by Carol Berg
“Lead? At your side?” No beggar presented with a crown of rubies could be more astonished or more skeptical.
She rose and joined me at the map, smiled again, and with one finger gently closed my mouth. “Who else could I trust to see both the wisdom of the future I propose and its dangers? Your life will stretch long enough to ensure we move past our time of suffering and penitence and into the new order”—she touched my wrist, setting my skin afire where a streak of pale blue peeked out between the silkbinding and my sleeve—“longer than I first imagined, longer than my own. Your unique magic will grow in these stretched years, serving to keep you safe and strong enough to lead. And your moral stature will shield the remnants of the old races from oppression as they die away.”
I had expected to find Sila Diaglou evil incarnate, a leering devil who relished blood, or perhaps a drooling madwoman who saw macabre visions. What was beginning to disturb me most were these times that she seemed halfway reasonable. She shivered in the chilly fortress, relished her supper, had a grandmother who taught her songs. She worried about moral stature and oppression…which made her act of stabbing a spear through Boreas’s gut to pin his bleeding body to the earth all the more horrific. I would not allow myself to become one of her besotted sheep.
I wrenched my attention from her face before I was completely undone. Behind her, the hanging blanket that covered the door to the gallery swayed, as if just dropped back into place. Despite Jakome’s wards, someone had been standing there, listening to what she had just said. Or perhaps I was merely twitchy because Gildas’s danger loomed so large. The last place on earth I dared stand was on some pedestal Gildas desired for himself.
I stepped away from Sila. If she viewed the move as a retreat, so be it. “Madam, I claim no unique magic and no moral stature. Indeed I think you mistake me for someone entirely different. But even if I were as you say, and even if I espoused your goals—which seem so grand as to be impossible—how could a person of any ‘moral stature’ countenance your tactics? These rites of blood, these burnings, and spreading fear…” I dared not mention the Danae. Not until I understood more. “I don’t believe in your Gehoum.”
“Your feelings are but confirmation of my judgment,” she said without the least trace of rancor. “They do you credit. But you must abandon your childish views, these notions of benevolent mother goddesses, compassionate father gods, and nurturing Danae guardians. No one tends this world. The universe is not benevolent. Look upon the stars—equal in their clarity, undivided in their brilliance—and the harsh truth of the universe becomes clear. I name this truth Gehoum that my followers might grasp it. It prescribes simplicity and demands order, and we who see the rancorous division and greed our ancestors have wrought upon the world, the corruption, this hoarding of talent, wealth, and privilege, the cruelties of war and servitude, must accomplish its return to purity. To me falls the dread task of cleansing, to you the task of regeneration. Our destinies track side by side, but shall never…marry.” Her apologetic smile ravished my wits.
Of a sudden, wood rapped on stone from the gloom at the far end of the chamber. “Regeneration? Fool of a girl! Didst thou think I would not learn of this connivance?”
“Grandam! Why are you hiding here?” Sila grabbed an unlit torch from the sconce by the door and shoved it into the brazier. Once it flared, she raised it high.
The shadows fled to reveal a person sitting in the room’s farthest corner. Shapeless robes and wimple hid all but her face and the walking stick she rapped angrily against the floor.
“I seek to understand why my dearest girl has not brought me this perverse creature fallen into her grasp. As she does not see fit to confide in me, I must resort to devious means.”
The pale-complected woman who voiced this harsh complaint was the ancient I had seen with Sila in the hall the previous day.
“Have you learned no lesson I’ve taught you, girl? The long-lived are a wound, festering with pride and corruption. They serve no purpose and cannot be made clean. And these Aurellian magicians dare set themselves above the rest of us. The world must be purged of them both, along with Caedmon’s prideful get. This halfbreed is abomination, yet you think to breed him and make more?”
“I will not bend just because you and I disagree, Grandam.” Exhibiting her coldest self again, Sila set the blazing torch in its sconce and knelt beside the old woman to kiss her cheek. “You would chastise me did I betray my convictions for sentiment, would you not? Thus I chose not to distress you with my decision.”
“But what is this breeding plan but sentimental attachment to corruption?” No excess affection displayed itself between Sila and her elder as they argued the merits of the world’s ruin.
Momentarily abandoned, I shook off my fascination with Sila Diaglou’s family disagreements, and stooped down as if using my bundled hands to adjust my boot. A little more wriggling and my thumbs poked through the layered cords and touched the floor. I poured out magic, searching for the threads of life I had created the previous night. Gods, I was halfway to the prince and Stearc.
“Magnus?” Sila’s hand touched my shoulder.
I blinked and looked up. “My boot…”
The lady’s laugh bit flesh as fiercely as Malena’s blade. “Do you think I don’t know what you do when you touch the ground? Gildas has told me of your Aurellian bent—and of your fondness for the Karish boy. Truly I have no wish to do him harm.”
