N ikolai grinned even as pain lanced through his foot. The carpet of leaf litter on the forest floor offered no solace from Medea’s attacks. His senses strained, trying to determine when the shoots would erupt next, ready to dodge at a second’s notice. Challenge with a dash of danger—just how he liked it. So much better than endless drilling or boring lectures.
Another shoot sliced through his heel, causing him to stumble. He jumped, grabbing on to a low-hanging branch, then swung deftly to land on a fallen log. Her attacks would have to come where he could see them now. He danced along the log, careful to keep turning so his back wasn’t always facing the same way.
“You know that’s not how this works.” Medea sat cross-legged on a stump, long blonde hair gleaming in the sunlight. “You’re supposed to sense them, not see them.”
The bark rippled like a wave. Nikolai toppled to the forest floor, where he was stabbed twice more in the back. He attempted to roll over with some difficulty. The plant shoots embedded in his flesh were still attached to their root systems, and reluctant to budge. One tugged loose, but the other broke off under his skin and clung there like the world’s most uncomfortable splinter.
“Am I going too fast for you?”
“I’m fine,” he said, even though he couldn’t sense shit. Errant leaves clung to his shirt. Nikolai brushed them off, wincing as his muscles tugged the shoot stuck in his back. He twisted to see if he could reach it and found he couldn’t. “Can you get this fucking thing out of me?”
Medea smiled. “Certainly.”
Momentary pain, followed by a blessedly dull ache.
Two months had passed since his first trip to London. True to her word, Medea let him have a day off every week. Each yielded similar results. The malaise struck with the same irregular frequency as it did on the island. One day, after a particularly prolonged episode that lasted almost a full day, he asked Medea for a week off, claiming a friend desperately needed help. She hadn’t been happy but consented to the break. He timed it with one of Harper’s numerous tours out of town, giving him a week alone at the London flat. The change in scenery didn’t help. Dark thoughts plucked at him the whole time, and he was forced to admit that the island could not be the cause.
It had to be Medea herself. Either she’d followed him to London, or the reach of her abilities was extreme. Didn’t voodoo dolls allow you to do that? It was difficult to counter her spell without knowing the method of it.
He’d searched the library for spells matching his symptoms. While there were many that addled the brain, causing fear or apathy, nothing quite matched. His affliction had a draining quality that killed his appetite and made him tired but unable to rest. Still, it was a start, and he’d begun to experiment with potions that claimed to solve self-deprecation and apathy.
For his initial attempts at treatment, he chose potions containing commonly available plants—St. John’s wort, English lavender, and Roman chamomile. Even without Medea’s insistence that ingredients be replaced doubly, he wanted potions that could be made with ease. Rare and exotic wasn’t helpful when you needed round-the-clock prevention.
In the supply cabinet, he found that someone had helpfully made a catalog of every ingredient and where it could be found, along with any gateways that were relatively close to collection sites. The penmanship was elegant and graceful, not at all like Medea’s chicken scratches, which adorned the pages in the form of corrections.
It seemed that in recent years she’d had to cross out many of the gateways. Usually a replacement was written underneath, but not always. All three of his chosen plants were common and readily accessible near gateways. It only took him a few days to gather enough to replace Medea’s stock, as well as build up a nice supply for himself, which he stashed in his room.
With the plants, he crafted several potions of varying concentrations. So far, none of them prevented his shifts in mood. Only the Roman chamomile remained. If that failed, he’d have to try rarer plants or concede that whatever was affecting him could not be solved with a simple potion.
Practical lessons had become more intense. Medea graduated him from repetitive wandless casting to various training exercises, and he soon understood why apprentices found her methods cruel. For his first exercise, she bade him lay on his back in the field. He was to conjure a shield no larger than his head and deflect small stones falling from above.
The task proved to be more difficult than he’d anticipated. At first he kept summoning a full body shield, which blocked the stones but earned him a magical slap. When he was finally able to get the size right, he never seemed to summon it in the right position in time. Soon he was bloody and bruised.
That was when the shitstorm began, literally. Medea declared he lacked sufficient motivation. She summoned feces from god knew where and rained them down from above. He rapidly improved, but not before taking half a dozen hits.
Not all her exercises were that grotesque. Most of the time, Medea simply picked a magical school for her own attacks and tasked him with surviving the onslaught. The injuries were near-constant, and he worked through his collection of healing potions in short order. Despite the pain, he enjoyed these lessons, the adrenaline rush satisfying some primal craving.
