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He wanted to ask; he was cluttered with questions. But he’d come here for a reason, tonight. He had to stay on topic.
“All of that is…” He shook his head and refocused. “Lucian.” It felt strange to address him by name, after all this time. “The last time I was here, you were telling me about the way my power used to function. About the first Dead Guard sharing it with – well, with you, I suppose. There were six of you, and using the magic didn’t send you into a swoon, and you didn’t have to go down into the bloody well all the time. I need to know how that was accomplished. I need to know if it can be done again!” At the end, his voice ticked up until he was nearly shouting; he saw more than a few curious faces turn their direction.
“Please,” he said, calmer. “I can’t be chained to this mountain for the rest of my miserable life.” I can’t marry someone I don’t love, he didn’t say, because it felt too selfish. This first Corpse Lord had chosen to cripple himself with magic, and surely he had his reasons; surely being in love with his Guard captain hadn’t been a deciding factor in any of it.
Lucian let out a slow, tired-sounding breath. “I was afraid you’d ask me this.”
“It’s only fair,” Náli said, bristling. “It may have come from you, and your decisions, but it’s my magic now and I’m the one who has to live with it.” He kicked his chin up. “I want to know why you took it away from your Guard. And why it wrings me out like a wet cloth whenever I use it.” He held the shaman’s gaze a long, fraught moment, conveying all of his displeasure and impatience, and, well, bratty authority in that look.
Lucian’s face twitched into a very human expression for a moment, less long-dead magical lord and more put-out with a young upstart. But then he sighed and said, "Magic is like a beacon. The stronger it is, the more easily seen by other magic-users. Some magic makes the user seem magnetic and charming – the ancestors of my brother that became the Drake family, the dragon-riders, always possessed a certain allure. They were beautiful, and charming, and captivating. They charmed kings and queens and smallfolk hung on their every word.”
Náli thought of a battle-hardened king braiding love beads into a Southern bastard’s hair, and a chill moved through him. Was that truly love? Or the charm of a magic Oliver hadn’t even known he possessed?
“Other, more powerful magics shine like signal fires on mountaintops,” Lucian continued. “That was our power. The fiercest power in the North…and that was why they came.”
“Who is they?”
Lucian lunged across the brazier – “Hey! What are you–?” – and seized Náli’s wrist. His grip was cold. So cold it burned. Náli tried to twist away, but then his vision was flooded with light, and he stood at the base of a mountain, smoke curling from its peak. Against a roiling, stormy sky streaked with lightning he saw them overhead: drakes. Five, six, seven of them. Black and sinuous and tremendous, much larger than the cold-drakes he'd met, their wings shredding the storm clouds as they circled, and then dove straight for them.
A ring of men stood around him, shouting, swords raised. His Dead Guard. Dressed all in gray and brown, their hair in long, single braids.
No, he thought, but he couldn’t move, and couldn’t speak, because this wasn’t his memory; was instead a flash of what had happened centuries before.
As the drakes neared, he saw riders on their backs: pale hair streaking from beneath black helmets, and armor that gleamed gold.
As abruptly as it had come, the vision vanished, and Náli was left blinking spots from his vision and massaging the icy pins and needles from his wrist.
Lucian sat back, winded, panting. He turned his face away, so the firelight carved harsh shadows beneath his near cheekbone. “We slew them all that day, drakes and enemies both. The last died at my feet, with blood on his lips, vowing the end of our ‘whole miserable people.’ He had my mother’s fine-featured face. Her sister’s face.” His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “I cut his throat, and moved to see to my Guards – but it was too late.
“They lay dying in the snow, burned by the foreign drakes’ strange green fire, bones broken, armor rent, flesh sliced to ribbons. I knelt by my captain, and laid hands upon his breast, but he begged me not to bring them back. Not to – animate them. Like poppets. Because that’s all that it is. It would take a magic stronger than any I possess to keep the soul inside a ruined body. The merging of flesh and spirit is something I hadn’t mastered yet – and something I wouldn’t.
“I gathered up their magic that day, as they died, and I took their diamond pendants, and my mother’s blood magic, and buried it all deep inside the mountain, where the heat and magma and poison gas would shield its secret from any such hunters in the future.”
He turned back to Náli, eyes bottomless and freshwater blue, full of all the ages that had passed since he’d walked the earth. “But even a fire mountain,” he said, gravely, “cannot contain such power; it is a power meant for the living, for a body that can wield it.
“Those diamonds lie even now in the bottom of the pool you call the well. They hold the power that belonged to my Guards. Bind it to your own, and together the six of you can carry the whole of the magic, without need of this mountain.”
Náli could barely breathe. “It would stop erupting? I wouldn’t have to return to it constantly?”
Lucian nodded. “Don’t you see? You don’t go down into the water and give your power to the mountain – you draw more power from it, and settle its disquiet. The well is a repository for magic. Once you take it out, that power will be loose on the earth at its strongest – for the first time in five centuries.”
