Arthur’s cousin only looked at him wearily. One hand lifted to rub absently at his chest, not as if he were pained but like he still expected the phantom ache to be there.
But there wasn't true pain behind his eyes. Only defeat.
"Meeting you was the worst thing that ever happened to me," he muttered, focus drifting as if lost in his own thoughts. "I should have never allowed my father to convince me to go to that damned hive."
"Why did he send you there?" Cressida asked abruptly. "You must have realized that in our circles, that was seen as an unusual move. You are his only son, with no other siblings, right?"
"That's correct," he said. "No other but me lived."
Arthur hadn’t asked any of this, but he allowed the conversation to play out. At least Penn was talking. Also, he hadn’t been around him for a full hour yet. They had time.
And a bitter part of him silently pointed out that if his uncle could have sourced more heirs from his brother's children. Maybe if his uncle cared, his sister could have lived.
Penn continued before Arthur could fall down that rabbit hole. "At first, I had only gone to Wolf Moon as a farce to offload extra cards. The Rowantree estates have always had productive land, but the debts and penalties the king imposed after my uncle, his father—" he nodded to Arthur, "was exiled, were meant to be crippling. They did their job well. Financially, we were in dire straits and... you've seen how changeable the King could be. We had to move carefully to sell the cards to raise funds, without his notice.”
"I don't get it," Soledad broke in. "Why would your king care that you sold cards?"
Penn just gave her a confused look.
She only returned the look and thickened her N'awlins drawl. "I'm not from 'round these parts."
At this, Penn blinked, and an actual spark of interest entered his eyes. "Truly? You come from outside the kingdom?" He looked her up and down as if expecting to see two heads.
Horatio, probably not liking the way Penn was looking at his girlfriend, stepped closer to her. "That's another story. Why don't you continue with yours?"
"Right." He shook his head. "Well, to answer your question, the king and most of his nobles do not care a whit for regular cards, with the exception of pairs and sets, and even then... bribes do wonders with making people look the other way. However, he puts strict regulations on the movement of any Legendaries within the kingdom." He glanced at Arthur and added, "Paired Legendaries are completely disallowed."
"He has since softened his stance," Arthur said with peak irony.
Penn scowled at him. "We needed that money. What did you do with those cards?"
"I gave them away," Arthur said with a shrug. “Mostly to the children of those stuck in the borderlands.”
"You—" He bit off what he was going to say, closed his eyes, and visibly worked to master himself. When he spoke again, it was through slightly gritted teeth. "Anyway, after our tête-à-tête in front of the king, we found themselves deeper in debt and very publicly on the outs with the royal house."
Penn fell silent then, biting his lower lip in thought. Arthur impatiently wanted to hurry him along, but... he had done his cousin wrong. This next part of the story would not be easy for him, and the least Arthur could do was extend a little grace.
Cressida had no such compunction. "What happened when the Mind Singer came to your estate?"
Penn winced. "It happened so fast. There wasn't an eruption to warn us. Everyone knows they've been happening more frequently, but still, I never thought the beasts would come to our door. Aren't you in the Hives supposed to stop things like that?" He glared around. Everyone met his gaze squarely.
"The Mind Singer is a special case," Arthur said, just to break the tension.
Instead, he got the full force of Penn's attention. "She has it in for you, you know. She's in so much pain... she came to us in the body of a dragon, but she isn't a dragon."
"You can tell?" Arthur asked.
He nodded, and once again his hand fisted the fabric of his shirt over his heart. "I'm a Legendary ranked user—or I was. I can feel it, and it felt wrong." He took a breath. "She and her thralls descended on the Rowantree estate right in the middle of spring planting. And it sang. I tried to fight back. I had my Master of Combat, and I was able to take out a few of its minions before it got to me. But eventually, it got to everybody. Except for my father."
"What?" Arthur breathed, but he may as well not have spoken. Penn's gaze was focused past him, somewhere else in time.
"When he saw the hives were not coming to save us and that we would lose, he went into the library and pulled out our greatest card. The Mind Singer couldn't get into his head, so he made a deal with it."
Everyone spoke at once.
"What card was this?"
"You can't make a deal with a scourgling!"
"Arthur sort of did, Horatio."
"Yeah, but Arthur pulls impossible things out of his—"
"Uh, what's going on with his skin?" Kenzie asked, pointing.
