Mother of All

by Jenna Glass

  Delnamal gave the man what was no doubt meant to be a soothing smile, but though his facial muscles mimicked the expression effortlessly, there was not a speck of warmth to be seen in his sunken eyes. “There is nothing to worry about,” he told his honor guardsman. “I just want to show His Highness something that is not fit for any but royal eyes.”

  That Bandar was not convinced by the attempt at reassurance was clear from his expression, and Draios couldn’t help noticing the nervous look the man shot in his direction. The look begged Draios to intervene on his behalf, and yet Draios saw no reason why he should do so. The man was obviously a disgrace to his uniform, and if Delnamal’s demonstration should cause him pain, then it was his due for cowardice and drunkenness while on duty.

  Seeing no path to escape, Bandar did as he was ordered and closed his eyes. His entire body was tight with tension, and there was a visible sheen of sweat on his brow.

  As soon as the guardsman’s eyes were closed, Delnamal opened his Mindseye. Leaning heavily on the cane in his left hand, he reached out into the air in front of him until his fingertips made contact with Bandar’s chest.

  Bandar jumped in surprise, his eyes popping open, a startled bleat escaping his lips. He took one hasty step backward, then froze in his tracks.

  Delnamal’s reaching hand closed on something. Something Draios could not see, so it had to be an element. Draios debated opening his own Mindseye, but decided quickly that he did not want to see Delnamal’s unholy aura again.

  Bandar cried out in what sounded like pain, although Delnamal was no longer touching him. His body jerked backward, and if Draios could not see with his own eyes that the man was not bound, he would have thought him tied in place. Bandar struggled against those invisible bonds, the cry of pain turning into a full-throated wail.

  Delnamal’s hand jerked suddenly, and the wail was abruptly silenced.

  Bandar’s body fell to the floor in a heap. Delnamal laughed softly, pressing his clasped hand against his own breast as his shoulders straightened and he tossed the cane aside.

  * * *

  —

  Kailee pushed the remains of her lunch to the side and reached for the primer she’d already been poring over for hours. The elemental ink Tynthanal had invented—and that the grand magus had perfected—curved and swooped over the pages, and Kailee suspected her interest in learning this once-impossible skill was becoming something of an obsession.

  It had taken several lessons before she’d made sense of how the various symbols represented sounds, but Tynthanal was a benevolent and patient teacher—even though their lessons stretched late into the night and left him with precious little sleep. Still, she knew there were better ways for a prince regent to spend his time, and she had now gained enough skill to carry on learning without him. By the time he returned to the royal apartments tonight, she would have amassed a wealth of questions to ask him, but he assured her she was learning at an impressive pace.

  With a quill and a bottle of elemental ink, she began painstakingly copying the next lesson in the primer, for there was no point, in her mind, of learning to read without learning to write at the same time.

  She was cleaning up an inelegant blot of ink when the door to the queen’s parlor opened, startling her enough to nearly overturn the whole ink pot. Blushing, she steadied the ink pot and pushed back her chair.

  Her Mindsight did not allow her to distinguish individual auras; however, she was so thoroughly familiar with the magic items Tynthanal habitually wore and carried that she recognized him.

  “Tynthanal!” she cried in surprise and perhaps just a little alarm. This was the first time since he’d taken office as regent that he’d shown up to the apartments while the sun was still up. “What are you doing here at this hour?” Her voice sounded a little shrill to her own ears.

  “Nothing bad has happened,” he assured her. “It’s just that I learned some information that I thought you would like to know immediately. Do you have a moment?”

  She appreciated the politeness of assuming she had a busy schedule in which she might have trouble finding time, although the evidence to the contrary was laid out on the table before her. She thought guiltily that it was untidy of her not to have rung for a maid to remove the remains of her luncheon.

