“You play a dangerous game, Adeline,” Granny Maude said without lifting her milky eyes. “The dark elf is suspicious.”
“Talsar is always suspicious, Granny. It is his nature.”
“Oooh, Talsar,” Auntie Posey sang. “Talsar, Talsar. First names. She comes to know them, Mother. Beware. She will fall in love and discover the truth of the power arcane.”
Her words raised the hairs on the back of my neck. “The truth? What truth?”
“Ignore her,” said Auntie Pearl in her sweet, soft voice, insectile needles clicking away. “You know how she is. She speaks nonsense and riddles.”
I relaxed, but only enough to reorganize my thoughts. “Tell me what it is I seek. Tell me what ‘trinket’ they have that will restore the construct that will give us access to the power arcane. I have searched them and their bags. I found no magic.”
All movement stopped. All was silence. My stomach roiled, rabbit stew on the rise.
When Silver Maude spoke, her voice was soft. A warning. “We told you not to seek the artifact. You are only to deliver the adventurers to us. You grow too ambitious, Adeline.”
I bared my teeth. “Perhaps I won’t bring them at all.”
“Ah. Will you not?”
“No. Not unless you tell me about the artifact.”
The granny hag set down her bones and rose from her chair, and even though I’d turned to run, there was nowhere to go. It was already too late.
A golden cage appeared around me. When I clutched the bars, they turned to vipers thick as ropes that sank their fangs into my hands. I cried out and threw myself back. The hags cackled and shrieked. I landed on my backside, and the vipers became golden chains around my wrists. Except these chains had thorns. A hundred half-inch thorns sharp as needles that sank into my skin.
“My dear,” Silver Maude whispered, gliding forward without moving. Or I was gliding, or the room. Everything shifted, and she stood before me, over me, but looked and spoke over my head. “The deal is struck.”
“We did not forge these chains,” Auntie Pearl hissed, soft voice gone bone-dry. “You did. You made them of Greed. Of Hunger. Of Thirst. Of Craving.”
“Stupid, stupid Adeline,” Auntie Posey sing-songed. “Pretty face, deficient mind. The deal is struck, the deal is struck, the deal is struck.”
Silver Maude pressed a wickedly pointed finger to my forehead. “Behold, and remember.”
Alone, muddy, soaked from driving rain. Wind whipped the wood, making the trees dance. They tore at ragged clothes. I was too half-frozen, lips bluish, eyes wild and wide. I came to the entrance of the ancient walled city. A city where mortals dared not go. But I dared. I was Adeline Riverdeep, and I dared, because I was desperate.
“What do you wish?” the silver woman asked.
“I wish never to be helpless again.”
“And what will you pay?”
“Anything.”
The silver woman smiled. “Anything?”
“Yes. Anything.”
“Show me your hands.”
I lifted my arms, palms facing the hag. As I watched, two twisting golden chains appeared around my wrists. Chains that burned. Chains of hatred and desperate need, and I understood. The chains did not come from the hags, but grew from my soul. Silver Maude reached out. Though the chains still bound me, she took a link from each, and as I watched, she swallowed them.
“The deal is struck. Four lives and a trinket. That is the price. Four lives and a trinket, and you will wield the power arcane.”
“Behold, and know,” Silver Maude said.
A magical construct of breathtaking workmanship stood in the center of a ruined village. It was an orrery, a model of the planets and stars held together by thin golden rods and powered by arcane energy. Orbs carved of precious stone in every blazing color from the size of my pinky nail to the size of a wagon wheel whirled and spun around the golden sun at their center. Other spheres representing moons zoomed around the planets, and every instant it seemed as if there would be a dozen collisions, but there were none. The dance of the cosmos was perfection.
Then the golden arms disappeared, and so did the village. Planets, moons, and stars whirled in space, spinning faster and growing larger against a profound blackness. It was not a flat, distant thing, the blackness. It was everywhere. Three-dimensional, close and distant, unreachable, and all-encompassing.
“We offer you All. You must only prove that you are worthy.”
The wonders of the universe expanded and unfolded around me. A thousand thousand mysteries brushed by, so close I grasped at them, only to feel the knowledge slide through my mind and out again like a whisper half-dreamed, half-heard.
“This is power,” another voice whispered, a voice I knew well, because it was my own. “This is All. What are the lives of four strangers weighed against that?”
I started awake in the frozen darkness some unknown time before dawn. Snow fell through the broken roof, lit bright by the moon. My protection spell had worn off in the night, perhaps dispelled during my dream. My chest rose and fell, my breath fogging the silent air. My head spun with the visions I had seen. The power I had felt at my fingertips. Close, so close.
An orrery—that was the magical construct the hags wanted to fix. The key to the power arcane. There had been a few small orreries under glass domes at the Regia Arcanum, but never one like this, so finely wrought and large enough to take up a village square. They must have had the pieces and put it together after I left, because it hadn’t been there before. But they were missing some piece. Some magical component that would complete it. And once I found that component, I would become one of the most powerful beings in the cosmos. Not a refugee child. Not a war orphan. Not a desperate student who near starved just so she could learn.
What were the lives of four strangers weighed against that?
Nothing.
That morning I moved slow as a bird with two broken wings. I didn’t want to talk or eat; I wanted to figure out which part of the orrery the group might have that I had missed. Maybe a magic-infused precious stone that was a moon or a planet? Maybe some kind of power source? Not the vital spark; those couldn’t be used like that. But I hadn’t found anything else.
By the time Ivy boosted me onto her horse, the sun was well over the horizon, and I was ready to crawl back into bed. The rest of the morning didn’t go any easier, not when we got on the road, not when the sun crawled to its weak winter height, and not during lunch or after. I spent those hours shivering and mostly silent, promising everyone else I was fine, just tired. When Ezo offered me another candy, this one green as an emerald, I refused.
“We need to make a plan,” Ivy said sometime in the late afternoon. “For the hags. We need to decide how we’re going to take them out without giving them a chance to hurt Adeline’s sister.”
Ha. I’d almost forgotten about my “sister.”
“What was her name again?” Talsar asked. The road was wide here, and he rode to my and Ivy’s right while Ezo and Firenza rode on our left.
I eyed him dully. Sometimes erasing the memory didn’t quite get rid of the emotion that went with it. He might not remember why, but the dark elf had definitely retreated back into sullen hostility since our confrontation yesterday evening.
“Maralyn Riverdeep.” As if I was stupid enough to make up a lie about a sister and then not come up with a name. Nice try, Mr. McBroodypants.