When the next failure of magic occurred, it was extremely public and impossible to mistake for anything else.
It happened in front of nearly the entire Unseen World. Another party, one to mark an unspoken change in the first part of the Turning and to celebrate the success of everyone still competing. A subtle signal that the real challenges—not just those about settling petty grievances and taking revenge for decade-old gossip—were about to begin. The duels weren’t mortal yet, but they were serious now.
The evening was meant to be a civilized, elegant occasion. The duel was even being fought with a civilized choice of magic: illusion. Perfect accompaniment to champagne bubbling in graceful coupes and rich food arranged like sculptures on plates the precise warm cream shade of the beeswax candles that decorated the tables.
Sydney had been right that Laurent would be invited to all the parties after her performance at the first duel. It seemed increasingly likely that the end of the Turning would see the establishment of House Beauchamps, and better to get to know him now, so as to have his ear and his friendship when he came into power. So that he might, perhaps, even feel indebted to those who were welcoming when he was still an outsider. Laurent knew exactly how much those welcomes meant, and so he turned down most of the invitations, but as he was that evening’s challenger, he was there, tall and elegant in his tuxedo.
She watched, grey eyes keen, as Heads of Houses and their heirs introduced themselves to Laurent, invited him to dance, leaned close and whispered to him as they stood around the small, high-topped tables that ringed the room. Miles Merlin, she noted, had not gone over to pay court. He was, instead, watching her. That was fine. She had come to be watched. She waved, pleased when Merlin ostentatiously ignored her.
She felt Ian at her elbow before she heard his voice. “You’re looking well.”
“Blood on the inside this time, and look—not even a scar.” Her dress, a severe plunge of black held by the thinnest of straps paid proof to her words.
“Better than well.” Ian smiled. “And what splendid activity do you plan to put them through tonight? Will you convince the gilded Heads of all the Houses that they should cluck like chickens or sing opera?”
“Not in the least,” Sydney said. “I think I’d like to see an opera someday, and the quality of the arias likely to come out of this crowd would probably end that desire. Besides, tonight’s challenge is illusion.”
“Will you play our nightmares over the walls like movies?”
“It’s not a bad idea. If I do, I promise to buy you popcorn first.”
“And sit with me and hold my hand during the scary bits?” He stepped close enough that she could feel the warmth of his skin.
“They’ll all be scary bits. That’s the point of nightmares.”
He stepped closer, leaned in as if he might whisper some secret, but was interrupted by the announcement of the challenge. Sydney sliced through the crowd, to stand at Laurent’s side. The representative of the challenged House was announced, and the casting began.
It was a Four Seasons illusion. No points for originality, but they wouldn’t be needed if it was well done. It was a complicated, exhausting spell that required a great deal of control to both bring the illusion fully into being and to maintain the subtleties of the transitions from one season to the next. A good choice. Sydney watched the woman’s hands as they bent and folded into the necessary shapes. She was casting well—her fingers graceful even in the extreme positions required, bending and stretching with ease.
As was tradition, the illusion began with spring—grass and trees and flowers slowly growing up out of the polished wood of the floor. Petals opening, leaves unfurling, the air ripe with the scent of growing things. It was beautifully done, and with an immense amount of power—pieces of the illusion filled the entire room and were as rich and detailed at its far end as they were near to the woman holding the spell. A second set of trees grew from walls and tables. The air grew warmer, richer, greener. It felt almost electric—the first edges of an oncoming storm.
Sydney went string-tight. “Something’s wrong.”
“Are you sure?” Laurent asked.
She pushed him. “Yes. Go. Get out. Now.”
“It’s rude to—”
“Better rude than dead.” She didn’t wait for him to respond, but set off across the floor in the direction of the casting magician.
Spring did not peak and shimmer into the haze of summer’s glory. Instead, physical vines burst into the room, crawled through the floor, grabbed at tables, at chairs, at the feet of the watching magicians, the illusion searching for any way to further anchor itself into reality. Trees grew, faster and faster, and the rumble of thunder rattled the windows. The green scent of the air no longer pleasant, but choking.
It wasn’t an absence of magic but a surfeit, extra power, pulled from somewhere, avalanching into solidity.
Sydney raised her voice to be heard over the crowd, over the roar of the magic. “Beauchamps forfeits the challenge in the expectation it will be ruled a failure of magic and strongly recommends you all leave before the forest takes the room.”
No one moved.
Branches curled from the ceiling. Floorboards flew through the crowd. A tree exploded up, driving straight through a thin man in a tuxedo, killing him before he could even gasp in shock.
People moved then.
