“You’re talking about Moses?”
Liam nodded.
I walked to a church pew made of gleaming oak, sat down. I needed to digest this. To think about what they’d said—and measure it against what I knew and what I’d seen of war.
I sat silently for a few minutes, until the worst of my guilt had subsided a little. “How many?” I asked, glancing over at them. “How many Paras were conscripted?”
“The estimate is four thousand,” Liam said.
Damn. Four thousand people forced to fight against their will, some of them undoubtedly killed in battle, even though they hadn’t really wanted to hurt us. Or they’d survived like Moses, been locked away in Devil’s Isle without a way to claim their innocence.
I blew out a breath, ran my hands through my hair, tugged like it would clear the doubt out of my brain, the new and sharp-edged guilt.
When I could breathe again, I sat up, looked at Nix. It wouldn’t help to drown myself in pain that belonged to someone else.
“You said ‘they’ couldn’t surrender, not ‘we.’ You weren’t one of those who had to fight?”
She shook her head. “I was fortunate. My people take many forms. Some are connected to water. Others, like me, to wood. I came through the Veil near Bogue Chitto.”
Bogue Chitto was a park and wildlife refuge north of Lake Pontchartrain, surrounding the Bogue Chitto River. Or it had been before the war. Now it was an unmonitored wilderness.
“It was the best possible luck,” she said. “The wood eventually gave me strength, allowed me to fight the compulsion, although it was a struggle. I stayed there for many years with others, hoping to find a way home, a way through the Veil. That hasn’t happened yet. But we have found friends, made new lives for ourselves.”
She was a wonder. “I don’t think I could be as gracious as you.”
“I wasn’t always gracious. There were times when I wanted to fight for my freedom.” Nix’s gaze narrowed, flashed with something sharp and dangerous. “But not against humans. They may be naive, but they are not my enemies. They did not bring me here.”
“You live as a human?”
She nodded. “I can pass when necessary, but I do not stay in the city often. We have a community. It is hidden, and it is safe.”
She walked to a rolltop desk, trailed fingers across the ridged shell. “There is a lot of wood in here. Cherry. Mahogany. Oak. It is happy to be appreciated, to be loved. And there was much love here.”
She glanced my way, and the expression of utter certainty on her face brought quick and surprising tears to my eyes. By that look, she acknowledged my family and remembered them.
“Yeah,” I said, blinking to keep the tears from falling. “There was. Thank you for that.” I looked away, embarrassed by the sudden emotion.
“Thank you for caring for these things.” She smiled. “But we should get started.”
She picked up a Newcomb vase—a tall, narrow design in pale green with deep blue flowers—and checked the mark on the bottom like a seasoned pro, set it down again.
“What are you looking for?”
She looked back at me, hair falling over one shoulder. “A casting and binding object. Ah,” she said, and picked up a small black-lacquered box. She opened it, peered inside. A moment later, apparently satisfied with whatever she’d found, she nodded.
She brought it back, handed it to me. “Magic is energy, yes?”
I smiled thinly. “That’s what I hear.”
“You must regulate that magic. You will cast the extra magic into this box—remove it from your body so that it does not harm you. Later, you will learn how to bind it. That’s too much for one evening.”
I glanced down at the box. It was pretty—layers of gloss over black, with a pattern of thin, waved lines in gold beneath—but not that big. Maybe four inches by six. “It doesn’t look like it would hold a lot.”
Nix laughed, the sound as bright and happy as silver bells. “Magic doesn’t have mass. Not in the way you’d define it. It will fill and infuse the box many times over before you need another container.”
She put the box on the floor, gestured to it. “Sit comfortably.”
If my dad could see me now, I thought, and lowered myself to the floor.
“She didn’t mean on the box,” Liam said with a grin.
“Yeah, thanks. I figured that out.” I sat a few inches from the box, crossed my legs.
Nix took a seat on the floor on the other side of the box. She sat as beautifully and effortlessly as a dancer, folding her legs beneath her, delicate hands in her lap.
Liam, who’d become silent as he watched us, moved closer, leaned against the edge of a console table.
“Tell me how you move things,” she said.
“Accidentally?” I said, and explained the star and the owl. “If I’m doing it on purpose, I just imagine the air is full of magic, and I try to gather it together. Then I pull. But not very well. Are we going to work on that? My aim is not good.”