Page 39 of Be the Serpent

“There is none in this Kingdom with the strength or finesse needed to cast a Llangefni screen,” said Oberon. “That is lost magic.”

“Hang on,” I said. “How can it be lost magic if half the people here know what it is, and know enough about it to be concerned?”

“Everyone here who knows about it is either old enough to have been here before it was lost, or a scholar of old magic, like the failure,” said the Luidaeg. “As to how magic can be lost, look to the blood.”

Simon’s eyes widened, as if that had explained everything. “Of course,” he breathed. “I’ve wondered about some of the older techniques, and how they could have been lost the way they have been, but that—that makes perfect sense.”

“What does?” asked Tybalt, blankly.

I raised my hand. “You want to share with the rest of the class? Because I am not seeing anything here that makes sense.”

“Magic lives in blood,” said Simon. “I know you’ve borrowed magic from other lines by taking their blood as a source of power, rather than memory. I’ve frequently done the same.”

“Etienne says we’ll have to start working on that in my training soon,” said Quentin, who didn’t sound thrilled about the idea. “He also says that Duke Torquill isn’t particularly skilled in that area, and we may need to find someone else who can instruct me.”

“My brother always found the idea of taking someone else’s magic as his own somewhat questionable,” said Simon. “It could be used as a means for incriminating the innocent, since it enables the caster to leave traces of someone else’s magic in a place where it shouldn’t have been. But refinement of the magic that dwells in blood is at the base of much of alchemy, and it was important to me that I master the art.”

“I used Caitir’s blood to open a path out of the Shadow Roads, when she and Tybalt had both been knocked unconscious and I had to get us out of there before I suffocated,” I said, slowly. “So yeah, blood.”

“But you couldn’t have done that without her blood being available to you in the first place,” said Simon. “On your own, you can’t open portals. Even now, even having done it, you can’t do it again without the blood to carry the key and allow you to slide it into the lock. You’re stuck without the blood.”

“Still not following,” I said.

“Llangefni screens require access to a type of illusion magic that hasn’t been seen in a very long time,” said the Luidaeg. She was watching Oberon fixedly, like a hawk watches a patch of grass where it’s sure a rabbit has gone to ground. She wasn’t blinking, that was for sure. “The Morgen could cast them, but the Morgen died out long ago. There just wasn’t room in the rivers for one more clear tributary, and they merged with other streams and all their unique gifts were lost with the tide.”

“So once the blood that had been harvested from the Morgen had all been used, the working became impossible,” said Simon. “The magic was lost.”

“My Summer Queen could cast the screens,” said Oberon. “My Winter Lady never had the gift.”

“Because Mom wasn’t about illusions; she was about transformations,” said the Luidaeg, sharply. “A Llangefni screen is all about tricking the eyes into not seeing what’s actually there, and when it’s cast on someone with fae blood, on convincing their magic that it’s been released when it’s really rising. It doesn’t bind anyone’s magic. It . . . redirects it. It tricks it. A Llangefni screen is a lie gone walking, and nothing stops it but tearing it down. I didn’t speak for the Morgen when it became clear they were going to fade into memory and myth. I didn’t want the things they could do to be preserved.”

I blinked at her. The Luidaeg had talked before about descendant lines going extinct, and she had always, always been sorry. She had always, always regretted it. To lose a descendant line was to lose a part of Faerie forever, and to leave another of the First grieving as she had grieved. To hear her talk about extinction so casually, so clinically, went against everything I expected from her.

“The Morgen belonged to Liban, did they not?” asked Oberon.

The Luidaeg nodded. “She died before they did, or I might have fought to keep them with us,” she said.

That eased a bit of my objection, but nowhere near to all of it. “So these Morgen people are all dead, and no one else can cast one of these screens?” I asked. “Just to be sure I’m on the right page here.”

“There are things that are just normal abilities, so ordinary that we never bothered to name them, and then there are things like the don’t-look-heres that got named because they were universal. The rarer abilities, like the Llangefni screens, are really more like techniques refined by and limited to specific descendant lines,” said the Luidaeg. “With Titania gone and the Morgen swept away, that illusion should be outside the capability of anyone currently in Faerie.”

“It’s worse than that,” I said, grimly. “Whoever killed Jessica didn’t leave their own image in her blood.”

“What?” asked the Luidaeg, more sharply than I would have expected. I blinked at her. She stared at me, face gone pale. “Are you serious right now? Choose your words carefully, October. This is important.”

I took a half-step backward, stopping when my shoulder bumped against Tybalt’s. He was standing silently, just watching for now, clearly confused. Hell, I was confused, and I had more information than he did. It was a wonder he was keeping up as well as he was. “I’m serious,” I said. “I went into Jessica’s final memories, and there was a woman attacking her. I know Jessica must have seen her. There’s no way she wouldn’t have. She was looking in the right direction, her eyes were open, and she saw everything else that was going on, but she didn’t see the woman who killed her—or if she did see her, her blood didn’t hold on to it.”

“Oh, Mom,” breathed the Luidaeg. It sounded less like she was trying to identify someone and more like she was praying. She walked over to her father and hid her face against his shoulder, and somehow that was the most terrifying thing that had happened during a fairly terrifying day.

Oberon, for his part, raised a hand to stroke her hair, looking at me levelly, and asked, “Did the girl see or hear anything else? Anything at all?”

“The woman who attacked her, while she was strangling her, she said, ‘Leave nothing behind. Be the serpent, be the shadow. Be nothing, or never come home.’ ”

Oberon closed his eyes.

“Ah,” he said. “Then this is to be my fault. I am so very sorry.”

TEN