For a week now, they’d been working on the current lesson, which took place not in the meadow but in the forest, a place he had yet to explore on his own. He arrived early, ahead of Medea, and cast Magic Sight before entering. As usual, the whole of the island held a faint glow of magic. The trees themselves held even more, and the largest were bright against his senses.
Unlike the rest of the island, which was dotted with pine and wind-battered cypress, here the trees were mostly deciduous—tall and already changing into their fall colors. Shafts of sunlight broke through the canopy, dappling the forest floor. He found some semblance of a path, barely a game trail, and followed it through dense overgrowth.
Light dimmed as the leaves thickened overhead. Soon the air grew chilly. Moss blanketed trunks and branches. Every so often he caught a whisper of something in the distance or saw a light just outside his field of vision. Like the details of a dream fading upon waking, so too did the sights and sounds vanish as soon as he turned toward them.
The path led to a clearing dotted with fallen logs and scattered boulders. Magic Sight turned up no enchantments, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched. He stretched out on one of the logs and waited.
The forest was silent until Medea’s arrival. She tiptoed barefoot over the leaves and took a seat on the log a few feet away.
“They haven’t bothered you, have they?”
His head jerked up. “Who?”
“The spirits who dwell here. This is a sanctuary of sorts. Not all of them come. Many choose to make a last stand where they are, but others find this form of exile preferable to the alternatives.”
That explained the lights and odd sounds. He put his head back down. “Huh. I didn’t think spirits were real.”
“Of course they’re real. Didn’t you listen to a word I said when we talked about the fae?”
“When you talked about the fae.”
“You didn’t, did you?” She made a disgusted noise and got up. “It’s a shame, because they’re as worried as I am about the current state of the world. Not only that, you’ve got a target on your back. Soul like yours—they’d be eager to have it. I’ve forbidden them to talk to you. For your own safety. If they try, let me know straightaway and make no oaths or bargains. Spirits are—well, they’re tricky to deal with.”
Was she trying to bait him? She had to be, as she’d brought up the topic and he never would have guessed spirits were on the island. But to what end? He set the thought aside as Medea started explaining the day’s lesson, which involved anticipating magical attacks.
Spells could be felt as ripples in the ether. Bare skin helped, which explained her distaste for footwear. It was the reason so many nature-casters of old ran naked through the woods, giving rise to stories of nymphs and dryads. Nikolai enthusiastically suggested they strip for the lesson, which earned him a rap on the head and a stern warning that he was to remove his socks and boots only .
The object was to stand, feet grounded, and dodge the plant shoots Medea sent at him through the forest floor. Her attacks came in rapid succession, no doubt due to his colorful comment, and within the first ten minutes both his feet were bleeding profusely. Never had he needed to take a healing potion so fast.
Even after she slowed her attacks, he had difficulty sensing anything in time to dodge. An hour later, his feet were raw from so many regrowths of skin. It went like that all week. Yesterday the buildup of scar tissue had been so thick he could barely walk, and she had to halt the lesson to do a proper healing.
“Shall we go again?” Medea still wore a smile. She did nothing to disguise how much she enjoyed hurting him during their little lessons.
Nikolai gestured for her to wait and downed a healing potion. The dull ache in his back subsided, replaced by the tightness of fresh scar tissue. He’d have to get her to fix that. A look in the mirror this morning had revealed skin heavily marred by such spots. At least he’d gained a bit of weight back. Now that he knew the malaise was affecting him that badly, he’d taken to eating twice as much on his good days. It left him feeling bloated and ill, but what else was he to do?
“Ready.”
Medea studied him for a moment. “Let’s try something different.”
Great. He’d probably have to dodge feces again.
“Sit down with your back to that tree, firmly against the trunk. Good. Now close your eyes.”
Nikolai did as he was told, nose primed for the stray scent of shit. The bark rubbed unpleasantly on his recently healed back.
“This exercise is designed to calm your body and clear your mind.”
Medea had him relax his muscles, one by one, and focus on his senses. Wind brought the scent of the ocean and rustled the leaves overhead. Birds chirped. Water bubbled in a nearby stream.
“Let the magic of the grove flow through you. Open your mind to it. Allow yourself to reach beyond what your physical senses can detect.”
