Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker

Author:Mishell Baker [Mishell Baker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781481451932
Publisher: Saga Press
Published: 2017-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

22

I looked over at Caryl. Somehow in the blushing golden glare she had gone from nondescript to heartbreakingly beautiful.

“You’re sure you want to bring it this close to the Gate?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and then began a droning incantation in the Unseelie tongue, gazing at the upturned palm of her hand.

“Is it safe to cast Unseelie spells around me? King Winterglass told me they’re poisonous or something.”

She halted her incantation. “My spells are not as strong as his,” she assured me, “but even so I take care not to cast too often in one spot. It can create a sort of . . . psychic aura around a place that depresses and demoralizes those nearby.”

“Lovely.”

She restarted her incantation. When she was finished, she said, “I doubt you recognize the words, but this is the same construct I used to find Vivian at Regazo de Lujo.”

Without fey glasses, I couldn’t see anything, since a construct was pure spellwork bound only to itself. “And you’re going to follow it?”

Caryl shook her head. “We will wait here. The construct is a sort of calling card. When it arrives at its destination it will allow the recipient to retrace its path and find us. That was the danger I spoke of when I sent it after Vivian.”

“Did you dissolve Elliott to make it this time?” I said, studying her face for signs of distress.

She shook her head, then gave her hand a graceful upward motion as though releasing a bird. “When I summoned it at the resort, my reserves had run out after hiding the car. I had to reappropriate Elliott’s energy in order to cast.”

I watched Caryl turn sharply to the left as though watching the thing speed away. “And you’re . . . fully charged now?”

“ ‘Charge’ doesn’t even matter here,” she said. “I can draw arcane energy from the very air. Every spell I cast here is more potent, more precise, and costs me nothing.”

“So you could cast a thousand of those.”

“I cannot cast duplicates of a spell. The first word of each spell is unique, and if I speak it again it simply starts the spell over. I could, however, cast one copy of each spell in my repertoire. I do not hold enough arcane energy within me to do that at home.”

“It must be almost disappointing to go back.”

Caryl turned and gave me a slow appraisal that carried a tinge of disapproval despite her expressionless face. “Perhaps it would be,” she said, “if power were something that concerned me. But I am no tyrant. And whatever I am, I was born human. I need a world where things are what they seem, where no amount of wishing can make them anything other.”

“Wishes come true here?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Caryl. “You could not wish for a rain of gold and have it suddenly appear. But Arcadia reflects the aggregate of its citizens’ desires and expectations. Reality here exists largely by consensus.”

“So . . . basically Arcadia is what my college friends thought the world was like when they’d smoked enough weed.

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