All other concerns fled Kai's mind. "What?"
"I think he saw me first—he was trying to sneak out without being seen. It was him and six or seven others. Cleared out fast when I came in. They're planning something, or I'm a bitch's litter."
"He's still in the city?" Kai demanded. "How in Hel didn't we know?"
"Still in, or back in," Cort said. "It's that whole place, though. Rubbed me wrong. I don't trust a one of 'em."
"Sehk," Kai spat, and turned to the Crownwardens still in the courtyard. "Jacinth, Marlon—double the King's guard. He doesn't enter a room or sip an ale without you checking it first. I'm going to find Patyr and Shaviid, get some Blackboots and Kesprey together to raid the temple." He started for the exit, thoughts whirling.
"Captain!" Cort called. "Your weapon."
Kai turned back to see Cort proffering Lar'atul's sword. It was glowing.
The sight tripped him up. That— Kai thought. That's . . .
He took the weapon and sheathed it with a gruff nod. "Thanks."
Whatever it meant, there was no time to figure it out now.
12
i. Angbar
On the first day of Angeltear, in the year of the Fatherlord 3171, a miracle unlike any before it did occur outside the city of Keswick. By Akir's grace, rewarding the faith of his followers, wheat grew from a fallow field in the dead of winter. The people celebrated and the King stood vindicated when they saw it, for it was enough to save their lives. Yet it was only the beginning. On every morning that followed, the wheat grew again.
Angbar paused. Writing on a bouncing sleigh was a tricky matter, leaving the page a mess of ink blots and stray scrawls, but he didn't care. It was a rough draft—or even less, a series of notes maybe—but he had to get it down. His muse was bursting at the seams. There was so much to capture, so much to convey. These were legendary times, he was sure of it. When he was older he'd want an accurate record of what had happened, unblemished by nostalgia. And who knew? Maybe others would find his accounts helpful, too. The sleigh ride, jolting and erratic as it was, was the first writing opportunity he'd had in days, and he meant to take it.
"Do you think we should still call it 'The year of the Fatherlord'?" he asked Lyseira. "Maybe I should call it 'year of the Grey Girl.'"
She laughed. "No one will know what you mean."
"I wouldn't be so sure of that."
"You can't just change the year number because it suits you," Seth said. "The Fatherlord's rule is still the basis for the year count. That doesn't change just because he's a fraud."
Angbar considered this, then resumed writing.
The sight of such bounty moved the people of Keswick to worship. Hundreds committed their lives to Akir and His new Kespran Church, pledging to do His works and bring word of His goodness to every corner of the Earth.
"We should have a pledge," he said to Lyseira.
"How do you mean?"
"I mean, all these people want to be Kesprey, but what does that even mean? Do they know? Hel, do we know?" He felt a brief pang of shame for using coarse language in a conversation about sacred matters, but rushed past it. "I assume if they're working Kespran miracles, Akir knows their hearts and they've proven themselves worthy."
Except I can't work miracles, he thought, so what does that say about me?
Again, he went on: "But the old Church works miracles, too, and it's not always easy to tell the difference between our miracles and theirs. I just think we need . . . you know, some principles."
"Lyseira has preached her principles many times," Shaviid said, holding the reins.
"I know, but—does everyone know them? Has anyone agreed to them, or are we just assuming everyone has? The people who are eating our bread—do they know them? Do they understand the difference?"
"We don't charge for healing," Lyseira said. "That shows compassion, generosity. Sacrifice. It speaks for itself."
"Well, it does, but―" He tapped the sheaf of papers in his lap. "Why not write it down?"
Lyseira didn't answer.
"That book you found in the Safehold. Ethaniel's History. That changed everything for you, didn't it?"
She nodded, reflective. "It did."
"But it's really old, parts of it are missing—we can't just make a copy for every temple. We need something else, something regular people can use."
Lyseira pursed her lips. "We can't just write a holy book, Angbar."
