The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Elae amassed in voluminous clouds as Baelfeir climbed the hill. His every step dragged the third beneath it. His paces marked not feet but time, his gaze not the distance to the hilltop but into the future, where the sa’reyth hovered ephemerally.

  Minutes passed beneath long strides, such that as he rounded the rise, the tents of the sa’reyth lay in view.

  He blew the canvas drapes wide to pass unhindered within. Vaile posed a cold weight in his arms. He had no idea if he’d be able to draw her back from oblivion.

  Zanthyrs only sought the stars when existence became a dull monotone. In the few moons since his return, he’d learned how much had changed during his absence; yet he still wouldn’t have believed that Vaile could abandon him for oblivion’s stars—no matter how many millennial seas separated their shores.

  The inside of the tents smelled like the interior of the sun. Drachwyr. But no dragons guarded the sanctuary that night.

  Baelfeir sought a room free of the imprint of others, and finding one, laid Vaile upon a marble-framed bed crafted in the style of the old-time tsars of Ravestan. He braced arms to either side of her body and pressed his forehead against hers. Sharing her energy then, he sought the starpoints she’d framed around the sa’reyth.

  It was the fastest way to find her consciousness.

  Her starpoints were still holding the sa’reyth in the future, still tied to her lifeforce...faint though it had become. He matched those starpoints and merged with Vaile’s universe.

  Then he summoned elae and with a thought, stopped time around them both.

  The earth ceased its pull upon the tides of his awareness.

  Baelfeir sat back and gazed at the only being to whom he’d ever pledged his heart. She wouldn’t thank him for what he intended.

  He touched two fingers to Vaile’s cold lips, representatives of a phantom kiss, and set to work.

  Fifty-eight

  “Those who know love, know truth beyond expression.”

  –The Fire Princess Ysolde Remalkhen

  A protective curtain of elae’s fourth strand gleamed with iridescence all around Tanis and the others as Princess Gemina Anshirali of Pashmir shared her story.

  She’d taken a seat at one end of the small couch and had her body angled towards Pelas, who occupied the other end with an arm draped across the back, his fingers lying long towards her. Their body language would’ve betrayed their mutual feelings even had they not both been radiating them so strongly. Tanis and the Eltanese were sitting about as far away as the room and politeness would allow, just because they felt like such intruders.

  Gemina took a moment to organize her thoughts, shifting through scarves of memory, searching for the right one to don, the right place to begin.

  Her mind was utterly transparent to Tanis. Clearly she’d never been trained to guard her thoughts. This same candor infused her manner as she spoke. For a woman living in a hostile court, she seemed to find trust readily; or perhaps she merely trusted Pelas so deeply that she could be brave when in his presence.

  “The years you spent with my brother changed him,” Gemina told Pelas, glancing up beneath a fringe of dark lashes surrounding her gemstone eyes. “I watched it happening, as I told you at the time, but it became even more apparent after you left us. That fountain you carved for him, of which he’d once been so proud, became a source of shame. Gabriel would spend hours contemplating it.”

  A slight furrow narrowed her brow, and she offered a tragic sort of smile. “Luftan grew up in the shadow of that fountain. Gabriel would take him often to visit it. The guard would clear the plaza—sometimes for the entire afternoon—and Gabriel would move his chair with the shade or the sun, depending on his mood, and contemplate how he might change the future he saw in your sculpture while Luftan splashed and swam in its pools.

  “Near the end of his reign, Gabriel began drafting a new set of codes for our land, establishing greater rights for Adepts.” She leaned and placed a hand on Pelas’s knee, her gaze both cautionary and entreating. “He didn’t just want to change things in our domain but for all of Avatar. He even traveled to Faroqhar once, in search of you, claiming he wanted your input, though I know he simply yearned to see you again, to show you how he’d changed.”

  She dropped her gaze to her hands, and her thoughts stilled. After a moment, she pressed her thumb and middle finger to her temples. A pained expression claimed her features, as though she battled a deep and inconsolable grief, but when she dropped her hand to her lap and returned her gaze to Pelas, her aqua eyes were clear.

