‘Good heavens, you are jumpy these days, aren’t you?’ Olivia slowly eased her foot down and continued towards the clothes chest, where she was depositing Gwen’s combat gear, cleaned of ink and salt.
Gwen half sank back into the chair, feeling like she was swallowing her own heart where it had leapt into her throat. ‘Isobelle would say it’s more evidence I’m under some spell.’
Olivia let the lid of the chest fall and turned to face Gwen. ‘Are you?’ Her eyes were sharp, her expression guarded.
Gwen cast a sharp look at her. ‘Isobelle just can’t admit to herself that her champion is a bloody coward, deep down.’
Olivia frowned at her. Unlike Orson, who had burst out laughing at the notion that Gwen had any cowardicein her bones at all, Olivia approached and inspected her quite seriously. ‘I suppose that depends on your definition of “coward”. But as I have no interest in engaging you in a debate over semantics, let me ask you this: you’ve spent the past weeks in a town that’s been steeped in fear magic down to its last cowering citizen. Why should you be immune?’
Gwen blinked at her. And, as she often did when trying to argue with Olivia, realised she had absolutely no valid answer. ‘So you’re saying all of this, everything I’m feeling, is all because of some … spell?’
‘Why does it have to be all one thing or the other?’ Olivia’s serious expression shifted, a wry smile curving her lips. ‘Magic is a strange thing,’ she mused. ‘It’s impossible to tell for certain what’s magic and what’s just getting inside someone’s head. For instance, if I wanted to render a famous monster-slaying knight impotent, I might visit upon them the horror of endlessly facing an unkillable foe.’
Gwen found herself coughing – any sharp breath still set her off, her throat and lungs seared by salt water – and had to bend over and rest her elbows on her knees until the fit subsided. Olivia made it sound so simple; a clever sorcerer would know some part of Gwen would have been traumatised by her fight against the dragon. So the obvious way to deal with her would be to give her another monster to fight, one he could manipulate into attacking and retreating, over and over …
Like my nightmares where I kill the dragon, over and over.
Gwen shut her eyes, focusing on the burning in her lungs, in the chill that still clung to her bones despite the blanket and the roaring fire. Then she felt Olivia’s hand coming to rest gently on her cheek, coaxing her to look up.
Olivia smiled, the expression sympathetic and wry all at once. ‘Magic is a headache,’ she murmured. ‘I find it best not to think too hard about it. Don’t fixate on what’s real and what isn’t, what’s you and what’s spellwork. Your mind wants to classify everything, but either way, what you’re experiencing is real to you. That’s what you have to face, regardless of its source.’
Gwen wanted to retort, to rail against the unfairness of that – what good was it being a knight if you couldn’t face down a world painted conveniently in clear shades of black and white? But as Olivia released her and turned away, another thought came to her, rising out of the depths of her tangled memories and suppressed suspicions.
‘Olivia, this fear magic that I’m not immune to … why isIsobelleimmune to it?’
Olivia paused a fraction of a second too long before turning to face Gwen and crossing her arms over her chest. ‘Who says she is? She would’ve had to have been awfully frightened to abandon you last night, even temporarily.’
‘You know what I mean,’ insisted Gwen, refusing to let Olivia slip out of this one.
‘Come to think of it,’ muttered Olivia briskly, ‘I ought to go check on her. I left her in the kitchen, and I’d rather she did not burn down the inn today …’
‘Stop it!’ burst Gwen, her abused throat rasping the word. ‘Olivia – why would an Order of magic-monitoring paladins and spies send one of their operatives to watch over Isobelle all these years?’
The question hung in the air, stretched between them like an invisible cord. Olivia’s eyes moved from the fire to meet Gwen’s. Her gaze was troubled, knowing. Fairly caught.
‘I … I can’t …’ Olivia’s voice was hoarse, strained in a way Gwen had never heard it.
Gwen’s eyes widened. Would an Order of magic-hunting paladins …usemagic to control its own members?
And then the door flew open to admit Isobelle, announcing with glee, ‘I did it! Gwen, I made potatoes, look!’ She came bustling in with a tray loaded down with several platters of food, including some steaming fried potatoes, only the tiniest bit blackened around the edges.
Gwen managed to find her voice and praise Isobelle’s culinary efforts, discovering to her surprise that her hunger had returned. But as Isobelle heaped potatoes and eggs and porridge onto Gwen’s plate, Gwen’s eyes followed Olivia, who was moving swiftly towards the door, murmuring about going down to clean up the inn’s kitchen.
She glanced back, only once, to look at Gwen – and then she was gone.
Gwen set aside the scroll she’d been reading and reached for another. Olivia had brought her a box of them from the limited selections in the library at Bingleton’s manor. His servants, the few who hadn’t fled, had reported that the man hadn’t been seen at his home since the night of the sea monster’s resurrection. He had abandoned his pretence of nobleman developer in favour of living at the tower.
The last scroll had been some bland text about how all witches simply live in harmony with the natural world and true witches never use magic for anything other than healing their inner selves – a lovely, optimistic idea, to be sure. Gwen hadn’t made it past the first few paragraphs.
This next one, though … Far older, the script so riddled with extraneous letters and puzzling spellings it might as well be written in another language, it painted a much different picture of witchcraft. Anyone could work a magical spell, it said, although some were born with an affinity for it. That witchcraft was simply a tool, like any other. A sword in the hands of an honourable knight was a force for good. The same blade in the hands of a murdering psychopath … not so much.
And when witches went bad, they went very,verybad.
Gwen was so absorbed in her reading that she didn’t hear the door open. It wasn’t until the bed beneath hershifted that she looked up and found Isobelle sitting there, a smile brightening her face.
Gwen grimaced. ‘It says here that to kill a witch gone bad you have to … to chop off their head. It’s a good thing we’re getting out of here – fear spell or no, there’s no way I could’ve done that to Bingleton.’
Isobelle’s smile flickered; it was one of her Public Performance smiles, which Gwen knew well from their days leading up to the Darkhaven tournament that summer, when Isobelle had been forced to pretend all was well as her doom approached in the form of a loveless marriage and enslavement.
