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“Char, what happened to your hand?”
Iris looked from the angry red marks on Char’s proffered palm to his eyes, and Char wished he could have hidden it longer. He didn’t like the furrow in her brow or the concern filling her dark brown eyes. Not for what amounted to minor aches and pains compared to whatever that mage had put her through.
“It’s nothing. Just a little burn. I hardly feel it at all.”
“I could—”
“No.” He grabbed her right wrist before her hand touched the amulet. “Don’t you dare. It isn’t that bad, and you’re still healing. I’m fine.”
“Char—”
He leaned in and kissed her. She made a small sound of protest, but she soon yielded, and the kiss he’d meant only to silence her lasted longer than he’d intended. He couldn’t resist. Not when her lips tasted of honey and herbal tea and she was so beautiful, inside and out. Even now, she still thought of others first.
Then someone cleared their throat.
Char pulled back and shot a glare at Rath, leaning against the doorway with a wide smirk on his face.
“If you’re done with breakfast, Kelnor’s getting impatient. But if you want me to stall a bit longer…”
“We’ll be right there,” Char snapped.
Rath left, snickering, and Char turned back to Iris. The flustered, embarrassed look suited her much better than the worried look. Her face was bright red, and she couldn’t even meet his eyes now.
He grinned and offered her his hand again, and when she took it, he hauled her to her feet and into his arms for another kiss.
“Char!”
“You know how cute you are when you’re embarrassed like this?”
She pursed her lips, trying not to smile. “You’re impossible.”
“Yep.”
“Kelnor is waiting.”
“Mm hm.”
“Char…”
He gave her one last kiss and examined his work. Flushed to the tips of her ears, shy smile, flecks of gold dancing in dark, half-lidded eyes—this was an even better look for her. A look he wanted to see more of, but that would have to wait until later.
“Hey, Iris.”
“Yes?”
He brushed his thumb across her cheek. Her thick brown hair was still damp between his fingers, and her hands rested on his chest as his arm pressed into her back. He didn’t want to let her go, and he didn’t want to hear the truth of what happened to her over the past three weeks. “If it gets to be too much, I can tell Kelnor you need a break.”
She shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ll be fine. I’ve been trying to get as much information out of Micah as I could so I could tell somebody when I escaped, and it really can’t wait.”
And that was another reason he loved her. She was stronger than she looked.
On the inside. On the outside, at least for now, she was stiff, slow, and weak, leaning into Char as he helped her into the living room, where Kelnor and Rath had left the sofa open for them.
Rath’s smirk faltered. His blue eyes narrowed. The ever-present scowl Kelnor wore around the brothers deepened.
The fairies were the only ones who didn't seem to feel the sudden tension in the room. They flitted after Iris with another cup of stolen tea, their movements light and frivolous, and Char made a mental note to ask around the barracks about the tea so he could replace it.
“Thanks,” she said, offering the fairies a smile. To the dragons, she said, “Sorry. It takes a few days to recover.”
“No need to apologize,” Kelnor said, his words brusque. “So, the king’s mage. Micah. Char said he talks a lot when he’s confident.”
She nodded. “He does. I don’t think he talks much to anybody other than his victims, though. He’s very smart, and he’s very careful about keeping what he does a secret.”
“That lines up with everything I’ve heard about him, which isn’t much. Nobody seems to know anything about him before he showed up at the human magic school as an apprentice, not even his name. He breezed through the ranks and somehow got in good with the king right out of school, and now, he’s the king’s personal mage and advisor. But I wonder if the king even knows who he is.”
Iris bit her lip. “Probably not. I think… I think maybe he’s controlling the king, or maybe he’s just manipulating him. I don’t know for sure. But I think… I think Micah started this war.”
Rath whistled.
Kelnor’s red eyes darkened. “Why?”
Iris dropped her gaze to her teacup. “For his research. I don’t think he’s actually a powerful mage on his own, but he’s been studying magic and how to extract it from people, animals, and artifacts since he was a child, and all the magic he’s stolen has made him stronger than anybody else. He always wants more, though, and he wants to study dragons next.”
“Is that why you tried to make me stay away?” Char asked her, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. The growing anger he felt was for Micah, not Iris.
She glanced up at him and gave him a small nod. “I didn’t know at first. I thought he was just using you the same way he used the fairies to blackmail me into cooperating, but when I found that out…” She paused, her eyes once again downcast to the steaming amber liquid. “He likes to play games. Twist things around so he never breaks his word, but he still gets what he wants. He said he wouldn’t use you in his experiments if I behaved. He said he’d just kill you quickly instead of putting you through that, or maybe find a way to make you forget about me so you couldn’t come back, but I knew he was lying.”
Char clenched his jaw. He hated the thought of Micah turning Iris’ compassion into a weapon he could use against her, and he hated the part he had played in Micah’s game of control.
“You said he’s been doing this since he was a child?” Kelnor asked.
Iris nodded.
“I need to know as much as you can tell me, Iris. If I can get enough information, maybe I can talk the powers that be into trying to negotiate for peace and joining forces against this monster.”
She nodded again and took a deep breath. “His first human victim was his little sister.”
Three sets of eyes widened in shock.
“You’re kidding,” Rath choked out.
Iris shook her head. “She was too young to fight back, and she trusted him, which made it easy. Their parents heard her… heard her screaming, so he killed them, too. Only his younger brother escaped.” Iris looked up at Char. “Jonah was his younger brother.”
Char sucked in a breath. “Wow.”
“I don’t know what Micah did after that, exactly,” Iris continued, looking down at her lap and the fairy that had come to rest there. More were gathering on the back of the sofa and the armrest. “He probably has it all written down. He takes detailed notes about his experiments. I think he had the extraction process perfected by the time he got to the magic school, at least for humans, and he was already so powerful by then, nobody dared to question him.”