  “When Luftan reached his majority, Gabriel sent him to the Fire Courts of Kell Ashkelan as his ambassador and advocate, hoping Luftan could gain support for his ideas. Unfortunately, the time Luftan spent there had the opposite effect.”

  A sudden fire flamed her cheeks. “You cannot imagine the decadence of those courts, Immanuel. Luftan was a good son, but he couldn’t escape the Fire Kings’ gravity. He returned to us enmeshed in the same hardened shell of prejudice as the other Furies. Gabriel was heartbroken. I believe this betrayal, which he could never forgive, speeded his death.”

  Pelas’s eyes were molten bronze, darkened by loss. He asked with a quiet and compassionate intimacy, “What happened to Gabriel?”

  She gave a resigned smile. “He hardly looked forty and five, yet his body had seen more than eighty years, Immanuel, when the glow of your love finally wore off.” She gave a helpless shrug. “It was like his organs suddenly realized their age. Luftan returned from the Fire Courts to watch his father die. A father who appeared only ten years his senior, a man yet in his prime. This was the apparent betrayal that Luftan could never forgive. He blamed Gabriel for submitting to death and swore he would never do the same.”

  For all Gemina’s forthrightness in these confessions, Tanis perceived something important that she wasn’t telling them, a chord of missing truth that vibrated all the more strongly whenever she mentioned Luftan.

  Pelas perceived it, too. “Luftan must be Gabriel’s...fourth son?” he said gently. “I don’t recall him. How is it he inherited Gabriel’s rule?”

  Gemina eyed him with both pique bristling at his perceptiveness and resignation that of course, he would miss nothing. Regret threaded between these in her thoughts.

  She closed her eyes and gave a lengthy sigh, redolent of inevitability. When she lifted her gaze to meet his again, her emotions were aflutter. “Luftan,” she said with significance underscoring her regret, “was born three moons shy of a year after you left.”

  Pelas exhaled a slow breath. “Oh, Gemina...”

  She looked away from him, battling back an emotional frenzy—longing, desire and guilt, all of it so twisted that she looked like she could barely breathe around it.

  “We both wanted—hoped—he might’ve been your...” but she bit off the words and flung a look at him instead, both pleading and defiant, daring Pelas to find fault with their desires.

  He said gently, “I told you it wasn’t possible for me to sire a child.”

  “You were full of contradictions, Immanuel. Can you blame us?”

  “Never.” His gaze was soft with apology.

  Gemina massaged her forehead. Tanis perceived her hauling in her emotions like a team of sixteen horses. “Well...Fiera knew you were correct. From the moment of his birth, it was apparent that Luftan was Gabriel’s son.”

  She lifted Pelas a look of candid regret. “For want of some shadow of you, Gabriel and I instead had given Luftan an incontrovertible claim over his half-brothers, for by the laws of our land, a child begotten of a Furie’s sister will always take precedence over a child born of his wives.”

  Abruptly she rose from the sofa and walked a few paces away, her hands working each other. When she paused their wringing, Tanis saw them trembling.

  “After Gabriel died, Luftan emulated his father in every way save that which had most mattered to him. Gabriel’s interest in antiquities became Luftan’s passion; his accidental lon
gevity, Luftan’s obsession.

  “He searched high and low for a wielder capable of working the Pattern of Life on his behalf. He interviewed wielders from the Sormitáge, Adepts in the Fire Courts—he even appealed to the Vestian Sorceresy. Everyone told him it couldn’t be done.”

  Gemina spun to fix her gaze on Pelas. “But you see...Luftan had seen his father live to over eighty years without aging. He believed the rest of them to be fools.”

  She started pacing in the space between the bed and the living area, her heels falling softly on the marble floor, silk skirts rustling with faint whispers. “Luftan took those of his father’s views that most suited his interests and discarded the rest, widening the discrepancy in our social strata as he formed his own paradoxical ideology. His father had wanted him to embrace Adepts as equals. Luftan used this to invite the Vestian Sorceresy into our city—”

  She spun Pelas a look of incredulous dismay. “He paid them lavish fees to develop the collars you see everywhere. Luftan hoped to learn the secret to immortality from the Adepts he bound. He required all of them to work the Pattern of Life and has spent years studying them via the bond the collars establish. But the worst of it is that the collars have spread, Immanuel. Like a plague.”

