The Soul of Power

by Callie Bates

  I glance at Rambaud, but he doesn’t look back. He’s watching his daughter. The sudden hum of love and fear that pulses from him is so strong I wince.

  The girl whispers, “Who are these people, Papa?”

  Now Rambaud glances at me. He says, “They’re our friends, Claudette.”

  Rhia lowers her dagger, though she still keeps it tucked within her palm. I hold my breath.

  Rambaud opens his arms, and the girl runs into them. She peers owlishly from me to Rhia. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Hello, Claudette.” I lean forward, holding out my hand. She clasps it cautiously, and I smile at her. “My name is Sophy. I have magic, just like you.”

  Claudette hauls in a deep breath. “Papa said I wasn’t to tell about it!”

  I wink at her. “You can tell me. We’re alike.”

  Uncertainly, she nods. She turns to her father and whispers loudly, “I’ve never met another witch before.”

  I hold the stone out to her. “You enchanted this.”

  “No,” she says shyly, taking it back. “There was magic in it already. I just let it out.”

  I smile and watch Rambaud.

  He looks back at me, then sets Claudette on his knee. “Dear girl, our guests are being much too modest. This is Sophy Dunbarron. The queen of Eren and Caeris.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Dawn is lifting the sky as Rhia and I cross back through the fields toward the farmhouse. I feel fierce, sharpened like the edge of a blade. We succeeded in turning Rambaud—at least, I hope we did—and he not only pledged me his support but promised to speak with the other Ereni nobles as well. Now it’s time to take Alistar back to the city, to a doctor, to safety. We’ve only been gone a few hours, and I’d know if he’d grown worse—or at least, I’m almost certain I would. When I reach for him, the dark threads binding him seem the same. Under the fresh, bright morning, it seems impossible anything could truly be wrong. Even the derelict farmhouse seems sturdier in the growing light, something that could be transformed by a few hammers.

  But underneath the earth, the softest groan tickles the edges of my hearing. I pause, blinking. Am I starting to hear the land the same way Elanna does?

  The sound doesn’t come again and, with a wordless prayer, I step inside the farmhouse. A putrid odor greets me. Just behind me, Rhia inhales and gags. Victoire starts up from Alistar’s beside, holding her hands out, as if to keep us back.

  A low, desperate hammering starts in my chest. I can feel all my hope, all my certainty, pouring away through my feet, into the earth. Alistar is lying still on the bed, wrapped in soundless darkness like a shroud.

  “Is he…” I begin.

  “He’s hanging on. Barely.” Tears brighten Victoire’s eyes. “I think he’s been waiting for you to come back before he…he…”

  I move past her. I seem to feel my heartbeat in each footstep. Alistar sprawls on the bed, his eyelids twitching. The odor is stronger here. I have to cover my mouth. When I crouch beside him, I can already feel the heat pouring off his skin. He’s sweaty. Tenuous.

  “The wound got worse.” Victoire’s followed me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We could try to take him back to Laon in time, but…” She pulls the blanket back, gently, and I glimpse the wound, now red and swollen. An angry red streak arrows up his thigh. Victoire lets the blanket drop, but not before I glimpse an ugly, thick green discharge seeping from the wound. I bite my lip hard against the urge to retch.

  I turn back to Alistar. I touch his cheek. His lips are parted. Chapped. His breath is coming faster even than before, in quick heaving breaths with long pauses in between. The sound of him has faded, so faint it is little more than an echo.

  “Alistar,” I whisper, but he doesn’t answer. There’s no indication that he hears my voice, that he knows I’m here, that I came back for him.

  I fumble for his wrist, but again the pulse is too faint for me to find. There has to be some way to breathe the life back into him. What use is my magic if I can’t save him? It will be like Finn all over again, like my mother, like Ruadan. Another death I am powerless to stop.

  “Sophy.” Rhia’s hand is on my shoulder. A high, desperate noise has escaped my throat. I must not scream. I must not panic, though hot tears are seeping into my mouth.

  He’s not dead yet.

