Something dropped heavily to the ground a few feet away from me. Pan must have dropped Ferius, I thought.
‘It’s enough,’ he said. There was a weariness to his voice. ‘Let’s bring them back to the council. They’ll stand trial for what they’ve done.’
‘No,’ Tennat said.
‘We agreed—’
The sound of footsteps accompanied Tennat’s voice as he walked the last steps towards me. ‘You may have agreed, Pan, but the rest of us have different plans.’ My eyelids closed reflexively as thumbs began pressing against them.
‘Tennat, no!’ Pan called out.
‘Look!’ Tennat said, scraping with his thumbnails at the paste covering the markings around my left eye. ‘Look at the marks. It’s like my father said: Kellen is a shadowblack.’
The forest went silent. I heard the sound of more footsteps coming closer, so close I could feel breath on my face. ‘So it’s true,’ Pan said. Something wet hit my cheek just below my eye. Pan had spat on me.
‘We take him to the council,’ he said. ‘They need to see what he’s become.’
‘They can see from his corpse,’ Tennat said, and I felt him gripping the sides of my head again.
‘No. I said—’
A brief sound of scuffling ended when Ra’dir said, ‘You’re still new at this, Pan’erath. You don’t understand how wars are fought. Think of this as the fifth test – the one every war mage has to pass.’
Tennat’s thumbs pressed ever so slowly against my eyes. I would have screamed, but the chain spell wound its way over my mouth and Ra’fan squeezed what little air was left in my lungs. This is it, I realised. I’m going to die now. For real. Forever.
Tennat’s voice crept into my ears. ‘You deserve this, Kellen. For being a liar and a cheat. For all of—’
He screamed so loud I went deaf for a second.
Another shout of pain, this one I think from Ra’dir. More screams. More shouts. Chaos penetrated the darkness of my world. I had no idea what was happening, but then I realised the blinding spell was gone. I opened my eyes just in time to watch a white-gold light smash into Ra’fan so hard it flung him deep into the darkness of the forest. A dull thud echoed in the air.
With Ra’fan unconscious, his chain spell dispersed and I fell to the ground. I looked up to see Pan standing alone, his eyes full of tears.
At first I thought he’d changed his mind – that once he saw what the others were doing, he had turned on them to save my life. But then the white-gold light shimmered again, and Pan’s body lifted up high above the ground. He spun in the air, slowly, almost gracefully, as if he were underwater. Finally his body settled some seven feet up, his arms and legs splayed out as if he were tied to four horses pulling him apart. He was still conscious. He said, ‘But I did it for you … I saved you.’
My head turned, following the line of his sorrowful gaze, and I saw Shalla leaning unsteadily against a tree. Her arms were outstretched in front of her. One by one the links holding back the coloured bands on her arms began shattering like thin rings of glass exploding to the vibrations of a perfect note. The last constraints on her abilities fell before the raw force of her magic. Shalla’s eyes, usually a piercing blue, gleamed pure gold, like the light of her spell. She turned her palms up and Pan’s body rose even higher into the air, then she closed them into fists, and he crashed to the ground.
‘Nobody touches my brother,’ she said.
43
Pan’erath
I rose to my feet slowly, unsure whether I was looking at my little sister standing there or one of those gleaming gods of vengeance the Berabesq write about in their holy books. ‘Shalla?’ I asked.
She took no notice of me. Pure, radiant magic cascaded around her hands again, building to a crest that would destroy Pan and the others along with half the forest.
‘Shalla, don’t!’ I shouted.
She turned to look at me. At first she didn’t seem to recognise me, but then the gold in her eyes gave way to blue. ‘Kellen?’ she asked. ‘You look terrible.’ Her hands slumped by her sides and all of a sudden her knees gave out. She fell back against the tree and slid to the ground with surprising elegance.
‘I swear, that kid’s too pretty for her own good,’ Ferius said, grunting with effort as she stood up. ‘Too damned powerful for anyone else’s.’
I knelt beside Shalla. ‘She’s not breathing right. What’s wrong with her?’
‘The human body’s not meant to move that much energy. I reckon she’ll be all right, but she needs healing.’
‘Can you—’
Ferius shook her head. ‘I don’t deal in that kind of medicine. She’ll need your mother’s help.’ She knelt down and reached under Shalla’s shoulders. ‘Come on, help me get her onto the horse.’
Sounds of movement in the brush drew our gaze, and a moment later Reichis emerged. He looked just about as beaten up as the rest of us and the fur down his left side was singed. ‘Sons of bitches,’ he swore. ‘Nearly knocked me halfway up the damned mountain.’ His beady eyes looked around at the unconscious mages on the ground, then up at us. ‘You didn’t leave any for me?’
I translated for Ferius as we lifted Shalla onto the horse’s back. She laughed, then groaned. ‘Tell the little bugger to stop making jokes. My ribs hurt.’
Reichis ambled over and skittered up a tree before hopping onto my shoulder and starting to pick at the burnt parts of his fur. ‘Who says I’m joking?’
Ferius and I spent the next few minutes tying up the others with copper binding wire I’d found in Panahsi’s bag. No, his name’s Pan’erath, I reminded myself. That’s who he is now. Jan’Tep through and through.
When I looked down at him, I saw the same pudgy face I’d known most of my life, his otherwise handsome features still too soft and pockmarked from a life-long fondness for lemoncakes and other sweets. But there was something else there, too. Anger. Determination. Something inside him was now as hard and sharp as the cards in Ferius’s steel deck.
How many times had Panahsi stuck by me these past couple of years while his magic got stronger and mine just weakened? How many times had the other initiates urged him to stay away from me? To shun me? Pan could have run his mage’s tests ages ago. He could already be a powerful mage, apprenticed to one of the masters, maybe even being groomed to join the lords magi on the council one day. Instead, he’d stuck by me.