by Jenna Glass
Slowly, Delnamal’s heart rate calmed and his breathing eased. A temperate breeze rustled the leaves around him, the soft susurrus accompanied by the occasional chirping of birds. Delnamal usually paid no heed to the sounds of country life, but with his limbs throbbing from exhaustion, they produced a pleasantly soothing backdrop that had his mind drifting toward sleep despite the torturous discomfort of the metal chair.
A much louder, closer sound jerked him awake, and he turned to glare at the tiny songbird in a cage that hung from a hook in the veranda’s ceiling. The little blue puffball made an unholy racket for something so small, and his mother had brought it outside precisely because the sound of its song grated on Delnamal’s nerves. He glared at the thing as it continued to caterwaul, but his body still felt too exhausted to contemplate moving inside to escape the noise. He glanced over his shoulder at the manor house door, for once hoping that his mother was hovering and would come remove the annoyance. But of course, when he wanted her to hover, she was nowhere to be seen.
Delnamal shook his head at the bird, unable to comprehend how anyone could find that constant chatter pleasant. He certainly wasn’t going to fall asleep while the creature insisted on singing—though perhaps he should be grateful for that. He didn’t imagine his body would appreciate even a short sleep on this damn chair.
Unable to sleep and unwilling to make his way back into the house, Delnamal opened his Mindseye to examine once more the mystery that filled him inside and out. He now kept a mental inventory of the Kai motes in his aura and had confirmed that their number increased by one each time he suffered a fit. The sight of all that Kai made his mind spin with possibilities, and he was now accustomed enough to the black motes moving through his blood that the sight of them no longer disturbed him.
He wanted to spend some quiet time contemplating his future, planning out how to use all that glorious Kai. However, the damn bird was still yodeling away, the constant noise making it hard for him to think. He turned to glare once more in its general direction—and that was when he experienced yet another shock.
At the center of the aura of Rho that surrounded the bird hovered a tiny, spherical mote that looked just like the ones pulsing through his blood.
As weak as he still felt, Delnamal scraped up enough strength to rise to his feet. Leaning heavily on his cane, he crossed the short distance between himself and the birdcage until his nose was practically touching the latched door so he could get a closer look.
There was no question that the mote in the bird’s body and the motes in Delnamal’s blood were the same. Both looked like spheres from a distance, their tiny facets only visible upon closer examination. And both occasionally flashed with color from somewhere deep inside.
On impulse, Delnamal reached up to unlatch the door to the birdcage. His hands were barely functional, the latch a severe challenge to his dexterity, but eventually he managed—more by luck than by skill—to open it.
The bird made a sound of alarm, and he heard the frantic flutter of its wings as it tried to fly away, the faceted mote moving with it.
He could not have said what compelled him to do such a thing, but he reached toward the mote, his finger hitting a feathered breast. The bird pecked at his hand, but the pain barely registered in his mind as his hand suddenly passed through the feathers and flesh and touched the mysterious mote.
Delnamal pinched the tiny mote between his thumb and forefinger. The bird went suddenly still and silent. He pulled the tiny crystal toward him, meaning to examine it more closely.
There was a last peep of protest, and then a soft thump. The mote crumbled in his fingers, the black outer shell fragmenting into a dustlike cloud that quickly dissipated. A puff of Rho—much smaller than the one that emerged from the motes Delnamal had seen burst within himself—spread out of the broken mote, revealing a miniature Kai crystal within. The Rho and the Kai both drifted into Delnamal’s aura. He shuddered as emotion surged in his breast and his heart sped. His legs gained strength even as his eyes pricked with tears.
The effect was brief and less overwhelming than the bursting of one of the motes within his own blood, but based on the surge of energy and the slight brightening of the Rho in his aura, he guessed he’d gained another hour or two of vitality before he teetered on the brink of death once more. Disappointingly, the miniature Kai drifted downward after it hit Delnamal’s aura, sinking slowly and inevitably into the earth. But considering how much Kai he had already gathered—and how much more he stood to gain as the motes in his blood continued to burst and fuel him—the disappointment was brief.