  I grip his hand tight in mine. Heat burns in his palm, but the tips of his fingers are growing cold. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to keep his life from slipping away, carried on a tide I can’t control.

  There is one thing I can do. I wipe away my tears. A good brave man like Alistar doesn’t deserve to be wept into his grave. He deserves to be loved until the breath leaves his body. And beyond.

  I clutch the bone flute in my pocket, but it can’t help us now. I tell him, “I’m here. It’s Sophy. Sophy, and your daughter.” The baby stirs, a tremor in my stomach. “We made it to Rambaud. You were right about him. I did it, Alistar. I talked him into negotiating with us.” I pause, wetting my lips, adjusting my grip on his hand. “But you don’t want to hear about that. Instead, I want to tell you how much I love you. How much your child loves you. I wish you would stay here. I wish you would open your eyes, and you would be alive, and we could raise this baby together. I want it. I want our family more than I have ever wanted anything. I’d give up my crown. I’d live with you in the woods and bake bannocks over the fire.” My voice thickens. “But if you have to go now, then you must. I—I can’t keep you here. I just have to tell you I wish—I wish so much that you would stay, and hold my hand when this baby is born, and see her take her first steps—”

  Tears are falling down my cheeks now, whether I will them or no, and my voice has gone raw. Yet I keep talking.

  “If you leave me, promise you’ll watch over us—if that is what happens when souls cross over.” My throat is swollen; I rest my face against his shoulder. The baby twitches. I feel the warmth of her, growing and growing in my womb, and I whisper, “Alistar Connell, if you leave me and this child, so help me, I will never forgive you. When it’s my time, I’ll follow you into the Good Land and hunt you down and—and I’ll make you pay.”

  The shirt beneath me is soaked through with my tears, but what does it matter now? I can’t tell if the warmth between our hands belongs to both of us still, or if Alistar’s has burned away. I don’t want to know. I don’t know how I can bear losing him. I don’t know what I’ll do with this emptiness where my heart should be. I want to scream. I need to go out into the woods and scream into the trees so only the great silence in the forest hears me, and maybe the gods if they’re listening. I want to tell Alistar that I’ll raise our daughter with twice as much love, enough for both of us, but I can’t say the words.

  “Don’t leave me,” I whisper. I want to tell him that I’ve loved him for so long, so much longer than I even admitted to myself, since our second, or third, or fourth kiss in that cold hallway with the snow falling outside. He asked for a good-luck kiss, and I said I didn’t have much luck but maybe the kiss could help both of us. He leaned into me and said, “Sophy Dunbarron, you give me the most fearsome feeling in my chest.” I laughed and asked whether that was a good thing or a bad one, and he said he didn’t quite know yet.

  Neither do I, Alistar. Neither do I.

  I want to tell him everything, but I can feel the stillness coming into his body beneath me. Hear one last ragged breath, and then nothing.

  His body is soundless now, as the green-brown humming that is Alistar tugs loose from his blood and bones. It’s so tremulous, so tentative. So fragile.

  The baby kicks. Heat burns up through my chest. I’m reaching for it, instinctively, for the last whisper of Alistar’s soul, as if I can capture it with my mind. But it’s slipped beyond the confines of his silent body now, out into the open world. It’s vanishing away from me.


  I don’t know how to stop it.

  I was wrong. I can’t scream. I sit instead, numb in the spreading coldness of my grief. The world was never supposed to take this man from me.

  Something is humming against my thigh. Its insistent frequency tugs at the edge of my mind.

  I close my burning eyes. There is nothing I can do for him. No way for me to keep him here. I can do only one thing: Send him into the spirit world with my lament. A Caerisian farewell.

  I tug the bone flute from my pocket and bring it up to my lips. My fingers move, leaden, over the flute’s holes; I have to force the breath into my lungs. But I play. I play the memory of him. I play the song that brought me here, the song of Alistar himself, crafting the shape and smell of him from the weight of sound. I play a bright, leaping melody that subsides into low, soft notes. I weave the music around the shell of his body, a lament carrying the tears I cannot shed, the yearning and pain so tangled like threads around my heart. Beyond me, deep within the land, I’m aware of a deep, powerful groaning, a counterpoint to my song.