This gentle declaration appalled me. She did not see what she had done to Gerard and Jullian as harm. How could a flesh-and-blood woman feel nothing?
One by one my secrets had fallen open to her, but anger hardened my resolve that she would not learn the rest. “You are most gracious, madam,” I said, bowing my head and climbing to my feet with as much dignity as bound hands allowed. “This child…I’ll confess I am preoccupied. He saved my life. Such a debt must be repaid, else a man’s life never comes into balance. With my own fate so little in my control, my concern for his rules both head and heart.”
“You must tame such weakness that your mind may be devoted to the greater good, Magnus. So my grandmother taught me.” She beckoned me to follow. “Come, she asks to meet you.”
Dutifully I stood before the old woman—older than I had thought from a distance. Framed by veil and wimple, her brow was high and her cheeks taut over square-cut bones like Sila’s, her dry skin finely checkered, like linen washed too many times and shriveled in the sun. Yet her turquoise eyes were astonishingly unclouded by time. They could have looked out at me from the face of a maid of one-and-twenty, save for the layer upon layer of despite in them. No few decades could have accumulated the depth of malice written in this woman’s face.
“Tell me of your parentage, abomination,” she said, wasting no time on pleasantries.
More than Gildas, more even than Sila, this woman incited me to caution. Her intelligence and festered grievance were so closely twined, opening anything of myself to her felt akin to spreading the lips of a wound and asking for salt. “I believe your granddaughter thinks bloodlines important only in their purposeful unraveling.”
She leaned forward, her invisible hands propped on her stick, her body formless beneath the heavy robes that draped her head and spilled from her shoulders. “Call it an old woman’s curiosity.”
Years…malevolence…somehow the pressure of her scrutiny squeezed an answer out of me. “My father is Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria, a pureblood who languishes in drooling mania for his sins. I did not know my mother, and he did not tell me of her. I was raised as human, only learning of my dual heritage these past weeks.”
“Son of the pureblood who returned Caedmon’s spawn to Navronne.” Hatred poured out of the old woman in a poison spew. “That itself is enough reason to drain thy blood. Who told you of your unnatural birthing if not the animal who caused it?”
No difficulty in framing this answer. Truth would suffice. “My master, Prince Osriel, is an uncommon mage. He suspecte
d the truth—using much the same evidence as Gildas, I suppose. Once his theory proved correct, he discarded me in some bargain with the Danae. Osriel explains neither his methods nor reasons.”
“And now you have passed two of the remasti while out of your head. How is that possible? The dam directs such matters. Yet she has clearly been uninterested all these years, and who else of the long-lived would bother to force a human-raised halfbreed through the passages? And why?”
The old woman held me paralyzed with her attention—a much more fearsome scrutiny than Sila’s. I dared not answer. I dared not meet her gaze. Surely she could read my flesh and bone. Sila saw people as clay to be molded to her will. This woman viewed us as prey.
“I desire to look upon his gards.” The old woman’s crackling voice rose a note. “Perhaps they are but pureblood enchantment designed to deceive, some play of this cursed Osriel. Have him show me, Sila.”
“This serves no purpose, Grandam. His marks are not spellworked.” Sila’s impatience scraped my nerves, creating noise and distraction when some insight waited just beyond my grasp. How did the old woman know so much of Danae?
As much to quiet the argument as anything else, I stuck my bundled hands in front of the old woman’s nose. “Look as you please, gammy. The god-cursed Danae did this thing to me. For all I know, they were trying to drive me as mad as my father.”
With a sigh of exasperation, Sila yanked my sleeve upward as far as it would go, exposing my right wrist and half my forearm. The gards had paled to silver, faintly tinted with blue. The old woman bent her head over my arm. Her breath seared my skin, as if hellfire burned within her withered body.
She slumped back into her chair. “The gards are true,” she said, her venom muted.
“As long as you confess their validity, then tell me what skills they give him, Grandam.”
The old woman averted her face. Had I not been cranked tight as a crossbow, I might not have noted the alteration in her expression—a closing, as if she had determined not to share what she had seen. “After taking the two remasti so short a time ago? Nothing of import. He experiences the world as unending noise and confusion. If you want to keep him living, lock him away where he can touch the wind and breathe. I am surprised he is not slamming his head against these walls. I am not surprised you find him pliable to breeding lust. He has completed only two changes. The third awaits.”
The third remasti—the maturing of fleshly desire—was that what was happening to me? How did she know?
Frigid as the coming night, Sila glanced from her grandmother to me. “And one more question…Gildas says that Danae males need pain to quicken their seed. You never told me that.”
The old woman snorted, an amusement that sounded like cracking wood. “I’m sure he must be correct,” she said. “Gildas knows everything. My small experience is of human males, and that is quite revolting enough. Do not fear, granddaughter, this one shall become everything you wish.”
“Who are you?” I whispered.
The old woman merely bobbed her head while staring until I felt naked.