Rubbing his fingers together where the faceted mote had once been, Delnamal closed his Mindseye. He was not surprised to see the bird’s lifeless body on the cage’s floor. The pretty blue breast was entirely unmarked, and no one looking at it would have any idea that the bird had not died of natural causes.
* * *
—
Kailee’s eyelids were getting heavy, and she shook her head to try to stave off sleep as she reached for the cup of tea on the side table. The only prolonged private time she and her husband had together was during the stolen moments before bed, and so Kailee waited up for him each night, no matter how tempting the lure of sleep. The need to finish deciphering Mairah’s notes helped her stay awake.
Although the notes were jumbled and disorganized and, according to Tynthanal, scribbled in a hand that seemed almost deliberately hard to read, they had learned some shocking information so far, although Kailee could not say they were any closer to understanding what was wrong with Aaltah’s Well.
When Mairah had fled Women’s Well, she’d taken with her a potion that she claimed, when added to a seer’s poison, would allow a seer to trigger a vision of a past event. The claim had been met with a good deal of skepticism—even Kailee, who knew and liked the woman so many others reviled, had thought the claim either an exaggeration or an outright lie. But if it was a lie, it was one Mairah had committed herself to heart and soul.
According to the notes, Delnamal had forced Mairah to take the potion herself with a powerful seer’s poison she’d feared might kill her. Instead, the dangerous cocktail had allowed her to learn more about how the Blessing was cast.
Neither Tynthanal nor Kailee was sure whether to believe the fantastical story. Mairah claimed that there was a special kind of Kai that could only be formed by the willing sacrifice of a woman. The three women who had cast the Blessing had each taken her own life, forming a unique and especially powerful mote of this sacrificial Kai that had fueled the spell they’d used to change the nature of Rho and make it impossible for a woman to conceive or carry children against her will.
According to Mairah, a spell cast using sacrificial Kai could affect a Well, although the notes also stated that the introduction of men’s Kai to a Well could have catastrophic results. Mairah claimed that in the course of developing her potion, she’d triggered a vision that showed her all of Aaltah reduced to a wasteland and that this would be the result of masculine Kai being introduced into the Well.
The notes included the formula for Mairah’s seer’s poison additive—which Tynthanal had already arranged to send to Women’s Well for analysis—but that was the last portion of the notes Kailee and Tynthanal had been able to make sense of so far.
After the section about the Blessing, the notes devolved into what seemed to both of them like little more than gibberish. There were suggestions that the notes pertained to a spell designed to undo what Mairah called the Curse, and there was a hint that whatever spell she was crafting would be triggered with the sacrificial Kai, but that was about all they’d been able to make out. Kailee felt convinced that the sudden lack of clarity had been no accident—that Mairah had been using her notes to try to convince others that she was genuinely attempting to undo the Blessing, but that her purpose was something else entirely.
Unfortunately, Ka
ilee had not yet come up with even a guess as to what that something else might be. She had suggested that tonight, when Tynthanal read through the notes aloud again, he recopy all the sections that felt vaguely coherent so that they could separate them from what she felt sure was the camouflage Mairah had used to hide her true purpose. But the task could not begin until Tynthanal returned from the formal ball Kailee had left hours ago.
Kailee jerked awake at the sound of an opening door. Her chin had come to rest against her chest, and she had sunk down into her chair in what she supposed was a most unladylike and unattractive position. Rubbing her eyes, she struggled upright.
“Sorry to wake you,” Tynthanal said softly, his voice warm with gentle humor. “But I don’t suppose you would have thanked me if I’d left you sleeping in that position.”
Kailee yawned and stretched, her neck making an audible pop in the process. Her ribs ached where one of her stays had dug into them, and her foot had fallen asleep. She wiggled her toes as much as her shoes would allow and flashed her husband a rueful smile.
