The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  “They were Karnee,” she said at last. “Like me.”

  She heard a small sob. Then the wall began to slide back, away from her. Scents rolled out of the sealed storage room, sweetly familiar, and a slender form stepped from the opening.

  Kait’s nose knew her sister before her eyes recognized her. In fact, her eyes might never have recognized the fragile woman that was her oldest sister.

  “Alcie,” she whispered.

  They threw their arms around each other and wept. When they pulled apart, Kait asked, “Who’s with you?” Alcie had had five children.

  “Lonar. And the new baby. I named her Rethen.”

  She led Kait into the room where she’d been hiding. Kait’s nephew Lonar hid in a corner, tucked behind a stack of crates, a baby girl clutched in his arms. When he saw Kait, his hunted expression vanished, replaced by a broad smile. “You aren’t dead,” he shrieked.

  “And neither are you.” Kait dropped to her knees and held out her arms, and he, clutching the baby, ran into them. “I’m so glad to see you, Lonar. And your new sister. You can’t believe how glad.”

  The baby, startled, began to wail.

  Chapter 18

  Then you hadn’t planned to be down there.” Kait and Alcie sprawled in deep chairs in the salon of her family’s apartment, facing each other. Alcie nursed her baby and nibbled fresh greens pulled from one of the untouched herb beds on the grounds. Kait sipped warm amber Varhees brandywine straight from the bottle.

  Ry and Ian were dragging stores up from the closest of the intact storerooms; Ulwe and Lonar had already been tucked into bed. So Kait had been able to hear Alcie’s story uninterrupted, and had been able to tell her own. Both sisters had done a fair job of horrifying each other.

  “It was just luck. Lonar was lonely, and I knew with the baby coming soon I’d have less time for him. He wanted to go down to the balcony rooms, and I thought I’d show him the secret room I’d found when I was little.”

  “I never knew about that one.”

  “I never told the Family I found it. It was my hiding place. When I married Omil, I showed it to him, and we decided to stock it. Just in case. We kept it full and rotated stock out of it regularly. That was the main reason we claimed the balcony suite so far from the upper House. It gave us a plausible excuse to go down there as often as we did.”

  Alcie grew still. She stared down at her baby, and Kait could see the sudden gleam of unshed tears in her eyes. Memory was hell.

  “I’m so glad you made it,” she whispered.

  “So am I . . . sometimes,” Alcie said. She stroked Rethen’s cheek and shifted her from one breast to the other. “When I look at her, or at Lonar, I’m grateful that I was away from everyone else when the screaming started. But I have to admit I’ve wished I’d died with Omil and my others more than once.”

  Kait took a long drink of the brandywine. “I’ve wished the same thing for myself.”

  “But you’ve done so much. And you and Ry . . .” She smiled. “I’m glad you found someone.”

  “You may be less glad when I tell you who he is.”

  “I already know who he is. He and Ian are brothers, right? And Ian is a Draclas. He told me so.” She took a sip from a glass of spring-water. “Don’t worry. They aren’t any of the Draclases who are closely related to us.”

  “That wasn’t what I was worried about.” Kait looked into the little fire that flickered in the fireplace. The flames danced comfortingly. “Ian and Ry are half-brothers. Ry . . . is a Sabir.”

  She heard no sound from Alcie. Not even breathing. She glanced over at her sister. Alcie was staring at her, face etched with disbelief.

  “Sabir?” she managed at last.

  Kait nodded.

  “How closely related to the Sabirs?”

  “He’s a son of the main branch. He was to have taken over one segment of the Sabir Family upon his father’s death.” She didn’t mention which segment. She thought she had enough trouble on her hands without linking Ry to covert wizards.

  Alcie looked stunned. When at last she spoke again, it was only to ask, “How could you?”

  Which was the question she had asked herself endlessly. In spite of her love for him, and in spite of the overwhelming feeling that the two of them belonged together, she still had no satisfactory answer. Her duty as a Galweigh had demanded that she forsake him, no matter how much she might desire him; she had, instead, forsaken duty for desire and love. She stared into the fire, trying to find words that could make Alcie see why she had chosen as she had. But she already knew the words. She just didn’t want to say them about herself.

  She was a traitor. A coward. A weak and foolish child.

