Magic Claims

8

I opened my eyes. I stood on a square platform high above the ground, holding a plastic cooler and a small bag. A beautiful palace spread before me, a vision painted against a glowing predawn sky in cream marble and Lemurian blue granite. Terraces stretched from stately towers; balconies traced graceful rooms, held up by elegant colonnades; waterfalls spilled from the floors above into stone pools. Below, a river wound its way to sea, its waters diverted to run through breathtaking gardens, where flowers bloomed along hundreds of ponds and streams, and stone gazebos with padded loungers and carved benches offered a chance for respite.

The wind was warm and pleasant. The air smelled like flowers.

In this realm, my father was a god, and this palace, so beautiful it almost floated among the greenery, was the purest expression of his will, his vision come to life without the constraints of reality.

A soft breeze stirred my hair. I walked across the platform to a narrow bridge connecting to a terrace, which bordered my father’s study, a vast chamber with tall arched windows. The doors to the study stood ajar.

“Father?”

Another swirl of the breeze.

“There you are, Blossom.”

Roland appeared in the doorway. He wore formal garments today, a tailored blue tunic that fell to his ankles, fringed with white at the hem, and a long outer garment he called an irrok, a length of snow-white fabric, thin like gossamer. It was secured at his left shoulder and fell in structured, perfect folds across one side of his body. Sometimes, he wrapped it around his hips in spiral folds but today, the irrok hung loose.

Usually, he didn’t bother with formal clothes just for my sake. I got a tunic, sometimes pants and a shirt, and one time, he had shown up in a tracksuit, which made me laugh for five minutes.

The clothes were different, but he was always the same. A man with the face of a prophet or a sage, his dark hair streaked with gray, his handsome features touched by the sun, and his eyes full of wisdom and warmth. My father, who adored me more than he loved any of my long-dead siblings, tried to kill me in the womb, murdered my mother, fought a war against me, and now pouted if I missed a scheduled visit. Complicated, our family did it right.

“It’s been so long since you came to visit me.”

True to form. “Disparaging my husband in front of our son might have something to do with that.”

He waved his hand, dismissing the idea. “I didn’t disparage him. I simply pointed out that a man who would sacrifice his position of power under pressure wasn’t fit to rule.”

I waved my hand in front of my nose. “It stinks.”

“What?”

“Your bullshit, Father.”

He chuckled.

“You keep using Conlan to deliver these little jabs at Curran. I realize you find it entertaining, but every time you jab, we unpack what you did. Like all of us, you are only human, Father, and your actions don’t stand up to scrutiny. Soon Conlan will be old enough to see you for who you really are. Let’s not hasten that realization. Let him have his wonderful grandfather for a little longer.”

“And who am I really?”

“Someone who murdered his grandmother, tried to kill his parents, and would have killed him if given the chance.”

A shadow crossed Roland’s face. “Is that how you see me?”

Oy. “We are more than one thing. I still love you, Father. And Conlan will always love you. But he’s his own person, and he’s growing up. Teenagers see the world in black and white. Right now, you are wise, kind, and glorious. Why not stay that way? So few of us can live up to our own legend, but you are, once again, an exception to the rule.”

His expression eased. “I’ll consider it.”

Flattery. It always worked. If I flattered Erra, my aunt would snap and tell me to stop my nonsense. But my father took it as his due. Flattery would be in short supply in a few years. Sooner or later, Conlan would ask uncomfortable questions, and Roland would have to own up. But for now, he was still a beloved grandfather, all-knowing and larger than life.

We crossed the terrace, strolling toward a grouping of couches.

“The boy is here, by the way.”

That explained the formal robes.

My father waved his hand. A section of the wall slid aside silently, revealing his study. Conlan was curled up on a plush couch, hugging his backpack. His eyes were closed. A thin veil glistening with magic separated him from us. A sound ward.

“He’s been here for four hours. He has something to show you and won’t tell me what it is.” He rolled his eyes and smiled. “He finally fell asleep a couple of hours ago.”

It was still almost an hour before sunrise when I left Penderton. If Conlan had come here four hours ago, he hadn’t slept last night. What was so important?

“How are his studies?” I asked.

“He’s brilliant, as expected. Unfortunately, he seems to be focused on the battle arts rather than more refined, academic pursuits. He’s developed an interest in defensive spells. Apparently, there was an incident. I’m not at liberty to discuss it, but you might want to ask your husband about it.”

