LITMIR.BIZ

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Malingo said.

      “Come closer. I can’t see you in the darkness. There. That’s better. Tell me about it. Was he cruel? I heard he was cruel.”

      Jollo’s interest in Candy had already slipped away; all his focus was now entirely upon Malingo. Candy got to her feet and left the two of them to talk, happy the boy was diverted.

      “So how did you become a slave?” he said to Malingo.

      “My father sold me . . .” Malingo began.

      Candy didn’t hear any more. She retreated until she no longer had sight of Jollo, and he had no view of her. Only then did she turn her back on the place where he lay and face the tree-covered slope. This time she didn’t need any magic to plot a course to Mrs. Munn. She could hear the chase going on through the densely knitted canopy farther up the slope. Candy could even hear echoes of the incantatrix calling after Boa.

      “There’s no way off this island, Boa.”

      “Let me alone, will you?” Boa yelled back as she sprinted over the treetops. “I didn’t know the boy was your son. I swear I didn’t. I mean, how could I? There’s no family resemblance.”

      “Liar! Liar!” Candy yelled right back, her interruption echoing that of Boa, minutes before. But she had more to say. “You knew exactly who he was, Boa. Because I knew. And if I knew then—”

      “Stay out of this, Quackenbush!” Boa hollered. “Or you’ll be sorry!”

      “I’m already sorry,” Candy yelled back. “I’m sorry I ever let you out of my head.”

      “Ah, the sting of regret!” Boa crowed. “Well, it’s done, girl, and it can never be undone. So you’d better get used to it. I’m in the world now. Everything changes from now on. Everything.”

      “Stay away from her, Candy!” Mrs. Munn hollered. “She’ll hurt you!”

      “I’m not afraid of her,” Candy said.

      “Liar, liar, funeral pyre!” Boa chanted.

      “Well, one of us is going to have to tell the truth sooner or later,” Candy replied.

      Boa finally reached the tree beneath which Candy stood, and looked down through the leaves, shaped in their fullness, like planets with golden rings around them. That Boa’s body was defined by the dual motion of bright rings was no accident. Her new skin—bought with the coin of Jollo’s suffering—had taken for inspiration the design of the foliage all around it.

      “You want the truth,” Boa said, squatting on a branch so as to peer down at Candy through the canopy. “Then here: have it. I would have taken all the life force in you to heal me completely. But I was denied the total sum of you by that fat witch. And then when I do the only thing left to me—take her son—she comes howling after me as though I’d committed a crime. Ridiculous woman!”

      “I heard that!”

      “So? You think I’m afraid of you?”

      “I know you are. I can smell the fear off you!”

      There was a great commotion in the trees behind Boa. The branches were cracking as they were shaken and their motion becoming more violent as it got nearer.

      “You are dead, you vile creature.”

      “No. Death is what you will all inherit now. I am returned with life. But you . . . you will follow the child into oblivion, come soon, come late. No exceptions for children or lost girls. Everybody dies, come soon, come late. And you—”

      She leaped off the branch where she’d been perched, heading for Candy as she descended. She grabbed hold of Candy’s face, throwing them both back through the barbed thickets to the ground. Her hand went from Candy’s face to her throat.

      “You, I say soon!”

       Chapter 16 Laguna Munn Angered

      IF CANDY HAD NOT had the sight of the Princess’s face to look up at, she would have quickly succumbed to her death grip. But luckily she only had to look up at Boa’s beautiful, hateful face to keep fighting, even though Boa’s hold on her throat had cut off most of her air. She just kept beating at Boa’s face, over and over and over, determined not to let the waves of darkness that lapped at her sight overwhelm her. But even with her fury at Boa to help keep her conscious she couldn’t hold back the black tide forever. Her blows were getting weaker, and Boa was showing not the least sign of being hurt or dissuaded from further attack. She stared down at Candy with the implacable gaze of an executioner.

      And then, behind her joyless face, there was a blur of color, too chaotic for Candy’s weary eyes to make sense of.

      But the voice that came with the colors was a different matter. That made perfect sense.

      “Let go of the girl right now,” the incantatrix said, “or I swear I will break every bone in your body, Princess or no Princess.”

      A moment later Boa’s hands let go of Candy’s throat and she gratefully inhaled two lungfuls of sweet, clean air. It took her body a little while to push back the tide that had come so close to drowning her, by which time the struggle between Laguna Munn and Boa had already taken the two of them some distance from the place where Candy lay. When she got to her feet and looked around she saw them a long way up the slope, standing several yards apart but locked together by several cords of conjuration—those pitched by Mrs. Munn, digging their blazing fingers into Boa, while the cords Boa had cast danced vicious tarantellas around Mrs. Munn. The cords had shed bright flakes of energy—some no larger than fireflies, others the size of burning birds—that littered the darkness around and above the circle of ash and blackened timber that the powers of the combatants had burned into being.

      Candy knew when she was out of her league. These two were exchanging blows from a magic she had no comprehension of, much less the means to conjure. Even as she watched, each of the pair called out more incandescent hurts and harms, yelling their furies at each other in what Candy recognized as Old Abaratian, the mother tongue of time itself. She understood not even a syllable of what they were hurling back and forth. But there was strange proof of its potency in the branches and on the ground all around the fire-formed grove.

      While most of the scraps of power remained in the arena’s zone of influence, a few escaped, and finding living subjects up among the branches and down between the roots, remade them. It was the sweet-songed capellajar birds that shed light on the spectacle, the magic transforming them into beasts that had something of the bat about them, and something about the lizard, their once modest beaks became snouts the length of their bodies, which pierced the dense lattice of branches, twigs and leaves as they descended from their high perches. The cavern’s crystalline roof threw down shafts of rainbow silver, lighting the shadow world below.

      For a few seconds Candy was enraptured by the eccentric life-forms that were appearing from the trees and thicket: bizarre relatives of creatures that would have still had a certain strangeness to Candy, even in their unaltered state, but were even more extraordinary now.

      The spectacle held her in thrall so completely that she failed to notice that the two women were no longer fighting in the burned-out grove, and were making their way back down the slope toward her, until she heard Mrs. Munn’s voice:

      “Take it, girl!”

      Candy persuaded her gaze to look away from the animals, and found that Laguna Munn was approaching her through the trees at an extraordinary rate, fearlessly careening through the thornbushes, no more than seven or eight strides from where Candy stood.

      And again she shouted, as though the sense of what she was saying was utterly self-evident.

      “Take it, girl!”

      And as she shouted, and raced toward Candy, she offered up her right hand, which was partially open and completely empty.

      “Be quick,

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