Page 26 of Bonds of Blood
No. I was both at the same time.
14
SYLVAIN
They couldn’t have gone far.I needed to remind myself of that. But were those only thoughts meant to comfort me? It had happened so quickly. All the power to command the leaves around me couldn’t have helped: Baylor Wilde restraining his own son in eldritch chains, binding him to his will.
I screamed. I raged. I blinked, and suddenly Baylor and Lochlann had mounted a dire tiger, a colossal beast, greater and faster than any horse I’d ever seen. One of his eidolons selected precisely for the terrain, just like Lochlann had said. It sprang through the forests of the oriel, bounding from boulder to tree again and again, until they were out of sight.
My fingers dug through solid earth, clawing furrows into the dirt. I clenched my teeth so hard they could have shattered. Voices shouted in my ears, vague shapes of the people around me swirling like silhouettes in the corners of my vision. The anger frothed in my blood, churned like a maelstrom in my chest.
A crack whipped through the trees as a hand struck me across the face.
“Pull yourself together,” Bruna said. “And sorry. I’m sorry for slapping you. But come on, Sylvain. They’re getting away. We need to catch up, and quick.”
My hand rubbed over the sore, warm spot on my cheek. I stared at her for a moment, then nodded, pulling myself to my feet. Namirah took me by the elbow, helping me up even as she frowned at the forests.
“I suppose I could assume a different shape, try and sniff them out. But I don’t particularly like our chances. Did you see how fast they were going?”
Ember fluttered into our huddle, his fire burning bright. “Then we need to hurry! The longer we hesitate, the greater the distance grows.”
“It would help if we actually knew where they were going.” Bruna was already on the move, hands bunched into fists as she kept up a brisk march. “What do you suppose Baylor is planning to do with Locke now?”
“Absolutely heinous,” Namirah said. “Could you imagine? All this time, Locke was just a pawn in Baylor’s plans. It’s like he was waiting for his son to grow stronger before he came to snatch him away.”
“Like ripening fruit,” I said. “I have no doubt that Baylor intended to abduct Marina as well, but this is horrible in its own way. Was that his aim all along? Knowing he could claim his son as an eidolon — except that Locke is also a summoner. It boggles the mind. A summoner commanding another summoner. It’s preposterous.”
Bruna shook her head. “And terrifying. I don’t think even Baylor understands how this is all meant to work. I suppose we’ll find out when we find them.”
How gracefully she’d sidestepped what I’d been suggesting, an implication that I truly did not enjoy considering. Now that Lochlann was under Baylor’s control, did it mean that the grand summoner had power over his son’s eidolons? Over me?
I glanced at their faces, these friends I’d made at the Wispwood. As a joke, Lochlann sometimes expressed his jealousy over how quickly Bruna and I had become so close. Namirah always had fascinating stories to tell about all the time she spent wearing different shapes. And little Ember, the newest of our group, and somehow also the fiercest, the bravest.
If the time came, if Baylor usurped his son’s power, warped my mind, and turned me against them — would the people I called my friends have the stomach to end my life?
Ember stamped his foot in the air, his fists shaking. “If he hurts Locke — if he so much as touches Satchel — I shall incinerate him.”
Namirah sniffed at the air, still in human form. I had no doubt that her expert training in transformation left her with the heightened senses of the creatures and shapes she favored. Shapeshifting for the sake of tracking down father and son would be redundant, except perhaps for the increased mobility of wearing an animal’s skin.
“That way,” she said, pointing. “Though I still have no idea what’s going on in Baylor’s head. It’s not like there’s a rest stop or a hotel waiting at the heart of the oriel.”
“So they didn’t enter any of these rifts, then?” Bruna asked, pointing at a disk of energy humming and spinning by a tree. “Are we absolutely sure Baylor didn’t skip to another oriel through one of them?”
Again Namirah lifted her nose to the air, taking a few cautious, deliberate breaths. “No. I’m sure. I would’ve lost the trail otherwise. Baylor must have a reason for staying in the Oriel of Earth.”
I didn’t voice my thoughts, but I had a safe guess for why that was. He wanted us to find him. This wasn’t the last of Baylor’s betrayals, his sick machinations. Threatening to forcibly escape the Wispwood with his wife, claiming the oriels and abducting his son instead — how much lower could one man go?
“There is a place in the Verdance,” I said, inscribing a line in the air, then a second to slash through it. “We fae refer to it as the Grand Cross. It’s where the kingdoms of the four courts inevitably meet, the borders touching in the rarest of instances. Once, in more peaceful times, it was used for meetings between the rulers of the seasons.”
My words trailed off. Things had changed since. Rivalries only grew bitterer, old wounds and slights never truly healing. And yet my queen mother had still found love beyond the barriers of the courts. I could only hope that my own father wouldn’t be nearly as monstrous as the villainous Baylor Wilde.
Little bits of jewelry tinkled when Ember snapped his fingers, his eyes growing wide with realization. “Oh, yes. This is true of the oriels as well. We do not have a name for it, but that is where the energies of the four oriels meet. I have only heard tell, never seen it with my own eyes. It is a place of great danger and chaos, where the elements themselves are unbound.”
Bruna crossed her arms and clucked her tongue. “And Baylor Wilde is just the kind of powerful and power-hungry summoner who would risk his hide going there.”
My hand tightened into a fist. “Not to mention his son’s hide. His own flesh and blood.”
“Then that’s where we’re headed,” Namirah said. “Good thinking, Sylvain. That must be how he captured the other oriels from the inside to begin with. Bruna’s right. Baylor knew that the reward was well worth the risk. He braved those turbulent magics, reached out and enslaved the other elements from the nexus.”