The runes had been slowly shifting and reforming as Penn spoke. Now it looked as if worms were crawling over his face.
Suddenly, a light that did not illuminate the room flashed through his cousin.
"Arthur, I just got a quest—" Cressida started to say.
Arthur wasn't paying attention because the spell that had just flashed through his cousin resonated with the three Master cards in his heart.
New Counterfeit spell obtained: Destroy
Time Remaining: 9 minutes, 59 seconds
"Watch out!" Cressida cried.
In the next second, Penn was striking a fist against Cressida's shield wall. He had acted so fast, Arthur hadn't seen him move.
Penn howled with rage and struck the shield again and again, hard enough to make it shimmer. His missing Master of Combat card must have left a mark on him because every move was textbook perfect and devastatingly strong. It rang her shield like a bell.
No longer hampered by the soul-deep pain in his heart deck, Penn seemed stronger than he had been before. His gaze burned into Arthur with singular focus. He didn't even blink as Horatio tried to blind him with another blast of light. It was as if the others didn't exist.
Horatio swore, then yelled, "Arthur, throw him in your Personal Space!"
"I can't without his consent." And he got the funny feeling Penn wasn't going to give it.
Working together, Horatio, Marion, Soledad, and Kenzie worked to subdue him physically. It helped that Penn didn't even seem to notice any of them, and Horatio was able to get behind and grab him while Marion and Soledad took an arm.
Cressida refused to drop the shield until they pulled him back.
"It's those runes," Arthur said. "Keep him steady! I'll get the paint thinner."
"You cannot keep dousing him with that—It’s a miracle he doesn’t have already chemical burns," Marion said.
Kenzie stood back and watched the man thrash, her arms, her hands on her hips.
"He wants to kill you, Arthur. Truly."
"That isn't his fault. He's under a magical compulsion," Arthur said, and stepped closer to the shield to… to… he honestly didn't know. Maybe try to talk some sense into him? Or get a better look at those self-healing runes. Brixaby was going to want to study Penn like a new favored project.
Unfortunately, stepping closer made Penn go berserk, and the others almost lost their grip on him.
It didn't seem that any of his terrible cards gave him enhanced strength, but he was apparently knew grappling moves. If he wasn't outnumbered, Arthur would have had to use his own cards to put him down.
"I told you that I have a quest to handle this," Cressida said, then broke off, shaking her head. "Arthur, get out of the room. If it's a compulsion, he'll calm down if he doesn't actually see you." She pointed behind them, and the back of her shield opened up. She had a lot better control of the card than Arthur had when he'd used it in a fight.
He didn't like it, but he reluctantly agreed.
Going to the outside ledge, he found Brixaby and Joy gathered close with their heads together, speaking softly. Both had a slightly guilty look when they noticed him, and neither refused to say what they were talking about, though Arthur caught an extremely smug expression on Brixaby’s face.
Dropping it for now Arthur awkwardly explained what had happened to Brixaby and Joy.
“Self healing runes?” Brixaby asked, predictably more interested in that than anything else. “Bring him out, and I will examine him. It does not matter if he fights—I am much larger than him,” he added, smugly.
“Let’s give it a few minutes,” Arthur said. “Cressida mentioned something about a quest?”
“Yes, I got it too,” Joy said, though she didn’t seem happy about it and didn’t elaborate further.
Finally, after ten minutes, Penn walked out under his own power—though just barely. There was a dazed expression in his eyes as if he were on the verge of falling asleep.
"I gave him a calming draught," Marion said.
"What’s that?" Arthur asked.
"We give it to people who cannot control themselves after scourge eruptions. Not everyone can handle the trauma, and fear is catching in a crowd, so it can be a good thing to calm him down." Marion gestured to a little pouch that was attached to his belt, and looking closer, Arthur saw that there were card anchor sigils on it. He suspected it was a carrying pouch, like his Personal Space—only much smaller.
Horatio had a black eye and was looking irritated that Marion hadn't fixed it yet. Catching his glare, Marion scowled in reply.
“Don't give me that look. I'll fix your black eye once I'm sure that this much more critical patient is fine."
"My eye is swelling," Horatio whined.
"You’ll live," Marion said primly.
"So this is the man for my quest?" Joy asked, looking down at Penn.
"The one and only," Cressida agreed.
