When he woke, someone had entered the space with him. The presence was unsettling. A man. He was certainly not one of the three who had been there before, and his Fire was stronger than the empty things he had seen in the courtyard. This was another, a youngling, with Fire so juvenile it tumbled and spat inside him with little sense or direction. Haltingly, hesitation in every word, the youngling was attempting magik. Ceithin raised his eyebrows in surprise. The words of enchantment to manipulate Fire slipped into Ceithin’s incomplete sleeping dreams. They were snapped, stuttered words—not smooth with practiced magik but harsh and shocking in their simplicity. Suddenly his dreams turned to blue. The crimson inside him tried to hold tight, but slowly it morphed to orange, then through the entire spectrum until it finally transformed to a sapphire so bright it hurt. The iciness of the blue cooled his own Fire, and he started to wake.
“Cariad?” Definitely a new voice, not one of those who had been with Sulien. This was a young voice, resonant with false bravado. “Cariad?”
“Nguh” was the most coherent response he could form. He pushed himself back up on his elbows, blinking into the dark. He tried to move more, but a new ward had been cast inexpertly around him to keep him still.
“Don’t push,” the voice said, and the glow of blue, apparently as young as the sapphire in his dreams, haloed a young man, clearly only at his Fire birthday. He was blond, beautiful, and his eyes were the same stunning, unreal blue as the Fire he had so recently received and was currently struggling to control. “You can’t move,” the voice added hurriedly.
Ceithin relaxed, giving the impression that the magik cast actually held him still. He was intrigued by this strange development in his incarceration. How was it that this young man had chanced his luck by coming to the Council prison? How had he managed to break through? Had the Council decided on a new strategy to try and break him, using this boy as some kind of trick?
“What is this?” He waited for the younger man to move closer, watching him crouch low. Ceithin observed blue on the young man’s shaking fingertips and determination on generous lips.
“I’ll ask the questions,” his visitor countered without hesitation. “Are you from the Cariad tribe?”
“Who are you?” Ceithin’s throat, still not fully recovered from its injuries, tightened.
The stranger ignored the question and snapped his fingers so his Fire flared stronger, brighter. He edged closer, leaning in with what Ceithin assumed was the young man’s most threatening expression. “Tell me about the Cariad.”
“The Cariad?” Ceithin coughed dramatically to hide his visceral reaction to the direct question. Not many of the New World, especially one so young, spoke of the Cariad with such issue or demand. “It’s a story, a fairy tale to scare small kids.”
“No.” The stranger’s voice was strong and determined. “The Cariad aren’t a story. And you’re going to help me to find them, because… you know.”
“I don’t understand.” Ceithin didn’t know whether to admire the youngling or laugh at his avid determination to question him. Had he really thought this through? He clearly feared the Cariad yet, at the same time, demanded their location so he could… do what? Try to steal something from the Cariad themselves? He attempted to remember what someone had said to him. A young man with green Fire, Kian, who’d been with Ceithin only a few weeks before he’d spoken of a friend with blue fire who he was convinced would try to find him. Something about how his friend would be utterly determined to follow him. Was it possible this was that man? Draven? Or Diren? Or something starting with a D.
“I know you’re Cariad. It’s why the Council has you here.”
Ceithin tested his bonds with an exaggerated huff of exertion. No sense in letting the other know that his puny infant Fire had no power to hold any Cariad.
“There are no Cariad.” Ceithin could be equally as stubborn. He cast a glance to either side of his visitor and judged the possibility of escape from the dim, murky, unlit part of the stone prison he was held in. There was no need for bars and locks in any Council jail. Each space for a soul was simply carved from the ancient mineral rock the City stood upon. The members of the Council were, in the City, all-powerful and had the strongest of wards, bonding any prisoner to the stone and stopping them from leaving. Granite reinforced by warding was impenetrable by all, apart from the Guardian and the three in the Council. Well, that’s what they thought, anyway. Council members couldn’t know, but there was no kind of ward strong enough to keep Ceithin, or indeed any Cariad, if they wanted to leave.
If he hadn’t been taken by surprise, betrayed, he wouldn’t even be there. He’d have done what he came for and been back in the Valley with his family before anyone really missed him. In the convoluted history of his tribe, there existed no record of any Council imprisoning a Cariad, and it was to his shame he had been trapped.
“There are Cariad.” Hell, this man—Darach, he suddenly remembered a name, was this Darach?—was a stubborn idiot. “Kian wrote—”
So this was the man Kian had warned him of? Still, he was startled by the use of the name, aware of what its use meant to his own future. Ceithin decided that enough was enough. There was no time to indulge questions or be cautiously diplomatic. He needed to be away from there, and with a growing dread, he realized there was nothing he could do but bring the stranger along with him. He had promised Kian he would look out for this Darach. Damn it to Hell.