  “Dùghall must have known,” Alcie said.

  “He knew. He . . . came to like Ry. Ry stood with us against his own Family’s interests. He helped us . . . helped Dùghall. In the fights we had.” And how could she explain Dùghall to Alcie? Alcie thought her uncle was a diplomat—an elder statesman—a respectable man. She knew nothing of his secret affiliation with wizards, or his religion that had waited for the return of the Reborn. She knew nothing of the wonders their world had almost gained, nor that those wonders had been ripped away again forever by the hand of their own cousin, Danya. Alcie knew of Kait’s escape, and the betrayal of the Goft Galweighs, and her long and dangerous voyage. Kait, though, had couched the whole ordeal in language that hid its magical nature.

  “Dùghall accepted this . . . treachery of yours?”

  Without knowing about the magic—about the battle between the Families’ Wolves, about the Falcons and the Dragons, about the Reborn and the prophecies and Danya, Kait realized that Alcie would never understand what had happened. Kait thought perhaps that would be best; if Alcie didn’t know about the return of magic to their world, it wouldn’t taint her or endanger her children. She would be safe, even if she hated Kait for the rest of her life. Kait thought she could live with that hatred, as long as she knew Alcie and her two remaining children survived.

  But what right did she have to keep the truth from Alcie? The bitterest truth was sweeter than the sweetest lie. Why did she assume that Alcie needed to be protected? Her sister had lost more to the Wolves and the Dragons than even Kait had. Along with brothers and sisters and parents, she had lost her husband and her children. If the situations were reversed, Kait would have wanted to know what had really happened.

  In the end, that fact decided her.

  “There’s more you don’t know,” she said.

  This time, she told her sister the whole truth.

  Book Two

  When men gather for battle,

  Ravens fill the skies,

  And wait to sup on war-spilled blood

  And feast upon men’s eyes.

  FROM A FOLK SONG OF THE GYRU-NALLES

  AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  Chapter 19

  The outriders approached the Kargan fishcamp with green pennants flying. They came to a stop well outside the perimeter of the camp and waited.

  Danya dressed in the beautifully embroidered split suede caspah and breeches the Kargan women had made for her. She mounted her lorrag and rode out to meet the outriders alone. She had to maintain appearances, after all. She was Ki Ika to the Kargans—the Summer Goddess, the mother of their long-foretold savior, Iksahsha. Luercas, in his role as Iksahsha, had done the necessary miracles, and the stories had spread. Were spreading. The Scarred—born of wizard magic and wizard madness a thousand years before—came, in all their twisted and perverted forms, seeking proof that their time of exile in the cold, harsh wasteland of the Veral Territories was coming to an end. When each new mob arrived, she greeted the leaders and Luercas convinced them, and they stayed—or if they left, it was only to bring the rest of their kin back to the camp. Already the summer camp of less than a hundred had grown to a city of nearly ten thousand. All of them would have to move northward soon, toward warmer lands and richer fields, for the hungry legions were strippin
g this place. It would be decades recovering.

  “Hail, strangers,” she said in Trade Tongue. “I am Ki Ika—Summer Mother and bearer of the Son of the Thousand Peoples.” She held up her right hand—the hand still Scarred with two fierce, scaled talons where once her first and second fingers had been. Those fingers were her brand, her mark, the sign that she was not a true human, but was, indeed, as much one of these rejects as the most hideous of them.

  The leader stepped forward and raised his own three-clawed paw in greeting. “We Stormeaters,” he said. “We come see truth for ourselves. We hear Hammer of Man here now. We want fight for Green Lands.” These latest Scarred were of a sort she had never seen before. Squat, heavy-furred, broad-bodied, they wore only leather harnesses hung with tools and weapons.

  Hammer of Man. Another version of the Scarred savior, no doubt. Like Kempi to the bearish Wishtaka, or He Who Leaves No Footprints to the terrifying Flame People, or Arrow-heart to the cadaverous, eyeless Oauk, Hammer of Man would be another name for the myth she and Luercas were bringing to life—the myth that the wrongs done to past, lost generations could be somehow made right.