“Makes sense, unfortunately,” Kelnor said. “Nobody ever knows something’s wrong with him until it’s too late.”
“‘For humans’?” Rath asked. “So, it’s different for different things?”
She nodded. “Permission and trust make it easier. He manipulates the subject into giving him both, and then he makes them drink a potion that keeps them alive through the process. Or until he’s done with them, anyway. They’d die instantly without the potion. He said most of the time, he can extract all the magic a person has in one session, so he keeps going until he has it all and they’re dead. If they have a lot of magic, he stops before they die, lets them recover, and then takes the rest in the second session. I’m the only person he’s kept alive longer than that.”
“How many times did he do this to you?” Char asked. He couldn’t keep the growl out of his voice.
“Three times,” she said, her voice flat and matter-of-fact. “He thinks I’ve been healing myself while he’s extracting the magic. I can handle longer sessions than other people, and I replenish my magic when I’m recovering, so I might be an infinite source.”
“He wishes,” Rath muttered. “If he thinks—”
“Wait a minute,” Kelnor interrupted. “We can all agree he needs to be stopped, but I need to know all of it, and it seems to me this part is pretty important. If you’re so valuable to him, why did he nearly kill you two nights ago? Everything you’ve told us about him makes me think he wouldn’t make that mistake.”
“He wouldn’t, and he didn’t. He wants to keep me alive as long as he can. I made him angry, so he altered the process to make it more painful and he pushed my body further than usual, but not enough to risk killing me. That was my punishment. Well, part of it.”
“You don’t need to say the rest of it,” Char interjected.
“Char—”
“It isn’t relevant,” Char insisted, cutting Kelnor’s reprimand off.
Kelnor’s red eyes shifted to Iris.
“Char’s right. It’s… he was just being cruel.”
Kelnor sighed. “Then I’ll move on to my next question. I heard the report from the second team, and I know what you did on the battlefield. Or part of it, at least. How did that happen?”
She hesitated. “I… I don’t know how magic is supposed to work, but I know the amulet doesn’t work the way he thinks it does, and I don’t think my magic does, either. Every time he… it’s horrible, but it seems like it makes it easier for me to…” She stopped and bit her lip. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Just do the best you can.”
She chewed on her lip for a moment as she thought. “I told Char before, but I can hear the voices of the past bearers of the amulet. They call to me during the extraction process. It’s… the pain is… I can’t do anything physically to make it stop, but if I focus on them, they can pull me out of it. Out of my body. So I don’t feel the pain anymore. And then they talk to me and teach me until it’s over. After the second session, I tried to reach them on my own, and I found out I could do it. So I started practicing.”
“To fight Micah?” Rath asked.
She shook her head. “My magic isn’t offensive, and I don’t think that's the key to defeating him, anyway. The past bearers keep telling me the amulet needs to go home. Micah said there’s a legend about the amulet being cut from a massive magical crystal a thousand years ago, and I get the sense everything is wrong, out of balance, because the amulet has been away from the crystal for too long. He doesn’t believe the crystal is real, but I know it is, and I’ve been looking for it. I think restoring the amulet to the crystal will take his power away from him and fix everything.”
“And when you were looking for it, you stumbled across that battle,” Kelnor summarized.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have interfered, but I couldn’t let him use my magic to hurt others. I wasn’t ready, though. I couldn’t handle taking that much magic back. I… If the past bearers hadn’t pulled me out of it…”
Char felt sick. Iris wasn’t familiar with magic, but he was, and what she was describing sounded like the myths he’d heard about ancient mages who’d managed to leave the physical world and enter a state of pure magic. Jonah had laughed those stories off as the hallucinations of doddering old men who’d wasted their lives with their noses in books, and he’d said almost every mage he knew thought the same.
But if it were real… If she’d found that state…
What kind of pain and desperation would it take to drive a person outside of reality for refuge?
“But they did pull you out of it,” Rath said. “And then you sent the fairies away before Micah got back, and they came here for Char, and he and I rescued you.”
“After another torture session,” Char added, his voice bitter with regret. He shouldn’t have left her alone.
“But you were still fighting when we got there,” Rath continued. “You were throwing white shields out to block Micah’s attacks from reaching Char the whole time.”
Iris frowned. “Was I? I… don’t remember that.”
“You were unconscious,” Char told her. “Micah didn’t know how you were doing it, either.”
She shook her head. “Maybe the past bearers took over, or the amulet prompted me to use it without my knowing. I don’t know.”
Silence echoed throughout the room. She took another sip of her tea.
“What about the original crystal?” Kelnor finally asked. “Do you know where it is?”
She lifted her eyes to meet his. There was a confidence in her gaze she hadn’t shown this entire conversation. “I do, actually. It’s in the castle throne room.”
Rath let out a loud exhale. “Well, that’s a problem.”
“Anything else you think I should know?” Kelnor asked.
She thought for a moment and then shook her head.
“Okay.” He sighed and stood. “Time for me to tell the higher-ups what’s going on. But going through official channels will take time, and time is something we can’t afford to give someone like Micah. We’ll probably have to come up with a covert operation to get you into the castle.”
“Kelnor—” Char started, but Kelnor held his hand up to stop him.
“It’s all theory and conjecture right now. You kids relax and let me do the heavy lifting. I’ll let you know as soon as I figure something out.”
Iris nodded. “Thank you.”
“Thank you. You’re a tough little lady. Char, Rath, keep an eye on her.”
“Yes, sir."12Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡs6zBI8Ow6a
