Page 67 of Twisted Magic

“Exactly that!” Nic spat, throwing up her hands. “We have eye-witnesses. They used moon-magic silver weapons on the hunters and it did nothing to them. Something else Seliah warned us about, remember? She encountered that hunter that was resistant to moonsilver and it knew it would be. It was smarter, too, she said. More adaptable. I’ve got that letter here somewhere. I need to reread it, though it’s too late now.” With that bitter declaration, she paced to her desk and began rummaging through the neat stacks of papers, scattering them with sharp gestures, with no regard for her usual orderliness.

Gabriel went to her, going behind his beloved and pressing his body against hers, reaching around to set his hands on hers, to still her frantic searching. “Take a moment,” he said. “Deep breaths.”

“We don’t have time to take moments,” she bit out, her voice watery now. “And breathing won’t save us.”

“We do have time,” he corrected, taking deep breaths himself, in the hopes that she’d match them. “Being under siege is entirely about time, and fortitude.”

“That’s when you’re waiting for allies to arrive. We have none.” She turned in his arms, facing him. As he’d suspected, she’d been weeping, her face wet with tears. “There’s more.”

Yes, he’d heard the plural when she mentioned the worst parts. “Tell me.”

“They’re digging a trench to drain the lake.”

“They aim to expose the arcanium.”

“It seems so. My father knows where the arcanium is, so that would be his strategy. Expose the arcanium and cut off our access to it. I should have let you kill him when we had the chance.”

He touched her damp cheek. “It’s not our fault that we made a choice to spare his life. It wasn’t only you. I decided, too.”

“And that’s our weakness,” she replied grimly. “My father always taught me to be ruthless in victory, or it doesn’t stick. Now you and I are paying the price for that moment of sentimentality.”

Gabriel didn’t think not wanting to kill her own father—a man she’d once loved, admired, and emulated—qualified as sentimentality. But he also knew Nic well enough by now not to try to argue with her in this rare black moment.

“I’ll expand the wards,” he told her. “With our current access to the arcanium, I can build enough power to move the bubble of the ward past the lake.”

“It won’t work.” Her mouth, like her mind, was fixed. “You’ll just trap those creatures inside with us.”

“It will work,” he insisted. “I can move it outward incrementally, pushing them away.”

“That will mean pushing everyone currently outside the wards away, also,” she pointed out with dogged fatalism. “Are you prepared to watch your people, perhaps your parents, hammer on the outside of your wards, screaming to be let in while the hunters dismember them?”

Horrified, he stepped back, putting distance between them before he realized he’d done so. “How can you suggest that?” he demanded.

“Because that’s what would happen. I know you, my only love, and you would not be able to turn your back on them. You would let them through the wards.”

“Of course I would!” That she could imagine otherwise sparked an insulted rage in him.

“And doom us all,” she continued relentlessly. “Because you open your wards to our friends, our family, you open them to your enemies.”

Despair settled over him with the realization of her correct assessment of the situation, on all counts.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, stepping close enough to set her palm on his chest over his heart. “We could generate the power to extend the ward-bubble as you suggest, but you couldn’t sustain it. Not even you, my powerful wizard. Even now the wards are a constant drain on you.”

“A trickle,” he corrected. “I barely notice. And I’m being conservative, doing as you’ve taught me—keeping my own reserves full and drawing from you as you replenish.”

She gazed at him in sorrow. “A trickle over time is enough to carve a deep canyon. Eventually we’ll both be losing more magic than we can replenish. Once we lose the arcanium—we’ll have to collapse the tunnel to keep the enemy from using it to get inside—we’ll lose magic even more rapidly. And that’s not counting what we’ll expend on magical counters to the attacks that will surely come.”

It was so unlike Nic not to have a plan. His sunny, determined, and relentlessly optimistic wife was nowhere to be seen. “I thought I was the gloomy one in this relationship,” he teased.

She didn’t laugh, or even crack a smile. “I don’t see a way out of this,” she admitted. “We’re trapped inside your wards, with finite supplies of everything. Anything we might do is only a delaying tactic to forestall our inevitable defeat.”

“We can petition for help,” he said, knowing he sounded desperate. “The Convocation won’t allow this outright act of war.”

“Won’t they?” She pursed her generous lips, dropping her gaze. “For all we know, they support this action. They never wanted to reinstate House Phel. This will neatly get rid of the house, and us, forever.”

“We need to tell Seliah to stay away,” he realized. “Jadren, too, if they’re even able to leave House El-Adrel…” He trailed off, realizing with a bitter grief that matched Nic’s that he might never know if Seliah was all right.

“She’ll be all right,” Nic told him with firm conviction, reading him easily. “Jadren won’t let anything happen to her. We’ll send an emergency courier to them. Tell them what’s happened and to stay far away. At least they’ll be on the side of the winning team. Alise, too. We need to warn her and send her funds to allow her to stay and graduate.”

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