Unspoken (The Lynburn Legacy 1)

“I don’t care about being protected!” Holly shouted. Tears and fury together made her eyes glitter. “I only care about Angela.”

Kami spun away from them all and headed for the stairs, down toward the woods. She heard Jared and Holly fall into step behind her. She heard Lillian’s whisper echoing against the manor walls: “It may be too late for Angela.”

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Chapter Thirty-Three

Red and Gold

Jared could feel the lure of the lakes as if there was a magnet in his chest, pulling him toward metal. Pulling him toward the cold waters of the Crying Pools. Something kept telling him there were people waiting for him there.

“You have the same blood in your veins as the rest of us,” Aunt Lillian had said. “It draws you to the same end.”

He resisted the impulse. He reached for Kami instead, touched the scared uneasy hum of her mind from all the way across the woods.

They were combing the woods to save Kami’s best friend from his mother. Jared wanted to punch somebody when he thought about that: he could feel something building inside him that wanted to be a storm. He locked every muscle in his body and stood straining, looking up at the sky. There were wisps of cloud forming against the blue, like the curls of steam from a kettle. He knew that he had created those clouds. Surely he could use all this power they said he had, and do something useful for Angela.

He wanted to send out envoys, conjure up goblin scouts or magical messengers, anything that would help them search this forest. As he thought that, he saw the tendrils of smoke slide out of the sky into the woods, spilling through to the brown tangle of the undergrowth, rasping with a dry whisper through the bright leaves. They went combing through the forest. Jared could feel them going searching.

He heard a soft indrawn breath and looked at Holly. She was looking at him, blue eyes wide and her mascara smudged by tears she had been brushing away as they walked, surreptitious as if she was stealing.

“Looks like an octopus made of smoke,” she said, and gave him a sliver of a smile.

“I was feeling like a pretty badass sorcerer until you said that,” Jared told her. He could feel something else in the air hunting through the forest. For a moment, he thought that the searching thing was what they were looking for, but then he glanced at Aunt Lillian’s face, intent as his mother’s when she was reading a book. The cool, searching air felt like Aunt Lillian looked.

Holly’s hand gripped Jared’s arm, startling him. Her fingernails dug into his skin. “Can you please hurry?” Holly said tensely. “We have to find her.”

Lillian nodded in unexpected agreement. “It has to be us who find her.”

Jared nodded and tried to concentrate. Holly’s hand on his arm was anchoring him to his body, and airy messengers were coursing through the woods because of his power, but Kami’s thoughts were the most important thing of all.

Jared, Kami said in his head, and he could tell she was wary. Ask Lillian why.

“Why—” Jared said aloud, and then caught up with Kami’s thought. “Why do you want it to be us who find her?” He glanced at his aunt, her restrained profile that should have looked out of place in the woods and yet did not.

She regarded Jared with a considering air. “Rob wants to be the one to do it,” she answered slowly. “If a sorcerer goes rogue, turns vicious—it’s the responsibility of the Lynburns at the manor to deal with it. It’s the responsibility of the Lynburn heir, and that’s me. Rob would want to spare me.”

Spare you …, Kami prompted.

Spare her from killing Ash, Jared thought bleakly back to her. Isn’t it obvious?

There was a sense of urgency in Kami’s fear, a cold current in the stream of her thoughts.

“Spare you …,” Jared prompted, echoing Kami.

“Spare me from executing Ash and Rosalind,” Lillian said. “Rob knows what I’ll have to do. There’s a place outside Sorry-in-the-Vale called Monkshood Abbey. Rob’s parents used to live there. You might call them the cadet branch of the Lynburns.”

Jared knew all this, but he tried to look encouraging and repeated Kami’s thoughts: “What happened to them?” he asked quietly.

“They wanted more power,” Lillian answered, just as quietly. “They broke the law Aurimere made and started killing people in the cellar of their house. My parents had to go and fight them to the death to stop them. My father died a year later; my mother was never the same again. But they had to do it. It’s our duty to protect the town. Nobody else can.”

Jared thought about the crest of the Lynburns fastened in a cellar floor, covered in dried blood. He thought of Uncle Rob saying that his parents had displeased the Lynburns of Aurimere, and not mentioning that they had done so by slaughtering people. He’d called the Lynburns of Aurimere judges and executioners.

“Rob would know what has to be done,” said Lillian. “He’s been there before. He understood then.”

The Lynburns of Aurimere had come to Monkshood and killed his parents, Uncle Rob had said, and taken him “as sorcerer breeding stock for one or the other of their daughters.” It didn’t sound to Jared like Rob had understood all that well. Horror pierced Jared as he thought of what that meant, and who he had trusted with Kami.

Kami! he said. Run!