Cyndi Cylendar's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The kettle never boiled. Cyndi set it back on the shelf and turned to Heather, who stood by the ritual table with her fingers on the split spine of a spell book. Before Cyndi could pour the cup and speak the trust spell, a bell rang far above them, three short strikes. Heather's head lifted. Cyndi knew the sound. A palace attendant was on the stair corridor, calling for Heather by name. "They tracked me," Heather said. "I told the guard I was walking the west field. He didn't believe me." She wiped her palms on her dress. "The dog is with him. It follows my scent to the door and Bella knows this room exists by supper." Cyndi crossed to the wall and pressed her hand to the packed earth behind the table. She had been feeding the ground for weeks, pushing her magic out through the dirt in a slow black stain that already reached the palace foundations. She pulled a thread of it back now, up through her wrist. The floor warmed. A small mound of scorched dirt rose beside her boot, veined with red like a coal cracked open. She spoke a name into it. The mound pulsed once. Above them, in the corridor, the guard dog's bark twisted into a whine and then stopped. Cyndi felt the animal drop. She felt the attendant stumble and forget which turn he had taken. She held the spell until his footsteps moved the wrong way down the stair. Heather watched the mound cool. "You killed the dog." "I turned him around. The dog will wake." Cyndi lied about the dog and knew Heather heard it. She stepped between Heather and the door. "You can't leave. If you walk up there now, he sees you coming from this hall and Bella has the map by morning." She lifted the second book off the stack. "Stay a season. One cup. You keep your tongue, I keep my work. After that you go home to your children and I never ask you again." Heather looked at the door, then at the mound, then at her sister. "A season," she said. "And when Bella asks me where you are, I say I don't know, and the words come out true." She took the cup Cyndi poured and drank. Cyndi drank after her and spoke the binding. Heather's shoulders dropped an inch, as if a small weight had been set down in a room she could not see. She sat on the stool by the table. She would not climb the stair until Cyndi opened the door. Cyndi bolted it and turned back to her books. The dirt under the palace was almost ready. Heather was inside the trap, and the attendant was walking the wrong way, and Bella did not yet know either thing.