At first he felt nothing, then a slow trickle of information began to flow. A beetle larva chewed through the bark of a tree. Leaves reached up in reverence toward the sun. An earthworm worked steadily to tug a leaf underground. A pocket of fungus pushed against the soil; tonight, it would erupt as mushrooms. Even the soil itself was a living thing composed of microorganisms. And there something else . . . something sinister, hovering before him.
His eyes shot open. A plant pod the size of a dinner plate halted a breath away from his face. He jerked back and slammed his head against the trunk. He tilted to one side, trying to slip around the tree, but something prevented him from moving. His entire body was wrapped in vines.
Beyond the giant pod, Medea’s grinning face tilted into view, mimicking his sideways lean. “Took you long enough to notice it.”
The pod eased forward. He struggled against the vines. Why did she have to aim it at his face? Feet were one thing, but his face? He slashed the vines erratically with telekinesis, scoring flesh in the process. Once freed, he started to stand until new vines wrapped him once more.
“Oh, come on !”
“No. You can do better. Think. What goes on around you?”
What the hell was she getting at? There was no time to speculate, for the pod opened to reveal rows of sharp toothlike protrusions. The stench of rotting meat emanated from its gaping maw. Its stem bunched up, poised and ready to strike.
He lurched to the side, offering his shoulder, which exploded in pain as the teeth found their mark. Something larger stabbed him and the pod pulsed sickeningly. His shoulder tingled and went numb.
“Dodging won’t solve your problem.”
She obviously didn’t want him using telekinesis. His hand strained against the vines, still accustomed to making wand movements, even without the wand. Time to try without. He concentrated on the base of the stem.
“Lancea!”
The Lance spell erupted from his hand only to reverberate loudly an inch from its target. Medea had shielded the damned plant.
“Attack better.”
Attack better? What kind of advice was that? If she couldn’t be helpful, she needed to shut up. He tried Ignite instead of Pummel, aiming for the base of the pod, though the pod itself blocked much of his view. Something sizzled and the air filled with the heavenly scent of cooking meat.
“You just burned a nice chunk of your shoulder.”
Fuck. At least whatever numbing agent the plant used kept him from feeling that.
“I grow weary of this,” said Medea. “Look around you. What can you use?”
“Could you be any less clear? You obviously want me to do something in particular, so why not just tell me what that is?”
“What I want is for you to—” She stopped and swore in Latin. He couldn’t understand the words, but the intonation was clear.
“As I was saying, I want you to feel around—” Her voice was oddly muffled. He shifted to get a better look.
“Are you eating a fucking kebab?”
She froze midsentence, looking to the skewered meat in her hand as if she’d only just realized it was there. “Yes?”
“Why?” He’d last seen her eat weeks ago, sitting in the grass during their noon repast. She’d summoned a scone and dunked it in her tea.
“I needed something I could hold.”
“Was popcorn unavailable?” He laced the comment with sarcasm, but she seemed to take it as a serious question.
“Popcorn isn’t really a meal. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know, why are you eating a kebab ?”
“Because my spell has been pestering me all day.”
“Your spell?”
“It reminds me to eat. The spell gets increasingly irksome the longer I ignore it. I can make it stop, but that would defeat the purpose.” She waved the kebab at him. “Sustenance!”
No wonder she was so slender. Did fasting tie into her immortality somehow? No one just forgot to eat. The body reminded you, as he well knew, and with much insistence.
Her gaze slid past him and she muttered, "Shit."
His back warmed and he twisted toward the new threat. Twenty feet behind him, the brush was engulfed in flames. The heat had to be intense to travel this far, and he soon saw why.
Nestled in the center, plants running right through it, was a human skeleton. It rapidly dissolved into ash, blown away by unnatural wind.
"Who was that?"
"Oh, don't worry about him," Medea said with feigned nonchalance.
Uh huh.
A tingling in his fingers reminded him of the pod, still pumping away at his shoulder. The numbness now extended down his arm and was slowly crawling across his chest.
“So, you want me to use something around me, but you won’t tell me what that is.”
“What I want is for you to solve the problem creatively. What is happening all around you? I know you sensed it.”
“Sensed what? Bugs? Leaves?”
“Some necromancer you’ll make.” She made a large sweeping gesture with the kebab. “Life and death are all around us. Let nature inspire you!”
