Natly noted the blush, narrowing her eyes knowingly. Lonen had likely polished all those bed skills, those many clever tricks of his, with this woman. Once that realization might have made Oria jealous, but not now. To have had Lonen in her bed and lost him…Oria could only feel sorry for Natly, which the Destrye woman would not abide.
“I think he’s worse,” Natly finally said, her tone far less brash, and Oria recalled herself to the important matters at hand. Natly even stepped aside, not quite offering Oria the courtesy of acknowledging her rank, but making way for them both to observe Nolan. “I stayed until late last night and have been here a few hours. I don’t think he’s slept at all.”
Nolan seized the iron grate barring the cell, shouting incoherently, eyes glassy and wild.
“Did you sleep much?” Oria asked without thinking, then wished she could take back the inconsiderate words.
“I couldn’t,” Natly bit out, her voice and spiky emotions daring Oria to say anything more.
“Nolan is fortunate in your devotion,” Oria said instead.
That threw Natly off course, and she paused, reeling back whatever words she’d been poised to hurl at Oria. She gazed at Nolan with a strange expression on her face, her emotions a tangible snarl of worry, anger, fear—and love?
“I loved him once,” Natly said, confirming it. “Long ago. Forever ago, it feels like. He didn’t love me, but at least he wanted me.” Rather than the brash, confidently aggressive woman Natly had presented herself as before, she sounded small in that moment, even forlorn. “Even after he returned, and Lonen… was with you, I offered to be his lover—we’d always been good together that way—and he ignored me. As if that part of him had died. I hate what’s become of him.”
The way Nolan’s once-handsome face contorted in his insane ire, spittle flecking his filthy beard, Oria didn’t blame Natly a bit. She couldn’t imagine seeing Lonen in such a state. And it was all her people’s fault. Whoever had turned Nolan’s mind—Oria’s brother Yar or someone else—the guilt belonged to Bára.
“I’m going to help him,” she told Natly, setting the resolve in herself as she said the words. “Maybe you should go rest. Come back later and—”
“You can give me orders,” Natly said in a flat, malicious voice, all softness gone. “Because you are Queen of Dru now, and I’ll obey. I won’t give you reason to have me exiled for disloyalty. But don’t pretend that you care a fig for me.” She gathered her skirts and strode off in a brisk, athletic stride, jewelry chiming as she went.
“Good riddance, I say,” Chuffta remarked. “She makes my ears hurt.”
“How can she make your ears hurt when you can’t literally hear her.”
“I don’t know. She just does.”
Privately Oria had to agree that the area felt calmer without Natly’s prickly presence—which was saying something given Nolan’s noisy behavior—though she also felt petty thinking it. Natly had suffered a great deal and lost her planned future. Oria should try to be more generous in her thoughts. She sat on the stool Natly had vacated and cleared her mind. Lately she’d been drawing on the sensations of flying to get there, evoking that calm, in-the-moment peacefulness of simply existing in the world. Back in Bára, Chuffta had helped her meditate by guiding her into trances that at least mimicked hwil.
Now she found that she could slip into that state—not hwil, which never had made sense to her—but a place of being, in the most profound and basic sense; a point of equilibrium, a still, quiet place she’d found in the inferno of the derkesthai cavern. Lonen’s delicious torment had brought her to a similar place, one where she accepted the flow of existing without trying to control it. As if she had immense wings like Chuffta’s, she soared on the currents of the wild magic.
Once those unpredictable currents had destabilized her, dragging her under and drowning conscious thought, driving her nearly insane. When she’d begun using the ancient mask of her ancestress, which she and Lonen had dug out of the unnamed sorceress’s tomb, the magical artifact had focused and exacerbated the effect—to the point that it had nearly killed her. Lonen had overreacted, wanting to take it from her. But after the trials with the derkesthai, Oria felt confident she could use the mask effectively, with no damage to herself.
But she kept the mask out of Lonen’s sight anyway. He hadn’t mentioned it since they had found each other again—possibly with so much on his mind, he’d forgotten about it, or thought she’d lost it in the molten lakes of the derkesthai caverns—so she hadn’t brought it to his attention. If they took the war back to Bára, then she would need to have the mask in hand. She and Lonen could fight about it then.
For the moment, she’d hold the mask in reserve. She held on to that steady core of balanced self, sailing with the magic, absorbing it into herself and becoming one with it. Not helplessly tossed about, but integrated.
One with the flow of the magic of the world, she moved the flow of it with her. If she let herself, she could spend hours distracted by the rivers and streams of different kinds of magic, each with its own particular quality. They’d be different scents or flavors, if magic was chemical. Or colors, if magic flows were a visible thing. They’d be different notes in a song if magic could be heard, the melodies and harmonies related to the source of that magic.
Gradually, however, she’d begun to learn to accept magic as its own thing. She didn’t perceive it with the same parts of herself that smelled, saw, or heard things. It could be that the part of herself that sensed, drew in, and manipulated magic had nothing to do with her physical body at all. Thus, comparing her magical senses to physical ones would only lead her down false paths.
