Anadae’s pendant. Though it had lain against Calya’s skin, warmed by her body and practically weightless to the point she’d forgotten its existence, now a whisper of ice suffused the metal. It leapt at the end of its chain as if it had a mind of its own. An intent and a target instilled in the magic.
The movement didn’t go unnoticed, Brint’s hand jumping up to grab the pendant. “What is?—”
Anadae had said all she needed to do was snap the end.
Calya swung her bound hands upward like a club, but Ervin reacted fast enough to jerk her back a step. Whether Brint’s hold was tight enough or the pendant simply wanted an excuse to break was impossible to say.
Be careful about how you use it turned out to be rather vague as far as directions and setting expectations went. Irrelevant, too, for the resulting concussive blast sent Brint flying back into the wall.
Calya’s trajectory was cut short by Ervin at her back, and her impact equally padded by his bulk, which left her disoriented rather than unconscious as the blast of icy air faded. She sat up, shaking frost from her hair.
“Everyone still alive?” she asked, crawling off Ervin’s prone body.
The other mages, having retreated to the back of the small room, had escaped the powerful, concentrated radius of Anadae’s pendant.
Matthias knelt next to Brint, feeling for a pulse. “Not dead,” he said gruffly, moving on to go through the unconscious man’s pockets.
“Neither is he,” the older Vreshan woman said, crouched by Ervin’s head.
“For now.” The Grae U man glared down at Brint’s henchman, hands flexing.
Further violence was forgotten as Matthias uttered a soft, joyous grunt. He pulled a stamp-like key from one of Brint’s pockets and pressed the flat, square end against his manacles. The key glowed white, causing a series of symbols to flare on the band of each cuff before they opened with a metallic click and fell to the ground.
Matthias quickly went about freeing his colleagues while Calya appropriated the belt knife hanging from Ervin’s waist for her own purposes. He had nothing else useful on him, but on Brint she recovered her pocket notebook.
She faced the others. “Let’s go. If your friends are still here, they can’t have finished scrapping the place.”
“What about them?” the Grae U man said, jerking his head at the Graelynders as they all filed out up the stairs.
Matthias pulled the door shut, dropping the bar back into place. “Leave them. We need to get the others.”
“Do you know where they are?” Calya asked as they hurried away.
“You’ve seen the spring we were trying to make?”
Calya nodded.
“Below it,” Matthias said. “That’s where they’ve kept the sick. Avenor’s office. The source. It’s all below.”
“Isolation, to keep it from spreading,” one of the Vreshans muttered behind Calya, every word bitter.
They paused at the end of a hallway. They were on a different side of the underground cavern than the one Calya had entered with Lowe. Half a dozen people moved across the floor, carrying crates of supplies toward another passage at the back of the cave.
“Any friends left up here?” Calya murmured.
“Those AG boys will stand with us,” Matthias said.
She looked back at the people ferrying supplies out on the floor. Brint had turned his own people into captives?
At the Grae U man’s skeptical hiss, Matthias glared back at the group, meeting each of their eyes. “They will. Especially without Avenor here. The Coalition fucked them as much as they did us.”
He didn’t put it up for discussion, instead striding forward, his hands glowing with golden light. Then, dropping to his knees, Matthias slapped both palms against the floor. Veins in the stone burned bright, racing in a line toward a man standing slightly apart from the rest. The stone melted around his feet, rising to mold around his legs before hardening at the knees. He wobbled, off balance, but the stone kept him from completely toppling over.
Calya hovered at the edge of the hallway, breath held as Matthias straightened. He held up the strange key taken off Brint, his voice too low for Calya to hear what he said to the men gathering around him. The other mages filed past Calya to flank Matthias.
The Grae U man went to the one restrained in stone—a Coalition guard, judging by the way the rest seemed so ready to turn on him. A flare of light in the Grae U man’s hand shone as he made a slashing motion, and the captive man swayed. His eyes closed, his body went limp, and he crumpled to the ground with a snap, his lower legs still held upright by the stone.
Calya swallowed hard. A grovetender and a mender. She’d seen mages of those affinities before, and she wasn’t exactly a stranger to seeing magic performed. But the small remedies Eunny made, Ollas’s gentle coaxing of the blooms in his beloved greenhouse, even her sister’s ice spells… none of them had prepared Calya for the reality of magic wielded for violence.
