He shot me a pained look as my arms shook and I almost felt on my face again.
He leaned forward, clutched his hands around the bars of the cage, and shot me another concerned look. “Please, just save your strength. You’re our only way out of here,” he added.
“Where… where are we?” I kept staring around the room, trying to pick out a door. That was the thing – while there were windows – there was no door.
“The Lonely King’s mansion,” Jim replied with a heavy, shaking breath. “He’s keeping us for his spell tonight.”
Though a wave of nausea shook through my stomach at that admission, I managed to draw up a shaking hand and clamp it across my mouth. “What spell?” I asked between my sweaty fingers.
“He’s going to use us as the final offerings for his time spell,” Jim replied.
It would have been seriously easy to give in to the sudden fear pitching through my stomach and to allow it to flatten me and send me back into the arms of unconsciousness. Instead, I clamped a shaking hand over my mouth as I stared at Jim. A second later, I realized he was in a cage while I wasn’t. “Why am I just lying here?”
“Because the Lonely King figures you’re no risk now,” Jim answered.
“Sorry?”
“He pumped you full of something called a blocking compound – it’ll prevent you from calling on your magic. I’m in the cage,” Jim brought his hands back and tapped the bars with resonant thumps, “because blocking compound is seriously expensive, and he doesn’t want to waste it on me. He rightly recognizes you’re the real threat.”
I swallowed. Then my attention returned to the room. “How do you know where we are?”
“Trust me, I’ve investigated the Lonely King for long enough to know this place. Plus, I saw the bastard a few minutes ago when he was administering the blocking compound.”
Another sick feeling descended through my gut. I would have clapped a hand over my mouth, but I honestly couldn’t spare the energy.
I returned my attention to surveying the room. Again I was struck by the fact there wasn’t a door. “How did the Lonely King get in? Did he climb through the window or something? What is this room, anyway?”
“It’s a prison,” Jim said grimly. “There is a door, but the Lonely King is the only one who can access it. I might be able to figure out how to open it, but I’d have to get a good look at it – and the Lonely King’s way too clever for that.”
I kept fighting against my fatigue, kept pushing myself to find more strength in my wasted limbs.
I felt as if I’d woken up from a month-long coma.
My body was unresponsive. It wasn’t just that it was weak – it was as if someone had set my muscles on fire.
“Why… why am I so weak?” I managed to ask.
“The blocking compound,” Jim answered. “He doesn’t want you using your powers to figure out how to get out of this room,” Jim said. “Not until tonight, anyway.
Another sinking feeling crashed through my gut at that. “What… what exactly is he going to do to us? You said we would be the last sacrifice. Why is he trying to cast a time spell, anyway? I mean, what the hell is a time spell?”
Jim listened to my barrage of questions, but it soon became clear he had no answers. He simply shrugged. “I’ve got no idea what he wants, but I imagine it’s more power. It’s always the same with sorcerer kings.”
“What’s a sorcerer king, anyway? And how can he have so much magic?” I gestured to the room around us. “Why doesn’t it cost him?”
Jim looked at me directly. “It does cost him. Big time. He just found a way to get past it, to make other people wear most of the cost,” Jim said through clenched teeth.
I grimaced as I realized what he was saying. “You mean hearts, don’t you? That’s why he collects the hearts of witches, right?”
Jim nodded. “There are other ways, too. It doesn’t just have to be hearts. If you’re smart, and all sorcerer kings are, you can fool other magicians into using their magic for you – manipulate them into contracts, threaten their families, that kind of thing.”
Nervous energy escaped down my back. It was the final impetus I required to push all the way up into a seated position. With ashen, pale cheeks, I faced Jim. “Sorry? What do you mean? A contract?”
Jim shrugged again. “It’s the easiest way for a sorcerer king to keep collecting his power. All he has to do is find a magician weaker than him, and then he can engage them in a magical contract. Take their power, control their abilities for his own ends. That way he can amass the kind of magic that can do this,” Jim gestured to the room around us, “without amassing consequences.”
I could hardly believe it.
…. I hadn’t really questioned the story Max had fed me – that my forebear Mary McLane had been a line witch who had cost Max’s village hundreds of lives. I’d just taken it at face value. Why else would the McLane seers have been cursed?
This was the reason we were cursed, because Max from the past wanted our power.
We descended into a sharp, itching kind of silence, one that settled my attention on how weak my body felt.
“How powerful are sorcerer kings, anyway?” I forced myself to ask, soon realizing I couldn’t whittle away the last hours of my life in complete silence. Though it now seemed likely I wouldn’t be able to free myself from the Lonely King’s grasp, I still wanted to figure out this mystery, even if it would be the last thing