  I reimagine the imprint of his body and his soul, even though it’s gone. I play my helpless longing for him to return, and the bitter knowledge that he has left too soon.

  I play until I can no longer feel my fingers, until my very teeth are humming. On the other side of his body, Rhia and Victoire whisper, and still I play. I squeeze my eyes shut. My cheeks are damp with tears, and somehow these are in the music, too, the shape of my grief. I can’t stop playing. Not even for Eren and Caeris.

  But I know I have to stop. He’s gone. I have to release this song, and I have to leave him here. Bury him and go. And when all this is over, I’ll find my way back here, and I’ll build a marker to him, so that anyone who comes to this farm knows a man came here once, a good man, who left the world too soon.

  “…Not possible,” Victoire hisses.

  “But he is,” Rhia says.

  I lower the bone flute. Numbness aches through my hands, my arms and back. I should take Alistar’s cold hands and cross them over his chest. I should put the bone flute back in my pocket. I should get up and be queen.

  Ruadan would expect it of me. My mother would. Finn would. If I don’t, they all died for nothing.

  “I love you,” I whisper to Alistar Connell, or to the cooling shell of him. I shove the bone flute deep into my pocket, though fresh tears seep down my face, and it feels as if I’m ripping the seams off my own body. I gently lift his hand to lay it on his chest. I’ll cross his other hand over it, and soon, if this cruel world will give me time, I’ll pick a posy to put between his fingers, or on his grave.

  His fingers, which tighten on mine.

  I feel myself freeze. It must have been my imagination. His soul is gone. I felt it leave.

  But…

  A faint blush of sound ripples through him. So slight I wonder if I imagined it.

  I lift my eyes. Victoire and Rhia are both staring at Alistar. They’ve been crying, but they aren’t now. Victoire’s face holds a kind of awestruck wonder. And Rhia…

  “Sophy,” she says, and she turns to me, terror and joy chasing each other across her face. “Sophy, he’s breathing again.”

  * * *

  —

  HE’S BREATHING, BUT he doesn’t wake. His fingers do not tighten on mine again. The wound is still weeping greenish pus.

  But his pulse has evened, though it’s still too fast. The sound of him remains faint, flickering, yet it’s there. Somehow my music summoned him back.

  I stay with him while Rhia and Victoire run in search of something, anything, we can use to carry him back to the city. “Talk to him, sing to him, do something, Sophy,” Victoire says. “Keep him alive!”

  Is it me or the bone flute that breathed life back into Alistar? Was it my longing for him to return—the way I crafted the shape of him through music? I don’t know, but my jaw aches from playing, so instead I speak to him. I talk and talk. I remind him of our picnics together, of the way he’d bring me music and play the tin whistle while I sang. I remind him of the music we made together, of how I’d coax him to sing despite his self-consciousness, and we’d both laugh when his voice cracked on a note. Finally, I simply sing to him.

  His breathing deepens. The sweat seems to be lessening on his brow, and the sound of him has steadied.

  This is magic so powerful, my mind can’t comprehend it. So I just keep singing. I sing as Rhia and Victoire return with a cockeyed stretcher made from pine boughs and a few old boards. We lift him onto it, and it holds, and I sing. I sing the old folksongs from Caeris, about the maiden with the owl’s eyes, who flew through the mountains at night when she should have been lying with her husband. I sing about the sorcerer who turned himself into a tree as an experiment, and was forgotten for a century until a woman found him, a woman who’d had her heart broken, who had seen too much of the world, and when she looked at the tree she saw the man inside it and the tree cracked open to spill him out. I sing about the princess who left Caeris one dawn and returned ten years later with a book full of all the knowledge in the world, and a heart too wide to settle.

  Outside the land is humming—a strange, deep groan that mingles with my singing. I sing, though my throat is growing raw, while Victoire and I carry Alistar out of the farmhouse. Rhia forges ahead to make sure we’re unseen. The morning has advanced; the dew has dried from the grass.

