A Magic of Dawn nc-3

by S L Farrell

  She could hear the offiziers shouting, turning the gardai, facing them westward once more. The tide which had pulled them along slowed, stopped, then began to flow the other way. They stood motionless against the current. Leovic and Niels were still holding her arms, but she could see them watching. “Go,” she told them. “They need you. I’ll follow as best I can.”

  “A’Morce,” Niels protested.

  “Go,” she repeated.

  They left her, running toward one of the chevarittai offiziers. She watched them be gathered up in the rush. Then, far more slowly, limping, she followed. Gardai swarmed past her, shouting. She heard the din of the battle renewed ahead of her, but all the spells seemed to be coming from the Faith’s war-teni and the Numetodo, not from the Westlanders.

  She was standing among the bodies of those who had fallen in the retreat, most in blue and gold. It was difficult to ignore them. The worst were the ones who were not dead but too wounded to walk, who reached out toward her for succor as she passed or were still crawling toward the city. To them, she could only say that help would be coming soon to rescue them-and hope that she was telling them the truth.

  But she was looking for one person in particular.

  She saw a body off to her left and ahead of her-dressed in a green teni’s robes. She thought it might be one of the war-teni, then she saw the face.

  Nico’s face.

  Ignoring her aching legs, she ran to him, sinking down to her knees alongside him. He seemed unharmed: no blood on his robes, his face dirty and dark with old bruises and cuts, but he looked otherwise untouched. “Nico?” she said, rolling him on his back, looking desperately at the robes for a sign of what had hurt him.

  He opened his eyes. He smiled. “Hi, Varina. I guess I was sleeping. Have you seen my matarh?” It was a boy’s voice. A child’s voice. He sat up and glanced around, his eyes widening as he took in the gardai running past shouting and waving their swords; the bodies lying nearby; the fumes and smoke of the battlefield; the trampled earth that had once been a farmer’s field. He pushed himself to a sitting position. “Varina,” he said, his voice trembling with obvious fear. He clutched at her arms. “I’m scared, Varina. Take me home. Please. I don’t want to be here.”

  “Nico, what did you do?”

  He looked frightened at the question, shrinking away from her. “I didn’t do nothing, honest. I just want to go home. I want to see Matarh. I want to see Talis.”

  Varina hugged him. “Nico, Talis and Serafina are… gone.”

  “Where did they go?” he asked. In his eyes there was no mockery, only the innocent question.

  “Nico…” She couldn’t answer him. Varina hugged him again. Whatever Nico had done, however he’d done it, the effort had obviously taken his mind with it. This was no longer the Absolute of the Morellis. This was no longer Nico the great teni. He clung to her like a child to his matarh, and she could feel him shivering with panic and dismay.

  Gardai were still flowing past them; the din of battle and the thundering of war-teni spells was deafening. “Nico, come on,” she said. “Let’s get you out of here. It’s not safe. You can come to my house. Would you like that?”

  He nodded urgently, clinging to her. She pulled him to his feet.

  Together, they stumbled eastward toward the city.

  Atl felt naked and unprotected, his spell-staff impossibly emptied in a few breaths by that terrible spell from the east, and now the battle was suddenly renewed when it was supposed to have ended.

  In victory. In the victory he’d seen. In the victory he’d told the Tecuhtli would be his. He remembered his taat’s vision, the one Niente claimed to have glimpsed, the path that Atl had been unable to see, the one he’d believed to be his taat’s lie. This was not possible.

  Citlali raged at him as fireballs from the Easterner nahualli fell near them. “Stop them!” the Tecuhtli shouted. “Damn you, Nahual! Stop them!”

  But all Atl could do was shake his head. “I have no power, Tecuhtli. None of the nahualli have. It’s been taken from us.” The spells were gone, and there was no time now to craft new ones to place in the spell-sticks.

  “You promised me victory, Nahual! You promised me the city!” Citlali wailed like a child deprived of his favorite toy, but there was no answer at all to that. His face was so flushed with his anger that the red eagle seemed to blend into his flesh.

