Dead Magic (2 page)

Thus, she'd allowed her friend to festoon her in the cream and caramel two-layered skirt. Margaretta could not afford the actual color copper, which she'd bemoaned for half a day before settling on the outfit Valeda now wore. Cream underskirt of satin, showing class and modesty, and a lacey caramel overskirt, to show color and vibrancy, added to a terrifyingly low-cut bodice of matching cream. Valeda had tuned the woman out, which she lamented because if she'd been listening she might have paid more attention to the fact that the skirts were an inch and a half too long.

By Fates, Valeda was never going to let another woman dress her again.

Realizing that Monty was waiting for her own introduction, Valeda blushed and stammered, inwardly kicking herself for getting distracted by something as inane as fashion; "Valeda Quinlan, from the
Tormey Regular
."

"The
Tormey Regular
?" Monty sounded genuinely surprised. "Is Tormey House planning some kind of alliance or union with Delgora?"

"Oh, no, no," Valeda said, feeling her face color even more. "That is, I'm not acquainted with House politics enough to say. I'm here on . . . other business."

A blond eyebrow quirked up at this and Montgomery hummed. It wasn't an altogether unpleasant "hum", but she recognized the curiosity in him and searched desperately for a distraction. In truth, her boss would be quite displeased to learn that her three-week vacation was really following the one lead to the one story he'd demanded she forget.
The one story
, she thought,
that affects every House Land in Magnellum.

It had been eight years since the last time Magic, the man-god, had walked in plain sight of his people. Eight years since he had attended a noble Witch-Born birth and bestowed the Talent onto a new subject, and while Magic was known as a capricious sort of god, he'd never been absent from Magnellum for so long. Valeda could sense that something was amiss. There was an ominous feeling to the very air around her, a churning in her gut that couldn't let the story go. Korman Poutre, owner of the
Tormey Regular
, could threaten her with her job all he liked, but Valeda had to know the truth.

Spotting the tear in the hem of her skirt, Valeda seized the change of topic, "Oh, Margaretta is going to kill me. She spent a month's salary on this outfit."

"Ah, the vagaries of borrowed clothing," Montgomery clucked his tongue at the ripped fabric. "If it helps, I can testify to Miss Margaretta that the skirt plotted against the toe of your shoe and lost the battle."

Laughing, Valeda shook her head, "I doubt it would help."

"Ambassador Taven," a soft, feminine voice intruded on their conversation.

Valeda turned, startled to find that Vicaress Leona had managed to approach them without her noticing. Dipping into an instant curtsy, she heard Montgomery greet the Vicaress with something that sounded like affection in his voice.

Copper was not a highlight in Leona's garb, Valeda noticed that straight off. The girl was resplendent in rich greens, so deep and constant that Valeda imagined she'd sprouted from the jungles of Delgora. To Valeda's envy, Leona's hair shone healthy and bright in the sun, making perfect golden ringlets that brushed her shoulders.

No one should be allowed to be so beautiful,
she thought.

"The gardens are prepared." Leona gestured toward the western side of the grand hall, a hall that, to Valeda's dismay, only served to feed her sense of inadequacy.

Great, high windows, all of them open, with massive pillars running the length of the room to the raised dais and ornate House Seat. Everything was a mesh of marble and brass fixings and Valeda thought again about her little apartment.

Outclassed, she told herself, definitely outclassed.

"If you will both follow me," Leona half turned but paused at Valeda's squeak of alarm.

"Oh, my Lady, I mean Vicaress, I am just . . ."

Monty interrupted her by taking possession of her elbow. "Miss Quinlan is my guest. An Untalented, but purely charming guest. I trust the House Witch will not mind the added company?"

"No, not at all." Leona appeared highly amused by this turn of events and gestured for them to follow.

At the suave and also amused gesture from Monty, Valeda began to do so, allowing him to escort her through Delgora Hall. Korman would wheeze with laughter at the sight of his pants-preferring, mud-diving, get-dirty-if-you-have-to, star reporter being treated like a dignitary. Valeda herself was having trouble with a fit of nervous giggles, but somehow managed to keep her reactions limited to a smile.