  All of these poor, twisted freaks shared some version of the tale of the day when the true humans had stolen their birthright—their own humanity—from them and banished them to the world’s wastelands. And all of them shared some form of the same prophecy—the story of the day they would bring down vengeance on the heads of unScarred humans. The prophecy seemed always to tell of another freak who would lead them, and promised that on the day when he came, they would no longer have to live on a bitter snowfield and wear skins and eat what they could scrounge from the hostile, ungiving earth. They would ride to the north, to the Green Lands, or the Fair Lands, or the Rich Lands, or the Fields of Heaven, and there they would conquer the true humans. And then they would reclaim warmth and softness, civilization and wealth, and all the comforts of a world they had never known but that they had made miraculous in their imaginations.

  And she and Luercas were telling them what they wanted to hear.

  It was so easy, really. Luercas took the form of whatever nightmare creature they expected to see—then metamorphosed into the form of a human. He told them that they would gain their rightful human form after the usurpers of the Green Lands were defeated.

  They accepted the lies because they wanted to believe. All of them were going to end up throwing their bodies against the brutal wall of human civilization—adult males and females, the old, the children, mothers with babes in arms. Many of them—perhaps most of them—were going to die. And she and Luercas would ride into Calimekka atop their broken bodies and claim the city for themselves. And after the great city-state, all of Ibera.

  It was an ugly future, but there was a price to be paid for revenge. She had paid. Paid with the life of her son, and, she suspected, with her soul. Having paid, she now accepted the offerings that came her way as her just due, and did not let herself think too much about the lives of those who made up the offerings. She smiled and welcomed the freaks because they were the coin with which she would buy vengeance.

  This time she welcomed the Stormeaters, and Luercas did the necessary miracles to convince them that he was both one of them and something greater. They watched, they worshiped, and they stayed. And the army of the Scarred, the damned, the unwanted, grew by another thousand.

  Chapter 20

  Dùghall gave Kait a weary hug. “The trip was hell. And the worst of it was once we reached Calimekka. The city boils with insurrection—Dragons gone, Galweighs gone, Sabirs weakened and discredited, the parnissery in a riot over traitors among its number, and both the Masschankas and the Kairns trying to make inroads into the territory once held by their betters. . . .” He shook his head. “And stirring among the landsmen the idea that maybe they should be governed by their kind and not by our kind.” He glanced back at Ry and Jaim and Yanth, who were exchanging their own greetings. He interrupted them. “Jaim, Yanth—see that you get Alarista to a comfortable bed, will you? And feed her. The trip up the mountain took most of her strength.”

  Kait stared at the old woman being lifted down from the back of her horse, then turned back to her uncle. “You’re not much older than me, and she is now the age of Grandmother Corwyn. What happened?”

  “A long and ugly story—one better discussed later.” He lowered his voice. “Where is it?”

  Kait didn’t have to ask what he meant. “The night we got here, I had it put in one of the treasuries, behind fingerlock doors. I locked the door myself. It’s shut down.”

  “But you know that doesn’t matter.”

  Kait had not even let herself think about the Mirror of Souls from the time she’d arrived at Galweigh House until the moment that Dùghall arrived. Dark fears within the memories she’d received from the Dragon Dafril had kept her away from the Mirror, from thoughts of the Mirror, from speaking of it to anyone else. She had not even dared examine those fears to find out what lay behind them. She’d simply kept her thoughts focused on other things, and waited for Dùghall’s arrival. “I’ve suspected as much.”

  Dùghall closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “I suggest you and I stroll about outside the wall while we discuss . . . our journey.”

  Kait nodded. She turned to Ulwe. “Follow Ry. Help him with Alarista. She’ll need someone to get things for her.”

  Ulwe nodded. “I think I know her somehow. I’ll be glad to help her.”

  Kait didn’t want to take that moment to unravel the mysteries surrounding Ulwe. There was no way the child could know Alarista, but in the last two years, all sorts of impossible things had suddenly become not just possible, but true. So she said, “Good. Treat her gently.”

  Ulwe ran off, and Dùghall raised an eyebrow and said, “Crispin’s daughter?”

  “The same. Certainly not what he—or we—expected.” Kait pulled the gate almost closed, propping it just enough that she and Dùghall would be able to get back inside quickly without help, should trouble come. Considering what they were about to discuss, that seemed more than a distant possibility. “How far would you like to walk?”

  “How would you feel about the other side of the world?”