  We begin to move through the forest, and the soft moan in the earth begins to deepen. I stagger as we step onto the path. Alistar rocks in the litter. The very earth shakes. A deep, persistent moan rises from the ground beneath our feet, trembling through every tree, every blade of grass.

  “Do you hear that?” Victoire gasps.

  “Yes.” It’s not only me, then.

  Rhia comes running back through the trees, her face stark. “Is it an earthquake? We need to take shelter!”

  “No,” I say involuntarily. There’s another sound twining through the moaning, aching earth. A vast green sound, a sound that belongs not just to this still forest in Eren but to all the mountains and meadows, the rivers and stones, that together make up our entire land. It is the earth’s voice, and a woman’s. “It sounds like Elanna.”

  They both stare at me. The earth is still twitching under our feet, as if a great shiver is running through it, like a horse trying to fling off a fly. Around us the tree branches have begun to sway. The wind roars through, sudden and powerful. A great crack echoes through the woods.

  “Run!” Rhia and I scream simultaneously. She grabs one side of the litter with her good hand and we all charge into motion, lurching as fast as we can over the buckling earth. The voice around us is rising to a deep bellow, a pitch that sets my teeth on edge. Just behind me, a great branch crashes down in the place we just passed. The trees are whipping into a frenzy.

  We run, awkward between the litter and the protesting ground. “What’s she doing?” Rhia pants. “Bringing the whole place down?”

  I just shake my head. If El has indulged in some mad, impulsive act of magic…Yet a voice in the back of my head reminds me how difficult sorcery has been for her. The land is drained, exhausted—or it’s supposed to be.

  This doesn’t feel like drained magic. This feels…desperate.

  “The road!” Victoire cries out. We lumber over the ditch and onto the firm track. The wind hurls itself along the corridor between the trees, so forceful we have to bend double. Alistar mutters but doesn’t come alert. We lumber on, no longer caring whether we’re seen. No one in their right mind is on this road, anyway. The trembling in the ground vibrates up through the soles of my feet. My whole body is shaking now in rhythm with the earth. Still that unholy cry continues, pouring out of no human mouth.

  Finally we glimpse the ridge where the Spring Caves lie. The wind gusts harder, sending us all stumbling as we climb, but we hang on,
practically horizontal on the steep path. As we reach the top, the wind bellows again. There’s a clatter below in the city. Roof tiles fly off the terraced houses below us, crashing down in the street. Victoire cries out.

  “Sophy!” Elanna’s run out from the cave to help us. I’m astonished to see her; I imagined her marooned on the height of the ridge, directing some magical feat of the land. She has to shout over the roaring wind. “Let’s bring him inside!”

  The four of us heave Alistar into the cool cave. It’s marginally quieter within the stone walls, though the earth is still groaning. Victoire and I set Alistar’s litter down, then drop to the ground, both of us gasping for breath.

  “What happened?” El demands. She’s staring down at Alistar.

  “Rambaud’s guards shot him.” I shake my head, still panting. “What are you doing to the land?”

  “It’s not me.” She looks at me grimly. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “But—” I exchange a blank stare with Victoire and Rhia. “—it must be your doing.”

  “It’s not,” she insists. “The land’s all strange. I can feel it. Yet some parts are almost dark. I don’t know who’s doing this, or what they’ve done.”

  A deeper thread of worry twines down my spine.

  El has crouched beside the litter, her hand on Alistar’s arm. He doesn’t stir. “Jahan may be able to help him, though it’ll be difficult to draw on magic.” She looks up at me. “Did you meet with Rambaud?”

  “I did. He seems to have agreed to help us.”

  “Good.” She calls over her shoulder for Jahan, then turns urgently back to us. “Hugh and the Caerisians arrived a short while ago; we were able to hide their coming from the spies in the city, as far as we know.” She presses her lips together. “There’s been word from Laon. Your fa—Euan made a decree. They’ve rounded up people who evaded the conscription. They’re to be executed at noon.”