by Terah Edun
She didn’t know what to do for a moment, and then it came to her. She didn’t have any leverage over him besides herself, so why not make him play for what he most desired? Her.
“That may be so, but I need to know, what have you done with the others? Where did Nissa take them?” she said, halting and firmly planting her feet in the dirt. She wasn’t moving until he answered. She didn’t care if the soldiers around her covered her hair in spit, as they were clearly trying to do. She also didn’t care if they broke out in a fight to do more than just hurl bodily fluids at her.
As the crowd grew increasingly rowdy, Gabriel hurried between her guards, put his face right in front of hers, and said through gritted teeth, “Move. Now. I can’t be responsible for what happens to you if you don’t.”
“I don’t care,” she said calmly as she stepped back from him, almost to the edge of her guard perimeter. “I’m not moving again until you tell me where they are.”
Gabriel huffed and rolled his eyes. “Nissa has them in a safe location. In a closed-off prison camp perpendicular to where we’re taking you. They’re perfectly safe away from the general population here, which you won’t be if you don’t get moving this minute.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Sara demanded.
He blinked at her. “You really think I’d make up the fact that I sentenced your soldiers to prison labor and gave you their location?”
Sara glared at him, but for once, he was radiating sincerity.
Wary, but knowing she’d find out the truth the minute they got to their destination, she conceded and started walking again. It didn’t take them long to get there, and Sara could see there was indeed a walled-off area with guard posts at each corner, looking in, not out. It certainly looked like a prison camp to her.
“There—satisfied?” asked Gabriel.
“Not hardly,” Sara snapped. “Take me inside.”
“Not so fast, Lieutenant Commander. There’s much to discuss.”
Sara set her jaw in stone and glared at him. “I’ve said all I will say to you.”
“Then say it to me,” came another voice Sara recognized.
It was Nissa walking slowly along the path from the prison camp. Two men were rapidly closing the gates behind her.
Nissa had found the time to change into a flowing robe that set off her brilliant red hair and loose sandals. Sara’s lips twitched in irritation. She was glad someone was having a good time. Meanwhile, she had been stripped of weapons and covered in spittle, and still had the dirt of the road and the quarry gravel caked into her pores.
Apparently seeing Sara’s discomfort, the Sun Mage cooed, “Oh, you poor dear, you could use some refreshment.” Sara eyed her in disbelief, and Nissa snapped, “What? When I’m not being tortured, yes, I can be hospitable host.”
“I’m not your guest. I’m your prisoner,” Sara said through clenched teeth.
Nissa shrugged. “That may be so, but that doesn’t mean you need to be starved and treated like a wild animal. We aren’t the imperials here—we have some common decency.”
Sara elected not to take umbrage at Nissa’s swipe—she, after all, knew how the Sun Mage had been treated. Chained to the wall of a dark wagon had only been the start of it all.
Still, Sara didn’t want to accept, and she shook her head resolutely and repeated her demand to take her to the others.
Nissa held up a forestalling hand before Sara could say more. “Tell you what,” the Sun Mage said, “let’s make a deal. You take a bath and eat some vittles. I’ll provide the same comforts of home to your little band of brothers.”
Sara frowned. She didn’t see where Nissa was going with this. Why would she want them to be comforted?
But then the Sun Mage’s voice went colder, and that was the woman Sara knew.
“But for every hour you don’t eat, every hour you don’t bathe, every minute you don’t hear us out,” Nissa said, “your friends will be starved and thrown into a cage. Oh, and whipped on the half hour.”
Sara knew she had no choice but to accept. She was willing to take any punishment they gave her, but to have horrors rained upon her cohort just because she wouldn’t comply? Unthinkable.
So she followed the Sun Mage meekly, chains rattling, as Nissa led her into a multi-level building opposite the prison camp. As the sun rose high in the sky and her emotions spiraled into fear and darkness, Sara wondered what the Kades had in store for her now.
28
Partly out of hunger and partly out of fear for her comrades, Sara gripped the plate that Nissa had set in front of her and gulped every morsel down. She tore the bits of venison off the leg bone with her teeth like a rabid dog and rapidly went through the soft cheese and harder hunk of bread just as quickly.
When she finished and looked up, the Sun Mage was watching her with her jaw half-agape and an astonished expression on her face as she held the same metal plate in her hand, but hers only had a bit of peeled fruit on it.
Eyeing Nissa’s fruit, Sara demanded, “Are you going to eat that?”
“Why? Still starving?” Nissa asked nonplussed.
Sara gave her a feral grin and said, “What I eat, my cohort eats, right?”
Nissa paused and then nodded reluctantly.
“Good,” Sara said as she reached out and grabbed Nissa’s plate with a rattle of chains as she set her own down. “Then this will provide a vital source of vitamins for them in a prison labor camp.”
As she sucked on her greasy fingers before scooping up the fruit, Sara saw another person hurry to her side from the corner of the room. Because her back was to them, she could be forgiven for startling so harshly that she very nearly tipped her first plate on the floor. The servant caught the discards and the metal plate with a clang, and Sara awkwardly stood with a muttered apology.
