Nineteen

The fish was good, silver-white and flaky, and if boiled nettles weren’t precisely what Erik would have chosen as a dish to go with it, hunger did not leave him inclined to be picky. Eating occupied both his mouth and hands, so that he didn’t fall into the temptation to fidget, nor to talk only to hear his own voice.

In time, as the food vanished and the process of digesting perforce calmed the men slightly, Marcus sat forward. The fire leapt up, and his bearded, angular face looked saturnine in its glow. Yet the men turned to him without hesitation. Even Franz had roused himself from his endless prayers long enough to eat, and now his eyes stayed on Marcus, not on his rosary nor darting nervously from side to side.

“It seems to me,” said Marcus, “that we can split our problems in two. Half is what to do right now, and that’s best planning like we’ll be here through winter, at best.” His voice was calm and dry: businesslike. When none of the men spoke out, he continued. “We’ll need better shelter. Could be we should move higher up the cliffs. We’ll need a good pile of wood and stores of food. We’ll start with all of those tomorrow. Prepare for the worst, yes?”

“Then what’s the best?” Samuel asked. “Do you think we’ve a chance of getting home?”

Marcus shrugged. “If there is one, I don’t know it. I wouldn’t. That’s where I’ll give you the wheel, Captain,” he said and, with a quick gesture to Toinette, sat back.

Her face in shadow was like a statue in a long-forgotten temple, all hint of feeling drowned in deep contemplation. Idly her hand played with the ragged hem of her skirt, winding a loose red thread around her finger again and again. “I’d not give anyone false hope,” she said, her voice slow and measured. “I’ve seen nothing like this before, nor heard of it. Nor have I fooled with magic for”—she hesitated before bringing out the words—“for longer than any of you has been alive. I wouldn’t be the one I chose to fight it. Yet I was trained, and Erik more, and from what I do know, most spells can be broken.”

Only then did Toinette turn her head, asking Erik to speak with a gesture very like Marcus’s. He wondered briefly if she was aware of the imitation, then answered her unasked question. “Aye,” he said. “It may be a matter of raw power, or the right set of circumstances. We’ve no way of knowing yet—but there is a chance.”

“How can we know, then?” Samuel asked.

“Toinette and I—and any of you who wish to learn magic, to some degree—can start learning more tomorrow. We’ve magical ways, scrying and that, but,” he added, remembering how little the visio dei had worked before, “the best way forward may be on this earth.”

Across the fire, Sence waited for him to elaborate, while John watched with narrow eyes and asked, “Why?”

“Magic needs a point of attachment to the mortal world. An anchor, if you will,” he added, knowing his audience. Long ago, Artair had spoken of flames and wicks, but water worked as well as fire for metaphors. “Often that’s a person, but I doubt there’s anyone but us living on this island.” Recognizing the possibilities in that statement, several of the men crossed themselves. Erik went on quickly. “It’s most likely that the spell’s bound to an object—it might be a place, but that’s a sight harder.”

“And if it’s the whole island?” John asked, his eyes narrow.

“Then our task is even easier, in some ways.”

“Breaking strain,” Toinette put in. “Or more room for holes, maybe. Size isn’t always the best defense—you remember that time in Rome, John, and that little wretch with the knife?”

John winced and put a protective hand to his thigh. His face changed briefly too, in a way that spoke of more than thought and remembered pain. Toinette was again his captain, the woman who’d been in Rome with him and likely fought in whatever brawl they spoke of. For a little while, he forgot dragon and Scot and They brought us here.

As when she’d imitated Marcus’s gesture, Erik wondered if Toinette had intended just that.

“No use wondering,” Marcus said. “We’ll find out, and we’ll work from there. Tomorrow morning I’ll say who’s for building and who’s for food. We’ll need you two as well, should we have to go further into the forest, but for now best that you figure out what’s happening here.”

“That it is,” said Toinette.

She made no objection, Erik noticed, to the way her first mate seemed to have taken command. He spoke without waiting for orders, and with no sense of deference. Perhaps it was always so between them in times of crisis—they had known each other for many years—but it stood out to Erik now as it hadn’t before.

They had no privacy for him to ask her thoughts, nor did he think she’d welcome the question. He wanted to put an arm across her shoulders, to offer comfort, but he knew that it would likely only make matters worse. Instead he sat and stared at the fire, one of a silent crowd.

* * *

Blearily, Toinette rubbed her eyes and glared into the purple light of early morning. She’d slept poorly the night before, the day’s events collecting into a ball of weariness that squatted in her stomach and refused to transmute to actual sleep for hours. When she finally had drowsed, she’d woken often.

