Give Me (Wyrd and Fae #1)(16)

Elyse started to follow but stopped at the cupboard and put her hand flat on the door. She had a vague feeling something wasn’t quite right, but she couldn’t focus on it. She had to calm Lourdes down before she upset Mother any further.

Lourdes was on the roof deck using the wyrded glass. “He’s going to Igdrasil.” She tossed the glass onto Mother’s chair and leaned against the deck rail, reaching out with her arms. Elyse thought Lourdes meant to enchant Galen from right there, but she was only pulling power from Igdrasil.

Only.

Galen’s blue dun stallion, visible to the naked eye, streaked toward the great tree. The mist was returning and had settled on its uppermost branches.

“I’ve got to stop him.” Lourdes hugged her arms to her chest, anchoring the power she’d drawn.

“Don’t go.” Elyse felt useless and weak. “If he loved you, he wouldn’t agree to marry Diantha. He wouldn’t consider her.”

“What do you know? You’ve never been in love.” Lourdes threw her arms out again and shouted, “Cloak!” Her black cloak appeared out of nowhere and settled over her. Her eyes were wild, triumphant. “Harness!” She reached into the air and plucked Hector’s bit and reins out of nothing.

Stunning. She must have been practicing on the sly.

“Lourdes, please—”

“Stay.” Lourdes set a boundary around Elyse that worked like an invisible cage. “It’s for the best, Elyse. You’ll see.” She leapt over the deck rail.

“Lourdes!”

Lourdes floated down to the paddock, calling Hector to her.

Elyse frantically searched the boundary for a weak spot. Her eyes fell on Mother’s shawl, still draped over the chaise chair. She’d forgotten it earlier, but now it might provide a connection to Mother. Anyway, it was worth a try. She focused on the shawl and pictured Mother in her mind. “Get me out of here!”

As she hoped, Lourdes’s trap was no match for their mother’s power. With a shimmer of light, the boundary dissolved. Elyse flew down the stairs and out the front door. She couldn’t shake the dreadful sense of oncoming disaster.

“Mother!” She wasn’t in the garden, or anywhere outside the cottage that Elyse could see.

Hector streaked away with Lourdes on his bare back. They jumped the fence and galloped away toward Igdrasil.

“Elyse!” Mother’s cry from the cottage sounded sickeningly weak and distant. Elyse found her in the kitchen leaning against the worktable, her face as pale as a rose petal. “I don’t feel well.”

Fear turned to terror. Mother never admitted illness. “I’ll get your medicine.”

The instant Elyse opened the cupboard, she knew she wouldn’t find the medicine there. Or anywhere. Lourdes had done something with it. Even the blossoms of wild garlic and hawthorn had vanished from the worktable.





6

The Wrong Lovers



Mother clung to the table’s edge, her

knuckles white. “Help me get up to the roof, Elyse. I want to see the forest one more time.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

She knew this was a nightmare, but Elyse couldn’t wake up.

“You can do it.” Mother struggled to stand without the support of the table. She cupped her hands and made a scooping motion in the air, then spread them flat, palms down. “I should weigh nothing to you now.”

Elyse couldn’t deny it. She still felt exhilarated being in on a spell, but this time it was mixed with dread. She draped her mother’s arms around her neck and guided, more than carried, the feather-light bundle up to the roof deck. Everything was clear to her now. Mother’s recent hand gestures hadn’t been for mere effect. Like a young wyrder newly come into power, she’d needed the movements to make her magics stick.

Elyse hugged her close, desperate to sense strength and power, but there was only the feeling of someone slipping away. On the roof deck, Elyse eased her mother into the chair and spread the shawl over her lap.

“Aeolios has gone.” Mother looked at the still gray clouds.

“My apologies to Brother Sun,” Elyse said, “but I prefer the clouds and mist.”

Mother’s gaze traveled over every little thing on the roof deck, the jasmine, the roses, and the rosemary. She looked north to the distant sea then southwest to the forest. She watched the trees, or the spaces between them, for quite a long time.

She was silently saying farewell to it all.

Elyse’s heart compressed, surely to the size of a walnut. She cut some jasmine and laid the blossoms like an offering on Mother’s lap.

“I shouldn’t have called you,” she said. “Breaking the boundary was too much for you.” It had taken the final toll on her mother’s strength. And for what? It would have dissolved anyway once Lourdes was far enough away from the cottage.

“I didn’t break the boundary, Elyse.”

Elyse frowned. “Did Lourdes let me go?”

“No.” Mother smiled sadly and stared at the woods as if thinking something over. Then she seemed to come to a decision. “I’ve made mistakes, Elyse. Many small. A few big. The Great Wyrding should never have happened. It altered the natural order below ground. I believe it gave Aeolios a perpetual headache.”