“Sorry, you came out of the periphery too quickly,” the War Mage said with a grimace.
The servant backed away a bit as they held out their other hand and said simply, “Your water.”
Sara eyed him uncertainly as he put the fruit plate back on the table. Then he raised a bowl of steaming water and gestured empathetically at it. Understanding now, she dipped her hands—still bound with heavy manacles—in the bowl and when she raised them, he put it down and wiped her fingers clean with a towel.
“Thank you,” Sara said contritely.
He didn’t acknowledge her, just nodded to the Sun Mage who told him, “Inform the guards. Fruit rationed out to all of the prisoners.”
He nodded again, didn’t look at Sara, and walked out the door while she sat down feeling vaguely insulted—as if she had been wordlessly reprimanded and had never been given the chance to defend herself. Which was funny to her, because it was the Kades who had attacked the empire. Not the other way around.
Still she ate the fruit as she watched Nissa warily.
Sara didn’t exactly know what the Sun Mage had planned for her, but she had promised to hear her out, so here she was.
Looking away for a moment, Nissa turned back to stare at the cross War Mage for a moment before saying, “You know you remind me of my sister.”
“In what way?” Sara asked coolly as she used both of her hands to grip a solid tankard and drink its refreshment.
She was tempted for a moment to throw the tankard in Nissa’s face and make a run for it, but the liquid in her mug wasn’t hot enough to scald her opponent and the wood was cheap crap that rang hollow. So she was left with very little options, other than getting the bit of loose chain between her shackled wrists around Nissa’s neck, and she had just about as much chance of doing that as blasting through the door behind them, which was currently locked…from the outside.
It was clear that the Kades didn’t want her going anywhere, and judging by the sound of the bar lowered in place outside the door after they first entered, they seemed to think Nissa Sardonien could handle any resistance she put up just fine. Sara didn’t think so, but when an enemy wa
s that powerful and that confident— you took care.
So instead of being brash, she was cautious, and she waited and she listened.
Then Nissa gave her a distant look as she replied to her primary question, the one which had sought the similarities between Sara and this mysterious sister.
“In every way. Fierce, determined, belligerent,” the Sun Mage said in a cool, detached tone. “A lion in life—she was everything I was not.”
Surprise colored Sara’s response as she said, “And what would you consider yourself?”
“Compared to her—a mouse,” Nissa said with a brittle smile.
Sara raised a curious eyebrow. “I wouldn’t say the leader of an uprising is a timid, little woodland creature.”
“Even a mouse has teeth when cornered,” the Sun Mage gently corrected. “And I have certainly been cornered enough in my life to fight back. In fact, I think that is the entire reason my collective amongst the Council of Mages were able to come together at all.”
Sara was silent as Nissa looked away and said distantly, “We were a divisive bunch before. Rarely agree on the color of the sky let alone the time of the day. But we managed to come together for this. Some of them are my closest friends and allies now.”
Divisive huh? Sara thought as she put away the description for dissection later.
Aloud, the War Mage decided to test the waters as she said, “Closest allies? You mean aside from the four you murdered in cold blood to get your way?”
Nissa laughed, “Is that what they say outside our camps these days?”
Sara twitched at the ice in Nissa’s voice, but she answered her bravely still, “Yes, they do. And soon the entire population will know that the Council of Mages betrayed its own and the empire.”
Nissa rolled her eyes and stood up. For a moment, she paced the room, and then it was as if she came to a decision abruptly because she motioned to the lone servant and said two words.
“Leave us,” the Sun Mage commanded softly.
And Sara stilled because that didn’t bode good things for her. But she wasn’t coward enough to beg the servant to stay. Even though she wanted to—bound in mage manacles and weaponless was not how she really wanted to be when sealed inside a tiny box in a room with an erratic woman like Nissa.
But the servant did as the Sun Mage bid, knocking on the inside of the door softly until it opened with a click, and he slipped out under the careful watch of guards in the outer hallway.
Then they were alone.
And Nissa didn’t waste a single second.
Her hands began to glow with a strange fire. It didn’t leap and burn like flames, instead it molded to her palm and moved like waves of water.
The only reason Sara was confident it was fire was because the heat it put off, even from across the table, was immeasurable.
Leaning back nervously as sweat began to bead on her brow, and knowing she had nowhere else to go, Sara asked the Sun Mage nervously, “What are you doing?”
Meanwhile she was screaming internally at her inner darkness, Up, up, get UP!
But it wasn’t listening. And it wasn’t like before where it had deliberately ignored her in order to sleep. This time, it was as if there was a wall between the two of them, and it couldn’t even hear her.
Looking down at the manacles with wide eyes, Sara cursed the day metalwork became infused with magic, which might as well have been the dawn of time since it had been in practice for centuries now. But that centuries work of practice had tendered today’s mage blacksmiths with skills all too well. The cruddy manacles weren’t just blocking her own physical manifestation of gifts, it was keeping her from tapping into her well and the darkness inside of her.
Snarling with more curses, Sara tried to stand up and back away, but Nissa raised that same hand and little lines of fire arced out from her palm and split up above Sara’s head into a claw.