  Gemina pressed hands to her flushed cheeks. Her voice was strained now, her breath continuously catching. “Every Furie within a hundred leagues now uses the collars on their Adepts. Luftan’s obsession has resulted in a total subjugation of the race his father only wanted to free.”

  She ran a marbled gaze across all of them, striated with outrage, shadowed by grief. “Now he’s advanced to these galas, and...darker permutations of the same pursuit. The energy fields you walked through are another Sorceresy creation undertaken on my nephew’s behalf,” and the contempt evident in her tone hit all of them with an electric pulse. “They screen for anything unusual about an Adept. Any such flagged by the veil are later invited to stay as my nephew’s guests. Some are beguiled, taken as lovers and quickly addicted to the lifestyle if not to the poppies whose milk is so abused by our nobility. Other Adepts may simply be held here, collared and kept for study, some of them so drugged they no longer recall their names.”

  As if exhausted of words as much as the fortitude to speak them, Gemina turned to face them, pressed her palms together and touched them to her lips. “This cannot become Gabriel’s legacy, Immanuel.” Tanis perceived her heart clenching around this thought. “But I...” she exhaled a tremulous breath and dragged her eyes up to meet Pelas’s sympathetic gaze, “I am helpless to stop it.”

  Silence followed her confession. A silence of understanding, of mutual outrage, of shared frustration over how to help her, or even if they should.

  She took their silence for what it was: an offering of solidarity, sparse recompense for her loss, acknowledgement of her grief.

  When no one seemed to know what to say, Gemina drew in her breath, and her dauntless self-possession resurfaced. “So you see why you must leave immediately. Luftan will want to know how you achieved immortality. He will hold you here if he can—and he has many ways of ensuring that he can.”

  Pelas shifted a contemplative gaze to Tanis. What is Balance telling you?

  Tanis arched brows. I think we have to help her regardless of what Balance might be telling me.

  Pelas cast his agreement with a glance. He stood and walked to Gemina, took her face gently and kissed her.

  I would have given you and Gabriel a dozen children if I could have.

  Tanis heard this thought as clearly as Gemina surely did.

  She caught her breath in the kiss and withdrew, staring open-mouthed at him. Tanis suspected that Pelas had never addressed her with his thoughts, never shown her even a glimmer of his true power. It was telling of the bond they’d forged that she loved him as much as she did without the faintest idea of who and what he really was.

  Now her thoughts tumbled headlong into fear, for she became certain of what she’d only suspected before.

  “You should go.” She struggled to regain her composure.

  Pelas looked to the Eltanese. “Are any of you opposed to helping here?”

  “Not opposed,” Gadovan said cautiously. “How do you want to go about it?”

  Gemina’s eyes flicked from one Adept to the next. “With all due respect, there are five of you.”

  Pelas returned calmly, “Gemina, you have no idea what we’re capable of.”

  She shook her head. “My nephew has legions at his command—wielders and blood-mages and a demon—” she broke off with a curse, half-uttered beneath her breath.

  Tanis said, “We know about the shaytan’jinn. He doesn’t present a problem for us.”

  Gemina gaped at him and whispered, “How can you know what no one knows?”

  “An ally of ours battled one of Luftan’s agents in Tambarré,” Tanis told her, recalling the memory as Ean had recalled it to him. “The agent told our ally that she was taking the shaytan’jinn for the Sorceresy to study, and our ally believed her, but I saw his memory as he was recounting the conversation to me, and her statement was, in fact, a lie.”

  He can tell a truth while someone else is telling the bloody story? Jude looked half incredulous and half mortified.

  Mat cast him an irritated glance.

