Our walk to the clearing had its own character of grim entrancement, and not only because my stomach clenched at the prospect of seeing Darius’s wicked old face again. No: now that I had committed myself, that twitching presence at the base of my brain woke from its long dormancy. It tugged. As if it knew where we were going, it seemed to draw an eager trajectory on the air, to cast a spidery thread, and then to pull me along the way it wished to go.
What was worse was that I couldn’t tell who was acting on me in this way. Was it Darius, or did that immanence in me have its own urges? If magic was indeed thought, my thought, then how could it want what I reviled?
Now that I have died for so long, I can say this: it is the nature of thought to oppose the thinker, to thwart and mock our conscious intentions. But I was then still young enough to be indignant at finding my self-mastery so limited.
Gus and I stepped out of the woods into the clearing, where sunbeams pierced like pins in a cushion. Darius was sitting on a fallen log, his head in his hands, tangled gray locks curtaining his face. I stopped some five yards away from him and braced for his usual crude intimidation. But when he looked up at us, his gaze had a strained vulnerability I’d never seen in him before.
“Hello there, pretty Catherine,” he crooned with insulting caution, as if I were a fawn he feared to startle.
“Coaxing is no better than bullying,” I said, brisk and annoyed. “Have you never in your whole ruinous life addressed another person as an equal?”
Gus’s eyes went so wide at my temerity that I realized in a flash how Darius had him cowed, and I hated the old sorcerer even more for it. But Darius grinned as he struggled to his feet.
“Vanishingly few,” Darius conceded. “And none in recent memory. But let’s say I’m ready to take a swing at it again, shall we?”
“What do you mean?” Gus demanded, and I heard pain in his voice.
“Nothing I haven’t told you frankly enough before,” Darius said, but his gaze was fixed on me. “Not my concern if you chose not to understand me. Well, Catherine? Don’t tell me you haven’t sensed it. Don’t tell me you don’t know.” I felt his regard around me like a web holding me upright; felt my knees weaken, and a loosening deep in my brain. “Ah, here it is! I can help it along a bit, keep the flow going—there. You’re feeling it now, aren’t you?”
I was. In some ways nothing changed: there was still the pressure of earth through the worn soles of my shoes, the birdsong, the sultry embrace of the air. But at the same time my senses lifted on new currents of thought; things were the same, but their alignments were different. Suggestible.
We are all familiar with the thought that manifests in words and pictures, unruly as a routed army, its impressions heaved up like banners and dropped again.
And I daresay we are all familiar with the thought running below the worded sort: the inarticulate rush that finds constellations, feels whole galaxies, in the precise angle of a dying woman’s head on her pillow, or in the zone of light trapped between two bodies in a doorway. That sort of thought is always slack-jawed, at a loss for words to contain all it knows, and knows, and so often wishes it did not have to know—
Well, this was yet a third variety of thought, one that ran deeper still. It seeped like water into the joints of reality. And pushed them all askew. Everything in the world that was beautiful, natural, necessary, from gravity to distance, from the chlorophyll lapping light to the racing language of the nerves, was abruptly and horribly vulnerable.
Magic was in me, frantic and undirected. But instead of delight at my own power all I felt was a crushing revulsion, a bone-deep offense that such a thing could even be. During my first confrontation with Darius magic had seemed a personal enemy, an element of a larger oppression. But now it menaced everything I held most dear—and worse, it did so from within me.
There was that scorched-violet scent now so familiar to me. Gus gawking in alarm. And Darius, looming close now, his face alight with greed and his breath wheezing out the same sickening floral fumes. “How lovely you are with your power flowing,” he murmured, and touched my hair. I shuddered, but I was too overcome to make myself pull away. “Got our rivers of milk and honey right here, don’t we now?”
Darius. He appeared to me in that moment like the animating spirit of everything that was corrupt, deranged, profoundly wrong. If he hadn’t cornered me with his fiery tadpoles in that field, then this awful uncanny pressure might have stayed suppressed forever, and Gus would have stayed innocent—at least of his mother’s maiming. We both could have gone on believing, forever, that magic was only a childish story, and not, as it appeared to me then, a disease of reality itself. His wrinkled old hand was still there, pawing at me; his smile was cloying and satisfied.
“I can teach you to control it,” Darius said. “You see, Catherine? You need me now.”
I couldn’t speak—couldn’t say that needing him was nothing I would ever do. But something in me rose in answer, and the wanton overflow of my power found its direction.
Slop, Gus had called such untutored flooding; his voice rang through my memories. Mindless instinct.
A spray of dirt flew up and struck Gus in the face. He sputtered, brushing clods of it from his tongue. My blood seemed to flow again, my limbs came free, and I was able to look around.
The ground was writhing, bubbling. Roots long concealed beneath the clearing’s surface reared up, serpentine and lashing—and apparently aiming for Darius. There was no mistaking their hostile intent as one immense root-fan arched over him, a dirt-dribbling cobra, and made ready to dash out his brains. Darius ducked to the side, his movements casual and unafraid, but his dodge had at least the virtue of carrying him several feet away from me. He was laughing uproariously.
“You did tell me she’s interested in botany,” Darius told Gus, and cackled. I could not grasp the relevance of his remark. He waved a lazy hand, and the roots burst into flames. I staggered.
But before I collapsed another root whipped up behind Darius. I saw it come with stunned apprehension, and all at once I understood—truly understood—that I was responsible.
“Stop,” I screamed. “Stop!”
But my voice was not the part of me the root obeyed. It struck him just above the right ear with a vicious crack. I watched him fall, even as I was somehow still falling. Crimson fanned out, fine and glittering, a cloud of ruby insects.
Then both of us lay on the ground, and the world went very still.