I’ll keep asking around.”
I moved a little farther away from the Original, carefully erecting my shields between us. Meanwhile, Blondie had pushed Phaedra back to her starting point, when Blondie turned just a little bit toward me, still keeping one eye on our enemies.
“Like I said,” she started, and then realized I’d backed away and put up my shields. “Jane?”
“Oathbreaker?” was my only reply.
Blondie sighed. “Oh, don’t freak out. I’m not working for Jarl. Any oathbreaking I did was a long time ago,” she explained, taking a step toward me even as she scoured the ground in front of Phaedra’s lot with a wall of fire.
I backed up another step to maintain my distance, lobbing a missile at Graeme as he tried to move away from Phaedra.
“Shit, this is ridiculous. Hold on a second.” With that, Blondie unleashed a crescendo of magic that wasn’t physical. It was the mental magic she’d used before, on Fugwat.
Time stood still, and it was like we were standing alone in an entirely dark space—so dark it was as if we were surrounded by black ink.
“How did you do that?” I breathed. “Did you… freeze time?”
“This isn’t Charmed,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I just put us all in our own little black boxes. Unfortunately, I have to be in one, too, or I’d just leave them there as we went on our merry way. But that’s not the point.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not. The point is you telling me why you’re called Oathbreaker.”
“I know. And I’ll get to that. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
“So start,” I snapped. I’d had more than enough of her secrets.
“The thing is, I know more about what’s under Rockabill than I’ve let on. And so do you.”
“Huh?” I said, confused by this turn of events. Unlike her, everything I knew I had spilled.
“The creature and you have a connection. It’s watched you, since you were little. It’s known you all your life.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your dreams,” she said. “After you were attacked. You need to remember them.”
Her words held power, and I felt her mind nudge mine. And with that, I remembered everything.
“Oh my gods,” I said. “The creature… I was the creature.”
“And that’s not the first time,” she prompted, again.
Suddenly, I knew she was right. I’d often been the creature in my dreams—as a child, growing up, when I was in the hospital.
“And it’s been with you, too,” Blondie said, reacting to the expression of recognition on my face.
I looked at her, my eyes wide. “How do you know all this?”
She returned my gaze, her expression conciliatory. “That’s what I haven’t been honest about,” she replied. “It’s been talking with me. We’ve been… I guess you could say, working together.”
“What?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because it didn’t want you to know,” she said, her voice soothing but her words anything but. “It’s got plans for you… I was just facilitating those plans. You’ll understand when you talk to it.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded, furious. “How can you stand there and tell me that you’ve been manipulating this whole situation and expect me to trust you? And what the hell do you mean talk to it? And how do you even know this thing, anyway?”
Her smile, at that, was grim.
“I told you you’d soon be touching that tat,” she said. Then she pulled the neck of her shirt down and tipped her head to the side so that the large black bull’s horn gleamed at me.
I blinked, my mind racing. “So this has to do with the Schism?” I asked, remembering she’d connected the Schism and that particular tat when we’d rolled around together in the second cavern.
“Yes,” she said, beckoning me with her free hand to come touch the ink decorating her graceful neck.
I moved forward slowly, and then stretched out a finger to make contact with her dark-stained flesh…
I was so full of rage, and hurt, and a desire to see ourselves freed of those that hated us. I thought of everyone I had lost: my own sister, killed by our own clan because she shared my blood; so many of my friends, picked off one by one when they were weak because the humans feared us; my people, so powerful and yet forced to live as animals by those we had the strength to control, had we but the will…
And so I raised the horn, channeling my power… It ripped through me, the pain agonizing. Yet even