Summary: In which Ral is frustrated, Ral's new friend makes herself scarce, and Jace is once again conscious enough to make terrible decisions.
Chapter Five
Ral wanted to cry with boredom. He'd been sitting in this damn tent for hours now, slowly falling asleep, as Brimaz negotiated with the cultists. Or—whatever. Ral wasn't certain what he was doing here, but the leonin king seemed to think his presence was indispensible. So far, his indispensability seemed to have taken the form of sitting inside a tent at the front of a table and staring vaguely at the ceiling, trying to decide if there was an optimal number of tent poles to maximize space inside the damn thing.
A small prickle ran through his ungloved hand, and he looked across to see that his star pupil, whose name had turned out to be Iskra, had a tiny spark jumping in her hand. She was sitting demurely cross-legged, and she looked up at him and raised a finger to her lips. Ral glanced around. Brimaz and most of the adult leonin were talking seriously with the cultists. They seemed pretty wrapped up in what they were doing.
Ral grinned and crooked a hand at Iskra, who flicked the spark across the room. He caught it in the palm of his gauntlet, bouncing it around and adding a little mana, so that it grew from thumbnail-sized to just under palm-sized, then glanced around and lobbed it quickly back. There was a soft zapping noise, and Brimaz's ears perked up. The leonin king glanced around in puzzlement, but Iskra was innocently studying her whiskers, the hand still holding the spark-ball hidden at her side.
As soon as his attention was diverted again, Iskra shot the spark-ball back. It arced across the tent toward Ral's unprotected hand, and he smirked and caught it with his bare palm, then let it run up and across his shoulder to his head and down to the other side. Iskra's ears perked up and her demeanor changed as she leaned forward, tail lashing with what Ral assumed was excitement.
She held out her own hand again, and Ral sent the spark-ball spinning from his right hand to his left and back, then shot it over to her. She caught it with a jerk, her fur puffing out around her head in a sudden burst of sparks. Oops. Had he increased the power a little too much? The ears were still up, though, and she didn't seem particularly put off. A child after his own heart.
Iskra shook herself, spraying sparks in every direction, and this time, one of the cultists' heads turned to stare. Ral hastily leaned back and stared at the ceiling again.
Several minutes later, a jolt of lightning hit him in the head. Whipping round, he found Iskra staring innocently past his shoulder. He narrowed his eyes at her, but waited until she finally sat back with a sigh and a huff of impatience, and then flicked a spark at her tail.
She stiffened, the electricity climbing her spine and popping between her ears and hissed, claws unsheathing from inside her hands. Ral smirked at her, and this time she simply bolted him back. He felt the mana levels rising and realized before it left her hand that it was too much, that the ignition would be enough to—
The thunderclap that echoed through the tent caused all eyes to turn to Iskra and Ral. The kitten visibly shrank, her ears flattening against her head, her claws retracting instantly. Ral shifted in his chair, trying to pretend nothing had happened, but it was only too obvious exactly what had.
"Iskra," said one of the older leonin warningly. "Back to your tent. Now. I thought you knew better than this."
Iskra got slowly to her feet, tail dragging between her legs. It was clear from the looks and whispers that jumped from the group of children on her side of the tent that this was a disgrace for someone of her age.
"I think you should let her stay," Ral said lazily, electricity crawling across the front of his shirt.
There was dead silence. Iskra looked up with widening eyes and shook her head minutely, but Ral didn't care. He was feeling black and vicious, little half-remembered sentences from his childhood floating up and clawing at his brain.
"So," one of the cultists said in amusement. "This is not what I expected to find in a leonin encampment. A little lightning-caller. Do you blasphemers teach all your children our secrets?"
Brimaz sighed. "Iskra, please go," he said. "Zarek, the child is being disruptive. Perhaps—"
Iskra's ears and whiskers drooped again and she headed for the tent entrance. Ral got to his feet. "I think I'll go, too," he said pleasantly. "I'm bored."
For one instant after Jace woke up, he thought he was in the middle of a hurricane. Wind, rain, and lightning buffeted his head before he succeeded in sitting up, limbs trembling with the effort. A wave of nausea passed over him, but he succeeded in stopping himself from vomiting by dint of squeezing his eyes shut and suppressing his gag reflex as hard as he could.
The hurricane subsided slightly, along with the anger that Jace realized had hit him square in the chest, both of them swallowed in a wave of guilt that was quickly suppressed. "Fuck!" Ral Zarek's voice exploded into the sudden silence. "I want to go home. As soon as I actually find anyone who makes this fucking plane bearable, they get taken away."
Groggily, Jace opened his eyes. "What happened, Ral?" he asked.
Both of Ral's fists were clenched at his sides, and though the storm had fallen away, lightning crackled around him in a brilliant halo. "There is exactly one person here other than you I can stand to be around," Ral said through clenched teeth. "And I've just been forbidden to speak to her. Apparently, I'm a bad influence. Not that they were willing to say that to my face. Just—" He growled angrily, looking as if he wanted to hit something, but there was nothing for him to hit. Lightning flashed from his gauntlet to the tent pole instead. " 'She's too young, Zarek. It's dangerous to teach her to manipulate such elements at her age.' Fuck that. The kid's talented, and there's no one here who can teach her, and—" Jace heard the sound of teeth audibly grinding together, and he winced.