Angbar spread his hands. "Why not? Akir has spoken to you. Really spoken. You're not making things up, like the Fatherlords have for thousands of years."
She didn't look convinced.
"Look," he pressed, "while you were gone, I had my hands full at Majesta. Scrambling like mad. It felt like drowning. So many people hungry or hurt, and so few of us to help. It was all I could do just to keep my head above water."
"I know." Her expression softened. "I know, I told you—I'm sorry about that, I shouldn't have―"
He waved her apology away. "No, no, that's not—I don't bring that up to make you feel bad. I bring it up because . . . I feel like we missed a piece of this whole thing. An important piece. We jumped right into the war trench—we had to, Marcus left us no choice—but now that things are settling down some, I think we should back up a step. Introduce ourselves."
"I . . . don't follow."
"We're not just the place people go when they're hungry. Are we? We're talking about Akir here. Why did He have us grow all that wheat? To save our lives, sure, but—why? The old Church said living a good life meant obeying the Fatherlord. It's the first Sacred Principle. What does it mean for a Kesprey to live a good life? I just . . ." He shook his head. "I don't see how we can take that answer away without giving a new one in return."
"But Akir hasn't given me a new one. I won't just write a holy book for the sake of having one."
"It's not for the sake of having one, it's because you have important things to say! You could start with some of those big ideas that came out of Ethaniel's History. The justification for manna. The idea that Kesprey are servants, not lords. All those things you told me. The important things you talk about when you're in front of everyone."
Now he had her attention. "Hm." He saw the gears start to turn behind her eyes. "I suppose there are some important things I want to make sure people know."
"Yes! See?" He took up the quill. "You speak, I'll scribe."
"But, you know—we missed something in all this." She gestured back at the barrels of wheat. "In Tal'aden―" Speaking of last summer still pained her. She bit her lip. "In Tal'aden, we didn't just feed them. We taught them to read. We should be doing the same in Keswick. What good does it do to write a book if no one can read it?"
It was so obvious, Angbar couldn't believe he'd missed it. "Kirith a'jhul. You're right. We've been so busy trying not to starve that we forgot about the rest of it."
"I think part of the book should talk about that—the importance of reading. Nobody should have to be dependent on the Church to understand scripture. The Kesprey should be devoted to literacy."
Excellent. She was warming to the idea, now. Angbar smiled and took it down.
"And compassion. It's not just a word. It's not some lofty ideal to strive for. It should be the whole reason anyone does anything. If you act out of compassion, you'll never go wrong. It's everything the Kesprey stood for." She corrected herself. "Stand for."
He gave her a secret smile and pointed the quill's feather at her: I see you. She flushed and shook her head, laughing.
She's pretty when she laughs, Angbar thought.
—and immediately shut the observation in a box, locked it, burned it, and scattered the ashes. No. Not doing that again. No way.
"I feel pretentious," Lyseira admitted. "A holy book? I'm just not sure . . ." The smile withered. "I don't want to turn out like him."
The Fatherlord. His example threw a shadow of doubt over every good thing they tried to do. "You won't," Angbar swore. "You're as di
fferent as night and day. If it helps, don't even think of it as a holy book. We don't have to call it that. It'll just be . . . 'A Collection of Lyseira's Best Ideas.'"
She scoffed, laughing again. "That's an even worse title than I could come up with, and I can't come up with much."
"That's not the title!" he protested. "That's the idea. If you want me to come up with some title ideas, I can do that later. The point is, you don't have to claim divine inspiration! You don't have to lie. People already respect you. They know you. Just tell the truth—'Here's what I think, and why I think it'—and they'll still listen."
She sighed. "I don't know, Angbar. People are sick of getting told what to do and how to think. That's why they rebelled in the first place. Who's actually going to read this?"
"I will, for one," Shaviid said, his eyes locked on the road. "The very moment it's finished."
ii. Takra
Syntal was not the same girl from the stories.
