“You never told us it could do that.” That was Morgan, her teary green eyes open again, her tone almost accusatory. Cato fought back disbelieving laughter at the idea that after all of this, he might still be keeping secrets from them.
“I don’t know what it’s doing,” he said hoarsely, still staring at the gauntlet. “This is—this is like no magic I’ve ever encountered.” The collar may have been gone, but it was true. Every magic item he’d ever encountered, no matter how much power it may have held, was itself inert. This gauntlet wasn’t functioning as a source of power for its holder to draw upon and use. Cato had had a magical item in his forearm for more than a decade, and this feeling could not have been more different.
There was also the point that neither he nor Haspar had been able to detect the faintest trace of magic on the item when they’d found it. But that wasn’t the case now, as he moved the silver fingers, the hand that he couldn’t stop thinking of ashishand. It moved as easily as his flesh and blood hand ever had in response to his whims and instincts—and there was something more there, too. It might not have been inert, like his collection of magical artifacts, but when he closed his eyes, he could feel it brimming with power more potent than any he’d ever encountered. Some artifacts could harm or even kill the unwary mage who accessed them without due care. This, he knew without hesitation, belonged squarely in that category.
But thirty seconds ago, he’d been convinced he was about to die anyway. What had he lost, really?
“Please,” he whispered. And then he opened his eyes, and let the full force of whatever was contained within the gauntlet rip through the open channel of his body.
The first thing he felt was his ears popping—and the sounds of surprise from the assembled dragons told him he wasn’t alone in that. There were murmurs of shock and confusion, Queen Lana reaching up to her hair, which was standing on end as though gripped in some kind of static storm. There was a great rushing sound, as though they were all caught in a high wind, though the air itself was as still as ever. The field of effect was expanding, to judge by the murmurs of concern from the onlookers as they were likewise affected by the static and the sound.
But Cato couldn’t think about any of that. He could feel the power burning and seething through him, feel himself relying on every trick he’d ever learned to hold it steady, to provide it an open channel through which to move, and to stay the hell out of its way. He was holding those outstretched silver fingers inches from Acantha’s face, as though some great warmth was emanating from his palm and onto her closed eyelids.
Later, every dragon there would tell their own version of the story, of the moment they’d realized the full magnitude of what was happening. For the Queen, it was realizing that she was standing squarely and painlessly on both feet instead of favoring her sprained ankle. For Prince Conrad, it was noticing that the seeping wet heat of his head wound had cooled—and that he could suddenly think clearly with the agonizing throb of the injury gone. In the crowd, dragons were exclaiming with shock, shaking each other and pointing out cuts and bruises disappearing before their very eyes. Down the corridor, a guard who’d given up applying pressure to a clearly fatal wound realized that not only had the bleeding stopped of its own accord, he couldn’t even find the wound.
But for Cato, the only part of the story he remembered clearly was the moment that Acantha opened her eyes.
Absolute uproar erupted around them. But Cato felt like he was in the eye of some great storm, holding his breath as Acantha sat up, her green eyes widening in shock as she did. Gingerly, and then with more confidence, she touched her chest, pressed on it… took a shallow breath, then a deeper one, the look of relief quickly replaced by confusion and suspicion. Then, finally, she turned back to him, and he would have laughed if he hadn’t been so scared to believe he could be seeing what he was seeing.
“Nothing hurts,” she said suspiciously, and the sound of her voice almost brought him to tears all over again. “How did you—”
But she was too slow. With a muffled shriek, Morgan pounced, pulling her sister into a bone-crushing hug that made Cato wince automatically at the memory of what Acantha had said about her ribs being broken… but Acantha was laughing, not wincing in pain, holding her sister tightly as the younger woman sobbed joyously against her shoulder. The Queen and Prince were both watching the scene unfold with identical looks of shock—until Lana found Cato’s eyes instead, and mouthed a question.
“I don’t know,” he said faintly, spreading his hands in a gesture of surrender… then catching his breath at the strange asymmetry between them. One silver hand, one flesh-colored one… cautiously, as though afraid he might injure himself somehow, he laced his fingers together, shocked by how vivid the sensation was. Why, his right hand was every bit as dexterous as his left, if not a little more so… and he felt the sensation in it as keenly as he’d ever felt with flesh and blood. No artifact he’d ever encountered had behaved this way. He’d stopped pulling power from it now, but it was still moving, still responding to his commands… how could that be?
Not commands, he thought faintly. This was something else entirely. He could already feel that this was nothing like his relationship with the magical artifacts he’d accrued over the years. This wasn’t about an object being used by its owner… the gauntlet had reacted to his need, but like a friend reacting to a question, not like a tool reacting to its handler. Strange as it was, he sensed on some intuitive level that this was a partnership. The same was true of the magic it had released, so unlike anything he’d ever experienced. The power had flowed through him, yes… but it had been the gauntlet that had released it. It was as though the hand, in attuning itself to him, had learned what he knew about the dragons around them… and had reacted by providing exactly what they needed.
All of this he meditated on as the strangest evening of his life so far passed before his eyes in a strange blur. Once the buzz of magic had faded from the air, the Queen and Prince took charge of the situation, calling instructions left and right. Acantha, among the other wounded dragons, was rushed away to be looked over by Palace medics. He felt a little bereft at how quickly she’d been snatched from his arms, but the fact that she was alive was more than enough to ease his sadness at their parting.
Then Queen Lana called for volunteers to gather the bodies of the fallen, a break in her voice. The somber atmosphere that claimed the assembled dragons was abruptly broken some time later when the shellshocked-looking volunteer group returned to report that every body they’d searched for—even those confirmed dead during the fray—had been found not only alive, but unharmed.