Yes, the cursed wereboar, knew all about it. “I’m very proud of him.”

“You’re proud because he brawled like an animal?”

“I’m proud because he put himself in harm’s way to shield others.”

Roland sighed. I had to shift this conversation before he went off on a tirade.

“What did you teach him?”

“The pits, the cloak of Ur, the siege shields… All those things you found boring.”

I couldn’t resist. “The best defense is a good offense, Father.”

“That’s idiocy. Who said that?”

“Your sister.” And many other people.

Roland grimaced. “It sounds like her.”

“I don’t sit back during battles. I do my best work up front, with my swords. That’s where I’m most effective.”

Roland rolled his eyes.

“Is he doing well with the spells?”

“He’s learning faster than anyone in my memory. However, as you recall, the incantations for the siege spells are long.”

“And tedious. So tedious.”

“The tedium is the point. If it were easy, Blossom, anyone could do it.”

My father, the magic snob.

“You seem troubled.” Roland dipped his head to meet my gaze.

For all his faults, Dad was always observant.

“Did Conlan tell you about Penderton?”

“No.”

“During the last flare, some sort of evil appeared in the woods north of Wilmington, near a town called Penderton. It sent its human servants to demand tribute from the town.”

“What form of tribute?”

“People.”

Roland furrowed his eyebrows. “Dangerous and foolish. Go on.”

“They come for tribute every year. They infected the town with something, and the residents die if they leave. The town offered us a lot of land if we can eliminate the threat.”

“I see.”

“I need your expertise, Father.”

I opened the cooler, took out one of the gold collars from the morgue and the plastic cup, and put the bag with the sphere next to them.

Roland picked up the bag. It opened in his hand on its own. A stone sphere floated up, wrapped in red string. Roland flicked his fingers. The stone ball slid back, putting a few yards between us. The red string snapped. The sphere expanded into a boulder.

Roland focused on it. It shrank into a ball, expanded again, then shrank again, and expanded one more time.

“This is of them?”

“Yes. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“No.”

The boulder rotated. Thin strands of light wrapped around it—my father analyzing the enchantment.

“It feels primitive somehow,” I said.

“The idea behind it is so basic. What could be more rudimentary than throwing a large rock at your enemy?”

“A very large rock.”

“But only a rock still. The concept is crude, but the execution… I do not know how this is done.” Excitement sparked in his eyes. “How peculiar. Simple idea, tremendous amount of magic to make it function. Grand and yet so inefficient. The work of a toddler god.”

“Is it divine?”

“No. This was made by a human.”

The collar was next. I watched it expand and contract in his fingers.

“Have you noticed the weight?” he asked.

I nodded. “Heavy.”

“Almost pure gold and heavily enchanted. Once put on, it will not come off. The wearer?”

“Dead.”

He sighed. “Of course they are. What did they look like?”

“They were shapeshifters. After they died, they turned human, but they did not look like us. They grow ridges of hair along their spines, their profiles are strange, and they have horns.”

My father raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. The cup?”

I explained the meeting of minds on the killing field in front of Penderton.

He took the lid off. The brown powder snaked out, swirled around his fingers, and slipped back into the cup.

“Spores.”

“What kind of spores?”

“A magical fungus, perhaps. Something that implants within the lungs when it’s inhaled. How quickly did the people die once they left the area?”

“Three days.”

“So it’s fast-acting, and yet the population of Penderton is still alive. Something is inhibiting their growth in Penderton.” He tilted his head and looked at me. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Do you have ink and paper?”

A piece of watercolor paper appeared on the table with an ink bottle, a brush, and a crystal cup filled with water. I took the brush, dipped it into the ink bottle, and colored a circle in a uniform, even purple.

“This is what we do.”

I washed the brush, then drew another circle with water next to the first one. Then I dipped the brush into the ink again and let a single drop fall off its tip into the center. The ink spread through the water circle, a saturated purple in the center that grew paler and more diluted toward the edges. A gradient.

“This is what the forest does.”

His expression shifted. The kind, wise sage was gone. An immortal wizard peered at the paper, the full power of his staggering intellect directed at the problem like a laser.

“A precursor?” he murmured. “Or a variation?”