She’d been mulling this, contemplating it in the last days while flying on Chuffta and distracting herself from anticipating the wedding. That had been a good event, no doubt about it, but it felt good to have their personal lives settled, and their political ones, too. Now she could concentrate on her sorcery.
And her first big project: finding the magical corruption in Nolan.
Removing it would be the second ambitious project.
In the still place, she shut out her physical senses, aware only of the world formed entirely of magic. There, Nolan’s shouted epithets didn’t exist, nor did the hard stool or the chill, dank air of the dungeons. Even she didn’t exist, exactly, nor did Chuffta, but they were together, swimming in an endless sea of magic.
“Or flying.”
“Yes. I’m going to look in a different place this time. Tell me what you notice.”
When she’d tried before, she’d looked into Nolan’s mind, the way she read Lonen’s thoughts or sensed the wordless images from Buttercup. With no time to spend with Nolan the day before, and lots of time to mull while all the ladies decorated her for the wedding, she’d realized that Yar—or whatever sorcerer had worked this magic to poison Nolan’s thoughts—would predict that Oria could read them.
Till now she’d thought that Yar assumed her to be dead. A reasonable assumption, since no sorceress had survived long outside of the walls of her city and its sustaining source of sgath. She herself had thought she’d die. Likely she would have, if not for Lonen’s stubborn determination to save her life, and his ridiculous optimism that he could thwart everything the Bárans knew about how sgath and the wild magic worked.
Never mind that he’d turned out to be right.
Oria had realized that whatever opened Nolan’s mind to Báran influence could be a two-way connection. The golems could also operate that way. The silicate constructs were given packets of sgath to animate them and instructions to follow, but Oria could receive and well as send through her magic portals. Surely a sorcerer could, too. Which might mean that Yar had been aware that Oria had survived ever since the Golems attacked her and Lonen in the desert. If so, he might’ve gained even more information once Nolan found them at the borders of Dru.
Worst of all, he might now know everything Nolan knew about Dru and the Destrye.
; That realization changed nothing—they could hardly prepare for attack any more than they had—so she hadn’t mentioned this possibility to Lonen. Not yet. Not until she tested her theory. If Yar had anticipated that Oria would read Nolan’s thoughts, then the taint lay somewhere Yar believed Oria couldn’t access.
So, this time, instead of looking in Nolan’s chaotic thoughts—an unpleasant experience, regardless—she looked at other parts of his being. Particularly the masculine aspects. Yar wouldn’t easily relinquish his ideas of the superiority of male grien and the sorcerers who wielded it. Even though he’d personally witnessed Oria using grien, active magic supposedly beyond the reach of women, that self-absorbed and self-congratulatory ego of his would blind him to the truth. She was gambling that he’d consider anything male beyond her ability to comprehend.
Sifting through Nolan’s masculine nature, she found it grounded in the physical body. From there the personality stemmed, partly shaped by the physical, partly by the non-physical. To her surprise, she found that the eternal aspect of Nolan—that which had existed before his birth and which would move on following the death of his body—was neither male nor female.
“This could explain why you can access both sgath and grien,” Chuffta noted quietly, observing along with her. “You’ve found that the world of magic exists beyond the physical. If you are not your body, then your use of magic is neither male nor female.”
“Balance in all things,” she remembered the Great One trying to explain. “Finding the point of equilibrium could mean between masculine and feminine also.”
He agreed, wordless in their connection in this space.
She moved into the parts of Nolan’s identity where his sense of himself as a man resided. And there, she found what she sought.
~ 7 ~
“Explain that again,” Lonen told Oria, wondering to himself if he’d heard correctly.
Oria huffed out a breath in exasperation, which made her full breasts—nicely displayed in the pretty gown her ladies had dressed her in—rise and fall enticingly. Not something that helped his concentration on the conversation. When Oria had asked to have their midday meal in private, in their chambers, and he’d assumed she had more sex on her mind. But no, she wanted to talk about his brother.
“I’ve already explained it twice,” she replied crisply, narrowing her eyes at him. “Focus on what I’m saying, not on my breasts.”
He grinned at her, unrepentant. “They’re beautiful breasts, and delicious. I’d like to have my mouth on them.”
“I shouldn’t have suggested a private meal here,” she said with rueful resignation. “I wanted a confidential conversation with the king, not a tryst with the man.”
“All right, all right,” he conceded. With an effort, he wrenched his mind from salacious fantasies and thought through what Oria had explained about Nolan’s state of mind. At least thinking about his crazed brother and his backstabbing treachery, regardless of the reasons for it, had the salutary effect of quenching his desire.
“So, if I understand correctly, you found magic that you associate with that of the Báran sorcerers, though not Yar specifically, and it’s attached to Nolan in his male sexuality?”
Oria beamed at him like he was a prize student. “You were listening! That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Hmm. Though it still didn’t make any sense. “Are you asking me to cut off my brother’s balls?”
She burst out laughing. “No! Not a bit of it. That’s the physical. I’m talking about the non-physical.”
“Some of us, like your loving husband,” he said, pointing his eating knife at himself, “have only the physical world to deal with.”
“Is that right?” she replied archly. “What about Arill?”
“She’s a goddess.”
“Does She exist physically?”