"Ral—" he said.
"I AM NOT SUPPOSED TO CARE ABOUT A PLANEBOUND CHILD!" They stared at each other, and Ral covered his eyes and sank into a sitting position beside the bed, the lightning fading away slowly. "Fuck," he said. "Fuck. Forget I said that. Just. I need to get back to Ravnica. I don't like it here."
Jace nodded wearily, wincing at the pain in his chest. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "The leonin can probably care for me, if you want to…"
"If I want to what?" snapped Ral.
Jace waved a hand. "Leave. I've been in worse situations."
Ral glared at him. "Fuck that," he said. "I'm not leaving you, Beleren. Just get better."
The instant denial sent a sudden stab of guilt mixed with gratitude through Jace's chest. Even if it was just for the Guildpact, Ral's loyalty was touching. And he wasn't entirely convinced that it was, though he decided not to stick his mental hand into Ral's head to check. He'd had enough of being nearly electrocuted in the last few days to risk it again.
"I'm doing my best," Jace said weakly.
"Yeah, I know," Ral muttered, running a hand through his hair. "Sorry I got water everywhere. I'll have to do something about cleaning that up."
"It's fine," Jace said. "I think you evaporated most of the rain anyway."
Iskra was making herself scarce. This was something that she had often been told to do, sometimes by her parents, and quite often by the rest of the adults of her den. "Make yourself scarce, kitten," her mother would say cheerfully, when she had stuck her tail into the cooking one too many times.
"Make yourself scarce, kitten," her father said, when she tried to slip in and join the warriors at their practice.
"Make yourself scarce," the guards said warningly when she tried to sneak a peek into Brimaz's tent.
Iskra was very good at making herself scarce. She did so not by actually leaving, but by practicing her stealth skills, until she had gotten to the point where most of the time, she was able to avoid people telling her to make herself scarce by never being noticed at all.
After a long, stern talking-to from her mother about the necessity of not disrupting important meetings, and a further long talking-to from her father about not associating too closely with lightning mages, no matter how pleasant they were, Iskra was exceedingly tired of being told what to do, and therefore she had decided to make herself scarce in the general vicinity of the most recent meeting.
The grown-ups—leonin and worshippers of Keranos and Zarek—had moved to an outside location to talk, which made things much easier. All she'd had to do was wait until their backs were turned, and then clamber up into the large-limbed tree that overlooked the area.
Unfortunately, the discussion turned out to be fairly dull at first, but Iskra had spent enough time patiently getting there that she wasn't about to just turn around and leave. So, instead, listening to the discussion with only one ear, she dozed and played with sparks.
Many of Iskra's teachers had dispensed wisdom. Think of yourself as one with your companions, one of her sparring instructors was fond of saying. Or there was her oldest brother, who told her to listen to the earth when he was teaching her to track. Iskra tended to find such statements too abstract to be terribly helpful, so her first lesson in lightning magic had been a rather pleasant surprise.
Stick your hand out like this, he'd said. Palm flat out, facing up. Now make a spark.
Iskra had been the only one to ask how? as the others simply waited expectantly.
The explanation she had received had been a little too complex for her to follow all of. But it had been concrete. Lightning meant separating different kinds of charged mana and then letting them flow back together, like water flowing down a river bottom. You took them apart and they wanted to fall back together, but they fell back too fast and crashed into one another. Something like that. She wanted to ask him more questions. Probably about a hundred. She'd only managed three or four, but then there hadn't been much time.
As the adults bargained, Iskra idly flicked sparks from one hand to the other, trying to conjure a new one while the first one was in the air. She lost control of them several times, sending sparks spitting down the tree, but they dissipated quickly and everyone was too focused to notice.
After a few minutes, her hands were buzzing with a little network of glittering motes, leaping from finger to finger. It took an intense amount of concentration that Iskra hadn't entirely expected, to keep the pattern going, one little light hopping after another and another, round and round and round…
The individual sparks began to blur as the brightness left green and pink trails in her vision, and she watched them, mesmerized, her fingers tingling. As they swirled brighter and brighter, she thought she could see a pattern forming within the whiteness—red and blue swirling together into a strange, stylized circle. She thought she could see a sort of beak pointing to the right—a pair of batlike wings—she squinted in confusion, cupping her hands as if she were holding water in them—and the vision vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, the sparks leaping from her hands and cascading down her arms.
She sat back thoughtfully just as a thunderbolt leaped down from the sky and crashed into the center of the circle below. Iskra's ears perked up and she leaned forward. Someone had said something distressing to Zarek, and that meant she might get a chance to see some proper storm magic firsthand again.
Jace had actually managed to sleep through the night for once, he noted, waking to what was probably the first rays of dawn seeping into the empty tent. Ral had left already, whether because someone had summoned him or simply because he was hungry, Jace wasn't certain. He was just turning over to give up and try to go back to sleep, when the tent flap opened and the lightning mage swept in, looking faintly harassed.
