Or a fight, I thought, catching sight of the rest of the courtyard.
“I told you I needed to get out there!” I said to Gertie, as my acolyte faced off with her own mother. I started forward, but Gertie pulled me back, and she was surprisingly strong for an old woman.
“Let me go!”
“Shush,” she said, and shut the door partway again.
I didn’t know why she’d bothered. Neither girl looked like they had eyes for anyone but each other. Especially Rhea, who was practically incandescent.
“You take that back!”
Agnes grinned at her insolently. “Make me. Oh, but I forgot, you can’t.”
“I can!” And shit. A wand had just appeared in Rhea’s hand.
“Okay, no,” I said, but Gertie had an arm around my neck.
“Give it a minute,” she hissed.
“We don’t have a minute!” And damn, it was true.
I vaguely saw the nursemaids shooing the children toward a door on the other side of the garden; saw Gertie’s magic throw up a shimmering barrier halfway across the yard, shielding them; saw a swirl of the
Pythian power descend and turn Rhea’s wand to ash.
And then it was on.
Oh, it was freaking on.
I tore away from Gertie’s hold and rounded on her. “They’ll kill each other!”
“You have so little trust in your acolyte? That she would harm her own mother?”
“I’m not talking about her—”
“Agnes knows what she’s about.”
“—and accidents happen—”
“Not in chimera,” Gertie said, causing me to break off and stare at her.
Chimera was an advanced technique in which the Pythian power made a duplicate body for its user, splitting the soul in two so that one Pythia could inhabit two places at once. Or no, that wasn’t exactly right. The soul wasn’t split; it was more like grabbing a balloon in the middle and having it bulge out at both ends, with the bulges each getting their own body.
It was used mainly for training exercises, since halving a soul halves its power, which made it dangerous in real combat. But for training it was perfect, as the body created in chimera could be damaged or even killed without hurting the original. The soul merely snapped back to its origin if one body was destroyed.
But if Agnes was a copy, that meant that she’d planned this. Both of them had, I thought, watching Gertie munch pear. But they’d forgotten one little thing; Rhea wasn’t in chimera!
I started a spell, intending to shift my damned acolyte out of there, but Gertie shut it down. “Let it be.”
“You let it be,” I snarled. “Rhea’s vulnerable!”
“Doesn’t look vulnerable to me,” Gertie said, as I turned back to what was now a full-out battle.
Because Rhea had been raised by the covens, and she always carried two wands.
The second was out and blasting, dealing Agnes a blow hard enough to send her flipping over backwards. But she’d been shielded and landed on her feet, with the only harm I could see a badly bitten lip. She licked the blood away, a strange smile coming over her face.
And then threw a blast of her own that Rhea dodged, but which hit the old oak. Which promptly became a new oak, when it de-aged to maybe half its previous size. It also threw out a mass of new, green leaves that floated gently to the ground like confetti as Rhea and I both stared at it.