetness, where are you going?”

He sat up when I jumped off the bed all of a sudden, naked, and went for the jacket over the armchair.

“I did magic just two nights ago, and it didn’t hurt,” I said, and pulled out the bracelet from my pocket. I ran back to the bed and sat with him, put the bracelet between us, on the white cover. Nothing about it had changed, though I don’t even know why I kept expecting it to. It was that same bracelet, big and thick and made out of metal that looked like dried mud.

“What is that?” Taland whispered, grabbing the bracelet in his hands and inspecting it slowly.

“I think it’s an anchor,” I dared to say. “I don’t know, Taland, but there’s something about it. The magic that comes out of me with this is different.”

“Different, how?” he asked, brows narrow, those dark eyes sparkling with curiosity like precious jewels.

“You sure nobody can see us from outside?” And why the hell was I so excited?!

“Positive,” said Taland, and he was smiling now because he could tell I was excited, too.

I grabbed the bracelet. “Watch.”

I chanted a spell with the same breath. I chose a simple one, to raise the cover in the air only because it was big and the magic would spread possibly halfway around it before it faded, so it would be very clear for us to see.

The colors would be impossible to miss.

I felt the connection going through it this time, as clearly as I always felt my anchor. In fact, I felt the way my magic eagerly chose the bracelet over my ring, as if it had a mind of its own, and it was happy to be guided by that bracelet.

I was in awe.

The colors were so beautiful, perfectly visible even under the fresh sunlight. They wrapped almost halfway around the blanket lightning fast, and pulled it up in the air with ease. Then the flames disappeared, and the cover remained inches off us, floating in the air, while Taland and I looked at each other with mouths open and eyes wide and hearts paused.

Then I burst out laughing and he started cursing while he smiled, standing up from the bed as he watched the floating cover.

Goddess, how I laughed—like I’d just discovered the most wonderful thing. Like I’d just unlocked a beautiful secret—and now that Taland was here, that’s what it felt like. Not something dangerous to be wary of, but something beautiful.

“Sweetness, you just unlocked a whole new level of this game,” Taland said, smiling still.

I let the cover down on the bed slowly. “And this is not all.”