“Well, no, but—”
“What about the healers in Arill’s service, like Baeltya and your mother—is their healing magic a physical thing?”
She was making his head hurt. What came of marrying a sorceress, no doubt. “Yes,” he decided. “Because I can feel it, therefore it exists physically.”
“Can you touch the healing magic? Smell it, see it, hear it?”
“No,” he conceded. “But it obviously exists, because it has an effect.”
“Exactly,” she pounced on the point. “You feel the effects of the healing, but not the magic that induces the healing, because that exists on a non-physical plane of reality.”
He nearly asked if it counted as “reality” if it didn’t exist physically, but Oria looked so earnest in her explanation, and so excited about her discovery, that he didn’t have the heart to tease her about it. He also still didn’t know what tree she was climbing. “Oria, my love, can you indulge your barbarian of a husband and reduce this discussion to what actions we can take? Whatever we need to do to fix Nolan, I want to do.”
“Well, that’s just it,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure we should.”
He reined in the surge of anger that she’d suggest such a thing—especially since her calm expression and sparkling gaze held no hint of malice or revenge. “Then what?” he asked simply, pushing his empty plate aside and leaning his forearms on the table.
She hesitated, a line forming between her brows. “You won’t like this part.”
Oh, wonderful. As if he’d liked any of this. “Say it anyway,” he said, as calmly as he could.
As she explained her theory, however, that the magically implanted control that guided Nolan’s thoughts and actions might actually be a conduit that linked everything Nolan experienced back to a sorcerer in Yar, his rage grew. His fingers itched for his iron battle-axe, leaning against the wall nearby, even though this particular enemy—this non-physical thing Oria spoke of—couldn’t be hacked apart. It would ease him to have the axe in his hands. He’d agreed to wear the crown of Dru again, but nothing could make him take up his father’s sword, the one Nolan had nearly killed him with. He trusted the battle-axe like he trusted his warhorse, Buttercup, like he trusted Oria.
“Lonen.” Oria leaned on the table, too, copper gaze intent, a whisper of her essence in his mind drawing him out of his dark thoughts.
He blinked away the red haze. “So he’s a spy. All the time that he accused you of being a spy for the enemy, accused me of being subverted by you, under your control, he was the one. All this time, working to destroy us.”
She smiled, crooked and close-lipped, both wry and sorrowful. “It’s a clever way to divert suspicion—accuse others of the very thing you’re guilty of.”
“I could kill him for this,” Lonen snarled, all those conversations with Nolan rolling through his head, the plans to repair the aqueducts, their strategy to plant crops in widely varying places and scatter livestock herds so that if one portion met with destruction, they might still have another… all known to the enemy. A few of the Trom dragons deployed to the right places and within the space of an hour they could lose everything, be utterly and finally destroyed.
Oria covered his hand with hers, small and delicate, but fiercely strong. “It’s not his fault, Lonen. Don’t kill him for that.”
“Right. I’ll just cut off his balls then,” he suggested, intending it as a joke, though it came out far too lethal sounding.
“He didn’t consciously betray you,” Oria insisted.
“You’re sure of that?”
She nodded, absolutely serious. “It’s not in his mind at all. Probably to him it feels like he’s in a dream. If he’s aware at all.”
“He acted like himself, for a while.”
“Do you want to know what I think they did to him, what happened?”
“Will I understand?” he retorted grimly.
Oria laughed and rolled her eyes. “You may be a hulking brute of a barbarian, husband of mine, but I happen to know what a sharp mind you have inside that thick skull. Of course you’ll understand, as long as you’re not thinking ab
out sex instead,” she added with a teasing note.
Sex, and happy topics in general, had fled far from his mind. He’d grown used to sorcery, being around Oria—but like her, the magic she embodied seemed full of light and the beauty of nature. Things he understood and loved about the world. This conversation… it reminded him of how he used to feel about Báran magic, ground under by the odious stuff. “All right.” He sighed, bracing himself. “Explain.”
“What would you be thinking about if I came over there, knelt down, and took your cock in my mouth?” she asked.
He paused, disconcerted—and immediately aroused. They hadn’t done that yet, her mouth, hot, wet, and tight on his intimate flesh. “I thought you didn’t want me to think about sex.”
“Where did your mind go just now?” she asked seriously, not flirting at all.
“You know perfectly well, sorceress,” he growled at her. “Since you can read my mind, you know how much I want that.”
“Could feel it? Imagine me on my knees in front of you?”
His cock had grown so hard he had to adjust it, giving her a wry glance as he did. “Yes.”
“Even though it wasn’t real,” she pressed the point.
“Even so,” he agreed.
“So, even though we’re having a very serious conversation about something critically important to you on several levels, with a few words I managed to divert your thoughts to something else entirely.”
“Something that’s never entirely far from my thoughts to begin with,” he pointed out. Especially with her in the room. Perhaps one day this hunger for her would relent, but the day after their wedding? Not likely. “Is there a point to this game of yours, Oria?”
“Don’t get testy with me. Of course there’s a point. I played on your male sexuality to influence the direction of your thoughts, and by saying only a few words.”
“A few extraordinarily enticing words,” he felt he had to say.
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