“It was never meant to be lasting harm.”
“Was that before or after your goon threw me into a wall and you magicked me, you asshole?”
“You’re one to talk.” Brint indicated the gash on his head. “I tried, Calya. I tried to talk to you, to see if I could trust you, and then we could’ve worked together.”
“To do what? There’s no fixing this mess.”
“Try again. We were so close here, and the Coalition is committed, even without Bioon,” Brint said. “We’ll have better protections. Think of what it’ll mean!”
Calya pointed at the Coalition mages caught in creepy stasis in the glass ball. “All the mages here think the project is fucked.”
“The Coalition has resources everywhere. They have lines in at Sylveren, in the Restorers. We’re going to be more prepared this time.”
His eyes gleamed in the firelight, something zealous and imploring blurring together in the way he looked at her. Anadae had only scratched the surface with her warning of the changes in Brint. Calya saw not the arrogant, mostly harmless dipshit she’d always known but a Coalition fanatic.
A prickle of fear ran down her spine.
She tightened her grip on the poker, trying to draw comfort from its weight in her hand. “Why, Brint? Why would you get involved in this? You’re stupid, but I didn’t think you were this stupid. You’ve got to know this can’t end well.”
The last vestiges of anything friendly between them faded from his expression. He dropped his cajoling tone, meeting her words with a disdainful scoff. “Graelynd will have a wellspring, and we don’t need the Eyllic Empire to get it,” he growled. “They thought they were the only ones, but we’ve already begun. And who’s the stupid one, Calya? We’ve been tapping the ley lines from the Valley runoff for years. Years! They’ve never even noticed.”
“If you’re making a wellspring, what do you need poison for?” Calya shouted. “Isn’t that what’s trying to kill Rhell? That’s all the poison does, and you want to grow them side-by-side.”
“No, no! They lied to us, to the delegation,” Brint said, his head whipping back and forth with the vehemence of his denial. “You need the power from the poison. You need enough to seed the well.”
Calya’s eyebrows rose toward her scalp. “You’ve been huffing too much of your own poison.”
Brint let out an exasperated sigh, some of the annoying, shitty weasel she remembered creeping back in. “You’re not a mage. What do you know?” he said, dismissing her with a wave of his hand.
“Yeah, I keep hearing that. But I don’t need magic to see that you’ve lost it.” Calya gestured at the brazier. “You see it, too. Destroying evidence? You’re fucked. The Sentinels know what you’ve done here. Rhell knows. You’re going to be lucky if Sor’vahl doesn’t chop you into little pieces of meat and cook you.”
A spasm of emotion twitched across his face. Uncertainty, maybe even a good dose of fear.
“I’m immaterial at this point, Brint. Give it up.”
The apprehension on his face faded, pushed away by conviction. By a sureness edged by panic and tinged with pity. He smiled at Calya, his expression a mix of regret and resignation that had her instinct to run shrieking past her reckless bravado.
“Immaterial,” Brint said. “You don’t have to be. You can be a part of this.” He went to the desk, raising his hands in a non-threatening manner when Calya brandished the poker. She took a step back, not letting him narrow the distance between them.
He pushed the half-filled leather pack containing Matthias’s journals aside and revealed what looked like a clear stone brick that had been propping the bag up. She’d thought it some kind of paperweight or similar frippery. An odd choice for a desk ornament, but there was no accounting for Brint’s lack of taste. But with the bag out of the way, Calya saw the brick held a small, vaguely cube-shaped object suspended in its center. The brick appeared more like a block of ice than the glass sphere down in the pit, but the same opaque yellowish curls of smoke wafted within. The cube at the heart, no larger than a grape, had an oily look, like it was comprised of thousands of tiny grains of wet sand. Though overall gray in color, some spots were a patchier white; thin veins of moldy green appeared, spread, and then faded in a cyclical manner.
The starter culture the other mages had mentioned. Calya didn’t need Brint to confirm; even standing several feet away—and a mundane, to boot—she sensed the blob’s oppressive aura.
“We can start over, and this time we’ll finish the wellspring,” Brint said. “Help us, and HNE can?—”
“Can what? It’s a wellspring. You don’t transport magic in buckets,” Calya said in a scathing tone.
“The Coalition will be your friend. Think of the business they can send your way. The deals. Your father wouldn’t be able to ignore that. No more Wembly getting the final say over your plans. HNE would finally be fully yours.”
“It will be anyway.” She gave him a grim smile. “I’ve found the root of all my problems. Daddy Avenor is finally going to cut you out of the family.”
His face darkened. “You’re making a mistake.”
Calya shook her head, chest stuttering with her wry laughter. “My mistake was?—”
Brint dove at her. It was a rookie slip-up on her part, one for which Calya’s old training master would’ve berated her for hours. Letting her guard down, getting drawn into pointless arguments, distracted by the block of poison while Brint slowly angled closer.
She did manage to crack him across the shoulder with the poker, but his momentum had him crashing into her anyway, despite his bellow of pain. She might not have been able to stop him even if she’d managed to stab him with the poker, such was his bulk.
