Syntal shared his frustration, or seemed to. She liked to talk about starting a school for "all the chanters" in Keswick, and when she got going on the idea, he could tell it thrilled her—she fell into that kind of hyper pacing she would sometimes do, her fluttering hands telling as much of the story as her voice. Sometimes her fingers would grip his shoulder or linger against his cheek, just long enough to set his heart thundering and lodge a place in his dreams the next night. He would meet her gorgeous green eyes and they'd share ideas in that way they had, each lifting the other, becoming two halves of a whole.
I'm falling in love with her, he'd told himself. The idea scared him. He wanted to reject it. But he'd been with other girls, and while they had all been special in their way, none of them had ever made him feel like she did. He had never craved their conversation as much as their bodies, never longed to talk to them when they were away.
During one late night, while poring together over a new spell they were working on, he had made his move. Kissed her. And she had leaned into it, her shyness vanishing, igniting a fire in him that had been burning every day since.
But aside from giving him the spell to find the chanters and stealing into his every waking thought, Syntal hadn't been a lot of help. When push came to shove, she had spent almost all her time learning the spells from the fourth wardbook, mastering them, and trying to figure out where the fifth book was. It was obviously the most important thing to her. And the instant she'd figured out the clues to the fifth Seal—incidentally, just after that wonderful kiss—she'd left town to find it.
She'd said goodbye. Kissed him again, even. But she'd still left him—alone and agitated, full of confusion and longing. He couldn't stand it. He refused to just sit and pine. He had to do something, so he took all his unfulfilled passion and channeled it into figuring out who all these chanters were.
He'd combed the city for days, marking down every location where he knew one of Syntal's chanters lived, and gotten something close to a final tally: eighty-nine. Eighty-nine chanters in Keswick, too frightened to show their faces.
Well, he'd finally decided, if they wouldn't come to him, he would go to them.
A few days ago, the fifth Storm had split the southeastern sky. For once, no Church clerics were around to decry it—everyone could enjoy it for the spectacle it was, awash in mingled hope, terror, and awe. Perfect, he'd thought at the time. This is the perfect time to find them.
As usual, he'd been wrong.
He picked his way around a hulking snowbank and ducked the spray from a passing draft horse, circling awkwardly onto Boarshead. "All grain at Deckard's silo is exhausted!" a crier on the corner shouted. A few of the passersby glanced that way; some shook their heads or muttered, We're gonna sehking starve. "By King's decree, all of Northwest Broadside from the west wall to the corner of Angler's and Evenstroll are directed to Benson's silo on Goliath!"
Harth winced. Benson's was nearly exhausted, too. Angbar had told him that morning.
"The Kesprey at Basicas Majesta, Alridaan, and Quietus will also feed those who need it!"
On a first-come, first-served basis, Harth thought, and they don't have enough for everyone either. He caught himself wondering if a chanter school would even matter, in the end. Certainly it wouldn't if everyone starved.
There. Boarshead had only a few rowhouses, crammed in against each other on a crooked, leaning boulevard. He Ascended and rattled off Syntal's chant. A glow welled up inside one of the houses. That was the place.
He debated using Syn's chant to suppress the hyper-reality of the eyes that resulted from too much chanting, but decided against it. Her chant was simple and brief; chanter-eye only resulted from excessive or straining chants, and right now, he was only maintaining the one. There shouldn't be a risk of his eyes upsetting anyone.
He sighed and approached the door. Here goes nothing.
A middle-aged man with a sagging gut and bulbous nose answered on the third knock. He didn't have the chanter's aura; that was coming from somewhere deeper in the house. "What?" he growled as he threw open the door.
In the spur of the moment, Harth decided on a new strategy.
"Good afternoon, sir," he said, extending his hand. "Harth Silwain, King's Chanter." It sounded good rolling off the tongue, even if it was complete dogsehk. A pin, he thought. I should've put on some kind of pin . . . and probably dressed better, too. He smiled and put the thoughts out of his head. It was far too late to act on either of them.