“That’s how it’s suppressing the spores.” The priest-mage’s clawed hand still bothered me. “Father, are we the only ones capable of this?”

“By ‘we,’ you mean our family?”

“Humans.”

“I don’t know.” Roland’s face clouded.

What? “You know everything.”

He smiled at me. “If that was so, I would go mad for there would be nothing left to discover. The family records don’t specify how or when we acquired this power. However, in my lifetime, I have met three outsiders, none of them with our blood, who were capable of it.”

None of this was comforting.

Roland tapped the ink circle. “This and the fact the blood ward stopped the spores makes your course clear. You already know what you must do to save them.”

I looked at the beautiful vista spreading before us. He was right, but that solution was the absolute last thing I wanted to do.

“Why, Blossom? Why do you push away your birthright?”

Because accepting it would mean taking a big step toward being like you. Because when I blundered into it the first time, it came close to altering who I was, and I will never allow that again.

“It is the art of your family. It is a part of who you are and where you come from. Every one of us has a right to learn our roots, for that’s how we understand ourselves.”

I didn’t want to get into this discussion.

“Think of your ancestors, who dedicated their lives to perfecting this magic in the hopes that future generations would use it to keep us and our people safe. Think of how they would feel if they were to witness your squandering it.”

“I think it’s about time we woke Conlan up,” I said.

Roland sighed. The veil slid aside.

I cleared my throat. My son’s eyes snapped open.

“Mom!” Conlan bolted upright.

“Your father told you to stay in the safe house. Why are you here?”

“Mom, Mom, don’t get mad!”

I took a deep breath. A smile curved Roland’s lips.

Conlan dug into his backpack. “It’s a Cuvieronius hyodon.”

I looked at Roland. He shook his head slightly.

“The picture.” Conlan pulled a large book out of the pack and scrambled to me. “Look!”

He opened the book and thrust it at me. On the page, Isaac’s strange pachyderm posed on a rock slope next to what looked like a weird armadillo. A silhouette of a person was drawn to the side for scale. The armadillo was the size of a VW Beetle. The Cuvieronius was three times larger.

Conlan read nonstop, absorbing all sorts of random knowledge like a sponge, especially anything to do with animals, and prehistoric animals were his favorite. Luiza must’ve shown him Isaac’s sketch as I asked, and he put two and two together.

“Someone saw this creature? In person, recently?” Roland asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“In the area you’re trying to protect?”

I nodded.

Roland raised his hand. A stone pillar thrust itself from below into our view. Rock flowed like molten wax and hardened into a colossal creature. It had four tusks, small ears, and a thick, muscular trunk, and it towered above us. I had seen an elephant before. This animal dwarfed it. Its ears were proportionally smaller, its trunk shorter, its legs longer. The resemblance to Cuvieronius was unmistakable. These giants were monstrous cousins to Isaac’s creature, closer to it than to a modern elephant.

“The four-blade elephant,” Roland said. “They had gone extinct in our part of the world long before I was born, but their statues remained. The ancients worshipped them as gods. Once, when I was young, I saw one. It was brought from the Eastern Plains as a gift to my great-aunt for her wedding.”

I took the book from Conlan and flipped it over to the cover. Extinct Giants of the Ice Age.

Ice Age.

Wow. I landed on a couch. Sitting down seemed like a good idea.

Conlan bounced around me, talking too fast. “You know how we have all these round lakes? They’re called Carolina Bays, but they’re not bays at all, they are old thermokarst depressions, like the ones they have in Alaska. That’s because twenty thousand years ago this area was all permafrost, and it had mega fauna, and it had Cuvieronius, which evolved in North America, then went to South America to escape the ice, but the ice began to melt, so they migrated back up. And there were other mega species, mastodons, giant camels, dire wolves, sabertooth cats, and lions like me and Dad...”

The shapeshifter that had attacked me flashed in my mind. Reddish spotted fur and nine-inch fangs.

Oh my God. I had killed a were-Smilodon.

“…and Luiza said there was a hill. And look, I found an old picture of it. I put it in the book. In the front. It’s a conical hill and it looks like a pingo. They have them in Alaska. They have a core of ice, and then the ice melts, and the hill collapses. The hill collapsed, Mom! It had Ice Age animals inside!”

He stopped to take a breath.

I looked at the book in my hands. “This says Cuvieronius became extinct twelve thousand years ago.”

