Page 74 of Magick and Lead
“I loved it,” I admitted. “The lights and the clothes and the music and…” I realized what I was saying and trailed off. So much had been happening, I hadn’t stopped to reflect on how I felt about Ironberg. I was supposed to hate the place and everyone in it. The fact that I enjoyed the capital of my enemies was alarming at best. At worst, it was treason.
“Well, I see why you and Charlie get along,” Bo said. When I didn’t respond, he added, “You are getting along, I hope?”
A vision of last night flashed before me, my body and Charlie’s intertwined as shivers of pleasure shook me from my core.
We are getting along,I thought. And we aren’t. And either way, when this is all over, I’m going to have to…
To…
Kill him.That was the end of the sentence. But I couldn’t even think it. Not on a perfect, peaceful morning like this.
“You know,” Bo said thoughtfully. “Charlie begged me to get that plane fixed up for him. Then he scoured the county for fuel and ammo—not easy to get in wartime. And he searched for you, every single day. I worried about him. Flying over the channel. Into enemy territory. Through dragon patrols and dangerous golenae. Risking court-martial if his Air Force superiors found out. But he just said to me, I have to find her. I’d rather die than not see her again.”
“He sounds like a romantic, not an ace,” I pointed out.
Bo sipped from his mug. “Well… why can’t he be both?”
I stared down into my coffee, but it was too much like scrying, like gazing into the void. It made me think of my mother. Of how, in her later years, she’d spent so much time staring into that spirit bowl of hers, looking for answers. But she’d only become more confused. And in the end, she hadn’t seen the difficult truths that had been right before her. Sure, she’d seen plenty of things scrying. Confusing, frightening visions. But the answers had been somewhere else. Inside her, maybe. Or out in the world. It was scary to think that through simply misplacing their attention, one could miss everything that was most important.
I looked out across the fields again, undulating waves of wheat drenched in morning sun.
“It’s so beautiful,” I said. Then I realized I was being insensitive. I turned quickly to Bo. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
He gave a laugh. “Oh, because I’m blind? It’s okay. I know it’s beautiful. I can feel it.”
I watched him. His placid expression. His pleasant calm. And I realized I liked this cousin of Charlie’s.
“Charlie said his cousin taught him to fly…” I said.
“Yeah, that was me,” he said. “Charlie may be a bigshot ace now, but I was one first. The first time he flew, he was stuffed in the back of my cockpit like a bag of airmail. There was no turning back for him after that first time. Charlie always wanted to fly.”
I sipped my coffee, thinking. “So, you weren’t always blind, then?”
He shook his head. “No. I was fighting a female dragon rider over the Bormish Channel. I had her in my crosshairs. Her dragon was taking a lot of shots. I almost had her. Then the dragon turned, craned her neck back toward me… and there was this flash.”
“Lightning,” I whispered. Laynine. My cousin. The one I fought in the challenge. The one I killed to become Irska… My cousin had blinded Charlie’s cousin. Gods, what a tangled web we were in. What a mess war was.
And why? Why did so much terror and killing have to take place when we could be sitting here on a porch drinking coffee on a perfect summer morning, perfectly content, with someone who was supposed to be our enemy?
Gods, this was bad. I was getting philosophical…
The door creaked open, startling me. I turned to find Charlie stepping onto the porch.
“Whatever this guy is telling you, it’s bullshit,” he said.
“I was just telling her what a fantastic person you are,” Bo said.
“See? Bullshit,” Charlie said, pouring himself coffee.
“He was also telling me how you searched for me every day,” I said.
Charlie looked at me, startled. I studied him, his sleep-tousled hair, the stubble on his jaw, the way the morning light illuminated the depths of his eyes.
Stop,I chastised myself.
“I did search every day,” he said. “And if you hadn’t found me, I’d still be searching.”
Our eyes met. Lingered.
