I frowned. “Why bother? Who’s going to take it? Some deer? A coyote?”
He clutched his stomach miserably. “With some luck, maybe we’ll catch them in the act. Can you eat a coyote? I wouldn’t mind at this point. I’m starving.”
I folded my arms, then relented. “Fine. We should look. Maybe there’s something useful in there. Perhaps the servants packed some rations among my books.”
Pierce found new stores of energy at the thought of discovering something edible in my luggage, though I sincerely doubted it. We’d have to subsist on river water until we found something to eat. I followed him as he dropped to his knees and undid the clasp of the nearest trunk.
“Oh,” he said, his voice dull and uncertain.
“Hmm? What is it?”
He turned to me, a strange look on his face. “I don’t think you want to look at this right now.”
I scowled. “Well, that just makes me want to look even harder.” I brushed past him, groping in the dark to feel around in the trunk for something familiar: an embossed cover, the wrinkled edge of an old tome, the weathered leather strap of a magical scroll. But my fingers only met the satiny inner lining of an empty trunk. “No. This can’t be right.”
Pierce moved on to the next suitcase, then the next, opening them all in slow, ceremonial succession. “We should turn in, Quill. It’s dark. We can’t see anything, is all.”
“Ignis,” I growled, igniting a patch of fire in my hand, throwing its light over all the opened, upended luggage.
Empty. They were all empty.
15
“Libris,” I muttered, holding my hand out, using the command word to conjure and summon my books to me. Nothing. I tightened my fingers until my hand turned into a gnarled claw, then willed a book – any book – from the Repository to appear before me. “Libris. Libris.”
Nothing.
This was it, then. Asmodeus’s final cruelty. She’d taken everything from me and more. I slumped to the ground, what little fire and fight still in my belly gone completely out.
Pierce looked at the empty trunks, then at me, then down at the ground, still holding his stomach. “I can’t believe this. It’s over. What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice sounding so distant.
Dantaleon fluttered over, settling onto the grass next to Pierce. It was strange seeing him like that, quite literally lowering himself to our level, for once, instead of hovering in the air like he was so very clearly above us all. Maybe I had him wrong.
“This is why I always warned you to follow your mother’s orders, Quilliam,” Dantaleon said. His voice was so different this time, not chiding, not cruel, but almost sympathetic. “Prince Asmodeus can be generous, but what she makes she can also very easily break.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest, close enough to what I’d heard described as a fetal position, my eyes staring at nothing in the distance. “That hardly matters now, does it? She won. She made her point.”
Dantaleon sniffed. “Now, if only you’d listened all those times I lectured you, then you might have access to magic beyond the books in your Repository. Haven’t I always told you that it was high time to come up with your own signature magic, with spells you’ve crafted yourself?”
Ah, there it was. The old Dantaleon. The jerk I always knew he was. He wasn’t wrong, though, not exactly. The greatest witches and wizards of history had borrowed charms and cantrips from those who had come before them, but they truly rose to infamy by handcrafting their own sorceries. One learns by imitation, but an artist is not an artist until he creates his own magnum opus. And since we learned about the voices that sometimes surfaced when I called on my inherent gifts, we’d decided that it would be prudent for me not to rely so heavily on the Inscription.
But really, Dantaleon? Read the room. There was a time and a place for everything.
I raked at my hair, barely even thinking to cringe when some of it came off in my fingers. “You and Mother raised me to believe that Inscription was the true source of my power. I spent hours, days, years immersing myself in magical tomes, something you deliberately warned me against, just days ago, in fact. And now you’re telling me that I should have spent more time memorizing and studying my magic?”
He sniffed again. “I am saying that you should have used that time more prudently. What I am saying is no different from what I’ve been saying for years. Yes, Inscription built your power on your collection of books, but haven’t I always told you of the need to write your own spells, to create your own magic?”
“Neither the time nor the place for a nagging lecture,” I hissed at him. The two syllables of my favorite magic power word tickled the end of my tongue, begging to be launched from the tips of my fingers, but I very well couldn’t burn my mentor into a pile of cinders. I could certainly try, and certainly be roasted alive for the effort. Besides, we needed Dantaleon around, possibly as our only mode of transportation, for one thing. I kept my breathing even, trying to still myself.
Pierce gave a long, exhausted sigh. “So, what now? What’s the plan?”
I shook my head, swallowing the bitter lump in my throat, smoothing away the snarls in my hair and tucking it behind my ear. There was no sense breaking apart. Perhaps Asmodeus didn’t want me anymore, but I was still Quilliam J. Abernathy. I wasn’t defeated that easily.
“The plan is unchanged,” I told him. “We head to that building, do our best to sleep through the night, then we wake up with clearer heads and figure out our next step.”
Pierce and I picked ourselves up off the grass and trudged for the ruined