“Yes!” my son confirmed.

I turned to Roland. “So whatever it is must have slept with all its people and animals for at least twelve thousand years. Is it even possible? Could something from the Ice Age pop up in our time and somehow be alive?”

“In theory, yes,” Roland said. “If the enchanted sleep was deep enough. I slept for over two millennia, and when I woke, it felt like I’d gone to bed the day before. Deep sleep of this kind is complete stasis. So it is possible that a human had accomplished such an achievement, but only in theory. There have been cases of ancient animals reappearing but never a human who has slept for that long.”

“That’s right. You had mammoths that one time,” I said. “When you attacked the Pack Keep during the first war with Atlanta.”

He nodded. “A herd had walked out of the snowstorm in Alaska. I bought a few. They were hideously expensive and finicky to take care of, and they did badly in that battle. A complete waste of money.”

It wasn’t the mammoths who lost that battle. My father had accomplished that feat all on his own. Despite his unbearable academic brilliance, he had a questionable grasp of military tactics. His battle plan consisted of arranging his troops into a phalanx and sending them against the fortress of the Keep while he rode behind his army in a gold chariot. Because chariots made of soft and incredibly heavy metal were both durable and very mobile.

“It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, Father.”

He waved his hand at me dismissively. “An animal lacks the awareness necessary to comprehend the passage of time, but a human doesn’t. Ten millennia is a great deal of time. In fact, before I had gone into my sleep, our greatest scholars begged me to reconsider. They were afraid that when I woke, the world would be so different, it would drive me mad.”

I flipped through the book. Smilodon. Keelan’s shapeshifter had looked like mine. If I was right, and we had fought were-Smilodons, his head would explode. I turned the pages. Mastodon. Nope, don’t want to fight that. Giant beaver. That might explain the weird animals Isaac saw in the swamp. North American camel. Wow, bigger than the modern version.

I turned the page and stopped.

A massive lion looked back at me, its fur splattered with ghostly stripes. Huge paws, powerful frame, nearly eight hundred pounds. The African lion positioned next to it for scale looked like a skinny adolescent in comparison. Panthera atrox. North American lion.

Nobody knew for sure how shapeshifting had started, but the legend said that ages ago, far back in prehistory, when fierce predators ruled the planet, humans worshipped them as gods. Eventually they made a bargain, giving up a little of their humanity for the gifts of their animal deities. They then passed that gift onto others, diluting and weakening it in the process.

The descendants of those original Lyc-V carriers, those whose ancestors had made the bargain, were called the Firsts. They were exceedingly rare, and their power and control were off the scale. Other shapeshifters sensed them somehow and gathered around them, viewing them as natural leaders. Curran was a First and a Panthera atrox. And so was our son.

Conlan was looking at me, his eyes opened wide, trying to see if I understood what that image of the lion meant to him. I did. This was how he and Curran came to be. This was why they were different.

“I’m so proud of you,” I told him. “You did very well.”

Conlan grinned.

Roland’s expression turned grave. “If he’s correct, you are fighting something from our pre-history. I have no frame of reference. No one does. The magic you and I wield has been tamed and refined. It is a force that we have harnessed and bent to our will. What your opponent has is something completely different. It is wild and unchanged. It’s chaos.”

I looked into his eyes and saw genuine concern. To him, magic was a force defined by laws and rules. It was something he studied and used as a tool. It behaved in predicable ways that he fundamentally understood. He never liked witch magic or shapeshifter magic because it tapped into that primordial unpredictability that he sought to define and limit. It defied him, and so he rejected it.

This was infinitely more unpredictable than witch magic. This was wild magic, a raw power with unknown limits. It disturbed my father to his core. It disturbed me, too.

“Can you walk away from this?” he asked.

“No. I gave them my word. Curran gave them his word.”

He covered his face with his hands. “Of course you did. The two of you blundered into this with no idea of what you were facing.”

Conlan hopped in place like an excited kitten.

“Mom! Can I come?” His eyes were like two headlights coming at you on a dark road.

My father took his hands from his face and stared at his grandson.

“No, you may not! Have you heard nothing I have said?”

Conlan looked at me, his face desperate. “Ice Age animals!”

Power swirled around my father.

“I FORBID IT.”

The palace shook from the impact.