“I don’t know any necromancy spells—”
“Stop thinking in such restrictive terms! Feel what goes on below you. Are all the roots strong and healthy, or do some wither and decay? What process takes place?” As she spoke, a green stalk elongated in front of him. The end bulged into a second pod. “Best hurry, this one will hit your face.”
He shot her a glare, then focused on the soil below, trying to find what she was talking about. Most of the roots grew strong, but those of one plant withered with fungus. What did she expect him to do, transfer spores to the vines and then wait days for them to take effect? Probably. Who knew how the hell her mind worked? He focused on the spores and willed them to move toward the vines entangling him.
“There’s no need for that,” she said. “Feel the process. Focus on mimicking it. Will the effect onto the vines and use your mana to spread it.”
Nikolai leaned his head against the trunk and closed his eyes, going back into the meditative state. There were the blighted roots, in a moist patch of soil across the clearing. And over here was the healthy root system which fed the plants attacking him. But how the hell to get them together?
He focused on the blighted roots, building a clear picture in his mind, then he targeted the healthy roots and attempted to overlap his perception of the two. The images kept slipping. He couldn’t focus on both sets of roots at the same time, and no matter how hard he willed necrosis onto the healthy plants, it failed to manifest.
His head drooped forward as the world blurred, his lungs working like bellows. The mana exhaustion had come without warning.
“Your will is strong, but your focus needs work. We are done for today.”
“Try . . . again . . .” He gasped for air in between words. Sweat trickled down his brow. “Just need . . . mana.”
“I think not. You were at it for nearly an hour.”
An hour? The vines snaked away from his body. At his shoulder, the pod loosened but did not fall. He fumbled at his pouch. Medea held out a potion of her own, face impassive. After a moment’s hesitation he took it. The potion theory was ludicrous in hindsight. Medea’s magic required no wand, no words—no outward sign of anything. She could be cursing him right now and he’d never know. By those standards, poison seemed downright pedestrian. Warmth flooded his body as the mana potion took effect.
He set to work removing the pod with his one working hand. His shoulder was slick with sweat and blood, and the pod resisted his efforts to remove it. He reached over to the back, wedged his fingers between the pod and his skin, and wrenched. It came off with a sickening sucking.
Numbness had concealed the damage. His shirt was completely dissolved underneath, the skin puffy and blistered. Blood trickled from wounds left by the plant’s teeth. In the center, some sort of plant stalk remained anchored in his flesh. He yanked until it came free with a trail of white fluid. Pain returned with a vengeance.
This time his pouch opened with ease. The healing potion tasted god-awful, but his wounds knitted themselves closed and he lurched to his feet.
“Tomorrow I will assign you a new task,” said Medea. “One designed to strengthen your focus.”
“Does it involve freezing water?”
The sarcasm escaped her and she considered it a moment. “No . . . but it would work for that. My current method is superior, but that’s definitely an exercise I could add.” She beamed at him. “Thank you, boy.”
He bristled. Medea rarely referred to him as anything at all, but “boy” was worse than nothing. Perhaps because she looked his age, it rankled in a way it hadn’t with Petrov.
“Boy?” It was an accusation.
A flurry of emotions crossed her face. Confusion. Realization. Concentration. Finally, the consternation of almost recalling something and repeatedly failing. “Ni—uh . . .”
“Don’t you dare guess and botch it.” She didn’t even know his name. How could she not know his name, after all these months, after all the effort he’d put into making an impression in Haven?
She had the decency to look abashed. “I’m sorry. The world—it’s so full of people and they all die in the end. I don’t bother with names. After a time, they all blur together.”
“You remember Thomas just fine.”
“Yes, well, he was exceptional.”
He crossed his arms. “You’re digging yourself in deeper here.”
“What? He was ! You’re—”
“Don’t.”
“—sufficient.”
“Stop.”
“I mean the potential is there.” She gestured to him.
Anger bubbled beneath the surface, but something else too. A chance to correct. To control. And that required calm.
* * *
“How is it that you’re a billion years old and haven’t learned a modicum of diplomacy?”
Medea considered this. “I understand the importance most people place on cultural customs. I just don’t see the point.” If someone couldn’t talk straight, they were hardly worth talking to. The boy at least had learned to forgo many of the frivolities of communication when in her presence.
“You think you’re being pragmatic. You’re not. Diplomacy can get you pretty far.”
“No, I don’t think so. When I was young, I traded knowledge for knowledge. And now . . .” She shrugged. “I can overpower anything.”
