The Necromancer ✓

Chapter Sixteen

Falling between worlds is a lot like riding a bike. I'd done it with Jack leading, dragging me through the space between worlds. He was like my training wheels, and the hand that steadied me. The first time I managed it by myself, I didn't even know how I'd done it, wasn't sure what I'd done differently to all the other times. But when you've gone through once, there's nothing really stopping you from doing it again.

I found myself in the library. I guess a part of me had hoped that Kieran and Jack would still be there, that I could just grab them and run. Of course, that would have been too easy. I walked out of the library, finding the Great Hall eerily silent. I stood in the middle of the empty hall, turning around and around, examining the space. It was just a room. There was nothing magical or sinister about it.

I looked up at the ceiling, where the exposed beams curved overhead. Like the skeleton of some giant beast, I'd thought when I first saw it. Now, it was just wood, carved in delicately sweeping lines and buffed to a pale and milky sheen but still just wood. I wondered how I'd ever mistaken that for bone. Me, who knew more about death than any living being had a right to know. How did I mistake wood for the remains of the dead.

I walked up to one of the walls, where a roof beam curved down into a support post and pressed my palm to the wood. I stilled my breathing and searched through the well of darkness at my centre, letting a line of power stretch along the wood, searching to learn its secrets.

"Oh," I said, tasting the whispered memory of death in the wood and connecting it to what I'd read about the spirits of the land. Fae had died making this building, and their deaths had been woven into the foundations so that they were a part of the building's mysteries. Just another facet of the Great Court's magic, built on the slavery of the 'lesser Fae.' It was so incredibly wrong. I wondered if there was anything I could do.

I felt a sudden tingling start up in my hand, where I was touching the wood. I pulled my hand back. As soon as I stopped touching the wood the tingling stopped but I could feel it along my line of power.

Magic is funny like that, sometimes. Just the intent to make things right with the lesser Fae had brought their bindings to the surface. I reached out with my mind and tugged at the ethereal threads that held them captive. I felt a twang reverberate through the back of my mind as the threads came loose.

A whoosh of energy trilled up my body, and danced through my hair. My skin was left feeling prickling and fresh, like how you feel after a good swim in the surf. I noticed that I could breathe more easily and I raised a hand to touch my nose. The swelling had gone down, and the area didn't feel anywhere near as tender as it had when I entered the hall. I felt refreshed and energetic.

A sudden horrifying thought occurred to me, as to where all of that energy had come from. What if, instead of undoing their bindings and setting them free, I'd absorbed them? I searched my mind, trying to find traces of the dead. I couldn't find anything. I glanced around the hall. The wooden frame of the room was dried out and cracked, as though it had passed through a hundred seasons in the last few minutes. Without the magic of the dead clinging to it, the building had aged beyond belief. It didn't look safe to stay here.

I turned to leave the hall and walked straight through the ghost of a brownie.

"I'm sorry," I said, stepping aside to balance myself.

"No," she whispered, her voice fading out as she dissipated like a puff of smoke. "Thank you."

I realized that I'd panicked for no reason then. I hadn't released them from one prison just to lock them in another. They were truly free. The energy I'd felt spring through me must have come from untying their bonds. The energy that had gone into imprisoning the Fae had been released when I released them. Since I was probably the only person with compatible energies in the entire world, not to mention the one who'd released the energies in the first place, it made sense that they'd returned the energy to me. I thought, in this instance, that old saying was true; a good deed is its own reward.