  But by the time Tynthanal had finished telling her about the vision that had been related to him by the seer from Rhozinolm, the luncheon dishes were the least of her concerns. She sat in silence for a long moment as she suffered a pang of grief over Mairah’s death. How she wished she’d succeeded in persuading Mairah to stay in Women’s Well before it had been too late!

  “I’m sorry about Mairahsol,” Tynthanal said with his customary gentleness.

  Kailee waved that off. “I was under no illusion that she had somehow survived.”

  “I know. But you didn’t know she’d died like that.”

  Kailee had him explain the vision one more time, then nodded. She was unquestionably saddened by Mairah’s death, but she believed now that her faith in her friend had been at least partially vindicated. It seemed that while Mairah had gone to the Well with the purpose of triggering her spell to close the Mindseye of everyone in Aaltah, what she had ended up doing instead was saving the kingdom from what she believed would be a terrible disaster.

  “You realize this means Mairah gave her life to stop Melcor’s Kai from damaging Aaltah’s Well, don’t you?” she asked, all but daring Tynthanal to contradict her. “We at least know that much from having read her notes.”

  “Assuming those notes are accurate,” he reminded her. “She was, after all, writing them in such a way as to convince Delnamal that she was genuinely trying to undo the Blessing, and neither one of us believes that was the truth.”

  She huffed impatiently. “You are determined to paint her as the villain, no matter what the evidence tells you.”

  “I’m merely determined not to make up my mind prematurely,” he countered. “Do you have a theory as to what exactly Mairahsol was trying to accomplish by sacrificing herself?”

  Kailee thought back to everything they had learned from the notes, frowning in concentration. There had been so much in there that she was certain were patent falsehoods, and also much that seemed to be entirely irrelevent. But there was that one section of the notes that had mentioned using the element Grae, although it hadn’t been clear in the context just what that Grae was for.

  “I’m sure Mairah had designed an antidote to undo the Mindseye spell she was planning to cast on the Well,” she mused out loud. “And from what I learned at the Women’s Well Academy, I gather many antidotes to potions are delivered in the form of a purgative of some sort.”

  She heard the sharp hiss of a quickly intaken breath, and knew that Tynthanal was finally thinking along the same lines as she.

  “If the spell to close the Mindseye needed to be triggered by sacrificial Kai,” he said, “then it stands to reason that the antidote would need to be triggered the same way.”

  Kailee nodded, sure they now had the answer. “Mairah meant to cast the Mindseye spell, and the other woman who was in the Well chamber with her was meant to be the sacrifice. However, she didn’t follow her script.”

  “Melcor was fatally wounded instead, and he and the woman fell into the Well,” Tynthanal continued.

  “Mairah then used her purgative potion—triggered by her own sacrifice—to try to purge Melcor’s Kai before it could damage the Well.”

  “And yet,” Tynthanal said, “the Well is still damaged in ways it is hard to comprehend. And I’m not sure anything we’ve learned tells us how to fix it.”

  “I’d venture a guess that the Well is damaged because of some unintended consequence of the spell Mairah cast,” Kailee said. “Perhaps it purged more than it was supposed to? Or perhaps the damage already caused by Melcor’s Kai was irreversible, and Mair
ah’s spell merely kept it from getting worse.”

  “Perhaps,” Tynthanal said, though he didn’t sound especially convinced.

  Kailee’s enthusiasm dimmed. “Can you at least concede the possibility that she gave her life to try to save Aaltah’s Well, even in the face of a great deal of mistreatment that must have made her hate this place?”

  “I will,” he assured her. “Just as I will concede that whatever damage befell our Well must be laid squarely at Delnamal’s feet, for he is the one who first recklessly endangered it and then fled the scene when it was clear things were going wrong.

  “I still don’t see the good in her that you saw,” he concluded. “But she was clearly more complicated than I gave her credit for, and she very likely saved us all from a much greater disaster.”