"You didn't have to do that," she whispered to Monty.

They passed through the garden doors and into a canopy of large, jungle leaves. Flowers bloomed everywhere, peppering the greenery with bright splashes of pink, yellow and purple. Were it not for the humidity, which made unpleasant prickles of sweat bead over her spine and pool in the hallow places of her body, it would have been the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen in person.

"Nonsense," Monty whispered back to her. "We cannot have Miss Margaretta's best skirt sacrificed for nothing. Besides, I've been here two wretched days. In my estimation, the Witch owes me for my time."

It was the dripping that woke him up. Warm and wet, he couldn't see what it was that kept splattering against his neck, but in the darkness of his metal cocoon Winslow could hazard a guess. He'd managed to make a pocket of space with his magic, just big enough that he hadn't been crushed to death. But as his Talent had waned, the train car had collapsed around him.

His right foot throbbed. Sharp metal tore into his skin when he tried to move it.

"Mother, Maiden and Crone!" he hissed and tried to relax.

He needed to concentrate. He needed to breathe. But the breathing part was hampered by what felt like two tons of pressure aimed directly at his chest. In the blackness of his little space, he could hear an alarming crackling sound in his shallow breaths. Leaning back against the bite of cold metal, Winslow closed his eyes and summoned his Talent again.

He could sense it at the core of his being, faint from over-use but still there. Slowly, meticulously, he took an inventory of his injuries. His magic led him, pinpointing several lacerations, a fracture in his left elbow, a large contusion on the left side of his skull where the seat had snapped free of the train and hit him.
Concussion, more than likely, but not nearly as disconcerting as the collapsed lung,
he thought. His right leg was broken in no fewer than three places, mostly near his foot, where the floor of the train car had been sandwiched against the wall of the train.

"Have mercy," he winced and wheezed at the same time.

Another droplet hit his jaw and Winslow focused. The map his magic had made of his battered body consumed his mind. He could see it, feel it, as he commanded his Talent to mend the lung. It was an agonizing moment as he bent time, speeding up the recovery process for the injury and he cried out from the pain of it. The sound of his own voice seemed very small, as though the train had swallowed him whole.

His lung patched and inflated and he took his first full breath of air since the crash.

After three deep breaths, Winslow concentrated his Talent on escaping from the train. The window would have been near his feet, or at least, that's where he estimated it would be. When he'd landed on the floor, his head had been half in the aisle and his body managed to lodge itself there. He could feel indentations in the metal floor where his elbows pushed back against the crumpling train.

He heard a small whimpering sound, muffled through the metal surrounding him. Winslow flinched, his heart twisting at the anguish he heard. It came again, originating from somewhere to his left. Craning his neck back, he squinted at the dark, calling on his magic to pull his vision into sharp focus.

A jagged tear made a vent in the iron floor, exposing shadowed ground that looked impossibly far away. The tear was a good two feet from him, but by the angle of it Winslow could calculate that their car was jammed up on top of something.

"Hello?" His voice was raspy, sounding eerie even to him.

A sniffle and a light movement came from just beyond the tear, and Winslow's stomach dropped.
The little girl and her mother,
he thought.

"Hello?" He said, more forcefully this time.

"My hand is stuck and Mother's asleep."

Winslow closed his eyes again, his chest locked in grief.
Fates have mercy,
he prayed,
may that woman just be unconscious.

"What's your name?" He tested his moving room, hissing as his fractures came roaring to life.

"Mirabella."

"It's nice to meet you, Mirabella. My name is Winslow."

Gritting his teeth, he forced his Talent to mend his body. He had to go one injury at a time, but none of the fractures were quite as agonizing as the lung had been. His magic still needed rest, but little Mirabella needed rescuing now, too. And if he was fully honest with himself, Winslow was starting to get claustrophobic.

"Are you hurt?" Mirabella asked.

"Only a little," he bit back a curse when he realized he couldn't fix his leg until he freed it from the bent metal.

"Mother says men swear a lot when they're in pain because it makes them feel better."

