Matthis stood in silence, his gaze fixed on the far wall. He had been a fixture of the Armed Forces my entire life—as solid and unmovable as my grandfather, General Griffith, himself. It was as impossible to believe he had been careless and over-talkative as it was to believe him a traitor.
“What did you discover from the servant?” my aunt asked as soon as the door closed behind me.
I could read the trouble in her eyes. If Captain Matthis proved to be untrustworthy, we were in greater difficulty than we had realized.
“He named the source of his information as Captain Matthis,” I said slowly.
“As in he overheard him talking to another officer about it?” the queen asked, but not as if she expected a positive answer.
Reluctantly I shook my head. “He told him directly. The servant thinks it was a test. And has been tasked with looking out for and reporting other such outlandish rumors. He won’t be a problem from here. But all the details he had on the matter were correct, and he wasn’t lying when he said where he heard it.” I met my aunt’s eyes, trying to convey silently that I had used my mother’s power as she suggested. I couldn’t say it aloud with Matthis in the room.
She nodded slowly, although she didn’t look happy, and I forced myself to look directly at Matthis. His face had tightened, his muscles tense, but he still stood at attention, his eyes fixed on the wall.
“All of the officers currently at the palace submitted to questioning under truth compositions,” my aunt said. “When asked, Matthis agreed he had told the servant, although he seemed unaware of having done so until directly questioned on it. And he cannot tell us why.”
“Cannot? Or will not?” My brow furrowed.
“Cannot. I myself placed him under a working compelling him to talk. But he had nothing to say.”
“I’ve seen something like this before.” I frowned, trying to remember the exact details of my long-ago conversation with Prince Jareth. “On that occasion the person seemed unsure if they didn’t know the answer or couldn’t speak it.”
Matthis gave a small start, his eyes flying to me. I addressed him directly.
“Is that how it feels for you?”
He nodded. “I have assured Her Majesty that I have never experienced such a thing before in my life. And I cannot account for having spread such sensitive information.”
“If it was anyone else,” Aunt Lucienne said, “or if I hadn’t used my own composition…” She met my eyes. “That’s why I called for you. I need to know what’s going on here.”
I could now understand why my aunt had wanted me and not my mother. For all her power, there were some things only I could do.
I nodded once, not waiting for any further invitation.
“Connect,” I whispered under my breath, and dove into Matthis’s energy.
His ability was ordered in a way I had rarely seen, everything controlled and regimented—and focused on knowledge and compositions relating to the Armed Forces. He was in every way a career soldier.
His discipline assisted me in my task. In some mages, the chaos was overwhelming, but amid such order, it was much easier to pick out a wrong note.
I feared finding signs of the sort of control Tyron wielded, terrified of how much damage might already have been done by such influence in the heart of our defense efforts. But I could feel no trace of my traitorous year mate, nor any sign of such an energy link to anyone else, either.
Instead, I found a dark spot. Buried deep, it might have been hard to notice in someone else, but in Matthis it drew my attention instantly, a sharp contrast to the rest of his ordered energy. I homed in on it, trying to understand what I was feeling.
On closer inspection, it was more an absence than anything else—a hole in his energy that felt black and cancerous. The rest of his energy swirled around it, trying to pull it back or tug it closed or cover it up. But it sat there, unchanging.
My eyes focused on his face which hadn’t changed in any way while I invaded his energy and ability.
“Can you feel that?” I asked him.
He frowned. “Feel what?”
“That…that hole in your energy. Can you feel that some of your energy is missing?”
He blinked. “My energy? Missing? I haven’t noticed any decrease.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s only the smallest piece.”
A swift indrawn breath drew my attention back to my aunt. When I met her eyes, I nodded.
“I have no experience with any of Conall’s compositions, so I can’t guarantee it, but it certainly sounds like what he can do.”
“Conall?” Matthis jumped in. “You think I’m being controlled by Conall?” He sounded horrified.
I shrugged. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. We know he takes a small piece of someone’s energy and uses it to control them, and it looks like a small piece of your energy has been forcibly removed. But there’s good news in that. The control Conall exerts is much more limited than what Tyron’s ability can do. It has to be extremely focused.”
“Can you tell its purpose?” my aunt asked.
I grimaced. “I can try.” Unlike other mages, I could often sense the vague purpose of a composition, but I had never encountered one like this before.
I concentrated on it again, trying to gain a feel for it, although everything in me wanted to pull away from its unnatural sensation. My overwhelming sense was one of contradiction—something hidden and something open.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek before meeting my aunt’s eyes. “It’s hard to tell with any specificity. I could take control of it, though. That would tell us everything. But do we want it removed?”
“Of course!” Matthis said, the words bursting out of him, his face instantly reflecting shame at his loss of control.
Aunt Lucienne regarded him for a moment with narrowed eyes before nodding.
“Yes, I think we must. While there is some small risk of alerting Conall to a change, we must trust that he holds so many people in thrall, he will not notice the loss of one. And at such a distance, for all he knows, Matthis might have died.”
“Take control,” I whispered, forcing my ability toward the hole in his energy, even as my inner self tried to pull away from such a connection.
The working unfolded inside my mind, its purpose and shape instantly clear. Only now, when I wielded it myself, could I detect the faintest trace of a connection between Matthis and the mage who had composed it, like a tube or pipe holding the hole open and maintaining the link.
The energy used to form the composition—which I now controlled—wanted to hold on to the energy it had stolen from Matthis with a tenacity I had rarely experienced. I let it cling to its shape for a moment as I considered the best way forward.
“Extract with care,” I eventually whispered, doing my best to layer in more meaning than I usually needed to employ.
The working I had taken hold of was strong and focused—let it use that level of focus to recover Matthis’s stolen energy without alerting Conall that it was being ripped away.
For a moment, I thought the working meant to defy me, and then with a feeling akin to an audible pop, a small sliver of energy rushed back into place within Matthis. I could feel the way the rest of his energy swirled around it, almost as if welcoming it back home. The angry feeling hiding deep inside him smoothed over until no sign remained there had ever been internal division.