Algonquin looked insulted. “That’swhat you think? I already own all the best mages in the world. Do you think I’d spend sixty years and a continent’s worth of spirit effort just to get a slightly better version of what I already had?”
Not when she put it that way. Now that Marci thought about it, something as simple as Mage 2.0 didn’t explain why Amelia had tried so hard to win her over, either. But if power wasn’t the point, what was?
“What does a Merlin do?” she asked. “Why are they so special?”
Algonquin gave her a disgusted look, and Marci’s old rage flared back up with a vengeance. “Don’t look at me like that!” she yelled. “It’s not my fault I’m ignorant! It’s not like there’s anyone around to teach us this stuff. We’re having to relearn it all the hard way. But if you need a Merlin so badly, it might help if you got off your high wave and freakingtold me what I’m supposed to do!”
She hadn’t meant to say all that, but at least her explosion seemed to have snapped Algonquin out of her snit. “You really have been around dragons too long, haven’t you?” she said, her voice amused. “Always raging and demanding when you should be thinking.” She tapped the side of her head. “Use your brain, mayfly. What do humans do that no one else can?”
Marci had heard this question before, and she answered immediately. “We move magic.”
Algonquin nodded. “And what vanished without a trace or warning a thousand years ago?”
The cliff fell silent as Marci’s jaw dropped. “Wait,” she said at last. “Are you’re saying thatwe—as in humans—caused the magical drought?”
“Who else could?” Algonquin asked. “Any natural-born spirit will tell you that the magic of this world is like the sea. It ebbs and flows, but it never dries up completely. Not unless something makes it.”
Marci blew out a breath. “And you think a Merlin can do that?”
“I don’t think,” Algonquin said. “Iknow. Any mage can grab magic and keep it bottled, but only a Merlin with the ridiculous power of a Mortal Spirit behind them could possibly manipulate magic on a global scale. That’s the level of power we’re talking about, and it’s why I grabbed you.” She looked over her shoulder back down at the thing moving in the bloody pool. “Even with the boost I got from the dragons, my Mortal Spirit still has far to go. Even when itisfinally born, I’ll still have to find it a proper human capable of controlling it. But you and your spirit are already here, and while you are both pushy, inexperienced, undereducated, and outspoken with far too high an opinion of yourselves, you’re still the closest this world has to a Merlin at the moment. I couldn’t just leave you with the dragons. Do you have any idea the damage those selfish snakes could do with a Merlin’s power?”
“But not all dragons are like that,” Marci said automatically. “Julius—”
“Julius is the runt you came to Vann Jeger’s with, correct?” When she nodded, the spirit scoffed. “He’s too young to count. He’ll harden up if he lives long enough, and eventually he’ll be the same as all the others. I should know. I’ve killed more dragons than you can count, and every single one of them was a conniving snake who’d trade his own family for power at a moment’s notice. They came to our plane as refugees, and yet they’ve done nothing but fight amongst themselves and terrorize their new home from the moment they arrived.” She lifted her lips in a sneer. “And the others wonder why I hate them.”
She looked so angry, Marci gave up after that. What was the point of trying to convince Algonquin that dragons could be things other than monsters when Julius was having trouble convincing his own family? There were more immediate problems to worry about anyway, starting with what Algonquin planned to do with Marci now that she had her.
“Is that why you laid a trap for me, then?” she asked. “To keep the Merlin away from Heartstriker?”
“One of the reasons,” Algonquin said. “Denying your enemy access to a weapon isalmostas good as getting one yourself. I would have preferred to grab you earlier, but I didn’t even know for sure what you were until Vann Jeger was defeated and you were long gone. I knew you’d be back eventually—there’s nowhere in the world except the DFZ with enough magic to keep a Mortal Spirit afloat—but I assumed you’d have an escort. Of course, I was expecting the Planeswalker rather than Raven and his tin soldier, but it made no difference in the end. Emily Jackson is as close to a true monster as your kind gets, but neither she nor Amelia is a match for my Leviathan.”
“And what is the Leviathan?”
That was a stab in the dark, but Algonquin smiled as though Marci had just asked something deeply profound. “He’s what happens if I fail.”
Now Marci was getting really nervous. “Fail at what?”
Algonquin looked pointedly at the Empty Wind, who’d gone very still. “Stopping them.”
“You mean Mortal Spirits?” Marci asked, baffled. “But I though the entire point of this was to make one.”
“Yes,” Algonquin said, holding up a single finger. “One. You only need one Mortal Spirit to make a Merlin, and one Merlin should be all it takes to stop the magic from rising enough to fill and wake the rest.”
“The rest of the Mortal Spirits?” Marci clarified, arching an eyebrow. “Why?”
“I know why,” the Empty Wind said, sneering at the water spirit. “She wants to stop us because she’s afraid we’ll be more powerful than her.”
The Lady of the Lakes didn’t even look insulted by that. She simply said, “Yes.”
Both Marci and her spirit jumped at the sudden agreement, and Algonquin sighed. “This is why I can’t stand mortals,” she said. “You’re too young to have any perspective. OfcourseI’m afraid of Mortal Spirits. Everyone should be. Mortal Spirits are the magical representations of humanity’s universal fears. Your own spirit is a face of death powered by humanity’s narcissistic terror of being forgotten, and he’s just the beginning. More will rise as the magic fills up the gap left by the drought, and when they come, they’ll bring hell with them.”
“It can’t be that bad,” Marci said with a nervous laugh. “There were Mortal Spirits before the drought, and the world didn’t end.”
“Not for lack of trying,” Algonquin said bitterly. “It’s been more than a thousand years since the drought sent us all to sleep, and your kind still has stories of the Wild Hunt and monsters in the night and bloody gods who demand sacrifices. This is because those things didn’t use to be stories. They were real, Mortal Spirits created by humanity’s terrors. Occasionally, Merlins would show up to control them, but mostly they raged unchecked across the landscape, self-fulfilling prophesies of your kind’s worst fears.”
“But there were good ones too, right?” Marci said, remembering what Myron had said. “I thought the whole idea of Mortal Spirits was that they were what happened when magic filled up the depressions left in the landscape by the combined weight of enough humans all putting their concern into a single concept. But cultures all over the world believe in love and justice and fairness and lots of other good things. We’re not all bad.”
“But you’re not good, either,” Algonquin said, glaring at her. “Yours is not a gentle race, Marci Novalli. True, you’ve produced gentle spirits, but they can’t begin to balance out or stop the far stronger devils. But horrible as the Mortal Spirits of the past were, they’re nothing compared to what they’ll be when they come back this time.”
