The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  “You’re probably right.”

  She stood up, a determination on her face that he found almost frightening in its intensity. “Life is full of difficult choices, isn’t it?” she said.

  He almost laughed, thinking about the quandary he’d been pondering before she joined him. “Life is full of hellish choices.”

  “He’ll be coming after me soon, Ian. He’s gone home, but not because he’s defeated. I can feel his . . . fury. He’s gone home because he thinks he can get help there. He thinks of a brother and a cousin . . . of people who owe him favors . . . of magic. He will use everything in his reach to come after me. He intends to destroy everyone and everything that stands in his way.”

  Ian’s blood chilled at that thought.

  Ulwe said, “I have things to do here. But so do you. They need you here, more than they know.”

  She left without another word, and he looked after her, unsettled. She was a frightening child—she couldn’t read minds, but she could read paths. She’d found him in his hiding place, something he hadn’t even thought about until that moment. She’d known he was thinking about moving on—she’d sought him out not just for her own comfort but because she had something to tell him that would change his plans.

  She was as alone in the world as any child could be—her mother dead, her father someone she needed to fear—and still she managed to be brave and fierce. And kind.

  And she was his blood. His kin. Perhaps he could be a father to her, to replace the monster she dared not love too much.

  He returned to the weeds, but his thoughts wandered down the mazy paths of the future, looking for signs that would point him in the right direction.

  Chapter 25

  Did he listen?” Alarista turned from the window and carefully let herself down into a well-padded chair.

  Ulwe nodded. “I feel that he’ll stay.”

  “Good. The zanda says we must not let him leave.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her hands over her frail arms, hating the papery feel of her skin, the stiffness of her joints, the sluggishness of her blood that left her cold even while she sat in the sun, out of the wind.

  Ulwe brought her a blanket and helped her wrap it around her shoulders.

  “Can you feel your father now?”

  “Not really. He is off the road and so am I—the stream no longer connects us.”

  “We need to go back to the road, then. I need to know if any Falcons come yet—and I need to know what your father is doing, and . . .” Alarista’s voice trailed off to nothing. She hated her body—that it could be so frail and useless that a simple walk to the road that began just outside the compound could defeat her.

  “If you want to sleep for a while, I’ll wait,” Ulwe said. “Or I can go now, and check, and come back to tell you. I know what Falcon magic feels like now. If any Falcons are coming to us who are not hidden by their shields, I’ll be able to find them for you.”

  “Please. I fear we have so little time. I’ll . . . just rest here while you’re gone.”

  Ulwe nodded. “I’ll bring you something to eat when I come back.”

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  “I know. But Dùghall says you have to eat anyway.”

  “Bring me some fruit. It doesn’t hurt my stomach the way other things do.”

  “I’ll find you some lovely fruit.” Ulwe gave her a bright smile and ran out the door.

  Alarista looked after her, wistful. Being with Ulwe, she missed her own youth—the boundless energy, the unquenchable hope, the certainty that somehow she would find solutions to every problem. Adulthood shined an ugly light on such childish optimism—at that moment she faced a problem that would probably be her death. If other Falcons did not answer the call that she had put out, and quickly, she would have to be the third in Dùghall’s and Kait’s thathbund, and the strain of that would kill her.

  She didn’t fear death—Hasmal waited for her beyond the prison of her flesh, and she yearned for her return to him with an impatience she shared with no one. But she feared that if she died too soon, the task she had to complete—the task that no one else could accomplish—would remain undone. Then her life would be a failure.

  She wished she could remember what that task was. That imperative had been so clear when she floated beyond the Veil. She’d known it—and though it had been daunting, she’d been sure she could return and carry it out. Back in the newly ancient and decaying flesh of her body, though, the crystal clarity of the realm beyond death vanished in a haze of muddled thoughts, bodily needs, pains, and hungers. What did she still have to do? The zanda would not tell her. Summoned Speakers would not tell her, and the strain of summoning them had weakened her to the point where she dared not try again. Dùghall did not know and his magic could not find it out for her, either.

  She closed her eyes to think, with the warmth of the sun pouring onto her skin and the soft blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She fought to connect with the answers she had once known. And once again her flesh defeated her.

  She slept.

  Chapter 26

  Yanth turned to Ry and said, “You think she holds the patent on stubbornness and stupidity, but she isn’t the one who left.”

  Jaim said, “Eat the damned food before it spoils. It’s no pleasure watching you stalking across the floor like a caged beast, wasting away to nothing.”

  Ry paced the floor, gray-faced and dead-eyed. “I gave up everything I had to be with her. My home, my position, my family, my future. But she wasn’t satisfied with that—she wanted me to give up myself, too, and I won’t do that.”

  Yanth said, “She was wrong. We’ve been over that more times than I want to think about. She was wrong, you were right . . . but you left. You’re the one who said, ‘You aren’t worth spending any more time on. I decree that our problems can’t be fixed. Good-bye.’ So you can’t complain about the fact that she didn’t run after you. If you cared, you would have stayed.”

  “I did care,” Ry growled.

  “Excellent way to show it,” Yanth said.