  It was not quite the utter exoneration Kailee had been hoping for, but it was a long way from the calumny with which things had started. In all likelihood, Mairah would still be remembered by many as a villain, but perhaps when people learned of her final selfless sacrifice, they would at least allow that she had redeemed herself in the end.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Draios stared at the dead man who lay on the carpet before him, unable to comprehend what he had just seen, and entirely unable to pinpoint how he felt about it. On the one hand, he was no stranger to killing. He was aware that it was wrong, and had performed a penance each time he’d done it, but it had never really felt wrong to him, and it had certainly never upset him in any significant way. So seeing a stranger—one who’d shown himself unworthy of his position, no less—killed before his eyes should not have moved him one way or another.

  Oh, he knew an ordinary man would be moved. But he was not—and had never been—an ordinary man. What was the death of some nobody honor guardsman to him?

  But of course it wasn’t the fact of the death that was so unnerving: it was the method.

  “Wh-what did you do to him?” he found himself stammering. Stammering! Even as a small child he had never exhibited such signs of weakness.

  Delnamal still did not look particularly well—his eyes and cheeks were still sunken, his hands gnarled and all but useless—but there was far more life and strength in his expression, and he stepped to the dead man’s side with no hint of a wobble, the cane lying neglected where it had fallen.

  “I believe that the Creator has gifted me with a very special ability,” Delnamal said, then proceeded to explain to Draios a fantastical, borderline heretical theory on the nature of Kai, and about a new element, which he called Rhokai.

  “Alone among men, I can see that mote of Rhokai,” Delnamal concluded, showing no sign of shame at the hubris of his claim. A slight and sinister smile played along the edges of his mouth. “I can see it in everyone. I can see it in you.”

  Draios had to suppress a shiver, as well as the superstitious instinct to take a step backward. Away from the threat.

  “And because I can see it,” Delnamal continued, “I can take it.” He nudged the body at his feet, watching it flop limply. “When I remove the Rhokai, it shatters, revealing a mote of Kai at its core. And if you were to open your Mindseye again, you would see yet another new mote of Kai hovering about me.”

  Delnamal looked up at him, and Draios could only imagine what the other man saw in his face. Certainly it was more than Draios had any intention of allowing him to see.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Delnamal said with a careless wave of his hand. “I didn’t obtain the other Kai in my aura by killing people. Thanks to the events at Aaltah’s Well, my blood has been infused with a great deal of Rhokai. These Rhokai motes periodically shatter and fuel me—leaving me with all this lovely Kai at my disposal.”

  “It is…unholy,” Draios replied, nearly choking on the response. And immediately wondering if he should have kept it to himself. He had told no one where he was really going, and only his father and a few close advisers even knew Delnamal was alive. If Draios failed to return from this visit, no one would have a hint where to look for him.

  Delnamal nodded sagely. “I thought so, too, at first. No man should possess this kind of power, and I spent many a long night at prayer, begging the Creator to save me from what I thought of as a horror.

  “And in prayer, I realized that my power is meant to be used for good. Something rose out of Aaltah’s Well, something dark and dangerous and impossible. It could have killed me. It should have killed me. So why didn’t it?”

  He looked at Draios inquiringly, for a moment reminding him of a far less benevolent version of his late and unlamented mentor.

  “Because the Creator meant for me to have this power,” Delnamal finished. “He knew it would take more than the ordinary powers of men to undo the abomination the witch unleashed on our world.

  “I believe He has given me some of the powers of the Destroyer. Had I been wiser and stronger and more devout when these powers entered me, I could have ended the Curse right then. But I did not understand what He wanted of me, and my body was too weak from an excess of self-indulgence. I allowed my mother to spirit me out of Aaltah, and that will be a source of shame for the rest of my days.

  “But the power still resides in me, and I now know exactly what I must do. I must return to Aaltah. Return to the Well that was the source of the original Curse. I, and I alone, have the power to undo what was done. But I cannot return to the Well unless and until I retake my rightful throne. And that is where Khalpar comes in.”