The air was suffocatingly humid. Wind howled. The growth of the forest was so rapid it could be heard over the chaos of people running for the doors.
Sydney continued to fight against the fleeing crowd, toward the casting magician. Ian’s hand closed over her arm. “Is there a reason you aren’t taking your own advice?”
“Look at her.” She yanked her arm out of his hand.
The casting magician had been at the center of the spell, and the forest was intent on claiming her as its own. A tree, some gnarled, twisting thing, was growing through her—branches emerging in horrible, wet red.
There was a high-pitched keen, constant, streaming from the woman’s open mouth.
“She’s still alive,” Ian said, horror in his voice.
“The magic will keep her that way. It will anchor itself in her. Use her as a vessel and keep her in pain and undying. No one deserves that. If I break the spell, I can help her.” Sydney stepped forward, put her left hand on the woman’s heart, her right hand on the tree.
“Sydney, no!”
There was a great, sharp crack, and then silence.
The magic had been ended.
• • •
She breathed in.
Sydney was, all at once, an entire forest. She was root and leaf, dirt and sky. Green and spring were blood in her veins, air in her lungs.
She was, between one heartbeat and the next, all of magic. The entire universe worth, rendered into a pinpoint hurricane. It moved through the air, currents and patterns, a sequence suddenly readable. It sang through her bones and reordered the stars. She reached out her hand and touched its heart.
It ran through her like electricity. She pulled it all into herself. She held it. She became.
She breathed out.
Ian staggered against the vacuum left by the vanished magic and looked around the room. The illusion had fallen. The living branches and trees were there, but they were now stone and grey, no longer alive. The only thing moving were flames from where a candelabra had been knocked over, licking at a tablecloth. He upended a pitcher of water, extinguishing them.
The room was quiet. No roar of wind, no howl of magic. Sydney had not only interrupted the spell, she had stopped it cold.
Sydney.
The magic. It hadn’t simply disappeared. It had gone somewhere. He looked to the center of the room, where the spell had started. Where the body of a woman with a tree growing from her heart was also stone, a cold statue.
Sydney was so still she looked like a statue herself. He wasn’t even sure she was breathing. The air surrounding her shimmered like the haze of heat that rose from asphalt in the desert.
“How are you not dead?” he asked.
She turned, and her eyes were as green as the heart of the forest. She saw his expression, and after a pause, her eyes shaded back to grey. “I’m a Shadow. I have some experience in siphoning power.”
Too much now to think about the fact that she had said out loud what he had suspected, that her presence here was a nearly impossible thing. The awe of that—the potential usefulness of her origins—paled next to tonight’s cascade of wonders. “This power. All of this power. That entire spell.” Ian gestured to the surrounding room, to the stone forest that had so recently been green and growing. “You hold it.”
Sydney nodded. She stretched out her hands, shaking them loose, and sparks flew from her fingers. She watched them fall through the air, a smile curling the edges of her mouth.
Fear pooled at the base of his skull. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to run or to kneel at her feet.
“You hold it.” It shouldn’t have been possible—it would be like drinking an ocean, like wearing a storm. He thought momentarily about casting a measurement spell, curious as to how much magic had actually been in the room, then realized it was possible he’d be dead before he spoke the second word if she misinterpreted his intent.
There were still flecks of green, floating like fireflies, in her pupils.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, far more casually than he felt.
“A bit strange. Like there is a river running beneath my skin. I think my heart may have stopped beating for a bit, too.” Her voice sounded detached from her body. “That’s fine, though. I didn’t need it at the time.”
“Well, if that’s all.” Maybe if he pretended like this was normal, like she hadn’t just become something else right in front of him, things would begin to make sense. He offered her an arm.
She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to touch you right now.”
She cocked her head to the side, like a bird of prey. “Because I can hear the blood in your veins, and I can taste the flavor of your magic on my tongue, and I could call them both to me in the space between one breath and the next.”
It took all the control Ian had not to step back, not flee like a fox before hounds. “Yes. Certainly. That makes sense. We’ll hold off on the touching.”
“Good night, Ian.” Sydney’s voice sounded like the heart of a dark forest, thick and rife with secrets.
The air shimmered green behind her as she walked through the broken room, through the stone wreckage of the magic it had held, and Ian felt fear drip cold down his spine.
• • •
Sydney stood, still in the black dress she had worn to the challenge, in the cold hall of the House of Shadows, holding secrets to herself, feeling them vine around her bones. There was, she realized, a smear of the magician’s blood dried on her hand. One more thing not to think about, not while she was here.
She had felt the summons as she walked home—like someone had lit a match to the ragged ends of her shadow. She had come immediately, hating every step that brought her here, knowing that waiting would make things worse and make it more difficult to keep things hidden from the House. There was so much she needed to keep hidden from the House.