The tales made her out to be wild-eyed and reckless, a witch whose very form crackled with barely-restrained power. She was the legend who had summoned the first Rending by sheer force of will when she was just a little girl, the sorceress who had struck Bishop Marcus with lightning on the day of Isaic's scheduled execution. They said her temper was short and her powers broad, that there was no clearer evidence of this than the people she had killed—again with lightning—for opposing the Kespran church the morning before Winterwheat had begun. Takra knew the stories were wrong, of course—Syntal hadn't killed anyone on purpose by the wheat field, and there had been only two deaths, not the half-dozen or more some of the stories claimed—but the thing that struck her the most was how badly the tales mistook the girl's temperament.
There was nothing wild-eyed about her at all. She was quiet and introspective for the most part, dedicated to her studies with an intensity usually reserved for the clergy. She became most animated when talking about her chants, particularly when speculating or extrapolating from one idea into another. Then she did have a kind of hunger about her, a manifest yearning to go further, find something new—a hunger Takra recognized, as she had just recently discovered it in herself.
They were in the back of the supply wagon, beneath the bonnet and alone. "This one," Syntal said, tapping the fifth wardbook's open page, "will be good for the war." She cocked a brow at Takra, eyes bright with challenge. "You wanted to push yourself? Take a look."
Takra had wanted to look at the fourth wardbook first, to take them each in order. That seemed to her the most proper way to approach her studies, as each book had built upon the concepts presented before it. But Syntal had gone straight to the fifth, and faced now with the prospect of analyzing it, Takra found she relished it. She slid the book around to face her and Ascended, determined to meet Syntal's dare.
One didn't have to understand a chant to cast it—that was what made them so dangerous. Reading them for comprehension and casting them for effect were completely different things. Picking apart the symbols, piecing together a chant's meaning without actually invoking it required deep concentration and even deeper force of will. She would swear that chants wanted to be cast; even now, she could feel the symbols of this one tracing themselves into her, longing for manifestation on her tongue.
"Don't chant it," Syntal snapped, throwing a hand over the script. "Just tell me what it does."
"All right," Takra snapped back, and shoved Syntal's hand away.
She kept the script at a mental arm's length and forced herself into analysis. It was complex and twisting, the runes changing shape as she looked at them. Long. It would be slow to cast, for certain—not as slow as a Rising, but slower than any other chant she'd seen. That's nothing, she berated herself. Any imbecile could tell that just from looking at the page.
"Give up?" Syn teased. Her lips hid an expectant smile, a taunt waiting to reveal itself. The great Takra, the great natural, she'd say. But not as great as the Witch of Southlight.
"Wait," Takra insisted. The runes ricocheted like shooting stars, impervious to scrutiny.
"Don't hurt yourself." A warning Takra herself had given to the other students back in Keswick many a time, now imbued with just a hint of ridicule. Maybe Syn meant it in a friendly way; maybe she actually felt threatened by Takra's potential. Either way, the barb drew blood.
A bucket of water, she heard Shephatiah say. One bucket, not overfull, not under-full, just enough to fill my personal wash basin. Can you manage that? Is that within your skills? And if she failed, he would rape her—and if she succeeded, the same. A lifetime of his fat face and tiny manhood, his constant derision—
And all the while, she'd had the power to kill him.
There. The inverse of the Ves anchor, which required a living being. Death, then. Not as the anchor, in this case, but as a metaphysical channel. And then she recognized another channel, this one physical—a permutation of a channel she'd seen in Cyclone, one of the few third-Seal spells Harth had shared with her. Now she saw that the spell shared an anchor with Cyclone as well: a spread of time and space, like a cloud.
She Descended as if she had just slammed a door. Others reported severe melancholy when they Descended, even spiritual anguish—but she had spent her entire life being raped by a sadist. She managed.
"A mist of death," she said, meeting Syntal's gaze. "A chant of mass murder."
Syntal's eyes widened slightly. "M'sai," she said, with a grudging nod. "You really do have promise."