  Kait’s laugh sounded hollow in her own ears. They said nothing else for a while; instead, they strolled together down one of the back paths, along the ridge of the mountain, through a barrier of dense understory plants that quickly gave way to old rainforest. They walked with magical shields wrapped tightly around themselves, keeping everything in, hidden from any magical eyes that might watch and any magical ears that might listen. When they were well away from Galweigh House, Dùghall turned to Kait.

  “This is far enough. If it can follow what we’re doing here, I doubt there’s anyplace we could go that it wouldn’t be able to monitor.”

  She nodded. She found a seat for herself on the rotting stump of a fallen blackwood, and waited until her uncle had made himself comfortable in a loop of giant cut-by-night vine. When he was seated, she said, “You think . . . it . . . is alive.” She did not speak the words Mirror of Souls. She would not.

  “My memories tell me as much.”

  “As do mine. If it lives, what does it want now that the Dragons have been banished?”

  “That I don’t know. But a characteristic of living things is that they have a strong sense of self-preservation. And a strong urge to fulfill their purpose, whatever that purpose might be.”

  “It’s a thing. It shouldn’t have a sense of purpose.”

  Dùghall shrugged, and rocked himself back and forth in his vine swing. “It shouldn’t have been created in the first place. It was born for evil, it lives for evil, and it will fight for its freedom so that it can do as it desires. I can feel it drowsing, now, napping. But it won’t nap forever. It is waiting to do . . . something, and you and I are going to have to deal with it.”

  “We’re agreed that it must be destroyed?”

  “I see no other choice. Thanks to D
afril’s memories, you and I know how to use it, and I’m uncomfortable enough with that. The temptation will grow greater as we grow older—impending death stirs instincts I would rather not face while gripping a gate to immortality in one hand. But Crispin, too, holds the old Dragon memories inside his skull—and while you and I value the souls of others, and so might face our own deaths without faltering, I hold out no such hope for him. If the Mirror exists and he can find it, he will use it and damn the price.”

  “Then the question remains—how do we destroy it? It was designed to prevent its own destruction, and it can pull power and life from every soul in Calimekka to fight us.”

  “I thought of little but the answer to that question on the way here.” Dùghall sighed and leaned his head against the vine that held him. He pushed with one foot—back and forth, back and forth—and the vine creaked softly, and high above, the leaves of the branch that supported the vine rustled in rhythm to his movements. He might have been a child sitting there, dreaming of a faraway future in which he would be a hero.

  “And . . . ?”

  Dùghall focused his attention on her. His gaze, direct and thoughtful, sent a chill through her veins. “First, there’s the question of you. I need you to become a Falcon, Kait.”

  She met his gaze, trying to see the threat in that, and after a moment, shrugged. “Hasmal was going to initiate me into the Falcons,” she said. “He wanted to make me a Warden. It doesn’t sound so ominous.”

  “It doesn’t. But when you swear yourself to Falconry, you become oathbound to the Falcons.”

  She had assumed she would have to swear an oath. That still didn’t sound like such an ordeal. “So?”

  “Oathbound,” Dùghall said, his voice slightly impatient.

  She supposed she was failing to see what he was trying to get at. “I’ve sworn oaths before.”

  “You have never been oathbound. Oath . . . bound. Constrained by the power of your word—locked into certain forms of action by the ties that connect you to every other Falcon, alive or dead. The Falcon oath is not empty sounds whispered into the wind, Kait. It has a thousand years of lives bound into it. A thousand years of magic, poured layer upon layer, life upon life. You swear your oath and it’s like . . . like . . .” He closed his eyes and for a moment seemed to go very far away. When he looked at her again, she saw the old man that he truly was looking out at her from inside that young body. “It’s like throwing yourself from a dock into an angry sea. The waves pick you up and fling you where they will, and you’re a long time finding your breath and your stroke and hauling yourself against the current and back to shore. And even when you reach dry ground again, for the rest of your life, you carry that angry sea inside of you. It’s a weight, and you can feel it with every step you take and every breath you breathe. I won’t deny that there are times when it’s a comfort. In moments of trouble, you can feel the path that the Falcons would take—you can feel the current of that huge sea pulling you toward right actions and away from wrong ones. It can be a second conscience—one that won’t ever weaken and tell you what you’d like to hear.”