"King's what?" The man made no move to take Harth's hand.
"King's Chanter. I've been charged with delivering news of his amnesty."
"What amnesty? We don't need any amnesty, we've done nothing wrong."
"No, of course not, Mister―?"
The man hesitated, then surrendered. "Stoker." He finally took Harth's hand.
"Pleased to meet you, Mister Stoker. If you haven't heard of it, it's an amnesty for any and all who have heard a . . . heartbeat, other than their own. Related to the Storms in some way, and may have strengthened in the last few days."
"A heartbeat?"
"Yes, exactly. Any who hear it will probably think themselves cursed. They might be afraid of being accused of witchcraft. That's what the amnesty is for. The King wants to hear from these folks. He's put me in charge of finding them."
"The Witch's Amnesty," the man snarled. "That's what they're calling it. Well, you can get gone. There's no witches here." He started to slam the door, and Harth stuck a foot in it.
"You'd do well not to slam your door on the King's Chanter, friend. I'm afraid I need to make sure everyone in your home has received the message."
"I'll pass it on," Stoker said.
Harth gave another disarming smile. "I'll need to do that myself." He pushed the door open and forced his way inside, prepared to chant the man to sleep if need be.
"You . . ." the man sputtered. "Get out of my house!"
"Shortly." Harth darted past him, toward the chanter's aura. He passed through a little kitchen area, then a cramped sitting space with a young woman nursing a babe. There he saw a closed door, with the aura beyond.
"Dad?" the young mother said, covering up.
"He just barged in," Stoker said, then roared at Harth: "You bastards are still going after innocent people!" The suckling infant pulled loose, started to wail. "What's wrong, didn't we kill enough of you in the riots? We need to go again?"
"No, sir." Harth opened the door. In the shuttered room beyond, a boy of sixteen lay curled in a bed sized for a boy of nine, his sheets stained with blood. Syntal's aura pulsed from him like rot.
Blood fever, Harth thought. Again. There had been one this morning with the affliction, and another four yesterday. He drew up short, his thoughts whirling, and closed the door.
"My son," Stoker barked. "Sick. You want to tell him about the amnesty, too? Or you just want to haul him straight off to the dungeons?" He had a knife, Harth suddenly realized. Where had he gotten a knife? "You're that sehking scared of a dying boy?" Stoker spat. "New king's same as the old damn king."
"Sorry," Harth muttered. "Never mind. I'll be going." He pushed past the man's knife and into the street.
Blood fever. Six of them with blood fever. He hurried toward the alley, his mind on the cusp of revelation. Why? Why do so many of them have blood fever?
He hit the main boulevard and started east, toward the river. By the time he finally reached Majesta, the seed of an idea had taken root.
"Angbar!" he called as he entered. Majesta's sprawling chapel teemed with people, patients and Kesprey alike. A few glanced his way as he barged past them, toward Angbar's retreating form in the back.
"Harth?" Angbar answered. "I was just about to―"
"Listen," Harth said, his thoughts running faster than his tongue. "Blood fever. Who has the blood fever here? Do you have a room with them, or . . . ?"
"Elthur has three more that came in this morning. They're in the corner there, by the . . . w
ell, where the angel statue was." Angbar pointed. "Why?"
Harth hurried that way, re-chanting Syn's spell as he went. When he reached the corner with the blood fever victims, all four of them glowed with the chanter's aura. A thrill of vindication rushed through him.
"Harth?" Angbar said.
"I know what the blood fever is," he said. "And I'll bet I know how to cure it, too."
ii. Takra
"They're out of manna at Alridaan," Shaviid said as he passed her in the hall. "I'm heading over there."
"M'sai," Takra answered. "I'm about to see Angbar, I'll let him know." Not for the first time, she berated herself for her own pathetic miracle-working prowess. They needed Kesprey who could call manna, not useless former initiates who had never worked anything more impressive than a clericlight.
