Page 18 of Enslaved

I curse softly and pull my hand away from my face. Tomorrow. Tomorrow is my day off. My first day off since my disastrous venture into Noxaur in a desperate attempt to find Lord Vokarum and persuade him to part with the Noswraith head he collected as a trophy some years ago. A wild, foolish, ridiculous plan. But it had served its purpose. It had forced the Prince to assert his Obligation over me. Which in turn reverted the power of Obligation back to my hands. And tomorrow, on my day off . . . I may do as I will, go where I choose. He cannot hold me; the laws of Obligation prevent him.

Meanwhile I may oblige him to do whatever I wish.

But what do I wish? What will I choose come tomorrow morning? Will I go home and visit my brother? It’s been so long since I last set eyes on him. Who knows what terrible mess he’s gotten himself into without me there to protect him. Surely that would be the right thing to do.

Or will I . . . dare I . . . ?

Shaking my head, I focus on the pile of work stacked before me. At least twelve battered spellbooks in need of resealing, their bindings on the verge of disintegration. All minor Noswraiths—I’m still not considered advanced enough in my training to tackle the more complex bindings. I pinch my lips between my teeth and reach for the top book on the stack. It’s one I recognize at once:Dulmier Fen.

My heart skips a beat.

This was the first Noswraith I encountered following my arrival in Vespre. The Prince set me the task of copying the spell afresh in the very book I now hold in my hands. It’s not a powerful wraith, yet it caught me, drew me into its spell. Nearly killed me.

Since then, I’ve encountered this particular wraith on one other occasion, when I ventured into the Nightmare Realm after Danny. There I’d walked with the young man at the center of this dark tale—a dead man, a ghost. Still suffering from both his death wounds and the guilt he bore with him into the afterlife.

Gently, I stroke the brittle cover. This spellbook should not have broken down so fast. No doubt my wandering within the spell had aggravated its collapse. It serves me right that I must copy it again now.

I pull out a freshly stitched grimoire with smooth blank pages, set my inkwell within easy reach, and trim the nib of my quill. All the while, my gaze flits back to the spellbook. In my mind’s eye, I see again the image of that sad ghost boy. He’d craved nothing more than a kiss—a kiss from the true love he’d left behind when he marched off to war. The girl he would never see again.

But of course he and all the sad ghosts haunting that gloomy fen were nothing more than a story. Figments born from the imagination of some writer who lived and breathed in my own world. It is the author himself who truly lives on in the spirit of his creation. Who was he, I wonder? What pain could have driven him to write this tale? Did he experience war and the loss of his comrades? Did he carry the guilt of their deaths when he himself survived?

I open the compromised spellbook to the first page and begin to copy. One word at a time, as I’ve been trained to do. Careful not to let myself be drawn into the spell as I was the first time. But as the characters slowly flow from my pen, and the magic of the binding strengthens, my mind begins to wander. The world around me fades: my desk, my inkwell, my books. A hazy image of thick fog creeps in around the edges of my awareness.

Then I am no longer seated at my desk. Instead I’m ankle-deep in the black mire of a swamp, peering out through the eyes of a young captain. But this is not right, this is not safe. This is letting myself be drawn in by the spell. I know better.

With a wrench of will, I step back, step out of that perspective. I hold onto myself as I did the last time I entered this Nightmare, floating on the edge of the swamp, a little above the scene taking place below. Observing the world, but not part of it.

Below me the young soldier marches along with his ghostly crew. Sometimes they appear as men of flesh and blood, pale and haggard, but whole. Sometimes they are phantoms, flitting in and out of sight. Worst of all are those moments when their gory death wounds can be seen. One man’s head is half blown away; another is burned across most of his body. A gory gash gapes from the abdomen of my young captain, who struggles to push his own entrails back into place as he staggers on and on and on through the endless swamp.

One by one, the phantoms fade away, until my captain is alone. Still marching straight ahead. Aiming for a destination he will never reach.

What is his name? He never said. Perhaps he has no name. Perhaps was left nameless so as to better serve as an avatar for the author himself. I want to call out to him, to let him know I’ve returned. I want to tell him I’ve not forgotten him or the kiss we shared or the way he saved my life. I want to . . . I need to . . .

Hard fingers latch onto my shoulder.

The next moment, I’m yanked so hard, my chair tips onto its back legs. Ink splatters across the page on which I’d been working. I drop my pen and grab the edge of the desk to keep from going over entirely. All the air seems to have been knocked from my lungs.

“What are you doing?” the Prince’s voice grows.

I gasp, wrenching my head around and gaping up at him. My mouth opens, closes, but no words will come. His eyes are dark, his pupils dilated so that the purple irises are scarcely visible. “Did you let yourself be drawn in on purpose?”

I want to deny it. But in the end, I can only whisper: “Yes.”

He stares at me like I’ve suddenly grown horns or broken out in ugly purple spots. Finally, he curses followed by a disbelieving, “Why?”

“I wasn’t in any danger.”

“Not in any danger?” The Prince looks as though he wants to wring my neck. “This is a Noswraith! You arealwaysin danger when dealing with Noswraiths. The moment you think you’re not is the moment it’s most likely to devour you.”

I can’t bear the look in his eyes. I turn away, stare down at the spell—both the breaking spell of the old book and the new one, half-copied in my hand. Touching the page gently, I shake my head. “He saved my life.”

“What?”

The word is like a slap to the back of my head. I almost yelp at the pain of it. Instead I grit my teeth, turn in my chair, and face the Prince once more. “He saved my life. When I entered the Nightmare to rescue Danny, it was this wraith who helped us in the end. He could have let me die. The fen had me in its clutches, but he . . . it . . . they . . .”

“You’re mad.” The Prince stretches out one long arm, snaps both books shut before tucking them under his arm. “You’re mad if you think there is anything to be found in any of these books resembling mercy. If you escaped the wraith, it wasn’t because ithelpedyou. It was luck. Or a blessing of the gods. Or just your own damned foolishness, too stubborn to give in.”

My jaw hardens, teeth grinding. “You weren’t there.”

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