  Draios had listened to the entirety of Delnamal’s speech in a state of perplexity and disbelief. His rational mind decried the explanation as the ravings of a madman. But when his mind tried to balk at the absurdity of it, his eyes returned to the dead man lying on the floor. A man who had died for no discernible reason.

  Distantly, Draios was aware that he should be appalled at having witnessed a cold-blooded murder. Instead of listening to anything else the man had to say, he should be finding an excuse to hurry away, to return to the capital and send soldiers to storm the manor and arrest this dangerous creature. Almost more disturbing than his own lack of righteous horror was the realization that Delnamal had somehow read him well enough to know he would not be arrested for this horrific demonstration.

  Delnamal bent and half-lifted the dead man, propping his back against a chair and resting his folded hands on his chest in a dignified pose. Delnamal’s frame looked as frail as ever, and Bandar was not a small man. The wizened, hobbled figure who had met Draios at the door would never have been able to bend down so far, much less manipulate a substantially heavier man into a sitting position.

  “You see that absorbing his Rhokai has made me stronger,” Delnamal said triumphantly. “Just imagine how much stronger I could become as I worked my way through a battlefield. Imagine how many Kai motes I would have at my disposal, and how easily I could replenish my supply. I have as yet had no means to test my theory, but I’d wager my life that no shield spell could keep me from plucking the Rhokai from anyone who dared resist. Our foes would soon flee in terror once they understood what I can do.”

  Fleeing in terror seemed to Draios a most rational option, and yet he found himself rooted to the floor, imagining the scene just as Delnamal described it. Who in his right mind would stand his ground in the face of Delnamal’s powers?

  “I’ve given you a lot to ponder,” Delnamal said. “Take some time to think and pray on it. If you come to believe that I am indeed the Creator’s instrument, as I believe I am, then perhaps we can discuss how best to approach your father and convince him that we must go to war and return me to the Well of Aaltah.”

  Draios nodded, feeling so overwhelmed he could hardly string two coherent thoughts together. He had never truly believed Delnamal had any great power, he realized now. He had come out of some combination of curiosity and rebellion, telling himself he was on a mission from the Creator while simultaneously braced for
what he suspected would be a crushing disappointment. He wasn’t sure what to do in the face of this surprising reality.

  “Yes,” he murmured weakly, licking his lips. “I believe I must spend the rest of the night in fasting and prayer. I have faith that the Creator will let me know what He wants me to do.”

  The words were said with what he hoped sounded like genuine conviction. But in reality, his faith had never felt so shaken as it did right now in the face of what logic told him was an outright abomination.

  * * *

  —

  From the moment Leethan had read Prince Waldmir’s letter saying his youngest daughter, Princess Elwynne, would be paying a visit to the Abbey, she’d known what it meant. Even in Nandel, it was rare for children to be sent to the Abbey. A father possessed of an unwanted girl child typically waited until she shed her first woman’s blood to send her away, but Leethan was aware of more than one occasion when some nobleman’s rebellious daughter was sent to the Abbey for a “visit” to be taught a lesson.

  It was a terrible lesson—the fact that the girl had set foot in the Abbey even temporarily devalued her as a potential bride and increased the chances she would become a spinster, at which point she would be sent back to the Abbey for good. Elwynne was unlikely to face such consequences for being sent to the Abbey—not when she was the sovereign prince’s daughter and so very young—but still Leethan could not fathom what Waldmir was thinking. He had always had a vindictive streak, but she’d never seen it directed at a helpless child before. Had the realization that he would never have a son turned his bitterness into outright cruelty? Or was his malice perhaps directed elsewhere? That seemed the more likely explanation, though Leethan wondered exactly whom it was meant to hurt. There were those in the Abbey who whispered—unwisely, and no longer in Leethan’s hearing after she’d issued a warning designed to terrify them into silence—that Elwynne might not be Waldmir’s daughter after all. For the first time, Leethan wondered if Waldmir might not have the same suspicion.