Spell Bound

SPELL BOUND WILD MAGIC HEATHER GUERRE CONTENTS Author’s Note Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Epilogue Thank you Also by Heather Guerre About the Author AUTHOR’S NOTE Spell Bound touches on topics that may be difficult for some readers, including emotional abuse (past, mostly off-page), child abuse (past, off-page), alcoholism (side character), death of family members (past, off-page), combat/weapons violence, and on-page death. Spell Bound contains explicit scenes of sexual intimacy. CHAPTER 1 The wild magic had always tended to linger in Carr Tyl. The city had once been the royal seat of the kings of Urdivice. Later, it became the capital of the powerful Urdivicean principality in the Darshan Empire. Now it was a crumbling ruin. Once upon a time, it had been known for producing more mages for the Darshan court than any other place in the empire. Ailis remembered the days when the old city had thrived and bustled. The wild magic had been a blessing, the key to the city’s prosperity and political significance. But then the Darshan royal family were assassinated, the empire collapsed in on itself, and the magic… changed. Nothing flowed like it used to. Instead of gifting Carr Tyl with a steady, reliable flow of wild magic, it became a deluge. Instead of following magical currents through the city, it accumulated in the lowlands, pooling higher and higher, becoming more erratic and dangerous with each passing day. The city’s mages couldn’t keep up with the influx. The once-renowned mage Amus Cynnid was Fractured in the efforts to keep the wild magic at bay. Even with the mages’ efforts, significant portions of the city quickly became completely inaccessible because of the wild magic. The rest of the city was beset by dangerous uncertainty. The Talien Bridge—which spanned the River Arth to connect the two sides of the city—could no longer be crossed; anybody who set foot upon it lost their ability to speak. Spiders were to be avoided at all costs—those who were bitten slowly decorporealized over the span of a fortnight. Cuith Mays, once the city’s largest gathering space for festivals and markets and the like, was gone. The land, the air, that space in the world, simply no longer existed. Every day had brought with it a new horror. Roads were blocked by shimmering pools of a mysterious substance that nobody dared touch. Trees assaulted anybody who stood in their shadow. Squirrels developed the ability to speak and said the most appalling things. Food that had just been bought turned into an inedible crystal imitation of itself on the walk home from the market. Individual cobbles sprang from the roads at random, sailing out of sight as though they’d been launched by a trebuchet. Massive, mysterious shadows lurked beneath the surface of the River Arth. Every night at midnight, a strange scream filled the air, jarring the entire city into heart-pounding wakefulness. In short, Carr Tyl was no more. The wealthy and powerful had long since fled. The ordinary residents—those who didn’t have another property to flee to—were slower to depart. The fortunate ones had family in other places who could take them in. Those who weren’t so fortunate stayed longer, but eventually, they were left with no choice. A strange black fog rose up from the river one day, creeping its way through town, turning everything it touched into shiny obsidian—including the plants, and animals, and people. Ailis woke that morning in her room above her shop and found that the stairs had been turned to obsidian. When she ventured downstairs, the entire shop and everything in it was shiny, black glass. On that day, the remaining few holdouts left. Ailis counted among their number. She’d been made a young widow nearly five years ago when her husband, Eian Rhis, the drunken sot, fell off the Talien Bridge and drowned in the Arth after a night of carousing. His death left her with no living family in the world. The old widow Linney had taken Ailis under her wing, given her steady work as a seamstress, and then left the shop to Ailis after her death a year ago. And now Ailis had nothing at all. No shop to sleep in. No income to live off of. No family to depend upon. Her only hope was to find a city or town in need of a decent seamstress and try to make a go of it there. She had no idea which town or city that may be, nor did she know how to get to any of them. Her only plan was to stay with the largest group of Carr Tyl refugees for as long as possible. The open road was a dangerous place. There was no protection from the elements. Bandits and thieves were rampant in the wake of the empire’s collapse. Wild magic could gather anywhere, creating strange and deadly interference. Their travel party of twenty-some people was an ill-fitted assemblage of Carr Tyl’s last survivors—mostly the elderly and the impoverished who’d had nowhere else to go and no way to get there. As a woman of formerly modest means, capable of reading, and still hale in body, Ailis somehow became the unofficial leader of their party. She didn’t immediately realize it had happened. She’d thought it was odd that the others kept requesting her permission to do things that were perfectly within their rights. “Should we take our supper now, Mistress Rhis?” “Do you think this is a good place to stop for the night, Ailis?” “Ought we not collect some water soon, Mis'ss Ailis?” “Is that a wild magic haze over there? Do you see? What should we do?” And so on. Ailis found herself answering automatically, in the same way she’d taken over the running of the shop when Linney’s health had begun to