stillness. “You did well,” he finally said, quietly.
Javier croaked laughter. “Did I? Is the fall of blood from the sky not a sign of the end times? Tomas, I enjoyed it.” Sacha's warning burnt him, but the all but empty place where the witchpower magic had been burned more deeply. “I've never known a woman as sweet, and in the heat of it I thought this must be God's grace giving me pleasure for doing his will. But the magic is gone.” The last words came out a broken whisper, as if spoken by a frightened child. “I'm empty, and know nothing of how to refill this place inside me. What if I'm wrong and the pleasure is the devil's?”
“The Pappas blessed you.” Tomas came to him, touched his hair, then knelt. “We must believe this is God's will, Javier, all of it. That the Khazarian betrayal is meant to test our resolve, and that we must push all the harder against Aulun.”
“Sacha thought you would stay my hand.”
Instead, Tomas took his hands, warm touch that brought a discovery of his own chill. “I've walked this far with you,” the priest whispered. “We've entered Hell, and I'll not leave your side now. We'll pray,” he promised. “God will replenish the magic, and you'll stand fast and take back the ground we've lost. Aulun will be our kingdom, yours and mine in God's eyes and in His name. Don't be afraid, Javier. Don't be afraid.”
Javier, trembling, leaned forward into Tomas's embrace, and as the priest began to whisper a prayer, felt the hunger of witchpower begin to grow again within him.
BELINDA WALTER
Belinda should have reached Javier by now, a full fortnight after she slipped away from Alunaer. Should have, and didn't like to think that it was fear keeping her from making contact. There were reasons to have delayed: whispering the stillness around all the ships, drawing it close so that even eyes searching for them were unable to see them, had wearied her. The same trick again spread over the army as it left the water and penetrated Brittany's north shore. They moved in silent secrecy, an advantage her people would have paid dearly in blood had they done without. Worthwhile, but tiring.
She felt Javier on the edges of that secrecy, felt his awareness of her presence, and shivered under the intensity of his hatred. He would mark this war a success if it ended with her head on a pike, even if every soldier he brought with him died in putting it there. Even his ambitions on Aulun's crown would be satisfied by her death, though he clearly intended on attaining both.
Hiding an army from plain sight was more exhausting by far than hiding only herself. She'd learned in Lutetia how far she could push herself, and had grown far beyond those limitations now, but even so, without a need to drive herself forward and face Javier, without a mission assigned to her by someone else, she risked a few days of lingering and recovering while the first battles were met. Her confidence in her own witchpower was immense, but she respected Javier's as well, and preferred meeting him when she was at full strength.
It was not, she had told herself again, fear.
And then Javier tore the front lines of the Khazarian army apart, turned them to mist that lifted to the sky and came down as red rain. Standing under that hideous downpour, Belinda Primrose admitted fear, and for the first time in her life, stood stymied by it.
The weight of his power, its destructive potential unleashed, brought ice to her skin, red rain colder than it had any right to be. She'd found the play of his magic erotic, once; now, even beside the truths she'd learned, she could hardly imagine finding anything but horror in what he turned his power to. And yet she felt no maliciousness in it, not like how his anger became pointed and focused when he thought of her. The bloody rainfall was a result of war, a necessary evil: that was what cold red water collecting in her hair and in puddles around her feet told her.
Slowly, as the sky bled through her clothes and soaked her to the skin, she came to recognise the necessity of what he did in what she had done to the Cordulan armada only weeks before.
They were both monsters, and she took comfort in that.
It released her from her fear, gave her a direction to move in. The combined Aulunian and Khazarian armies had won the day, but sleeping under the falling blood of their comrades stripped away their bravado. They would need it come morning, and that, at least, was a thing she could help with.
Standing unnoticed in the midst of a war camp, Belinda turned her face to the weeping sky and reached for magic. Golden warmth chased the ice away, then stretched upward, though she tried to mute the witchlight itself. Tried, but with her eyes closed, could hardly know if she succeeded, and she had no intention of parting her lashes to risk blood drops splashing in her eyes.
After the storm and the armada, pushing a handful of summer rain clouds away from her camp seemed simple, little more than a whisper of concentration and an encouragement to empty themselves elsewhere. They had no will of their own, no personality, and yet she was inclined to assign them willingness or stubbornness, depending on how easily the wind bent to her call. She sent them out to sea, not just from over her camp, but from over Javier's. Her armies were distressed by the falling blood, and she thought Javier's might be shorn up by it, such proof as it was of their king's power. Better to take away their source of pride as well as her people's source of worry.
She waited, witchpower still extended, in expectation of Javier's response. They might fight the war themselves, sister against brother, Aulun against Gallin, Reformationist against Ecumenical, and leave the rest of the armies to return home, there to sleep safe in bed, to lie in the arms of lovers, to forget the savagery that had made up this day and those like it.
But there was no answer from Javier, no angry lash of power to match the outpour he'd made that afternoon. Recognition sluiced through Belinda, a suspicion without foundation: he had exhausted himself, as she'd done the first time she used her magic extensively; as she'd done, indeed, at the armada, and again in concealing Aulun's navy and army from Gallic eyes. Unlike Belinda, though, Javier had never needed to measure his ability to continue beyond the edge of exhaustion: what he faced now would be new to him, a frightening depletion of witchpower. The war, if it came down to them, would not happen tonight; if she was lucky, if her army was lucky, he would be days in recovery, and his confidence would be even longer in returning to form. With a little leeway, the newly allied forces could finish taking Brittany and move east to Lutetia.
And Belinda could face an unarmed Javier with her secrets and her plans.
Satisfied that the rain had stopped, hopeful of her deductions, she opened her eyes to find herself the centre of a gathering, all wide-eyed men struck with awe. She smiled, gentle as she could, and murmured, “You don't see me, my friends. I was never here.”
For the rest of her life she would wonder what they'd seen that night, and so, for the rest of theirs, would they.
Javier had recovered by morning.
Belinda knew it the moment she awakened: the air tingled with released power, far more controlled than it had been for an exhausting long hour the day before. She left the camp, taking high ground a mile or two away, and from there saw Javier standing alone in a column of silver.
It washed out from around him, ripples that cascaded over his people, shielding them from the Khazarian onslaught. Only sometimes did he lash out with a witchlight bomb, and after the first time she recognised the building of power in him, and so aborted the explosion's power.
He flinched as though he'd taken a physical hit, just as he'd done months ago in his bedroom as they'd played at this game now made deadly. She was harder to see than he, her power less active; that, it seemed briefly, was how it had always been, Javier with a showy talent and herself keeping hers under wraps, more subtle. Dismay twisted her stomach as she saw how neatly those two things fit together, the one the half of the other, and again cursed herself for not seeing the impossible before. Dmitri would pay for the folly he'd led them into, she promised herself again, and then Javier's attack leapt across the space between them and she flung up a shield of her own.
She knew Javier's power better than Dmitri's, knew its shape and knew his thoughts, and yet when she followed his magic back, reaching for its source as she'd done with the dark witchlord, the knack of grasping it and cutting it off eluded her. Silver magic hammered her shields as she searched for that point of closure, until a blow
