It was nearly an hour before we could step off the road and into the woods, muttering concealment spells as we picked our way through the overgrown path. No one would be able to see us, I hoped, and no one would be able to scry us from a distance. There was so much wild magic in the forest, even miles from the shrine, that there’d be no way for anyone to pick us out from the haze. Or so we told ourselves.
“Put the pack down,” I ordered Robin. His face was bland, as he were a wallflower at a family dance. A pleasant and utterly meaningless smile gave him an eerie look. “And then wait.”
“It worked,” Void said. “I told you it would.”
“Yeah,” Himilco said. “I expected tighter security.”
Void snorted. “How many people would want to steal a student-grade wardstone?”
“Point,” I said. The wardstone wasn’t designed to be permanent. I’d seen tutors casually undermine and collapse ward networks that had become tangled messes or actively dangerous to their casters. “We’d have a harder time getting our hands on rare potion ingredients.”
I sighed, inwardly. How long would it take to uncover the theft? I’d served detentions where I’d had to go through the shelves and check that the supplies actually matched the inventory. Professor Bodoh wasn’t one of the teachers who believed in corporal punishment when the student could do something that would be useful as well as teach them a lesson. The theft might be discovered a week from now or a month or any time in between. We would have to move fast. If the school realised the wardstone was gone, they’d start taking a careful look at everyone who’d visited since the last inventory.
“True.” Void pointed a finger at Robin, who regarded him absently. “We’ll have to dispose of him.”
“You mean kill him,” I said, flatly. “No.”
“It’s too dangerous to leave him alive,” Void argued. “If they discover the charms on him…”
“He’s a student, not a dark wizard,” I argued. “He doesn’t deserve to die.”
“He’s a prefect,” Void growled. “How did he get the post unless he spent a lot of time kissing Boscha’s ass?”
“He doesn’t deserve to die,” I repeated. Yes, there had been some prefects who could only have been improved by being dropped into a volcano. Robin might not be one of them. Even if he was, his disappearance would be noted. It would take some time, I thought, before it dawned on the staff he hadn’t been turned into an object and stuffed somewhere out of sight, but once it did they’d start searching in earnest. “Void, we cannot kill him.”
“He’s a massive security risk,” Void said. “If he talks…”
I scoffed. “Have some faith in me,” I said. “He won’t remember a thing.”
Robin came at my command. I led him some distance away, then muttered instructions while carefully untangling the charms so they’d vanish before anyone got a good look at them. He wouldn’t remember Void or Himilco or anything beyond walking me down to Dragon’s Den, then going to a brothel with the tip I’d given him. His subconscious would fill in the details as he walked back to the school, ensuring that he didn’t think to question his own memories. It would be more convincing, to him, than me spinning an entire story. There’d certainly be fewer rough edges that might prove key to unlocking the truth.
“Go,” I ordered.
He went. The spells would fade away when he reached the road, reality and false memories merging into a seamless whole. There should be no reason for anyone to ask questions. I hoped…
I returned to my brothers. “He thinks he went to a brothel,” I told them. It wouldn’t be the first time a prefect had been ordered to go to the town, then take advantage of the lack of supervision to stay longer than his superior had intended. Prefects could get away with things normal students could not. “They’ll understand.”
“A good chance to do nothing while following orders,” Himilco agreed. “No one will look too closely.”
“I hope you’re right,” Void said. “We could have killed him, or even kept him prisoner, long enough to complete the ritual. Letting him go might have been a mistake.”
“And if we’d killed him, we would have tainted the ritual,” I countered, as we started to walk back to the shine. Hamilcar would be wondering what had happened to us. “We have to enter the rite with the best of intentions.”
Void didn’t look convinced. I understood. We were already too exposed. Grandmaster Boscha and Professor Bodoh knew we were at the shine, they knew our cover story; they might just ask questions, even if they didn’t realise they’d lost a wardstone. It was just a matter of time before someone asked the right questions, or contacted our uncle to ask what we were doing. Uncle Mago might be quietly hoping we’d buggered off for good — I knew how he thought — but he’d be shocked into action if the Grandmaster asked what was happening. And who knew what would happen then?
“We got the prize,” Void said, as we reached the shrine. Hamilcar stepped back from his work and waved to us. “We can do the final preparations now, then start tomorrow at midnight.”
“It is supposed to be the best time,” I agreed. I didn’t pretend to understand it — most charms could be cast at any time of day — but all the books on demon summoning insisted the summoning needed to be performed in darkness. There was no point in taking chances by ignoring the rules, as absurd as they seemed. “And we have to prepare ourselves too.”
“Quite,” Void agreed. He rubbed his hands together, eyes alight with the promise of future glories. “If we can make this work…”
We concealed the wardstone, then returned to our tents to build a fire and cook dinner. It was… it was pleasant, to talk to my brothers and share food with them. And yet, it was just another meal. If we’d known what was going to come… if we’d known…
But we didn’t. And so we walked to our fate.
Chapter Six
I stood and stretched, then knelt by the pool to splash water on my face as the sun dropped behind the distant mountains. We’d spent the day preparing ourselves for the rite, rising with the sun and eating a simple breakfast before meditating on our goals and plans for the future. It hadn’t been easy to fast for so long, but it was part of the rite. We had to prepare ourselves as much as we had to prepare the spellware, wardstone and everything else we needed. It was hard not to feel that we were on the cusp of something great, that the world was about to change. We were ready. Was everything else?
We ate a sketchy dinner, while the potential thrummed around us, on the verge of becoming real. My brothers and I were practically one, sharing understanding even though we weren’t speaking. I felt magic pulsing through the air, our souls binding us together. We’d wondered, as we planned the rite, if our father had had something like this in mind all along. There was no one else, even amongst the most experienced ritualists, who could hope to make the rite work. They simply couldn’t work in perfect unison.
I sipped my water, remembering Uncle Mago. He’d held out the promise of acceptance to us as a way to keep us under control, constantly backing away from actually keeping his promise and making the family council acknowledge us. He was in for a shock, I thought, when it dawned on him what we’d done. If we had something the family needed desperately, they’d give us whatever we wanted. It would be easy to demand our uncle be banished from the family. He’d made promises and then broken them. It spoke, I felt, of a lack of integrity.
And also of a degree of short-sightedness, I thought. The longer you keep someone dangling on a string before telling them you won’t keep your promises, the greater their anger and resentment and their determination to make you pay.