  “Both of you shut up. Ry—sit down and eat. Yanth—don’t antagonize him. I’m sick of this subject. I’m sick of your fighting. I’m sick of both of you, if truth be told.”

  Ry and Yanth both turned on Jaim. “Then you can leave, if truth be told,” Ry said. “No one barred the door.”

  And Yanth said, “I’ll show you the way out if you’d like.”

  Jaim said, “I can leave. Unlike you, Ry. I’m not Family or barzanne. No mob is hunting me for the one—no zealot will want my skin for being the other. No one is going to take me out for a day or three of public torture before ripping me into pieces and nailing the pieces to the city wall just for being in this damnable city. Look out there.” He pointed to the window, half-shuttered, that opened onto the bay. “There are ships out there. Ships. We could be on one of them, bound anywhere, and not shut in here hiding because you don’t dare show your face in the street.”

  “I won’t leave the city.”

  “Why? Because she might come to you and tell you how wrong she was and how sorry she is?” Jaim stood up and stared at his friend. “She isn’t going to do that. She was wrong until you left—but when you walked through the gates and didn’t go back, you ended things. You closed the door on her apologies. You told her nothing else she could say mattered to you. So if you want to hear what she has to say, you’re going to have to go to her to hear it.”

  Ry was quiet for a long time. “I can’t go back,” he said at last.

  Yanth snorted. “You can. Your legs work. We can climb the damned mountain and knock on the damned gate. You just don’t want to, because if we go back up there, then it’s her turn to decide whether she wants to open the gate or not—and you don’t want to find out she won’t open it.”

  And Ry thought, Yes, that’s probably true. He’d left her with a hellish chore waiting for her—destroying the Mirror of Souls—and he’d made it clear that he wouldn’t do t
he thing he had to do to help her destroy it. He’d refused to become a Falcon with her. He didn’t understand what had gotten into him—he’d been upset with her, but he’d never intended to say the things that he’d ended up saying.

  Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t meant them. He had. But if she was wrong for wanting him to give up being a Sabir, perhaps he was wrong for not caring if his presence offended the last surviving members of her Family. Being suddenly without Family of his own, he found it hard to care about her relationships with her relatives.

  Which was simple jealousy, and petty of him.

  In the end, though, the thing that decided him was the same thing that had let him walk through the gate—she hadn’t tried to stop him. He could see where he had been wrong to leave. But if she had truly loved him—if she had felt about him the way he felt about her—she would not have let him walk through the gates and out of her life without making some attempt to make him change his mind.

  His head hurt, and his body ached as if he’d spent two days Shifted and hadn’t eaten after. He turned to Yanth and Jaim, wishing that she would come through the door right then, knowing that she was still back in Galweigh House, not coming after him. Not going to fight for them. He said, “We’re leaving Calimekka. Get us transportation.”

  Jaim and Yanth exchanged wary glances, and Yanth said, “Where do you want to go?”

  Ry turned his back to them. “Do you think I care? Do you think I’ll ever care? Just make the arrangements to get us out of here.”

  He heard only the faint clinks of coin-filled purses being tied into belts, and the soft click of the door as it opened, then shut. When he turned around, they were gone.

  Chapter 27

  The Army of the Thousand Peoples rolled northward, into warmer terrain, into the embrace of land not always hunkered against the onslaught of ice and snow and darkness. It passed the Wizards’ Circles that had once been the lustrous cities of a great civilization, and that had become glassy sheets of water that cried out with the voices of the dead. The army walked first west, then north, gathering soldiers and believers, clearing villages of their young and strong and hopeful, growing huge. And hungry.

  The Army of the Thousand Peoples became a plague on the land, swarming like the poisonleapers that hatched every thirty-one years and flew through the air in clouds so thick they blotted out the sun. Where the army passed, the land lay bare, stripped of everything edible, both animal and vegetable. It grew—from ten thousand to fifteen thousand to twenty thousand—and it crawled inexorably forward.

  And then, on the rough and rocky banks of the Glasburg Sea, where once, in the city named Glasburg, a million people had danced in perfumed streets and strolled down grassy lanes between gleaming white arches and delicate spires, it came to rest. It foraged from the sobbing sea, and from the cruel and twisted land. And it waited. Patiently. Hungrily. In sight of the southernmost borders of Ibera, in sight of the promised land.

  For the final miracle on which it waited had not yet come to pass.

  Chapter 28

  Kait knelt in the darkened chapel with Dùghall by her side. She wore a simple gray tunic with fitted sleeves and fitted gray suede breeches, and at Dùghall’s insistence, no shoes. Dùghall had told her that she must wear no jewelry, nor any other metal, and that her hair should be bound back in a braided bun that could not move around—and that she must accomplish that without the use of the silver pins and clips she preferred. She’d wrapped the ends with linen thongs and twisted the long braid around two long wooden sticks, and tried to imagine why it could matter.

  Dùghall, similarly attired, but wearing shoes, dropped easily into cross-legged repose across from her. “You’re certain you want to do this?”

  She nodded.