So that was it, in the end. A violent, bloody invasion by a powerful enemy… hundreds of injuries, no wounded. Even by the standard of shifter physiology—they were famously more resilient and faster healers than humans—that was unique. Nobody seemed to know what to do. The Palace’s healers all seemed at a loose end, almost annoyed by the lack of work to be done after all their preparation… he’d have laughed at all the aimless wandering going on if he hadn’t been guilty of it himself.
He spoke only briefly with Queen Lana, whose injuries might have been magically resolved but whose exhaustion was clearly going very strong. She’d shoved her hair out of her face with the heel of her hand in a less-than-regal gesture that made him smile, then matter-of-factly told him that his status as a prisoner and a war criminal had temporarily been suspended. It would be restored only if he continued to bother her about it before she’d had a good night’s sleep.
Cato knew when to take ‘yes’ for an answer. He gracefully receded into the background with his most elaborate bow, feeling such a profound sense of relief and gratitude that it made him light-headed. After all the chaos he’d rained down on them, one burst of magical healing was a minuscule drop in the bucket when it came to making things right. But if it had been enough to buy him a night’s reprieve, he’d count himself lucky. Honestly, he was still wandering around in a delighted daze at the simple fact that he was still alive. There seemed to be a lot more space inside his body for joy right now… but whether that was because of the near-death experience or the absence of Haspar’s controlling presence, he couldn’t tell.
He’d hoped for at least a minute or two alone with Acantha, but who had he been kidding? She wouldn’t have been the woman he loved if she hadn’t leaped straight up from what had quite literally been her deathbed and immediately set about obtaining a full report of the battle from every single guard she could track down. Every time he caught a glimpse of her that long, long night, she was deep in conversation with a different guard… still in the blood-soaked armor that told the horrifying story of what had very nearly happened to her. But she was happy, he realized. Her face was its usual stern, unchanging mask… but he could see the light in her eyes, see how much more quickly her lips shifted into small smiles now and again. Her soldiers had all survived… even the ones she’d presumably seen cut down, he thought, noticing that in one or two cases, she even went so far as to embrace the guards she was talking to.
And so he left her to it. They were both still alive… he could wait a little longer to speak with her again. Besides, he had one last thing he wanted to do… and so he found his way back down to the prison, where Haspar’s body still lay. He’d had the strange idea that he needed closure, that he needed to see the dead man to really begin to process what had happened… but there was something oddly anticlimactic about seeing Haspar’s lifeless frame in an empty room. Alone. He was just a man, at the end of the day. Just a sad, lonely, bitter man who’d lost faith not only in his cause, but in himself. Looking at him now, Cato could hardly believe how much of a sway the man had held over him—and how quickly it had disappeared. No real leader needed fear or pain to ensure loyalty. Acantha had taught him that. So had Queen Lana, and Prince Conrad, and all the dragons he’d met who served them unswervingly without so much as a hint of a threat.
“Cato? We’re ready to take him away—but please take as much time as you need.”
That was Prince Conrad, standing a respectful distance away in the doorway, a worried look on his face. Cato nodded, not trusting himself to speak around the lump in his throat. What could he say? The injuries that Haspar had left on his body might have healed, but the deeper wounds… well, it was going to be a while before he could even speak about those, let alone heal from them.
“No,” he said finally, turning away from Haspar’s body one last time. “Thank you, Prince Conrad. But I’m done here.”
It could only have been a few hours before dawn when he finally headed for his room, hoping that they hadn’t gotten around to clearing it out or locking all the doors on him just yet. To his relief, it was just as he’d left it—and he felt a strange rush of vertigo to think of the last time he’d been here. The disastrous conversation with Haspar, Acantha taking him into custody, those dreadful manacles… he shivered a little at the memory, felt the fingers of his new hand twitch, too. What would the manacles do to him now? He ran his fingertip gingerly over the almost seamless connection between his skin and the smooth metal of the gauntlet, which was growing harder and harder to think of as anything but his hand.
Something told him that the manacles wouldn’t be able to sever this connection. There was a different kind of magic at play here altogether. He was developing a few theories about what that could be… theories he was already looking forward to sharing with Arric and Hartwell, provided the two of them were willing to take him back as a research partner.
But those thoughts disappeared in an instant when the door swung open to reveal the unmistakable silhouette of Acantha. He rose from the edge of the bed where he’d been sitting, everything he’d wanted to tell her bubbling up to the surface of his mind at once. Frozen by indecision, he closed his open mouth as she strode towards him… and opened his arms instead. She barely slowed down, hitting his chest with such a thud that he felt the air rush out of him. But he didn’t care. He hugged her as hard as he could, heedless of the armor pressing into him, of the dried bloodstains adding even more mess to his clothing, of everything except how unbelievably grateful he was for this. Just this was worth everything he’d ever been through. Just to have her in his arms again.
Chapter 25 - Acantha
She’d died, Acantha kept thinking. It was like she was trying to surprise herself with the information, as if she might believe it if she could trick herself into thinking about it unawares. She had physically felt the life leave her body, felt the dark rushing in, felt a curious kind of peace that was tempered by a wistful, resigned flavor of sadness. Nothing to be done, but oh, if there was any way to get a little more time, the things she’d have liked to do…And then it was there, shining like a beacon behind her closed eyelids, so bright she simply had to blink her eyes open to check on it. And just like that, she was back. How it had happened she didn’t know—and from the look on his face, neither did Cato.
But that night, as she worked her steady way through what she’d thought was going to be a harrowing series of casualty reports, her wonder continued to grow. No injuries. No deaths—even the dragons she’d seen lying motionless, even the guards she’d known for a fact weren’t going to recover from their injuries… she found every single one of them, alive and well, telling the same story. A story she’d never have believed if she hadn’t lived through it herself.