“Sit down,” the Sun Mage said firmly.
Sara sat quickly as her hair veritably fried above her.
Swallowing harshly, Sara said, “Going to kill me now, are you?”
“No,” the Sun Mage said with a distant tone in her voice. “I just want you to look and see. Look at what I can do with a twist of my hand.”
Sara’s eyes trailed up nervously at the molten fire claws inches from her face.
“Acknowledged, beautiful work,” she said weakly.
Nissa frowned and Sara honestly wondered for a second if she was going to fry because she hadn’t profusely complimented another mage’s work. She had heard of individuals killing others for a slight, but this was taking things a bit too far in her opinion!
“It is not the work I want you to take in,” Nissa said forcibly. “It’s the knowledge of what I can do.”
Sara nodded with an appearance more calm than she felt.
“Now what do you remember about how those other four died?” Nissa asked as she turned her claw back and forth so the fire alternatively brushed either side of Sara’s face. Like a caress. A deadly one.
Sara answered her quickly, “I wasn’t told much. Just that their deaths had the appearance of a more…natural passing.”
Nissa smiled and then cooed, “And if I melted off half your face while frying your brain, would that too look natural?”
Sara eyed the Sun Mage while glued into her seat and desperately wishing for a weapon. And her freedom.
But she answered her still with a gulp, “No.”
“No,” said Nissa thoughtfully, “And why would that be?”
“Don’t toy with me, you and I both know why,” Sara snapped as she gasped for fresh air and instead felt a rush of heat scald the back of her throat so harshly that she curled in on herself while clawing at her own throat in pain.
After a moment, the intense fire died down, and she was left with a dull ache. Sitting back up, she glared at Nissa with a look that said she was going to rip her face off the moment she could.
In a voice with a bit of amusement, Nissa pulled back her claw of fire from over Sara’s head and said, “See? A lion.”
Then she let the molten fire in her palm dissipate. Sara slumped over the table in relief and glared at her some more.
“If you didn’t plan on killing me,” the fed-up War Mage asked, “then why all the theatrics?”
Nissa looked at her simply and said, “To show you what I could do.”
Sara looked at her in disbelief as Nissa continued speaking, “And to truly instill in you that if you find the manifestations of my powers astonishing and burning a person alive to bring their death about terrifying, when you meet my colleagues you shall see and feel true terror.”
Sara grimaced. She didn’t find the thought of meeting just one more Kade delightful, let alone a scheming bunch guaranteed to put a child to death with nightmares. Still she was curious, so as she licked her parched lips, she decided to satiate at least one desire and at the moment—that wasn’t going to be her thirst. Her tankard had long since run dry.
Quietly, Sara Fairchild asked, “So you’re saying you didn’t kill those four because their deaths were too…simple?”
Nissa shrugged, “I’m saying their deaths were so maudlin they might as well have been an insult. And burns would have been the least of their mutilations once the others got through with them.”
“Alright then,” Sara Fairchild said. “I’ll play your game. If you didn’t kill them then who did?”
Nissa smiled and leaned across the table as she said, “Now there’s the right question, my dear.”
Sara eyed her suspiciously as she waited for the Sun Mage to answer.
“It wasn’t us,” the Sun Mage said as she sat back.
“Then who?” Sara asked. “Other Kades?”
“No other Kades act without our explicit permission,” Nissa said in a clipped tone.
“Then who killed your people and started this crazy uprising?” Sara said in a voice that was clearly frustrated, and she had every right to be after aski
ng the same question numerous times. “Because someone had to. Unless you’re saying their murders themselves were a falsehood.”
“Oh, our people died alright, but it wasn’t by our hands,” Nissa said curtly.
Tired, frazzled, and furious at herself and the Kades for luring her into this trap, Sara snapped, “Cut the bullshit, and tell me something or I walk.”
Nissa blinked at her. Then blinked some more.
And then like a cat with a membrane lowering over its eyes, her gaze closed off for a moment as she looked away and thought through her next words carefully.
Sara waited but she knew that this time, unlike the others, would be the last. She would have the truth or she really would walk out of here and keep walking, no matter who got in her way, until she reached her cohort.
And then?
Then the gods would will what they would. Release, sacrifice, even exchange. But no more lies—not from the Kades. Not from anyone else.
That resolve must have shown in her gaze because Nissa’s own face soured, and then she spoke.
And the words she said were the ones Sara had been waited months to hear. Even when she hadn’t known that there was something stirring inside of her, desperate to hear them
29
As Sara listened to Nissa’s life-altering revelation, she did some soul-searching of her own. She knew that these words spelled freedom, but was it the freedom to run away or the freedom to fight?
She hadn’t yet decided, which was why she let the possibilities ruminate through her mind. Like a good vintage, maybe it would improve with age. Unfortunately, she didn’t have much longer to think it through. Only minutes passed, but the agitation on the Sun Mage’s face said she was running out of time.
Then fed up Nissa leaned over the table and said in a deadly serious voice, “Didn’t you hear me? I said that those people died, the first of the Council of Mages died, because the Algardis Imperial Courts wanted to start a war.”