About a month after she first got out of Shadows, she had tried to resist the summons back. She was out, she told herself, beyond the great doors. It wasn’t as if Shara could physically bring her back in, not with the spell that bound her to the island. She would wait, return when she was ready.
Even then she wasn’t quite foolish enough to consider ignoring the summons altogether.
And so she went about her day. And so, Shadows responded.
It began like an itch, crawling across her skin. Mild, an annoyance.
Then the sensation increased: insects—tens, hundreds, thousands of legs. By then Sydney realized what was happening and was determined to resist. If she just waited long enough, it would stop.
She held out for another half day, until her skin was swollen and bloody, covered in welts from things that she had never even seen, from terrors that had been conjured out of her head. Until she felt like she might claw her own skin from her body for relief.
Then she went to Shadows.
Shara had not ended the spell until she had finished talking to Sydney.
Sydney had never waited to answer a summons since.
Magic burned like a fever through Sydney’s blood as she stood in front of Shara. She was close, she could tell, to not being able to conceal its effects. It wouldn’t be the worst for Shara to discover she held it, but if the House didn’t know she held the extra power, then it couldn’t order her to use it, couldn’t add its weight to the tithe she owed to pay back a bargain she had never consented to. If the House didn’t learn about it, the magic might be only hers. She had been stronger than the House before—she would be in this as well. She let the fever burn.
“The House requires an explanation,” Shara said.
Sweat beaded at Sydney’s temples. Her heart was skipping beats that it found to be unnecessary. She wondered, idly, if the excess of magic she had absorbed would mean that trees would burst forth from her as well, that she might birth a forest spontaneously. She bit the insides of her mouth to keep from breaking out in laughter she had no desire to explain. When Shara gave no further clue, Sydney swallowed the potential consequence and asked: “An explanation of what?”
“Of your performance and standing in the Turning so far.”
Nonsense, then. Nothing that mattered. The parroting of information that Shara would have already known, the summons simply an excuse to remind Sydney that she was not—not yet—free. “Candidate House Beauchamps is currently ranked first in the standings. I am undefeated.”
“Due to—” Shara said, and smiled, slow and saccharine.
“Due to the training I received here.” A beat. Magic so hot in her hands Sydney had to restrain herself from glancing down to see if they were blistered. It had been a rather large amount of magic she had taken in. An entire season. Could magic be measured in seasons? Would a winter’s worth feel different—colder, perhaps, and more crystalline—than this heated spring blooming in her?
Shara’s voice jarred against her thoughts. “And which—”
“And which I am grateful for.” Sydney considered for a heartbeat, two, reaching out with her magic and stopping Shara’s heart. With Shara dead, she would be free, though free only of Shara, and the question of what would happen to Shadows as a place without its avatar was one she wasn’t ready to answer. Besides, it felt like there were fireflies in her blood, which was perhaps not the most optimal set of circumstances for casting death magic. She could wait.
“That will be all.” Shara handed her the knife and pen so that the contract could be signed once more. There were still-healing marks on Shara’s hands. Sydney recognized their patterns—a ritual for the extraction of magic. A ritual she herself had been forced to endure on more than one occasion.
There was no one in Shadows who could force Shara into anything.
“Are you well?” Sydney asked. “Those look painful.” Not because she cared—because she wanted Shara to know that she had seen.
“We all make sacrifices,” Shara said. But she pulled her hands away, hiding them.
There were dark green edges on the piece of shadow Sydney carved off herself. Shara said nothing. Perhaps she didn’t see them.
Sydney was magic-sick enough to call for a cab when she reached the edge of Central Park. She didn’t trust her feet to carry her home without incident. When they arrived at her building, she tipped the cabbie double the fare and then stripped his memory of her.
She made it into her apartment, locked the door behind her, and collapsed to the floor, lost in the dream of the forest, wrapped in the thick, green blanket of its magic.
• • •
Had the eyes of the Unseen World been turned to the Angel of the Waters that night, instead of to their own magics, then they might have seen a wonder.
Green and spring burst through the air, all out of season in the current month. Vines wreathed the statue. A small rain rippled across the water, and the scent of spring flowers—of lilacs and peonies and hyacinths—filled the air.
And then.
The howling of a storm, wind sending waves across the fountain, birds pulled from their flight as if they had been flung into the column of a tornado. As if there was something hungry, reaching, reaching.
And then.
A crack. Spring paused in its progress, then shattered like stone. The winds quiet, the air once more that of early winter.
Snow fell, delicately, through the darkness.