The skin under his eye twitched.
“Now,” I said, clapping my hands, “as fun as this chat has been, I think it’s time for the cheese and butt sex, so I’m just gonna—”
“Open your pack and take out the Grimoires.”
“Godsdammit,” I muttered. But I did as he asked. The tomes were heavy and felt jittery against my hands, like they were radiating energy. My own felt familiar and light, the pages known to me. Myrin’s was dark and heavy, a rotten mystery whispering in my ears.
Morgan’s felt like comfort and home. It was his I’d avoided the most.
“If you want to defeat Myrin,” Randall said, “the answers lie within these pages.”
I frowned at him. “That sounded suspiciously like something Vadoma would say. Be more specific, please.”
He looked like he barely stopped himself from reaching out and slapping me upside the head. “What is a wizard’s Grimoire?”
“Their history,” I said promptly. “The story of their lives. Their triumphs and failures, their magic and their innermost thoughts. Even though you give me shit for putting my innermost thoughts in mine.”
“That’s because yours are done in sparkly pink pens and usually have to do with how firm Ryan Foxheart’s buttocks are.”
“Yeah,” I sighed dreamily. “Like, you can bounce stuff off of it. Trust me, I have.”
“Most other wizards have an emotional maturity that doesn’t allow them to write Mrs. Sam Foxheart in the margins.”
“I pity them immensely.”
“Be that as it may, if you hope to find the way to defeat Myrin, then here is where you must look. You have the magic, Sam. You have the dragons. Now it’s time to formulate a plan.”
“How do you know I don’t already have a plan?”
He stared at me.
“Right, right. It’s me we’re talking about. Sucks, dude.”
“You should start with Morgan’s. He would… I told you he knew. That day.”
I nodded, swallowing past the sudden lump in my throat.
Randall averted his gaze, suddenly looking very tired. “I think, in the end, he knew what was coming. What he was doing. What was going to happen. And I know you blame yourself, Sam. For what happened. But your guilt is unfounded. Or at the very least, misplaced. Morgan of Shadows chose you because he loved you more than anyone or anything else in this world.”
My eyes were stinging and wet. There was nothing I could do to stop it.
Randall’s hands shook. “I know that if called upon, he would do it again. And again. And again, because more than anything, he believed in you. He believed that good would always conquer evil, that the light would always burn away the shadows. He made a choice that day, Sam. He chose you. And I think he always would.”
I hung my head. Tears dripped onto his Grimoire in my lap.
“Turn to page five hundred and twenty-seven in Morgan’s Grimoire, if you please. Read what is written, and then join me outside. It’s time we reunite a unicorn with his horn. Gods only know how that’s going to go.”
He lifted himself from his chair, knees popping as he grumbled about being far too old for this shit. There was a brief moment as he passed me by when he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
And then he was gone.
The house was quiet around me.
The fire was nothing but charred wood and tendrils of smoke.
I—
“—THINK IT’S time for me to return,” I said as the Great White loomed above me. The others were there but not there at the same time, lost in the haze, the colors of the forest bleeding around me like wet paint. I felt them, their little pinpricks of light, bright and strong. The bonds between us had grown from the first day I’d entered the forest, grief-stricken and blinded by tears. I carried them within me, each of them pulsing and reverberating within me.