  There will be no victory, Atl wanted to tell him. Or if there is to be one, it’s not one that I’ve glimpsed in the bowl. The paths in the scrying bowl had been wiped away. Everything had changed. I have never seen this path at all. I don’t know where it leads.

  As his taat had warned. His hand felt for his pouch, where the carved bird his taat had given him was nestled. If one of us sees the way, then we can tell the other that the Long Path is open… Could Niente have been right: could this Long Path exist, the one Atl could never see?

  He wished Niente were here.

  Citlali was still raving, but Atl’s attention was on the carved bird in his pouch. It seemed to rustle, as if it were alive and flapping its wings in panic. He opened the leather flap, reached in. Yes, the thing was moving. It went still in his hand as he took it out, and as he did, he heard, unmistakably, Niente’s voice.

  “Tototl is returning to the ships. You must go too! The Long Path is here.”

  “Taat?”

  There was no answer. Atl dropped the bird from fingers that had lost their strength. He watched it tumble to the ground, to be lost among the stalks of grain that the armies had crushed into the dirt. His taat’s voice had sounded so weak, so lost, and there came to him a certainty that he would never hear it again.

  “Tecuhtli,” Atl called. “We must retreat and find the ships. We have no magic. We’ll have none until we can rest again.”

  “No!” Citlali spat. “I will have the city today.”

  “It’s not possible now,” Atl said.

  “How would you know?” Citlali scoffed. “Nothing you have told me has been true. You are no longer Nahual. I’ll find another. I’ll make Niente Nahual again.”

  Citlali raised his sword against Atl as if he were about to strike, and Atl lifted his spell-stick uselessly.

  Someone called toward them in the tongue of the Easterners, and a warhorse broke through the ring about Citlali and Atl, bearing a warrior covered in blood and dirt, his helm lost, a notched sword clutched in his hand. He bore down directly toward Citlali, and the Tecuhtli turned from Atl to parry the the man’s stroke. Steel rang against steel, and Atl saw a shard of Citlali’s blade fly away, spinning. As their warhorses came close, Citlali pushed hard at the Easterner, and the man fell from his saddle. Citlali laughed. “You see?” he said. “You see how easily they fall? And you tell me to retreat?”

  The Easterner was struggling groggily to his feet, favoring one leg. He seemed barely able to lift his weapon. All around them, Atl could see the black-and-silver and blue-and-gold uniforms of the Easterners, though the three of them stood alone in a quiet nexus of the chaos. Warriors were falling under the press, and their spellcasters hurled their magic with the nahualli unable to respond. Citlali jumped from his horse; Atl saw his boot crush the carved red bird into the muddy, torn ground. The Tecuhtli lifted his sword again. The strike, Atl saw, would take the Easterner’s head.

  Atl lifted back his empty spell stick. He brought it down hard on Citlali’s skull. The sound was strangely quiet, like a stick thumping a ripe melon, but Citlali fell senseless at the Easterner’s stunned feet. The Easterner looked at Atl, who stared back. For a breath, neither of them moved, then-as Atl watched from his horse, the Easterner lifted his sword. He brought it down through Citlali’s neck. “The Tecuhtli is lost!” Atl called out loudly so that the warriors nearest him could hear. “The Tecuhtli is lost. Retreat! Back to the ships!”

  As the warriors began to respond, as they began to disengage and fall back, as the Easterners shouted in triumph, Atl stared down at the Easterner. The man leaned o
n his sword, still buried in Citlali’s neck. Atl nodded to him.

  Then he jerked the reins of his horse and began the long flight westward.

  The Dawn

  They were pursued by the army of blue and gold and the army of black and silver, hounding them as they retreated toward the river and the waiting ships, but not hotly. The stragglers had been picked off, but the main armies had never reengaged. It was apparent that the Easterners were content to chase them from their land, but they would not demand their extermination if the Tehuantin were willing to leave.

  The army had seen the masts of their fleet the second day, ten miles upriver from Nessantico, and they’d boarded as quickly as they could. Tototl, now calling himself Tecuhtli, had boarded the Yaoyotl, and he had turned the fleet westward as soon as the surviving warriors and nahualli were aboard. The empty boats-far too many of them-he’d scuttled in the middle of the river to discourage any of the Holdings’ navy from pursuing them.