  He began pulling implements and powders and long, hair-thin silver needles from a rolled kit. He unwrapped a roll of black silk and spread it between the two of them. It had a large divided circle embroidered in silver thread in the center, with a single glyph centered in each section. “The zanda,” he said, and passed a handful of heavy silver coins to her. “When I tell you to, drop these into the center, from about here.” He held his arms straight out in front of him, pantomiming the motion he wanted.

  She nodded again.

  He gave her a searching look and said, “If you aren’t sure about this, it will just waste your time and mine. You will not become a Falcon unless it is something you truly desire.”

  “It is something I desire,” she said softly.

  “But . . . ?”

  She clinked the coins from one hand to the other, eyes closed. “He left Calimekka,” she said. “He’s on a ship headed to the New Territories right now. He’s gone, and I’ve lost him.” The coins clinked faster.

  Dùghall put a hand on her arm. “Don’t damage those,” he said. “I’ve had them a long time.”

  She opened her eyes and stared at him. “Did you hear me?”

  “Of course I heard you. You didn’t expect him to stay in Calimekka, did you? Think what would have happened to him if he’d been found here.”

  “But he’s gone.”

  “For now. Things change, Kait. He’s alive and you’re alive, and life and hope ever embrace.”

  She straightened her shoulders. “Yes. And meanwhile, I’m ready.”

  “I hope so,” he said. Then he smiled at her. “I’m sure you are. I simply wish it didn’t come as such a shock, that first moment.”

  “I don’t see why. You’ve warned me about it.”

  He chuckled. “Words are not the thing itself. If they were, life would be so much simpler. Well, we might as well begin. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. And hold those damned coins still. That racket you’re making will drive me mad.”

  She stilled her nervous hands, and the warm coins settled against her skin.

  “With your eyes closed, look upward, as if you were looking at the top of your forehead from the inside.”

  She did as he asked and felt suddenly dizzy, as if she were falling backward. Her pulse thudded in her ears, and the world began to feel far away.

  “You are at a crossroads,” he told her. “At this branching of the road, you choose to live either for yourself or for others. Down the road of self, there are many other paths that can bring you back to this point if you so desire, and there are many other ways to serve—but once your feet are set upon the Falcon road, there is no turning back. Listen to the voice of your heart and the voice of your soul, asking if this is the road you should follow.”

  Her knees hurt from kneeling on the hard tiles. The small of her back ached, and her shoulders felt cramped, and she wanted to move around, but Dùghall had impressed in her the importance of maintaining her kneeling position throughout the whole of the ceremony. “It will keep you from getting hurt,” he’d said—she’d thought that cryptic, and still wondered what he’d meant. Still uncomfortable with the god Vodor Imrish, she prayed to the gods of Ibera for a sign that the path she sought would be the right one. She listened, but her thoughts refused to still, and any answer she received from the gods was buried in her mind’s noisy chatter.

  After what seemed to her a very long, uncomfortable, and unprofitable time, Dùghall said, “With your eyes still closed, hold your arms out and drop the coins on the zanda, asking for guidance from Vodor Imrish as you do.”

  She raised her arms and let the coins fall—they hit the silk with a musical clatter. Then she waited.

  Dùghall said nothing for a long time.

  Then he said, “The Fates would have plans for you no matter which road you choose. You are marked to change your world—marked to touch the lives of those around you—marked to carry a burden from the old era into the new one, but always in secret. You will never be acclaimed a hero by the masses, you will never rule in name, you will never receive praise or thanks for your many sacrifices, though you will be a hero, and you will rule in fact, and you will make great sacrifices throughout your lifetime that w
ill be deserving of great praise. Your life, no matter which road you take, will bear the scars of hardship and want, of pain and loss, and of great regret. You will lose a great friend, and regain a great love.” He sighed. “And from all I see before me, the Falcons need you more than you will ever need them. Vodor Imrish watches you with interest and some admiration, because you have chosen never to lean on the comfort or promises of the gods, and have proven time and again that you can make your way without them. Not all lives are bound to the gods—yours is not and never will be, and though you may ally yourself with Vodor Imrish, you will always be a comrade, not a worshiper.”

  She maintained her posture, eyes closed and focused upward, trying to puzzle out from Dùghall’s words whether he was telling her that she should join the Falcons or shouldn’t. They needed her more than she needed them. She was destined to rule, but in secret. She was destined to heroism, but in secret. She was to be the comrade of the gods, not a worshiper. She would lose a friend and regain a love.

  Oracles annoyed her. She wished that they could offer advice not couched in confusion. She would have liked Dùghall to read the zanda and tell her, The gods decree you are to be a Falcon, or conversely, The gods decree that you are not. Simple, direct, clear.

  “I choose the Falcon path,” she said at last. No oracle had convinced her, no god had whispered in her ear, and even her soul had failed to offer her compelling reasons for saying yea or nay—in the end, she decided simply because she believed that the Falcons had much to offer the world even without the promise of Paranne, and she wished to add her strength to their numbers.

  “Open your eyes, then, and tell me again, for no path should be chosen with eyes closed.”

  “I choose the Falcon path.”

  “Then repeat after me,” Dùghall said.

  “I offer all that is mine to give: