The Payne, Blair, and Darrow had needed a protector. But Isobel didn’t. What would she gain from this alliance?
He sent out a simple Testing the Waters, meant to assess the power of an opponent’s magickal arsenal, harmless enough that he needn’t worry about blowback. It roamed over Isobel’s body, searching for concealed spellstones but finding none. Searching for any spellstones but finding none, except in the duffel bag she carried.
Any other champion would deflect such a simple spell, but Isobel gave no indication she’d even noticed it.
He took a step closer—close enough to reach for her. He cast another harmless spell: a Trick of the Light, a low-class illusion spell. A brown spider the size of an apple scurried up Isobel’s mud-soaked clothes. But she didn’t react, not even as it stroked a hairy leg from her lips to her chin. She didn’t even blink.
“You’ve lost your sense for magick.” Alistair let the illusion of the spider dissipate and flashed his best, wickedest smile. All of those insults she’d flung at him before, and now she truly was powerless. It must’ve been quite a blow to her pride to come here.
She lifted her chin higher, looking down on him even though they stood eye to eye. “Only you can help me get it back.”
He was prepared to laugh—cackle, even—when her expression softened. “We could help each other,” she said gently. Her tone infuriated him, the way the coldness of the Cave suddenly went warm and pleasant and suffocating. She was the powerless one. Not him.
His gaze found the sharpest point in the cavern wall. He could push her onto it. He knew he could.
“And if you do get it back,” he snapped, “then all I’ll have done is equip you in a battle where I’m the enemy.”
“You’ve always been the enemy. You still are, even now.” Isobel took a step back from him, as if reminded of that fact. “But with my help, you wouldn’t need to lurk in your Cave, wondering who or how many had shown up to attack you. With my help, you wouldn’t need to worry that every curse you cast will kill you.”
“And you’ll, what, stay here with me until you’ve either regained your sense for magick or died?” He was acquiescing—not just because of her convincing case, but because, no matter how much he tried to stoke his fury, he didn’t have it in him to kill her. Not like this. “If we leave here, I’m not protecting you.”
“Who said anything about leaving? It will take high magick to bring my powers back, and you’re the only champion with the expertise. If you can fix my powers, then I promise you that I will, to the best of my ability, help you craft all the new weapons you need to win. And then…” She took a step closer again. Unlike at the banquet earlier that night, Alistair was no longer drunk, but her closeness still made him feel light-headed. He got the feeling she knew that. “When we’re equal again, we can have a duel like proper rivals. The victor takes the glory, the loser dies. The sort right out of your monster stories.”
She was winning him over. Maybe because she’d peered inside his head and knew how to persuade him. Maybe her clever dark eyes were persuasion enough.
“Just remember,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “In those stories, the monster always wins.”
ISOBEL MACASLAN
I believe the legends that magick comes from the stars, not just for how it looks, but because of how it rejects the earth, how the only way to capture it is a glass flask, a crystal stone. Even magick behaves with reason.
A Tradition of Tragedy
Alistair had refused to answer her questions about high magick until he had at least crafted new defensive spells, in case of attack. And so, as the first night in Alistair’s lair crept into morning, Isobel showed Alistair how to safely dispose of a spellstone’s contents without hurting himself.
“You can’t just empty the magick out if the spell is contaminated,” Isobel told him. “You need to bury the stones. It’ll cancel out the recipe entirely.” It was no different from how raw magick dispersed from a body at a funeral.
For two hours they both sat on uncomfortable ground at opposite corners of the Cave. Alistair was hunched over, digging holes with the handle of Isobel’s hairbrush and heaping his sabotaged spell-and cursestones inside. Though Isobel couldn’t see it, she knew what the process entailed—glittery common magick would burst from the earth as though repelled. And it must’ve been working, since Alistair kept swatting at invisible magick particles in the air, muttering angrily, and storing them in empty flasks.