Joy looked hesitant, her bubbly demeanor dimmed. "You sure you want me to go through with this quest? I don't like it very much. It's a little... dark."
"It will help him, dearest," Cressida said. "And Marion is standing by."
"What's this about?" Arthur asked.
"Well, we can't keep throwing paint thinner on him. That's a ridiculous solution. But Joy... Joy has another option, and we tried to explain it to Penn, but he's a little... out of it right now."
“Just get it over with,” Penn muttered, looking at no one.
Joy brought up her front forepaws and showed off her claws on her green-tinged arm. Her claws, usually a matching color to the arm, were suddenly glowing white.
"Oh, I hardly ever get to use this."
Then, carefully, she reached over to a still-dazed Penn and ran a single claw down the length of his forearm.
Penn looked down at it and the blood that bloomed up in a line.
"Oh," he said.
It was, all told, a shallow scratch, but her claws were razor-sharp, and she was very compared to a human and she seemed to have trouble with fine control. But everywhere that Joy’s claw touched, the runes on Penn’s skin immediately vaporized.
That was when Arthur belatedly remembered that Joy had nullification aspects to her claws as well.
"Sorry about that," the dragon said, wincing as she saw the blood.
Then Marion stepped over, placed his hand over the cut without giving a care for the blood, and instantly the wound was sealed, save for a pinkish line of new skin.
It seemed that Joy's nullification claws had a cascade effect, because all of the runes up and down his arm had now disappeared, not just the ones along the cut.
But that left the rest of Penn's body: his face, legs, and chest.
Arthur stood there and made himself watch a grisly procedure.
To Joy’s credit, she did everything she could to make the nullifying scratches as light as possible.
Brixaby said nothing, and certainly did not interrupt Joy as she was working, though he pushed his head forward and observed the runes closely as they puffed out of existence.
Joy’s claws seemed to have an overall nullifying effect because after both arms were done, Penn snapped out of his forced-calm state. He stood there with surprising dignity as the last of the runes broke.
Marion, his face lined with fatigue but with a look of determination in his eye, healed each cut as soon the last rune vaporized. When he was done, there were no lingering scars.
All waited a with baited breath to see if the runes came back. After five minutes without a sign, it was considered a success.
“I’m free,” Penn said then looked down at himself ruefully. On top of all the rest of the filth he had accumulated, his clothing was now ripped and spotted with blood.
Marion wavered and sat down flat on the cold ground. “I insist we wait a bit before you remove those cards out of your heart deck.”
“Why?” Penn asked. “I don’t want anything of what they did to be left in my heart.”
Marion sent him a grumpy look. “Because I will have to reheal your heart again, and I fear I don’t have it in me.”
“The longer he has that Death Aura card, the worse it will be for everyone around him,” Soledad reminded them all.
Most subtly drew back at the reminder.
In contrast, Brixaby inserted himself in the conversation again, literally the tip of his muzzle was close enough to brush against Penn’s chest. “Tell me of those runes. Who placed them on you?”
Penn looked like he wanted to push the dragon away, but didn’t quite dare. “Why do you want to know?”
“Those were high leveled runes,” Brixaby said, smugly. “The person who added them was a Legendary-level user. I can smell the power on you.” He inhaled so sharply that Penn was actually drawn in a couple inches.
“Cut it out,” he snarled.
Arthur, though, caught his breath as several separate facts clicked into place in his mind, like a card shard finding its perfect fit.
“You said your father had resistance to the Mind Singer.” He hadn’t chased that down because he had been trying to get Penn to spit out the rest of the story. Now it was very important. “Why? What card does he have?”
Penn turned to smile at Arthur. It was not a nice smile. “Why, can’t you guess? It’s been in our family for years—though to be fair, it had been held in the library as until we had a rogue mind scourgling swooping down on us, we didn’t dare incur the King’s wrath by adding it to a family member’s heart deck.”
With that, Arthur could connect the rest of the dots. Their family had been near financial ruin, but using the card may have invited total ruin? Why? Because its sibling cards were already in the heart decks of family members, and the king was famously touchy—and changeable—on the subject of Legendary pairs.
“He has Master of Magic,” Arthur said.
“Actually,” Penn corrected, smile widening. “It’s called Master of Spells.”
Next Chapter: Thursday January 22nd 9PM