In one surge of movement, Ceithin snapped the fragile blue Fire trying to hold him in place and had the younger man pinned to the floor in bonds of crimson. His visitor opened his mouth. Ceithin stopped any potential shout for help with a casual flick of his wrist and a spell to silence Darach. Carefully, he eased to kneel next to his new prisoner. He only had one question for Darach. A rhetorical question given the frightened man was spelled into absolute quiet, but a good one to get out into the damp cold air.
“What are you doing here, you idiot?” He rolled to his feet and looked down at the figure prone on the floor, and a sudden uncertainty tugged at him. “Darach Gravenor.” The harshness of the syllables scratched at his throat when he spoke them, and he sensed immediate shock from his prisoner. He leaned closer. “The one who wants to follow. Kian told me, warned me you would try to find the Cariad.”
Darach shook his head, and his eyes widened in the dim light of crimson.
“I’ll let you loose. Are you going to scream? If I lift the hold, don’t make a sound, all right?” He waited until Darach nodded, then breath by breath, he snagged the bands of his Fire hovering around Darach’s face.
“You… How… Kian—” Darach wasn’t making any kind of sense, but at least he didn’t shout and lose them the safety the half-dark provided.
“He said you would look for him, and you would need me,” Ceithin stated simply.
Blue sparked around Darach’s face, an unearthly glow shimmering and snapping on his skin, and confusion was carved into his features. “But you’re a Car—”
“How the hell did you make it in here?” Surely there was the Guardian to pass by? The Council wards?
“It was easy,” Darach boasted, pride in his voice. “I do have magik.”
Magik? This man thought he had magik? That was laughable. However, the fact he got past the wards and the Guardian meant only one thing. He was allowed through. Which meant this was either some kind of Guardian trick, or a Council trap and Darach was in as much danger as he.
“We need to get out of here.” He didn’t want any more of the nightmare-story-from-my-childhood-Cariad shit, not from Darach with whom he needed to work to escape.
He had made a promise to Kian. A simple one. He promised he would watch out for Darach if he came to him, and he would remove him from harm’s way simply because Kian had begged him, his gaze so damn serious. The Cariad did not break their promises.
But how in the Hell had Darach got by the Guardian, past the library, and across the Council wards? Doubt and suspicion prickled his thoughts as he turned over possibilities in his head. Darach was like a child, a newborn, with his Fire. Nothing the man possessed in him would have protected him or made it easy for him to penetrate any kind of magik, let alone magik placed by the Council or the Guardian. It must be some kind of setup, which only reminded Ceithin of his need to leave. Whether Darach was an innocent part of an anti-Cariad trap or the instigator was a thought he had to push to one side. He had no time to consider delays or double deals or any kind of what-ifs and maybes.
Cautiously, he touched the wall, tendrils of his Fire following, the scarlet inquisitive. Feeling the stone delicately, he traced one seam of pure quartz in the granite, looking for an opening, anything where the wall wasn’t entirely solid and impenetrable.
“What are you doing?” Darach asked, and Ceithin grasped Darach’s arm, encouraging him closer. The rock was solid beneath his touch, but he sensed the water, the path of a thousand tiny streams passing through the stone around them. Carved by erosion, these hollows could be expanded. Inspiration was there in an instant. Darach had fire so blue it was incandescent and near white in places. Water, the element, was driven with the blue Fire in a symbiotic relationship, and if he could manage to pull Darach into—
“I need to get us out of here,” he half whispered, his voice low. “I can cast the magik, but I need your element as well.”
“I don’t understand. My element? I don’t have—” Darach looked bewildered, and Ceithin just stopped him there and then with his own input.
“The Fire, the element, water. Look, just give me—”
Words weren’t going to explain this. He moved his own hand to Darach’s and laced their fingers, placing them flat against the stone, mumbling the words of ancient power and taking another step closer to the sudden vortex that opened in the rock. The swirling aura was stable at least ten or so feet ahead into the mountain, but the space was tight. Steam swirled in a corona around them as the Fire and Darach’s element worked to hold back the quartz.
“No—”
Darach near whimpered as he tried to pull his hand back, but Ceithin couldn’t let him. They had to keep the magik in place, or they would become a permanent part of the Earth. He tightened his grip and yanked hard. The solid rock in front of them was now altogether something different. The fabric of the stone split and widened, and the motion of the magiked barrier was dizzying and bright. Darach tugged away, frantic, a single word on his lips: no.