“I was not asleep,” she said, making no attempt to sound convincing. “I was merely resting my eyes.”
“Uh-huh,” he agreed, coming to sit on the chair across from her. “I’m sorry I’m so late. It never ceases to amaze me how much self-important noblemen love to hear themselves talk. I was beginning to fear I’d still be trapped in the banquet hall at dawn.”
She smiled sympathetically, knowing Tynthanal must have been fairly crawling out of his skin with the desire to get away. He was a far cry from a natural-born politician, and though he would have recognized it as his duty as prince regent to quell his impatience and maintain a good relationship with the rich and powerful nobles who’d attended the ball, she imagined he’d more than once entertained the fantasy of knocking some of their teeth out.
“You don’t have to apologize,” she told him. “I’m well aware of how many bridges you have to mend after the mess Delnamal made of this kingdom.”
Kailee had no doubt that if it weren’t for her shocking eyes, which made so many people so terribly uncomfortable, she, too, would have been trapped at the ball for many long hours, listening to and otherwise entertaining all the women of the court while their husbands discussed politics. She knew that more than one member of the court had suggested to Tynthanal that she resume her erstwhile habit—vigorously enforced by her stepmother—of wearing a veil over her eyes. It was not her blindness, per se, that made her into such a social liability. It was the shocking impropriety of seeing a woman with her Mindseye open in a land where women’s magic was considered shameful and dirty.
Tynthanal held something up in the air. Something that she could see at once was a magic item, for it was packed full of elements. “Are you too tired to take a look at this tonight?” he inquired.
All hints of sleep fled from her mind when she realized exactly what he was holding. With a soft exclamation, she held out her hands and barely resisted the urge to snatch it.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Tynthanal said, laughing as he laid what felt like a wineskin on her outstretched hands. The liquid inside sloshed softly as she took it.
The grand magus had been stubbornly reluctant to hand over the mysterious potion that had been found with Mairah’s things, which had frustrated Kailee no end. She’d been sure she was more likely to make sense of it than the male spell crafters of the Academy, but she’d begun to despair of ever getting hold of it.
“So your grand magus could make nothing of it?” she asked with an ironic arch of her eyebrow.
“Shockingly, no,” he responded with a smile in his voice. “I will send it on to the Women’s Well Academy tomorrow, but I know you wanted to take a look at it first.”
Kailee studied the elements that had been bound into the potion. There were two she didn’t recognize, and one that she had seen before, although she didn’t know what it was. But the others were very familiar. Her pulse sped, and something fluttered in her belly. She couldn’t have said whether it was excitement or dread.
“Except for the Sur, every element I recognize in here is also present in the potion Mairah gave me.”
The potion that was designed to forcibly close Kailee’s Mindseye. Others had tested the potion to ensure that it was harmless, and to determine that it would indeed force an open Mindseye closed temporarily. But so far, Kailee had not tried it herself. She had yet to sort out exactly how she felt about the potion. She was certain Mairah had meant no insult when giving it to her. The woman had certainly not been the soul of sensitivity, but she had given the potion to her in secret so that Kailee need never worry about being pressured into trying it. Subsequent events had forced Kailee to tell both Tynthanal and Alysoon about the potion’s existence, and she’d been pleasantly surprised that neither seemed inclined to push her.
Tynthanal sat back in his chair, and though he said nothing, Kailee was certain his mind was traveling the same path as her own.
In all likelihood, this potion was some modified—possibly more powerful, and, with the addition of Sur, no longer temporary—version of the one Mairah had given Kailee. Mairah had, for some reason, brought that spell with her to Aaltah’s Well.
“The emphasis on sacrificial Kai in these notes is no coincidence,” Tynthanal said. “Mairahsol was planning to use her potion and some sacrificial Kai to forcibly close the Mindseye of everyone in Aaltah. That would explain why there was a second, unidentified woman who was seen heading toward the Well with her. Because Mairahsol had no intention of ending her own life to cast this spell, but had found a sick, desperate woman who would do it for her.”