In time, she’d remembered the feel of Erik’s body atop hers, his cock deep inside her and his face as he lost himself in pleasure. That had helped—sensation, even remembered sensation, had been strong enough for a distraction—but facing him in the morning, across a circle in the sand, Toinette squirmed inside. Fun was fun, but finding its memory comforting was a step too far.

“The hour of the Moon,” she said, “is too damned early.”

“Have a word wi’ the spheres about it, then,” Erik said, his accent speaking of his own lack of sleep.

Had matters been less urgent, Toinette would have suggested simply putting off the scrying for a while: the hour of the Moon came around a few times a day. She couldn’t have justified the delay in this case, though, not to herself and not to the men. There were few of them awake yet, but Samuel and John both sat watching nearby.

“You take the shapes,” Erik said, passing her a thin pine branch. “I’ll write the letters, and the men can light the candles. Such as they are.”

Artair’s training had involved lambskin, bronze, and beeswax candles. On the island, they had sticks and sand, with tapers of wine-soaked firewood and sailcloth as rough torches. In theory, Toinette thought, spells would work regardless. The right elemental correspondences were what mattered most, and the right inscriptions. She hoped most was enough, and also that Erik remembered the inscriptions.

Yet the process came back to her as any childhood skill would. Walking slowly around, she drew the inner circle, then the five-pointed star, leaving herself in the middle. Samuel and John planted a torch at each compass point. The smell of burning began to fill the air.

Erik chanted as he wrote the sigils, speaking the name of each. At first the words sounded normal; as he went on, they developed echoes that sounds shouldn’t have had on the beach. When he stepped into the circle and wrote the last word, his voice was like a hum of bees.

The lines in the sand slowly filled with blue light. That light rose up around them and then shifted, splitting into lines that reconfigured themselves, midair, to form a net. A word in ancient Aramaic from Toinette and Erik’s throats alike cast that net outward. It grew on the way, though the inner circle stayed around them.

Through it, in a wall of images around her, Toinette saw the island flick by. She recognized the tall pines and the brush, even the burnt area where they’d found the plants, though it was all faintly blurred and colored with the more extreme shades of magic. The spell didn’t pause to look at the scenery: it sought, as a good hound might do. Magical power left her, a bit at a time, to form the “leash.”

Then it stopped. Rather, it was stopped. A shock ran through Toinette. She remembered the feeling from falls in her youth. It reverberated up the lines of power and into her. She felt no pain, not exactly, but a momentary whirlwind of sensation. Darkness was part of it—so too was cold—and a thin, whining howl wormed through her mind.

The spell tried to seek further, but to no avail. If there was a way around the thing blocking it, or a path through it, both required more strength than even she and Erik had together. Toinette raised her hands, drew her power back, and spoke the Latin words that would end the spell. After a syllable or two, she heard Erik join her.

They collapsed as it faded, both of them dropping bonelessly to the sand. This was the bad side of magic, the aftermath that left the magician wearier than three days of fighting and sicker than three of drinking—although it was far from the worst. Toinette knew that, even as she struggled to make her stomach behave. Scrying spells usually didn’t backfire violently, from what Artair had told her, but she was glad not to have touched off one of those rare occasions.

She thought her eyes would grow back over time if necessary, but she wasn’t sure. Organs were tricky.

“Here.” A voice spoke above her. Toinette didn’t open her eyes, lest vision make her spew the previous night’s fish along the sand, but she placed the speaker: human, male, English, and therefore John. When she didn’t move, he put a tentative hand under her chin. “Drink this.”

She smelled watered wine, with a bit of honey in it, and sipped slowly. The first swallow left her sitting rigid on the sand, convinced that all her willpower would go to waste—and then her stomach shuddered and righted itself. She drank more quickly and, when she was done, tried to focus her sore eyes on John. “Thank you. How did you know?”

He shrugged. “The Scotsman”—a glance over at Erik, who was finishing his own drink with Samuel in attendance, a fact that made Toinette feel better—“said last night that you might feel sick after. Wine with honey helped my Elsie when she was carrying. So I thought—” Another shrug. “Didn’t expect it this bad, though.”

“Me neither.” Toinette wiped her lips. The wine did help, though her stomach twisted again at the mention of John’s wife—and his children. She at least had nobody waiting for her return. “The thing that’s keeping us here doesn’t want to be found.”

“You saw nothing, then?” asked Samuel.

Erik shook his head. “Not nothing. Only nothing definite. We got into the forest, past the Templars’ bodies. And maybe those should be our next try.”

“Grave-robbing.” Samuel shook his head. “Unsettling.”

“What isn’t?” John asked. “I’d dig up my own grandmother if it meant getting off this rock.”

“Besides,” said Toinette, “it’s not actually a grave, is it?”

As justifications for necromancy went, she knew, that was very thin.