“Sometimes a diplomatic approach is best.”
She burst out laughing. This coming from the boy who’d killed his previous master to get out of a contract. “You? You of all people are lecturing me about restraint?”
“I’m not talking restraint, I’m talking strategic use of manners to get what you want. Like with the Collective delegation—”
Not this again. She was sick of hearing about it. They’d invaded her home, Jacques’ damned cronies. He couldn’t defeat her on his own, so he’d gained the support of the newly formed Collective, convincing them she was an imminent threat. Half a hundred of them had poured onto her beach. When they lost, Jacques spun stories that she’d murdered a small, peaceful delegation, though from Nikolai’s conversation in the Hanged Man, it appeared the number had grown in retellings.
“That was an assassination attempt! As I recall, you were rather impressed with how I handled them.”
“I was—I am—but that doesn’t change the fact that it had unintended consequences.”
That was true enough. The event sparked a wave of you-killed-my-brother/cousin/mother/uncle/grandfather dueling challenges and assassination attempts that lasted for generations. Like a hydra’s head, every challenger she dealt with seemed to spawn two more. But that probably wasn’t what the boy was referring to. “What do you mean?”
“There was no mention of you at the Academy. No one uses your magical methods, and no one teaches them either. You’ve been blacklisted. So while you may complain about how little I know and how terrible magic is these days, you helped bring that about.”
Ridiculous. Enemies were the best people to learn from! “It’s not my fault if they ignore how magic really works.”
“People don’t care about truth . They only care how you make them feel . You complain only dark wizards seek training with you. Who else would come? You’re the one who lectured me on the ramifications of reputation. No decent person wants to train with a murderer. If you’re polite, if you make people feel good, they let you get away with a lot more. They say to themselves, ‘He can’t be that bad, he’s such a nice fellow.’”
Maybe he was right. Jacques might have been a subpar wizard, but he was immensely popular. Popular enough to get scores of idiots to die for him. He and the boy were cut from the same cloth, now that she thought about it. Past experience told her he was probably being manipulative, but she couldn’t see how. Her brain circled back.
“All this, just to get me to use your name. Fine, discipulus , give it to me again.”
“Nikolai.”
The name passed through her like a sieve. She nodded and began to walk away.
“Say it.” The boy stood with his arms crossed, patient yet unyielding.
“What? Why?”
“You’ve already forgotten it, haven’t you?”
She crossed her own arms. “I know it begins with an N .”
“Say it three times. It’ll help you remember. Nikolai.”
What the hell was this? Names held power—was he working a spell? No, she would have felt magic being performed. Besides, he wasn’t that good yet. He just stood there, with a too-calm expression that told her nothing. Fine. She’d say his name if it would get him to shut up and leave her alone.
“Nikolai, Nikolai, Nikolai,” she mumbled. There. She turned to go.
“Say it clearly.”
She spun to confront him. “I am your master !” By what right did a novice have to lecture their master?
“And I am trying to teach you a valuable skill. This is what I’m good at. Say it again. Clearly .”
His voice was frustratingly patient. The constant sass and irritability were preferable to this. She glared at him, but he didn’t flinch.
“Nikolai.” She tried to make it an insult.
“Thank you. One more thing, if you really want to remember it, try pairing it with something familiar—another person, object, event. It helps with recall.”
“Anything else? Shall I wait for my own apprentice to dismiss me?”
“No, and I apologize if I came across as impertinent. Names are important to me. It’s a sign of respect. I know I have no right to demand your respect, so all I ask is this common courtesy.”
She hated when he slipped into formality like this. Formality was a lie dressed up, courtesy a shackle people applied to themselves.
“One day I hope to distinguish myself enough that you won’t need tricks to recall it.” His tone was deferential, pleading. “I want to be like Thomas, not all the nameless apprentices before or since. If I can’t reach that level, what’s the point?”
Ah, that at least made sense. He did seem rather competitive. So this was less about the name and more about being good enough to be remembered. His desire for recognition had just been a little overzealous. She could sympathize with overzealousness, if not the reason.
“Get good enough, and the name will follow. I have no doubt you can reach that level if you apply yourself. As for your . . . outburst, it is forgivable to come on strong when one seeks to make a point.” She paused a moment, then said, “We both have that problem. It demonstrates a passion—for the subject.”
He bowed his head. No doubt a calculated move, but she’d take what she could get.
“Good work today, Nikolai.”