She knew her limits, though. Years of work toiling under Keeper Shephatiah had taught her them—or she thought they had, until she had exceeded all of them by stabbing him in his rear as he'd hung from the window. Everything had changed that day, when the Grey Girl came—all Takra's nightmares had ended as surely as a new dawn breaks the horizon. But if Shef were still alive, he'd be mocking her now. Despite all her efforts, despite how desperately she wanted to help, she was as useless now, to Lyseira, as she'd ever been to him.
The most she could do was keep things moving, help keep people informed and connect the people who needed help with the people who could give it. She was good at that, she'd discovered in the last few months. She knew everything about every one of the Church's temples in Keswick—she'd always had a mind for numbers, and instead of fudging them for the piece of sehk who'd used to rape her every week, she'd been able to help Lyseira's new church with logistics. Hardly critical, but useful at least—and Angbar was pulling her away from it.
She liked Angbar. He was a friend, and he believed in what Lyseira was trying to do here. But she felt so anxious about everything, so desperate to prove herself, that sometimes any distraction from her duties riled her up.
"What is it?" she asked as she entered his office. The room still made her sick. Shephatiah's stink clung to every fiber of the opulent rug; the phantom of his gaping, fish-like smile would always haunt that ridiculous desk.
Today Angbar had another young man with him. Takra had seen him a few times around the temple. Good looking, rakish, with tousled brown hair and deep eyes to match. Heath? Howarth? She couldn't remember.
"Hi, Takra," Angbar said. "Here, you can sit down. You've met Harth, I think?"
Harth. That was it. "Once or twice."
Harth peered at her. "Blesséd sehk, Angbar," he murmured, as if she weren't in the room. "She's . . . really bright."
Takra bristled. "What does that mean?"
"You're still waking with blood fever, right?" Angbar opened a book on the desk—heavy and black, a broken steel clasp hanging limply from its covers—and pulled a sheaf of papers from inside.
Takra glanced at Harth. She didn't like him being here. "I shared that in confidence," she said tightly, "but yes." This morning had been particularly brutal: she'd woken with blood leaking from her nose and eyes, feeling like she'd spent the night wrestling a bear. A screaming headache still throbbed behind her right eye. "Why?"
"Here." Angbar leafed through the papers and set one in front of her. "Try reading this."
She scanned the words. They were nonsense. "I don't . . . what is it?"
"Try it out loud," Harth said. "Just be careful."
Takra scoffed. "Angbar, Alridaan is out of manna. Again. Shaviid is going there now, but I need to find―"
"Please," Angbar said. "We think it might help you."
Fuming, Takra turned again to the paper. "Moshka do vér te," she said, and something in the words' rhythm seized her, like finally placing a tune that had been running through her mind for years. "Satchka se shér le." Her tongue danced over the syllables, light as a wasp. "Paela sen ér re. Voran sah rér de."
The words weren't the rhythm. The words were just a pale imitation of it, a reminder of something deeper—a rhythm she'd known for a decade but had never been able to sing. She reached through them, beyond them.
For the first time since she had been born, the world became real.
She breathed a curse or an exclamation; it floated away from her lips in a mote of pure sound and intent. It entered the ears of Angbar and Harth. Bounced briefly off the walls. Some shred of it leaked between the boards of the broken window, out to the snow-shrouded street; another wisp crept beneath the door and into the hallway.
All of it according to these thundering rules, this booming, implacable Pulse.
"Here," Angbar said. He was raw vitality, bound in precarious flesh. Intellect and consciousness gleaming from a shroud of meat. His words, too, followed every rule the Pulse made for them regarding their sound and distribution, their deeper meaning. "Can you read this?" He set the book in front of her. The words on its open page sizzled like Godsflame.
Of course she could read it. She read it so easily it very nearly read her, fitting effortlessly into the grooves of her mind. Not only did she understand the words, she recognized them. She had sought them her entire life.
She spoke. She gestured. Slipped between the beats of that omnipotent Pulse like a thief in the night.
And the light obeyed, bursting from her outstretched palm like the first rays of dawn.
