Unfinished, page 17
Near the pond—or where the pond had been, she realized, as there was no other side of the pond any longer—was Lilah. She had a defensive pattern formed around her, and the creatures were being pushed back from it, but she was being attacked in a way that even Lilah could not withstand. There were simply too many of the creatures.
There were too many for Imogen and too many for Lilah.
But what if they fought together?
Sword and shield. Wasn’t that what Imogen had said before? That was why she’d come looking for the Koral. If she could use that connection, and if they could somehow work together, they could be a sword and shield. She had to find Lilah to do so.
Another strike caught Imogen from the side, and she twisted. There was pain, but it was blunted, not a penetrating sort of agony. She lowered herself with Petals on the Wind.
When she came to land, she did so with a burst of Lightning Strikes in the Storm, and then immediately shifted to Tree Stands in the Forest, and then arced out again with Lightning Strikes in the Storm. She swept the creatures around her, carving through them.
She had to get to Lilah.
She wasn’t about to leave Lilah to die from these creatures.
Energy built around her in an overwhelming sense of power.
Imogen was forced to use Tree Stands in the Forest, but even that wasn’t enough against the power that threatened to crush her. She strained against it, but the creatures chewed at the power her sacred patterns formed, ripping through it. They swarmed up and over her Tree.
Imogen collapsed. She couldn’t withstand it.
She had come this far. She would not fail here.
There had to be another sacred pattern.
She hadn’t been focusing on the possibilities that Benji had granted, and when she did, she saw that there were countless lines, but they were all hazy.
Blurred.
This was what Abigail had mentioned. This was the kind of difficulty she had been seeing. This had to be the same difficulty Benji had seen.
She needed a sacred pattern here.
But what sacred pattern would work?
It was a tugging deep within her.
Imogen couldn’t tell where it came from, and whether it was Benji whispering on the wind, trying to give her some insight, or whether it came from something else.
She felt the Tree collapsing. It was painful.
Could this be what it was like for the shamans to have their enchantments shattered? If that were the case, she needed to be more careful. She had downplayed the agony that Rebecca might feel when her enchantments shattered.
She cleared her mind and held on to Tree Stands in the Forest, knowing there was only so much longer she could hold on to it, struggling to find an answer. Not with what she had done so far, and not with any of her attacking patterns.
What had Benji shown her?
Her mind raced through the patterns, her practice with meditation helping to guide her, but nothing in those patterns gave her any insight as to what she needed to do. She searched her memories but came up with no answer that Benji had provided.
She was drawn to the enchantment Rebecca had given her. It was supposed to help, but would it help against something like this?
The creatures were all around her, chewing her sacred pattern. It wouldn’t be long before they got through to her.
Lilah cried out.
The tugging in the back of Imogen’s mind came again. It was strange, an urgency that came with it. There was a shriek. And then she realized what it was.
The renral.
She looked up, tried to focus on the renral, and wondered if even he was under attack. But the renral pattern was one Imogen hadn’t even tried before.
She didn’t know if it would even matter. She shifted away from Tree Stands in the Forest. She had the connection to the renral deep within her. She could feel it coming from the renral, and she recognized the source of it, and the way that they were bonded together. If she could find some way to use that connection, and if she could figure out how to draw upon it…
One of the creatures almost came through.
Imogen closed her eyes, and she focused.
That pattern formed in her mind.
And within it, she felt something else. A strange connection. Within that pattern came something different. She opened herself to the renral.
As she did, she could see him circling. He had his feathers tipped up, and the glowing crackling around them, as if he was building Lightning Strikes in the Storm from within him.
The renral had an innate resistance to magic, and Imogen wondered if she might be able to draw upon that. Could she open a connection and let the power of the renral channel through her?
She didn’t know, but it was time to try.
It wasn’t any sacred pattern she knew. It was accepting magic—and that was what this was—but now she no longer fought against that idea. How could she? She had seen magic used for good so many times.
Power came through her weakly. There was a burst and then something else.
Crackling energy. It flowed, and it came through the renral, shooting along his wings, through the way that his feathers were tipped up, and through the connection Imogen shared with the renral. That energy rose with a painful intensity and spilled out from her, connecting to the Tree Stands in the Forest that Imogen held. It flowed down through her feet, through the roots of her Tree, and up through the branches. Each of them crackled with lightning and energy, and the power of the renral.
Then that power shot from her. Creatures were thrown back.
Imogen fortified Tree Stands in the Forest, no longer fading under the weight of that power. She focused again, solidifying her sacred pattern, drawing upon more of the renral energy while looking up. There was considerable power all around her.
The renral shrieked.
Imogen yelled out in response, joining her voice to his. She opened herself to that power once more, and as she did, she could feel that power flowing, drifting through her, and it exploded out when she wanted it to.
