Raging elves and a raging Queen of the Fae. Not a good mix.
Suddenly, as if a motor had engaged, the sigils ground into the snow and dirt like two massive saw blades, doing at least three full spins in a blink of an eye before freezing again.
I jumped back.
“They’ve almost settled onto the surface of this bubble,” Sal said.
I snatched her off the ground and spun toward the magical rope rippling around Ellie. “Deep breath, my friend.”
Sal did her version of an inhale.
I slammed her blade into Titania’s magic.
Chapter 15
To rupture is to tear violently without control. Something you wanted contained always comes gushing forth. There’s no way around the spilling of guts.
The thing with real ruptures is that they don’t mend themselves. Even after all the pain and anger spills from the wound, that hole in the soul is still there. Which is why I’m thankful my mind was never as piecemeal as my body. If it had been, the rips and the agony would have needed surgery to fix. And no one can be their own surgeon.
My brushes with tearing have made me that much more sensitive to magic. I can see if magic is stable, precarious, agitated, or about to burst. I can read the spits and the sparks and the vibrating sheets. I know good magic from bad, and good magic going bad.
But nothing had prepared me for the magical rupture I caused when I sliced through Titania’s snake-ropes of power.
The moment Sal’s blade touched the outer edge of the rope, I felt the magic reverberate through her metal, into her handle, and up the woven magic around her grip.
A reverb similar to, yet different from, the same oscillating waves that had rung through the space of the veil earlier. It felt deeper this time. Lower, as if the entire boundary vibrated.
Sal slipped through the magic as if she were slicing off bits of gelatin which didn’t give the resistance I expected. I stumbled into the wound as Sal’s head slammed into the snow-covered pasture and for an instant—a microsecond blink of an eye—I was connected to Titania’s magic.
Red and green. Tooth and claw. Hunger and sex and warm bones. Fae magic was alive and free and only cooperated because a fae it liked fed it good treats and kept its cubs warm and safe.
And now I’d sliced open that magic, and it spilled so violently it slammed me backward into Arne’s ready-to-buzz sigil.
My back hit what felt like a vertical puddle of acid. When Sal’s handle hit the sigil, my arm went numb.
She was unconscious, as she warned she’d be. She couldn’t help. I leaned forward, trying to get off Arne’s barrier, as I willed my numb hand and fingers to not let go.
The shield sigil spun once, twice, three times—and spun my perception with it. I didn’t move—my body stayed against the magic Arne had raised to shield himself from Titania—but my sense of the boundary flashed forward, then back, then forward again as if the ground itself flipped. My perspective flipped from snow-covered and elven to richly green and fae and back again.
The elves, my home, the magic of Alfheim, the steady state of the region’s Norse heritage, the calm of so-called Minnesota Nice, the predictability of snowfall and snowplows, the cycle of freeze and thaw of my lake—these were quiet waves. Order and chaos balanced. No ruptures. No gushing.
But Titania—and all the fae—were all about the peaks and the valleys. All about the emotions and touches and worship of nature’s wonders. Entire realms were built around perfect apples. Religions manifested out of the fervor and raucous dances under Beltane moons. And chaos balanced order.
Then back to Arne and Magnus. Back to the riotous democratic—yet controlled—violence of the Norse gods.
Then Titania and the layers and layers of festivals and goddesses worshiped.
My gut rolled. A pounding throb smashed against my temples and if I didn’t get off Arne’s sawblade, I’d lose myself in the back and forth flashes. I’d be vulnerable.
Titania might take Ellie again and the acid-like pain, all the reverberations and the echoes and the veil-rupturing magic, would be my life, or lack of life. Lack of mate magic. Lack of reason and emotion and the brilliant wonder that was Ellie, half-asleep and skin-to-skin, under the warm golden sun of her cottage.
Ellie, also alone, somewhere she couldn’t leave, not knowing if I remembered her and probably stripped of her own memories of me.
I bellowed but my yell came right back at me, like all things in this mirror-thin place between worlds, and hit me full force with its teeth and claws.
I gasped to pull in what breath I could. I’d survived a pike through my chest. I was not going to my end because I’d accidentally backed into an elf’s sigil. I wouldn’t be collateral damage in something so banal.
A shadow appeared in front of me. Two hands reached through the wavering mirror-like waves and pulled me away from Arne’s sigil.
“Frank!” Hrokr Arnesson peered at my face, then around my arm at his father’s sigil. “Move!”
He tossed me, Sal still in my hand, toward Ellie.
I stumbled, but managed to avoid Titania, and somehow circumvented her flailing, sparking magic before falling to my knees in front of Ellie.
Sal had said nothing about possible ill effects on Ellie and Hrokr from rupturing Titania’s magic. No mention of how it would stun Ellie into incoherence, or cause Hrokr to change.
I looked back at the Loki elf.
There was concern there, in that face, hidden amongst the burning awe.
I shouldn’t have looked at Arne when he went All-Father back at the barn. I shouldn’t look at Hrokr now. One should not look upon the face of a god.
Hrokr Arnesson’s ears were no longer the same tall, pointy shape of the elves, and had lost a good three inches as they rounded down into something more sprite-like. A subtle rainbow of colors now danced in his gray elven ponytail and in the sparks of magic outlining every