"How are you feeling, Jace?" he asked, stepping aside to let Xenia enter as well.
"Um," said Jace awkwardly, trying to sit up. "A little better?" He shook his head minutely at Ral's loaded glance, and the lightning mage's shoulders slumped slightly.
"Let me help you get your clothes on," Ral said roughly.
"What?" said Jace.
"The culti—the worshipers of Keranos want you," the lightning mage responded.
"What?"
Xenia bowed her head. "They've requested an audience with Keranos' chosen oracle. We were hoping you might be willing to…relay some information back to us."
Jace felt cold revulsion and fear settling into the pit of his stomach. "No," he said. "Absolutely not."
"We wouldn't let them take you," Xenia said awkwardly.
"No," Jace said again.
"Let me talk to him," Ral put in. "Here," he said to Jace, shoving the cloak at him. Xenia allowed herself to be escorted back out, and then Jace found himself alone with Ral.
"What the fuck, Guildpact?" Ral asked. "Do you really think I'd let you do this if it was dangerous? They're not going to let Keranos take you."
"That is not the point," Jace said tightly, clamping down on the burgeoning fear in his chest, a fear he didn't know how to control or articulate. "I'm not going to do this. I can't do this. I won't."
"Jace, come on," said Ral, sounding frustrated. "We need their help. Getting into an argument with them isn't going to do any good."
"You mean like you arguing with them over your new kitten friend?" Jace asked frostily.
"That's not—" Ral swallowed the end of whatever his intended statement had been. "Jace, for fuck's sake."
Jace managed to lever himself dizzily to his feet, wrapping the cloak around him almost automatically. "I can't do this," he said. "Find something else to keep them happy."
Ral put a hand to his head. "I have been debating this for fucking hours," he said levelly. "They wanted more than this. They wanted to send you in as some kind of fucked-up sleeper agent, Jace, and I bargained them out of that. All—all you have to do is go in, sit around there for a while, pick up some of the thoughts from the cultists, and—"
"So you told them about my telepathy?" Jace asked. A chilly rage boiled up along with the fear, and his hand automatically traced along the edge of his robe.
"I—well, yeah, I mean, it came up—I'm not exactly good at diplomacy, Jace!"
The fear and rage overtook even the exhaustion. Jace reached for his manabonds and wrapped the illusion of invisibility around him, stepping out of the image of himself he had left behind and hurrying for the tent entrance. As he slipped through it, he let the illusion behind him dissolve, heard Ral's puzzled voice shaping his name, but he was driven by a single desire—not to let this happen again.
He needed to get away.
The feeling drove him out of the leonin encampment and through the fields on the far side before he even began to feel the exhaustion, but it caught up quickly. Pain radiated outward from his lungs to his arms and legs, and he had to stop moving, bending over at the waist and trying to draw long, shuddering breaths. He was sick, he was so damn sick, he needed to turn around and go back.
A single glance back at the scattered little encampment made his heart skip a beat and drove his feet onward again. He didn't know where he was going, but he needed to get somewhere—anywhere else. No one was going to use him like this again. He needed to be somewhere else.
It was another few minutes before he paused, leaning against a nearby tree, and admitted to himself that the 'somewhere else' he needed to be was Ravnica, with Lavinia calling for a healer. Guiltily, he considered trying to planeswalk. Ral would follow eventually—probably much faster than eventually. The Izzet mage had a healthy respect for his own skin. Jace doubted he would stick around on Theros too long after he was certain that he couldn't find the Guildpact.
Leaning against the tree, feeling the grain of the bark against his arm, he shut his eyes and tried to will the world away. The moments between heartbeats began to stretch, as he breathed in, breathed out. The walls of the world thinned like ice melting beneath his breaths, and he felt the bright shadow of the Eternities hot-cold on his back, pushing him away and pulling him in.
He was falling toward the sky again, and a memory was tossed up—not his, one of the myriad he'd stolen—of playing in the ocean and a wave breaking over his head. The blue sky overhead turning to blue water below, and the stomach-churning lack of air as bubbles floated away in every direction. He was caught, trapped, smeared across nothingness and breaking apart with the bubbles, with only the pattern of tree-bark beneath his palm keeping him from drowning.
Jace pulled back, and his connection to the Eternities snapped instantly, sending a wave of shuddering dizziness through him as if a gong had gone off in his head. He was on the ground, vomiting miserably, shaking as if he had a high fever, one hand still pressed desperately against the tree at his back.
When he finally managed to look up, exhausted and utterly miserable, the trees around him seemed to have grown taller and darker. He had been trudging through ferns and undergrowth, but beneath his hands and knees there was now a scattering of red pine needles. Though he knew he hadn't succeeded in leaving the plane, he seemed to have managed to come close. He hadn't returned to his starting point after his little dunk into the eternities. Putting a hand to his aching head, Jace realized that he was completely and irrevocably lost and alone.