And then she felt something else.
She felt the power, the energy, and she felt the connection to the renral.
She used that to create an opening and fought her way toward Lilah.
Lilah stood surrounded by creatures.
Imogen whipped out her blade, Lightning Strikes in the Storm, carving through them. She darted toward Lilah, and then mixed Tree Stands in the Forest with the renral pattern to create an opening.
“Come,” Imogen said.
“What did you do?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m somehow connected to the renral, and I’m using his power.”
The enchanted creatures, the dark creatures, and all this power continued to swarm toward them. Imogen had to hold on to Tree Stands in the Forest, mixing in the renral pattern, but even that had its limitations. She could feel the connection to the renral, but she could also feel that there was some part of that connection that wasn’t going to be strong enough.
“I need you to come with me. We need to find a way to fight this. We need more help. Sword and shield.”
Koral and Leier. They would need a different sort of connection, and a different sort of power, if they intended to overwhelm whoever was in charge of this.
“You would really protect both our peoples?”
Imogen drew on the connection that she shared with the renral, and power crackled along her Tree Stands in the Forest, shooting out from her. It sent the creatures back, but without nearly the same strength as it had the very first time that she’d used it. There were limits to this power.
“I have a feeling that our peoples are more alike than dissimilar. Yours might use magic, and mine might fight magic, but I think we all came from the same place.”
Lilah regarded her for a long moment. “Why?”
“Why would I help them?”
“Why would you help me?”
“Because you were used like I was used,” Imogen said.
Lilah glanced over at where the pond had been, and then she turned away. “What will you do?”
“You’re going to have to trust me.”
Lilah’s brow darkened for a moment. “With what?”
“Just get over here.”
Lilah came over, and Imogen grabbed her as she formed Lightning Strikes in the Storm. They shot upward. And then Imogen shifted, Petals on the Wind. She gripped Lilah.
Lilah held on tightly, clinging to Imogen, all attempts to use power forgotten. “What are you doing?”
“I’m using a sacred pattern,” Imogen said.
A dark shadow swooped beneath them, and Imogen angled toward it. When she landed atop the renral, she could feel the connection forming again, and she breathed out a sigh of relief.
She looked down. The creatures swarming beneath them were far too numerous for her to count. This was a different army from the one that swarmed her people, but even this was more than she and Lilah could withstand.
“Do you see what you did?”
Imogen looked over at Lilah.
“We had him.”
“I don’t think we did.”
They circled, and the renral kept his feathers tipped up, catching the air, crackling with a strange energy, as they continued to swoop overhead.
“I had him.”
“He wanted you to think that so that he could destroy Abigail.”
With the kind of power that she felt here, Imogen believed that was the more likely scenario. And worse, she wasn’t sure what she could do to stop this.
Chapter Twenty
INTERLUDE
The city was almost unnaturally quiet. Given how long Imogen had been in the city, she found it strange for there to be such silence along with a sense of emptiness. There was less tension in her. She had grown so accustomed to that strange tightness that she attributed to sorcery that having it missing felt surprisingly strange to her. She sat on a rooftop, legs dangling off the edge, sword sheathed at her side, shifted so that she would not sit on it, as she surveyed the streets below her.
She had completed her bond quest.
So why did she feel a sense of emptiness?
She shouldn’t. She had done what Master Liu had sent her to do and had cleansed this city of the hyadan. Doing so had proven challenging but not beyond her ability. And perhaps that had been Master Liu’s intention, for her to learn that she could be more than she had been when she had still been in the sacred temple.
And she had learned something else about herself. Imogen had learned how to handle sorcery and had gained a certain comfortableness with it.
None of that was the reason that she struggled, though.
It was what she had done here and what she knew she would be leaving behind.
She had changed something. There was a part of her that felt a measure of pride in that. Imogen knew that she should feel that pride, and that what she had accomplished mattered, but she also knew that she couldn’t stay to see it through.
“I thought that I would find you here.”
She turned to see Ruhid. He approached along the roofline, wearing his sword at his side as if he had been born to wear it. Since she had defeated the hyadan, and since her people had had a hand in it, they had grown increasingly confident, especially since they had proven that they were a match for sorcerers. Not the same match as Imogen, but they no longer needed to fear sorcerers within the city as they once had.
“I came up here to contemplate,” she said.
“You don’t have to do so alone,” Ruhid said to her. He took a seat next to her, watching her. “There are others who want to be a part of what you have been doing.”
“I know,” Imogen said.
“But you don’t want them to be a part of it.”
She smiled tightly, and she turned her attention back to the street in front of her. It was late, and the sun was setting, leaving a golden sort of glow streaking across the ground. It was lovely. It was not home, though. More than anything else, Imogen had started to feel that was the most significant thing. It was not home.