  They sailed down the A’Sele, moving quickly with its current toward the sea.

  Toward home.

  Atl, aboard the Yaoyotl, stared into the green mist of his scrying bowl. Tototl watched him carefully, the warrior’s skull painted now with the red eagle pattern that would soon be tattooed permanently on his flesh.

  The myriad futures spread out before Atl, no longer blanketed and dim as they once had been. It was as if Axat had lifted a veil from before his face. He could see far more clearly than he’d ever seen before, all the uncertainties that had shrouded things for so long blown away like passing storm clouds. The futures were open before him, all the possibilities.

  What he saw made him gasp. The Long Path… This was the future that Taat saw, that he always said was there. He realized then that Niente had known what that Long Path would cost: that to achieve it he must die; that Tecuhtli Citalali would be killed as well if this future was ever to rise; that a multitude of warriors would die as well. How long did you keep this secret, Taat? Did you know before we even left?

  Atl suspected that he had. It explained so much. It explained why Niente had never wanted him to use the scrying bowl himself. That had been the act of a protective father, not that of a jealous Nahual. The realization made Atl regret the harsh words they’d exchanged.

  “Will I return here?” Tototl asked Atl harshly, interrupting his thoughts and making the green mist waver as he exhaled so that he almost lost the vision. “Will I avenge our defeat?”

  Atl could see that future as well: their ships loaded again with an army, one yet larger than Citlali’s, returning a third time to those shores. Only this time, the armies of the Holdings were one, and they descended upon them furiously and early, the bulk of them armed with terrible weapons like the ones that Tototl and Niente had witnessed during their battles. The warriors of the Tehuantin were cut down like wheat with a scythe and the earth drank their blood.

  It was a terrible future, but it was one that could easily come to pass.

  But the other… the one stretching out until the mists swallowed it. That one was also possible if Atl could direct Tototl that way. It would take skill, and it would demand sacrifice, but it was there and he could see Niente’s hand upon it.

  “You will do better than that, Tecuhtli,” Atl told him. “You will one day bring us to peace with the Easterners. Your name will be honored everywhere in our land. All the Tecuhtli who come after will compare themselves to you. You will be forever the Great Tecuhtli.”

  The mists were failing now, and Atl took the bowl and threw the water within it over the side of the ship. He handed the bowl to one of the lesser nahualli. “Clean this,” he told the man, “and put it back in my cabin.” He could feel the weariness of the X’in Ka hammering at him, and his left eye twitched uncomfortably. Atl squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. Tototl was watching him.

  “Peace?” he said. “How does a warrior find honor in peace? How does one become great without war and victory?”

  Atl took a long breath. He looked westward, toward the smoke and fumes of Nessantico, toward the place where Niente’s body would forever lie. “I will show you,” he told Tototl. “Together, we will keep to that path.”

  “Watch me,” she told Nico. “Then I want you to try it yourself. Are you watching? See, you loop one string like this, then take the other and go around the bottom of the loop once, and…”

  There was a knock on Varina’s bedroom door as she was tying the laces of Nico’s boots. “A’Morce?”

  “Come in,” Varina said, and Michelle entered, carrying Serafina in her arms. The baby was bundled in lace, and Michelle held the child protectively as she glanced warily at Nico, who sat on the bed. His guileless face turned to look at Michelle.

  “Is that Serafina?” he asked Varina, his voice eager.

  “Yes,” she told him.

  He looked down, almost shyly. “May I… May I hold her?”

  Michelle was shaking her head slightly, but Varina smiled at him. “Just for the tiniest bit,” she told him. “And you must be very careful with her.” Varina nodded to Michelle; still frowning, the wet nurse came forward and placed the baby in Nico’s outstretched hands. “Make sure you hold her head,” Varina told him. “Yes, like that. That’s good…”

  Nico grinned, cradling Serafina in his arms. The baby fussed for a moment, then quieted as Nico rocked her unconsciously, staring down into the baby’s face. “Her eyes are so big,” he said wonderingly. “And her hands are awful small. She’s really my daughter?”

