Much Ado About Magic

Reluctantly, I left his side to go warn everyone. Nobody needed much urging to take cover, since the one beam falling had really destabilized the roof. Even the magic making the chamber bigger on the inside than it appeared on the outside wasn’t enough to withstand Ramsay’s magic. When I was sure everyone else was safe, I crawled under a bench.



I couldn’t see from my hiding place exactly what Owen was doing, but I knew it couldn’t be easy since that crystal was channeling some serious power. It must have been like digging bare-handed in an electric generator. Whatever it was, he did it quickly. There was a loud explosive sound, a burst of white-hot bright light, and then total silence.



I waited a few moments more, then crawled out from under the bench. The building had stopped shaking, and nothing was falling from above. I first looked to where Merlin and Ramsay had been fighting to make sure the fight really was over. I didn’t see Ramsay, but Merlin was kneeling in the circle, next to a motionless figure in black.



My heart started pounding so hard I could hear my pulse. “No,” I whispered as I drew close enough to see Owen. He was so pale his skin was almost transparent.



“He’s alive,” Merlin assured me, “but very weak.”



“And Ramsay?”



“He is unconscious, as well, and rather badly singed.”



James, Gloria, Rod, and some of the others joined us. Gloria immediately knelt by Owen and brushed a strand of hair off his forehead. “Will he be okay?” I asked. “What happened to him?”



“He sent most of the built-up power surging into Ramsay, but some of it blew back to him,” Merlin explained.



“And what does that mean?” I demanded.



“It means he received too much power for the human body to manage, though not as much as Ramsay left himself open to.”



That still didn’t mean much to me, but Owen was the one who was good at explaining magic using nonmagical metaphors. “So it’s bad?” I asked.



“It could be,” Merlin acknowledged. “The full impact remains to be seen.”



Rudolph joined us. Almost as an afterthought, he pounded his staff against the floor to break the wards. Emergency crews then rushed into the chamber. I watched with a sense of despair as they carried Owen away.



James, Gloria, Rod, and I followed to the building’s medical facility, where I sat holding Gloria’s hand in a waiting room while the healers did their magical healing thing and James paced. “He’ll be fine,” I said, wishing I had the power to make that be true. “I don’t think he’d have done something like that if he didn’t know exactly what he was doing.”



“I’m afraid he did know what he was doing. He knew what he risked, but he also knew the danger of not acting. I am very proud of him,” Gloria said, holding her chin up, even though her voice trembled. Now I was worried. If Gloria was practically writing his eulogy, that was a bad sign.



The chief healer came out then and said, “We’ve done what we can for now. Physically, there appears to be no permanent injury. The full extent of the magical damage remains to be seen. He will likely remain unconscious for a day or so.”



They let us in to see Owen half an hour later, and seeing him didn’t reassure me. I’d never seen him so pale. The bruises on his face from his capture stood out in stark contrast to the pallor. When I tentatively touched his hand, I was surprised that it was warm—not normal warm, but he looked like he’d been carved out of ice, so I was expecting him to be frozen. Gloria straightened and smoothed the covers around him, then adjusted his hair so it didn’t fall into his eyes.



We stayed there until the healers made us leave, then I went home with James and Gloria. I told myself it was because they needed someone there for them, but I also didn’t want to be alone, and I wanted to be with people I could talk to about what had happened. Besides, they needed someone to drive them back and forth to the Council infirmary.



The next morning, we arrived at the infirmary to find Merlin already there. “It appears that both Mr. Idris and Mr. Ramsay have been stripped of their powers,” Merlin reported. “The power surge was too much for Mr. Ramsay, and it both burned him and burned out his powers. The link between him and Mr. Idris that maintained the compulsion spell fed enough power into Mr. Idris to damage his powers, as well. The same thing happened to a couple of other people who must have been under a similar spell.”



“What will become of them?” I asked.



“That will be for the Council to decide, but I can’t think of a worse punishment for those two than to be forced to live normal lives.”