“I’m happy to have all the people that we worked with be a part of what we have accomplished.”
“But?”
“There’s no but to it,” she said. “It’s more a matter of my own uncertainty. I am conflicted.” She might as well put it out there for him. She wasn’t sure how he would react to her admission, and though he had been supportive of everything that she had done, everything that she had told him that she needed to do, Ruhid had his own agenda.
“Now that you have completed your quest, you can help us with what we need to do.”
Imogen looked over. “That can be your quest.”
“We don’t want to do it without you. I don’t want to do it without you.”
She knew what he wanted to do. She didn’t need to have him explain, especially as she had a very good sense of what he intended. He had shown her that. Some of it came from what he had said, but most of it came from how he had acted, and the way that he had proven his desire and willingness to slaughter.
He wasn’t who she had thought he was.
Then again, Imogen wasn’t who she had thought she was. Maybe that was part of the bond quest. Perhaps that was what Master Liu had wanted her to learn so that she could better serve the people.
“I can’t stay and hunt sorcerers,” she said.
“Why?” He turned toward her, looking up at her with his dark eyes. There was something compelling about him as he did, something that demanded her attention, and it drew her in. “You were trained to fight sorcery. We have an opportunity for you to do that here. Why wouldn’t you want to stay and clean the city up?” He swept his hand out, waving toward the tower that the Society occupied. “You can help us expel the Society from Loruv. Don’t you want to do that?”
There was a part of Imogen that wanted that. It was the part of her that felt the same hatred of sorcery that she had always felt, but there was also part of her that knew that she could stay and hunt and cut down sorcerers for the rest of her life, but she would not be serving her people.
“When I was younger,” Imogen started, turning away from him, “I lost my parents. I don’t really know what happened to them, though there are stories about it. My brother believes one thing, while I believe something else. After that day, I undertook my training far more intensely and devoted myself to the blade and to its mastery.”
“Which is why you should stay here,” Ruhid said.
“As I got older,” Imogen went on, ignoring his comment, “I recognized that I was among the most skilled in my village. When I was selected to go to the sacred temple”—Imogen had revealed some details to those she had trained, but Ruhid was among the very few who understood that she had trained in the sacred temple—“I felt that it was my right. In that selection, I was chosen for something that would allow me to help my people in ways that I could not have done had I not been chosen. I felt that it was my destiny.”
She fell silent. It was easy to think back to what had brought her up to one of the sacred temples, and easy for her to remember that first journey, the difficulty that she’d had in scaling the mountain, and how she had very nearly not survived. It was harder for her to remember all the days spent training, thinking that she could eventually learn the sacred patterns, and failing.
And as she turned to Ruhid, saw him watching her, she couldn’t help but feel he would not understand. In his mind, he would have her stay and fight his fight. Imogen wasn’t sure that his fight was her fight, though. The bond quest was part of her journey, but what was she supposed to learn from it? And what was she supposed to learn to do once she had completed it?
The only way that Imogen would know would be by returning to her homeland and asking Master Liu, the one person who might have those answers for her. And if he didn’t…
Imogen wasn’t sure if he would have those answers, and what she could and should do if Master Liu did not know, but she had to find out.
“It is the bond quest,” she said, looking at Ruhid. “And I have trained you and the others as much as I can.”
“There is still much that we can learn.”
“Learning the blade is a lifelong journey,” she said. “Whether I’m here or not doesn’t change that. I trust that you and the others will continue to progress, each of you taking your own journey to understand the blade. And I suspect you will do well in leading them.” She looked over at him, holding his gaze. Ruhid didn’t go away. She could see the irritation in his eyes. She could sense his frustration. And yet Imogen knew there was nothing that she could do differently. “I hope you can understand.”
“What’s there to understand? You’ve trained us, given us hope, and now you intend to abandon us. That’s what you want me to understand. And somehow you want to make yourself feel better for it.” He got to his feet, looking down at her. “Go on. Leave. Just know that you could have made a home here. We could have had a home here.”
He glowered at her.
Imogen waited until he was gone. She stared out for a long while, watching the street, listening to the sounds of the city and feeling the energy that she had come to know better than she had ever expected to know the energy of any city, and she let the tears fall. She had completed her bond quest, but she couldn’t help but feel that rather than finding herself, she had lost a part of herself.
Chapter Twenty-One
The renral shot into the air. There was an energy to the way that the renral was flying, and Imogen could feel something burning through him, as if that crackling power that radiated up through his tipped-up feathers began to push power through her. It was a significant surge of energy that left Imogen open to his power.
Lilah sat behind her, quiet since they had left the hut. The renral continued flying, and Imogen kept looking for signs of the Leier, signs of where she needed to travel, and could not find anything. There had to be some way for her to get the help that she needed.
“What do you intend for us to do now?” Lilah asked.
