Then Lord Myrddin Wylit turned around, and she couldn’t contain a gasp of shock.
He was horribly burned—and not by fire. There was no mistaking the signs of magical backlash: the bluish tinge to his ruined skin, which hung from his face in peeling shreds. Some very powerful spell had gone terribly wrong.
“Evangeline Emrys,” he said, drawing out her name between thin white lips. “I am very pleased to have freed you from your captivity.”
“I was not a captive,” she said, hoping her cold expression covered the tremor in her voice. “I was exactly where I wanted to be.”
“In hiding?” Wylit scoffed lightly. “With your one fledgling vassal?”
“Don’t presume to know the extent of my connections,” she said.
Wylit indicated his chief vassal. “Balin informs me that he found you a prisoner of Transitioners, cut off from the Kin, and that you only took the boy as your vassal at the last second. You may keep him, by the way. My gift to you.”
Jax looked startled when the younger Balin handed back his honor blade. Evangeline motioned him over with a subtle curve of her fingers. Jax took the hint, strapping his dagger around his waist and crossing the room to her side.
“It’s very kind of you to give me something I already had,” Evangeline said. “If you would like to win my trust with a more significant gift, you could grant me safe passage home.”
“I’m sure you understand that’s not possible. I brought you here for a purpose.”
“I don’t even know where here is.”
Wylit raised a hand toward the mural and stepped to one side.
Now that she gave it her attention, she saw it was a map titled Zona Arqueológica de Teotihuacán. Three pyramids were connected by a long road lined with smaller temples.
“Teotihuacán,” Wylit said. “City of the Gods. When the Aztecs rose to power in the thirteenth century, this city had already been in ruins for seven hundred years. The Aztecs had no knowledge of the people who built this place—only legends of their greatness. Do you know why?”
“Because the people who lived here were wiped from existence,” Evangeline guessed. “Their timeline destroyed.”
Wylit gazed at the mural. “Imagine a city with a population in the hundreds of thousands at a time when London was a Roman village—obliterated in the span of a few seconds by a handful of Indian shamans.” Wylit turned to Evangeline. “The perfect location to right an ancient wrong.”
“You want to bring them back?”
He laughed. “Hardly.”
“Then you’re still following my father’s plan to undo the Eighth-Day Spell.”
Wylit’s voice hardened. “Your father’s plan was flawed.”
Evangeline said nothing. She knew her father had been misguided. Even when she was a little girl, his passionate speeches on the matter had made her uneasy, especially when she saw what kind of allies rallied to his cause and how her mother had grown more and more reluctant to participate. But she listened silently to Wylit’s reasoning.
“The Kin are scattered across the earth, hidden among Normals. We’ve had no more than ten generations to their hundreds and are outnumbered by billions. The Wylit line has been lucky, served for centuries by the Balin family, but most Kin were weakened by this imprisonment. What would Normals do if an unexplained race suddenly appeared among them? Mistake us for aliens? How long before they decided to kill us all?”
“Then what do you have in mind?” Spit it out, she wanted to say.
“To push the seven-day timeline off this world,” Wylit said. His Kin blue eyes gleamed. “To even the odds against our Transitioner enemies by giving us the same number of days they have—and to eliminate Normals entirely.”
“Leaving a world full of empty cities,” she whispered. It was a terrible, chilling image. Evangeline might not have known, at age eleven, the correct answer to give when the Taliesin men rescued her from the attack on her father’s home. But in the five years of isolation since then, she’d learned about the Normal world as best she could from her position as an outsider. She knew what her ancestor Merlin had been trying to save—and on which side of the conflict she stood.
“It can’t be done,” she said loudly to Wylit, hoping that was true.
“I’ve seen it done,” Wylit replied. “In my mind, I’ve seen this world emptied for our use.”
Prophecy was the Wylit talent. In ancient times, people took great stock in the visions of a Wylit clan leader. But Evangeline had learned from her mother that prophecies had a way of unraveling. “Be wary of those who claim to know the future,” her mother had said. “Constant, multiple, contradictory visions will drive people insane and cloud what they see.” Evangeline’s mother knew that very well. Prophetic visions had been her family’s talent too, as well as their curse.
“Forgive me, Lord Wylit,” Evangeline said cautiously, “but your injuries suggest you’ve already attempted this and did not succeed.”
“My previous attempt was premature,” he admitted. “I failed to procure everything necessary—including a spell caster as strong and spirited as you.” He smiled at her as if she were a pleasant surprise. “Additionally, we need representation of the three main bloodlines who led the casting of the spell. You, of course, are an Emrys. But we need to account for the Dulac and Pendragon bloodlines as well. It took a great deal of trouble to locate appropriate artifacts, but I have finally done so.” Wylit beckoned her to approach him. “Come, Evangeline Emrys. Meet one of your greatest enemies.”
Evangeline glanced at Jax in puzzlement, and they trailed behind Wylit to a table at the back of the room that held a large wooden crate. “Taken from a barrow in the Celtic foothills,” Wylit explained, “a long-lost, once-famous queen, hidden in obscurity for over a millennium.”
After one peek inside, Jax recoiled, covering his nose and mouth. Evangeline had more restraint. Her life, Jax’s life, the lives of billions of people depended on Wylit’s being wrong. She needed to know what she was looking at. “It’s a well-preserved body,” she said at last. “Probably a Celtic queen or princess. But there’s no way of telling who she was.”
“She’s a Dulac,” the Donovan girl called out. “I can smell her from here.”
Silently, Evangeline cursed the girl. She could identify specific families? That was unfortunate—and probably the reason Evangeline’s hiding place had been discovered. It would have taken stronger wards than she could make to defend against that talent.
Wylit, meanwhile, looked pleased. “This is the recruit you spoke of, Balin? Quite a gift she has. Come, child. Tell me what you think.”
The girl’s eyes darted guiltily toward Jax, who shook his head at her. But she crossed the room anyway, gripped the wooden slats, and leaned over to sniff deeply, as if the crate were filled with roses instead of a mummified corpse. “This was a high-ranking Dulac,” Donovan said. “A queen, I think. I can’t say for sure she was Niviane of the Lake—but who else would be buried with that?”
“Spotted it, did you?” Wylit looked at the girl as if she were a dog with a clever trick.
“Can’t miss it. Reeks to high heaven.”
Wylit reached into the crate. “Who else, indeed?” he said. “She’s the one who gave it to him, and after his death, Sir Bedivere returned it to her.”
He pulled something free from the mummified remains and held it up in the air. “Behold, the blade of King Arthur Pendragon—Excalibur.”
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