  “In fact, the agent was working for the Khashathra-pāvan,” Tanis said. “The Furie had sent her to acquire an eidola for him, though I cannot imagine why he wanted it.”

  Gemina’s startled gaze flicked across all of them. “Luftan’s mages are studying it. More fuel for his obsessive quest for immortality.”

  Pelas took Gemina’s hand and guided her back to the couch, where he sat close beside her, their legs touching. He pressed a kiss to her fingers. “Give us a minute to confer.”

  Then he opened a mental channel to all of them. Eliminating the Furie is an option, but I’m not sure it’s the right one.

  I agree, Gadovan returned. The Council has regulations about such intervention. We have to stay safely within those boundaries or incur the Council’s wrath as well as that of Balance itself.

  Pelas leaned elbows on his knees and fixed his gaze on the knights. We want the Adepts freed, not just one tyrant replaced with another...

  While they rapidly proposed and debated, Tanis watched Gemina. Her aqua eyes remained on Pelas while her thoughts replayed memories of the three of them together, the happiest years of her life.

  She’d adored Immanuel nearly as much as her brother and had never begrudged either man in those times when Immanuel chose Gabriel’s bed over hers. When Gabriel had invited her to share their bed too, she could no more deny him than she could’ve denied Immanuel.

  Her heart still maintained the shape of the endless knot the three of them had woven. At the empty center of this entwined circle lay their lost hopes, that heartbreaking moment when she and Gabriel had realized that the child they’d been dreaming of did not belong to Immanuel.

  To Gemina, it was as if she’d lost that child of her dreams. He lay stillborn in her memory, and the child that had emerged mewling from her womb, a changeling.

  All of these thoughts, Tanis read of the princess without trying—in many ways trying not to—but she wanted these heartbreaks known. They were a confession too long denied, a burden of consequence too weighty to bear now that the man who had inspired such love was once more sitting beside her.

  Farshideh had always said the world was unfair to lovers.

  The others were exploring battle scenarios. Between Pelas and the three Paladin Knights, all of whom could wield the fifth while protected behind impenetrable armor formed of all the strands of elae, they packed some serious fighting power. But Tanis didn’t think overwhelming force was the solution they needed.

  While the others debated feints and counterstrokes, Tanis asked the princess, “How does the necklace work? The one he made you wear?”

  She slowly reeled in her thoughts of the past to focus on him in the present. �
��It allows Luftan to listen to my conversations, as you might’ve guessed, and enables his men to find me no matter where I am. Luftan claims it’s for my protection, but I’m not a fool.”

  “How is it made? Are the patterns in the placement of the stones, or on the stones themselves?”

  “The stones are incidental. It’s the metal threading through them that carries elae. In my understanding, the Sorceresy uses this same metal in their tattoos.”

  Upon this statement, Tanis felt a surge of hope. “Are all of the Adept collars made with the same metal?”

  “Yes.” She looked bewildered. “Does that matter?”

  Hope transformed into crystalline certainty.

  Not waiting for a break in the others’ conversation, Tanis announced, “Let’s give him what he wants.”

  They all fell silent, looking at him.

  Mat scrubbed at his jaw. His gaze darted to Gemina. “I mean no offense, my lady,” and back to Tanis, “but Tanis...giving this guy immortality?”

  “You’d have to waken him as an Adept first, wouldn’t you?” Jude asked. “Can that even be done?”

  “I can do it,” Pelas murmured, to which Gemina caught her breath.

  “By the Time Fathers...I think I see where you’re heading with this idea, Tanis.” Gadovan fixed a blatantly wondering gaze on the lad that made him really pleased and slightly embarrassed at the same time.

  “I’m not sure that I do,” Pelas said. What absurdly dangerous plan have you concocted for us this time, little spy?

  Tanis showed Pelas in a flurry of jumbled thoughts, doing his best to sort them into some semblance of order as they came.

  Once Tanis had laid it all out, an approving half-smile tugged at one corner of his bond-brother’s mouth. That’s bold, even for you, Tanis.

  Tanis grinned. Will you do it?

  Pelas’s copper gaze became molten. Need you really ask?