Kailee stifled her immediate urge to leap to Mairah’s defense. She had to admit, the evidence seemed damning—especially considering the terrible damage that had been done to the Well chamber as well as to the Well itself.
“But she didn’t use the potion,” Kailee finally said, holding up the full wineskin.
“They did find the cap of a second skin in the rubble,” Tynthanal countered. “It seems likely—”
“No,” Kailee interrupted impatiently. “If she’d cast that spell, then everyone in Aaltah should be Rho-blind, and we’re clearly not.”
“Just because she cast it doesn’t mean it worked according to plan. It was not something she could possibly have tested before the fact.”
But Kailee shook her head, certain she was right. “If that’s the case, then why would she have brought two wineskins with identical potions in them to the Well? I’m sure that whatever happened down there did not go according to anyone’s plans, but Mairah did not sabotage the Well.”
Tynthanal’s silence was as eloquent as words.
Chewing on her lip and frowning, Kailee tried to remember some of the more jumbled and nonsensical sections of the notes Tynthanal had read to her. She seemed to remember there being some mention of the element Grae, which was often used to produce antidotes to potions.
And with that thought, suddenly a great many things made sense.
“She was trying to redeem herself,” Kailee announced. She knew that she was talking too fast, making herself sound frantic, if not outright hysterical, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “She wanted to win her way back to Women’s Well, and she thought to do that by closing the Mindseye of everyone in Aaltah, to neutralize Aaltah’s threat.”
There was another eloquent silence.
“Don’t you see?” Kailee asked, a hint of desperation in her voice. “There was some part of the notes that talked about using Grae. If we read that again with what we now know, I bet we’ll find that she was also devising an antidote potion that could be used to undo the damage she planned to cause. She would close the Mindseye of everyone in Aaltah until Women’s Well was safe, and then she would use her antidote to set things back to rights.”
Tynthanal sighed. “I know you liked her, but—
”
“No!” Kailee insisted. “I didn’t just like her, I understood her, which was more than anyone else ever tried to do. I know she was more than capable of malice, and I won’t pretend what she was planning to do was a good thing. The effects on Aaltah and on thousands upon thousands of innocent people would have been devastating. But she would not have planned it if she didn’t believe it was for a good cause, even if her beliefs were misguided. And if she had done it, we would not have found this at the Well.” She held up the wineskin. “And we also would have found bodies. I don’t know what actually happened, but it was not what Mairah intended. And if we read the notes again with our new understanding, we may well learn a great deal more.”
Tynthanal reached up and scrubbed a hand through his hair, which Kailee had come to recognize as his favorite nervous gesture. She fully expected him to make another attempt to convince her that Mairah had been an evil bitch who had nothing but spite in her heart, for him to dismiss her arguments as being nothing but feminine sentimentality. But it turned out she was not giving her husband enough credit.
“Very well,” he said. “Let’s go through the notes again. One way or another, we’re going to figure this out.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Corlin stood in the mess hall and contemplated his options, none of which was appealing. The rest of the first-years had been relegated to a set of tables at the very rear of the hall. He’d arrived late to the midday meal, but doing so had been a conscious decision, as he’d hoped to avoid the inevitable jockeying for position that occurred when the cadets lined up to get their food. He’d arrived so late, in fact, that he found himself behind even Rafetyn, the two of them getting the dregs that their fellow cadets had already picked over.
Rafetyn was even now approaching the most sparsely populated table, his shoulders stiff with tension. Corlin shook his head. The rest of the first-years were a miserable lot. They could have left the table empty to start with—there was plenty of room for the four boys at the table to find places elsewhere—but instead they made the grand show of sitting at the empty table so they could all dramatically get up and move when Rafetyn sat down at the other end of it.