To me, this was ancient history coming to life after lying dormant for eons and killing people. To Curran and Conlan, it was much more. My father was right about one thing: every one of us had roots.

“DAUGHTER! DO YOU NOT CARE FOR YOUR CHILD?”

The full power of his magic reverberated through me. Ouch.

“It’s the origin of his bloodline.”

“I AM THE ORIGIN OF HIS BLOODLINE!”

The palace trembled again.

“One of the origins. He isn’t a clone of you, Father. He is a prince of Shinar, but he is also a First, and his animal counterpart hasn’t walked the planet for over ten thousand years. This may be his only chance to experience the world as it had been.”

Roland glared at me.

Nobody knew what we would find in the forest. Whatever it was could vanish once we took down the power ruling over it. Conlan would likely never again see it in his lifetime. Ice Age mammals didn’t exactly pop out of nowhere every day like daisies.

Penderton was dangerous. But I had made up my mind. Conlan was a child, but he was a child of two trained killers. He would be fine.

“You may come.”

Conlan grinned ear to ear and vanished.

My father’s face was terrible.

A mountain rose in the distance, split in half with a thunderous crack, and spewed molten lava. Roland strode to the rail and gazed at it. I came to stand next to him. We watched the eruption for a while, with a stream of glowing lava flowing to the sea and very considerately avoiding the gardens. Minutes ticked by.

The eruption seemed to ebb.

“Feel better?” I asked carefully.

“Not appreciably, no. This is a terrible idea. You are putting the boy in real danger. You and that savage you call your spouse blundered into something you cannot comprehend and now you will allow my grandson to join you on this idiotic quest. Can you at least understand that?”

“What would you do in my place?”

He faced me. “I would face the threat that dared to challenge me. I would erase them from the face of the planet. They do not belong here. Their time has passed, and they have no claim to the land or the lives of the people who inhabit it. They didn’t come bearing gifts. They came demanding tribute. But I am not you. I do not willfully shackle myself, denying the power my family sacrificed so much to obtain.”

Again with the shackles. Him and Jushur, two peas in a pod.

“Have you ever offered a servant a drink?”

He glanced at me. “Why would I do that?”

Jushur was right. My father was the king atop his mountain. He never forgot who he was or where he came from… Oh.

“Sometimes I think we’ve reached an understanding,” I said. “And then you manipulate me like this.”

He didn’t say anything.

“You focused my attention on our ancestry, trying to guilt-trip me, and then, when Conlan told us about the Ice Age, you saw an opportunity, so you dramatically forbade me from letting him join us in Penderton, knowing that if you gave me an ultimatum, I would be inclined to do the exact opposite.”

“Your point?”

“You gambled with your grandson’s safety for a chance to push me into doing something I don’t want to do.”

“No, I bet on your maternal love. Even without my nudge, you wouldn’t deny him this chance to see the source of his power. It would be cruel, and you were never that, Blossom. One way or another, you would’ve allowed him to join you, and once he’s there, you will use everything in your arsenal to protect him, including the powers of your bloodline that you are trying so hard and pointlessly to reject.”

“Why are you so hung up on it?”

“Because you insist on hobbling yourself. Your fear of following in my footsteps cripples you. You don’t have to be me, Blossom. You don’t have to be your aunt. Our bloodline has produced many great rulers, benevolent, just, enlightened. Shinar was the beacon of progress and safety long before any of us were born. You must keep your chosen people safe. It is your duty, and your sword has limits.”

The volcano smoothed itself out into verdant mountains, as if it were never there.

“We both know what you have to do to save that town. Your son’s presence there is just the excuse you need to justify it to yourself. I gave you that excuse. Knowing you and the boy were safe would make me sleep better at night.”

Forgetting someone there in our family of three. “You don’t sleep, Father.”

“Of course I do. I sleep and eat, even though I have no need of it. I live my life as normally as I can, or I would go mad in this prison of your making.”

“The dragon made the prison. Your actions, your decisions put you here.”

“Semantics.”

“If you beat me, where would I be?”

He didn’t answer. I picked up the book Conlan had left behind, turned, and walked back to the platform. It was my designated point of arrival and departure, and despite everything, I respected my father’s rules.

“Blossom,” he called out.

I turned to look at him.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to return here after you’ve done it and hear me say, ‘I’m so proud of you. You’ve done very well’?”

I kept walking.

Yes. It might be.