He smiled briefly before pressing his palms to the seat half folded on top of him. "I don't know that it makes us feel better, but it certainly lets us focus on something else. Are you hurt, Mirabella?"

"My hand is stuck and I can't feel my fingers."

"What's it stuck in?"

"I don't know, I can't see around Mother's head."

Winslow fought back the images that brought to mind. Imagining the girl staring at her dead mother for however long he'd been unconscious, he felt terrible that he'd been so frustrated with her before. Of course, he didn't know that the mother was dead. He prayed she wasn't, but someone had lost enough blood for it to drip into his face. It seemed uncharitable to hope that fate belonged to Cosata Divenhurst-Lorlain.

"Mirabella, I'm going to move the seat that's on top of me. There's going to be a lot of noise. Try not to be frightened."

He waited for her to acknowledge him before he pushed at the seat. It was a joint effort of his natural strength and his Talent to move the thing, straining muscles and magic to an almost painful point. Iron scratched into iron, screeching in a spine-tingling pitch. Something shifted higher up in the train car, slamming into the row of seats as it came free. Winslow felt the shock of it rattle into his arms and through his shoulders but didn't let go.

Mirabella screamed in pain and Winslow stopped, panting and alarmed. "Mirabella?"

She continued to cry, great gasping wails, and Winslow panicked. He tore his foot out of the vice it was stuck in, shouting in mingled fear and pain as the metal tore deep into his leg. All the fractures in the offending appendage shifted to squeeze through the opening. He fought his way up to the tear in the floor, placed his good foot on the jagged lip and shimmied his way up to where Mirabella should have been.

He found a booted foot first: feminine, with a half an inch of pointed heel and several dainty buckles up the side. By its size, he could tell that this was the mother. Carefully, trying not to jostle the train any more than he already had, Winslow reached out and circled the woman's ankle with one hand. He concentrated on the sensation of touch and tried to ignore Mirabella's hiccupping cries.

A rapid, stuttered pulse beat into his palm and he exhaled in relief.

The mother was alive.

"Mirabella?"

"My hand . . ."

Fates alive! He wished he could see through metal. "I know you're hurt, but I need you to be brave. Can you be brave?"

"Mother says being brave means you look at the thing that scares you most and tell it to scram."

Winslow smiled and wiped blood and grease from his brow. "I like your mother. Do you think you can be brave?"

"Yes."

"Good." He paused and bent to duck his head through the hole.

Their train had leapt the tracks. In the shadow of their particular car, Winslow could see the railway tracks more than five feet away. The ferny, mountainous landscape of southern Clenci meshed with the white-washed gravel that held the train tracks. He was grateful for the sudden brush of late autumn air through the vent on two accounts. For one, it smelled a damn sight better than the wreck of the train; and for another, it meant less of a chance of a fire. At the moment, he had quite enough trouble to cope with.

"Mr. Winslow?"

"One moment, Mirabella."

He didn't want to move anything on the inside of the train again. Fates only knew what else might fall on top of them if he did. They didn't have time for him to climb on top and work his way down to them, either. Pulling his head back inside the train, Winslow glanced between the snaggle-toothed metal and feminine boot. There was no way to help Mirabella or her mother until he could see what he was dealing with.

Setting his hands against the edge of torn iron, he summoned his magic once more, growling as he ripped the train floor further. He kept tearing, folding the iron away, ignoring the sharp bite of broken metal in his palms. His own blood started a slow roll around his wrists, soaking into the sleeves of his dress shirt. The tan, linen material turned a rusty color at the cuffs and for a moment he turned his attention to that instead of the strain. Then he redoubled his efforts, widening the hole until he reached the mother's knee.

Pausing for breath, Winslow balanced on the shredded floor and considered the tangle of iron and woman before him. The best way to get the girl and her mother out of the train was just to continue ripping the hole in the floor, and then lower them down. But Mirabella's hand was stuck on something and he had to get around the mother to see properly.

With a resigned sigh, Winslow got back to work. Bracing himself on either side of the hole, he peeled back the floor, pushing warped curls of iron away until he encountered Mirabella's leg. Then he continued further, inch by painstaking inch, scooting his own body along for better balance.