  “Yes. Yours and Liana’s.” Varina reached down and stroked Sera’s head. Her hair was fine as down, the skin smooth and warm. Her tiny hand waved, finding Varina’s finger and clutching it. She laughed.

  Nico shook his head. He was watching the interplay. “I don’t remember Liana,” he said. “I don’t know how…”

  “I’ll tell you one day,” Varina told him. “Right now, we still have to get ready to go to the Kraljica’s funeral. Here…” She held out her hands, and Nico carefully placed Sera there. Varina heard Michelle’s audible sigh of relief. Varina kissed Sera’s forehead, hugging her for a few breaths before handing her back to Michelle. “She’s fed?”

  “Fed and dressed and ready to go,” Michelle answered. “I have a change of clothes and diapers. I came up to tell you that the carriage is here from the palais.”

  “Good,” Varina told her. “Go ahead and get her in and settled. Nico and I will be down in a few moments. I just have to finish his boots.”

  Michelle glanced at Nico again. “A’Morce, the young man’s dangerous. What he did…”

  “What he did with the Tehuantin saved us,” Varina answered. “And cost him far more than most would have been willing to give.”

  “He could be faking his condition, or he could recover his wits. What then?”

  Nico said nothing as they discussed him. He only looked from one woman to the other as they spoke.

  “Then,” Varina answered, “we will deal with that when it happens.” It was the same question she’d heard already a dozen times or more. There were those on the Council and among the ca’-and-cu’ of the city and the teni of the Faith who wanted Nico tried and executed for the deaths he’d caused and the damage to the Old Temple during the Morelli takeover. For that matter, there was a part of Varina’s own heart that was still angry with him for the destruction and deaths he’d caused, unapologetically, to her own friends during Karl’s funeral.

  Nico, truly, had much to answer for, yet he had nearly single-handedly saved the city when it was about to fall. There was also no denial of that-or of the fact that his efforts had cost him greatly, and perhaps, perhaps that had been punishment enough. The Nico in front of her seemed to remember nothing of that day or much of his previous life at all. The Nico before her was an innocent-he might inhabit the same body, but he was not the Nico who had claimed to be the Absolute. Perhaps the Kraljiki would demand punishment for the past, but Varina would fight that, with all the efforts she c
ould muster. “For now, he’s a child, and he needs to be treated as such.”

  “As you say, A’Morce,” Michelle answered. Serafina cried, and Michelle rocked her gently. “I’ll get her quieted down again, and we’ll see you in the carriage.”

  As Michelle left the room, Varina bent down again to the laces of Nico’s boots. He was watching her, frowning. “It’s all right, Nico,” she said. “Michelle’s not angry with you. She’s just concerned about you, as I am. Now, watch me and let’s see if you can tie the other one. Loop the lace like this, then pass the other end around it…”

  The teni were already in attendance at the Archigos’ Temple. A’Teni Valerie ca’Beranger of Prajnoli would conduct the service-the rumors were that she would most likely be elected Archigos when the Concord A’Teni convened in a few days. Brie escorted the children up an aisle lined with e-teni in white robes-the color of death-trimmed in green. The teni watched, silent: like lines of white bone arrowing toward the Stone of Cenzi as Brie and the children ascended the dais and approached the altar, the great Stone of Cenzi, draped in a brilliant azure cloth.

  “There,” Brie whispered to Elissa, Kriege, Caelor, and Eria. Her voice sounded loud under the dome and she glanced up once at the frescoes of Cenzi and the Moitidi far above them. “This is your great-matarh Allesandra. She was a great woman, and she told me that she wanted so much to get to know all of you. I wish you could have known her when she was alive.”

  This was not how she’d intended for the children to meet their great-matarh. She’d hoped to introduce them to the woman, not the dead container that had once held her. She wondered whether it might not have been better to let the children remain in Brezno for the funeral, but for the fact that they would then have missed their vatarh’s coronation.

  “It’s ugly here,” Elissa had proclaimed on disembarking from the carriage at the palais. She looked around at the buildings, broken and scarred by fire and war. “It smells horrible, too. Brezno is much prettier, Matarh. Why can’t we just stay there?”