Page 89 of Bonds of Magic
“What was?” I asked, shooting a glance at him. Sticky black ooze was dripping down his cheek from his eye socket.
“The spell,” he moaned. “I’m sure I did it right. But how could it—what went wrong?”
“You did a spell to bind that spirit to you?” I couldn’t keep the contempt out of my voice. I wasn’t a fan of slavery, of any kind.
“It was supposed to work,” he repeated. “It took weeks to set up. I was so caref—ahh!” He broke off in pain as he stumbled over a tree root.
Weeks to set up. That could explain what Teresa meant, if Hans had been going out to the woods multiple times to prepare for this ritual. That cairn would have taken time to build.
“Why did you want to bind that spirit?” I asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Hans’s tone was scathing, but his words turned into a moan as he stumbled again. He braced his hand on a tree trunk, and I stopped walking, giving him a moment to catch his breath. I wondered how he wasn’t crying in pain from touching his raw and bleeding hands to that tree.
“Evidently not.”
He sighed. “Power. I did it for power.”
“You have power.” I pulled him away from the tree roughly. We didn’t have time to waste. He needed help, and quickly.
“Not enough,” he whispered. “Not enough for anyone here to take me seriously.”
I was concentrating on picking a clear path for our feet, and not jostling him too hard, but this made me look up in confusion.
“People take you seriously,” I told him. “You’re a wardkeeper for God’s sake.”
“Grunt work,” Hans whined. “No one else in Harvest wanted it.”
“Grunt work?” I repeated. “I don’t see Teresa doing grunt work, and she’s the wardkeeper from Hex.”
He winced. “Teresa’s a control-freak. And Hex set the spell up in the first place. Of course she wants to micromanage it.”
“Sheridan’s respected,” I said. We were almost to the edge of the trees now. I could see the lumpy shapes of cars in the parking lot.
“He’s new,” Hans said. “Harmony told him it was his job, and he didn’t have enough clout to say no. Autumn and I are even lower rank in our havens. We definitely didn’t get a choice.”
“Why is it grunt work, though? I thought it was fairly easy to maintain, once the spell was invoked.”
“Because it saps our power. It’s taking magic directly out of us to maintain the spell. Which means we have less power left for our own research. Try publishing and making a name for yourself when you have as much power as the average sophomore.”
He sounded bitter. I supposed he had a right to be. But that didn’t give him the right to enslave a spirit to make up the difference.
“You won’t tell Isaac, will you?” Hans asked as we made it to the parking lot. His steps were a little surer now that we were out of the trees, but he still wasn’t steady enough for me to let him go.
“That’s up to you,” I said. Of course I was going to tell Isaac—but he didn’t need to know that. “I’m definitely taking you to see Cinda, though. I’m not letting you walk around like this.”
And I wasn’t stupid enough to try to fix Hans’s wounds on my own, like I had with Cory. God, that seemed like ages ago. Back before he and I had…
No. Best not to dwell on that.
Something Hans had said tickled the back of my mind.
“Sheridan,” I said to Hans. “Do you know what university he was at, before he came here?”
“Univerzita Starobylých Umení.” Hans’s lips twisted. “They think they’re so much better than Vesperwood. Better than the other European universities too. Didn’t even give me an interview when I applied for an open position there.”
That agreed with what Sheridan had told me. But I was surprised Hans was talking so freely. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken advantage of that. But I did.
“You applied there?” I asked. “Did you apply anywhere else before you came to Vesperwood?”