Surprise rippled from the two men, eddying in the sea of the room's deeper meanings. "Now come back," Harth said, his words pregnant with warning. "It's dangerous. You can't stay."
She blinked, and set the infinite behind her. The shock of its loss nearly drove her from her chair; but she had endured much, and she understood she could return any time, now that she knew how.
"That was the Pulse," she said. She had heard the word, but until now had had no idea what it meant. Harth nodded.
Angbar said, "Are you well? It can be hard to come back sometimes, especially after the first―"
"I'm fine." A chamber she had always sought had opened in her heart, a part of her she had cried for in her dreams. "I'm . . . it's wonderful. My God, it's wonderful. How did you―?"
"Blood fever," Angbar said. "It's not a sickness. It's Ascension. You were doing it instinctively, in your dreams, without knowing it."
"My miracle," she said. "The clericlight." The curse that had gotten her father killed, that had subjected her to a life of abuse. "It was never a miracle at all."
"No," Angbar said, smiling.
"It was easy for you," Harth said. "Wasn't it?"
"I . . . suppose so. I'd never tried it before—I don't really have anything to compare it to." Already she longed to try it again.
"I've never known anyone who Ascended on their first attempt. It took me several tries before I got it—Syntal too. But you were just . . ." Harth snapped his fingers. "I think you've got potential as a chanter. A lot of it.
"Listen, Syntal wants to start a chanter school in the city, and I'm helping her get it going. I think you should join us."
"And leave the church?" Takra balked at the idea. "I couldn't. We're trying to feed the city, here."
"Sure," Harth pressed, "but you have to see this isn't where you belong. Your talent's so strong you were working chants before you knew what they were. You're no Kesprey. You're a chanter."
Takra bristled. "Lyseira would differ."
Harth saw the defiance in her eyes and let the matter drop. "All right. If you change your mind, just come find me." He smiled at Angbar. "We've got a cure for the blood fever."
"Are you sure that's not premature?" Angbar asked. "How do you know Ascending once will solve the problem?"
"No, I think he's right," Takra said. It had been like fitting a key into a lock. A perfect solution to a problem she hadn't even realized she'd had. "Based on how it felt for me, I just . . . I think he's right."
Harth stood and started for the door. "I'll start with the ones in the chapel. Then I'll get the word out."
/>
"All right." A tentative expression of relief stole across Angbar's face. "That would be one less problem, at least."
Takra stood, too. "I'm going to catch up with Shaviid," she said. "I've been meaning to head over to Alridaan anyway, check on their distribution."
"All right," Angbar said. She ducked out after Harth, turning the opposite direction as the memory of his words chased her down the hall.
You're no Kesprey.
She had spent half her lifetime in the Church, yet Akir had never become more than an idea to her—an idea personified best in Mother Angelica's illicit honey cakes and quiet snatches of peace between the grueling hours of chores and abuse. She had always run on faith that He existed like they said He existed, having never truly felt His presence.
But that had all changed just now. In Ascending, she had finally, truly experienced God—and it had left everything else the color of ash.
The weeks passed. The needs of the new church intensified. She did all she could to help, visiting each temple to streamline their manna and grain distribution, implementing ideas that seemed simple to her but that everyone reacted to as if they were nothing short of revolutionary. Shephatiah had never permitted her this much freedom, never allowed her to apply her intellect to problems of any kind. In the days before she had first Ascended, that newfound freedom had been glorious, if frantic. Its continuing growth should have thrilled her.
It didn't.
Instead she found herself slogging through the challenges as if they were merely a barrier to her next few precious minutes alone, when she would unfurl her mind and sneak secret glimpses of the Pulse. She had resisted its call at first, but not for long; now every morning before breakfast, every night before falling asleep, she would Ascend. Not to work any chant—all she knew was clericlight, and that would draw attention—but simply to experience it, to drink it in. Angbar had warned her it was dangerous, that she could kill herself that way, so she always did it with great shame and care . . . but she always did it.
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