"This is a nightmare waiting to happen." Takra tapped the page. "Have you cast it yet? Have you seen it in action?" She respected the other girl, so she offered her a kind of olive branch: "I couldn't make out every parameter. How big would it be?"
Syntal accepted Takra's deference; the defensiveness in her shoulders loosened slightly. "Size of a house, I think. I've looked at it several times. Haven't cast it yet. It would have to be life or death."
Wow. Takra looked at the page again, but it was meaningless without Ascension. "Does the King know?"
"Not about this one, not yet. I plan to tell him, but only when I have to. It's the kind of thing that will scare people if it gets out."
Yes, Takra thought. That's one way to say it.
"If you want to see something really amazing, though, watch this." She chanted briefly—a half-dozen syllables as she splayed her fingers and ran her hands, palms facing inward, along the front of her body without touching it. Then she handed Takra a knife and, smiling, said, "Stab me." She set her hand against the floor. "Right in the hand."
Are you sure? Have you tried this before? Takra knew Syntal would expect her to ask a question, express some kind of reticence—so instead she brought up the knife and slammed it into the girl's hand.
Or tried to. The blade turned away with a squeal, jerking out of Takra's grip and clattering to the floor. Syntal flinched, yanking her hand back with a yelp—then burst into laughter.
Takra couldn't help it—she started laughing too. "You can't be stabbed?" she finally demanded.
"Not while I maintain the spell. It's heavier than a wagon of wheat barrels, though—and it's still hard not to flinch."
Takra picked up the knife, its tip now bent, and shook her head. "That's incredible. Fourth Seal?"
"Fifth," Syn said.
Takra nodded at the book, still open on the floor. "Show me."
iii. Lyseira
Late in the afternoon, the lead sleigh got trapped in a snowbank. Angbar Hovered it loose, turning an hours-long ordeal into a momentary inconvenience, but it happened again an hour later, and then again just before dusk. After making the horses pull it clear for the last time, she took it as a sign and called for camp.
"What do you think of Angbar's idea?" she asked Seth after they had finished dinner and had a little time to themselves. Angbar had gone to check in with Syntal; Shaviid had retired early.
"It's good," Seth answered at once. "I would read it."
That surprised her. "You would?"
"Of course. You're very wise."
Again, a little jolt of wonder. "You think so?"
"I do. Why do you think I'm still here?"
That made her think. She had always assumed he was still here because he was her brother, and he cared for her. His words made her think there was more to it than that, and maybe that made sense—maybe, after everything they'd been through, there had to be. She was still chewing on it when he spoke again.
"I'm worried about Syntal."
She blinked the first line of thought away. "How so?"
"Her powers keep growing, but her common sense doesn't."
Lyseira sighed. A heavy memory of the trampled child on the Winterwheat field came back to her. "Yeah."
"You can call fire. I've seen you do it many times. Yet no one's ever been harmed by it that you didn't intend to harm. Syntal killed two people with that spell outside Keswick. She nearly killed Angbar with her lust for the wardbook in Kesselholm, and she's put me to sleep with her magic more than once. That's not even considering the horrors she's unleashed on the world with her crusade. All those dead we found in Shepherd's Hill—I lay those on her. That happened because of the second wardbook, which she wouldn't even pause to discuss before she opened it.
"She's careless. Or callous. I'm not sure which would be worse."
"I know." Clearly, this had been chewing at him for some time. Lyseira felt a surge of shame that she hadn't been as focused on it, but the sheer joy she had felt that first Winterwheat morning had driven most other concerns from her mind. "After that last time, though, with that boy—maybe she finally realized, she'll start being careful."
"And if she doesn't?" Seth shook his head. "She wants to find the sixth wardbook in Colmon. The sixth. After the second released those fire-trolls, and the third let her kill two Preservers—strong ones, stronger than me—with a snap of her fingers. What will the sixth let her do? Can you even imagine? How long until she gets something as strong as the cataclysm we saw in the Waste? Would you trust her not to use it?"
Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3) Page 21