Sila grabbed two of the folding stools and beckoned me to the brazier, leaving the old woman hunched in her dim corner like a mother spider. Relief warmed me more than the flames.
“Do not expect me to apologize for my grandmother’s plain speech. Grandam has a gift for seeing through all the world’s masks, and she has taught me to do the same. We speak as we find. But my experience out in the field, seeing the cleansing as we accomplish it, has caused my vision to expand beyond hers. Once the harrowing is done, something will grow; it can be weeds or it can be wheat. I have great hopes for you.”
She beamed, and I began to understand why men and women destroyed themselves for her. Her beliefs permeated her being—flesh and spirit indistinct one from the other and exposed for all to view. She stood as an exemplar of truth, naught hidden, naught sly or deceitful. She wore no mantle of ambition or greed. No petty grievance sullied her mission. No wonder the battered poor overlooked her ruthless strikes against their own interests. They believed her.
I could not succumb to fascination. For every answer I gleaned, two more questions arose. “To learn more of this vile”—I gestured toward my body—“state I have been left in would be a boon. Noisy is a mild description of what they’ve done to me. How does your grandmother know these things?”
“She has lived a long time. And now, dear Magnus”—she leaned forward, hands folded—“I must know about Prince Osriel.”
For near an hour, she questioned me, precisely and specifically, about Osriel’s magic, his fortresses, his legions, and his gold. The intriguing map loomed over us, yet I could spare no thoughts for it. The interrogation justified the prince’s close grip on his secrets, for I had scant need to lie or hide anything. I spoke of his cruel and varying humors, of his disdain for friends and confidants, and his callous use of Jullian as hostage. Without mentioning gold mines or walking dead men, I spoke of my certainty that Osriel dabbled in vile and wicked sorcery, developed through long study. I described in gruesome detail the scene in Gillarine’s kitchen when he took the dead messenger’s eyes, while disclaiming any knowledge of what he did with them. When she asked me what I could tell of his military aide, Mardane Voushanti, rumored to be under diabolical influence, I said only that the man was a formidable warrior and shared his master’s scorn for unskillful pureblood vagabonds. And I could certainly tell her nothing of Osriel’s bargain with the Danae.
When she questioned me of Evanori military strength, I gave her modest estimates of the warmoot and vouched the warlords’ loyalty was for Caedmon’s kin and no love for Osriel himself. And when she probed to discover his plans, I said only that I had been discovered and tossed out before I could hear the prince’s charge to his warriors. The Bastard believed his brothers weak and untrustworthy, I said, and Sila herself to be his only worthy rival. All his machinations were to defeat her—but I swore I could not tell her what those strategies were. “He never trusted me.”
While displaying reluctance to aid her cause, I let her tease out this information. And I focused my answers through the prism of Osriel’s betrayal, allowing my rage to surface and taint every detail of my experiences with the worst possible interpretation. And as I spoke, I gave full rein to my body’s certainty that the arrow slits in her walls were closing and I would soon be dead of suffocation. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and I twitched and fidgeted. Her grandam should be well pleased that I was half a lunatic.
“What of this Stearc of Erasku?” she said, after I repeated my claim that Osriel favored no Evanori lord above another. “Your friend from the cabal? And his secretary and his charming squire? How does Osriel view their activities?”
I croaked a laugh. “Friend? The thane damned me as a coward from our first meeting. And I don’t believe he changes his mind. The only time I saw Stearc at Renna was on the night of the warmoot, amid the other lords. I glimpsed Gram—the secretary—only briefly on that visit, but was not allowed to speak with him. I doubt the prince takes notice of secretaries. As for the girl, she near fainted from fright when I once mentioned Osriel’s name. I gathered she believed he would flay them for their activities.”
“Why did you help the cabal? Gildas could not explain why you would endanger yourself for those who want to preserve their superiority over common men.”
“I was looking for advantage,” I said. “If they had found out I could not read, they would have thrown me out of Gillarine. I had no intention of starving.” As I said this, it came to me that this crass rendering was naught but truth. Yet even if I had dared explain to Sila Diaglou how my motives had changed, she would not have understood. Faith was not a word she had use for.
“So what of the monk you saved from my hangman—the chancellor Victor—what happened to him?”
“Osriel never permitted me to see him. He claimed that his house mage had put Brother Victor into a healing sleep to recover from his wounds. I didn�
�t particularly care. Save for Jullian, the Tormentor can take the whole lot of the cursed cabal—including your pet monk, Gildas. They thought to use me, just like every other person in my life has sought to use me, and when they had squeezed the use from me, they threw me to the dogs. The boy was the only one of the lot who tried to teach me how to read their fine books.”
“Loyalty is a great virtue and should be rewarded.” She stood and motioned me toward the door. I prayed I had not given her anything of value, nor condemned myself with some contradiction of Stearc’s testimony.
“Jakome!” The guard came running. “Return Magnus to his chamber and unbind his hands. Then inform Gildas that, at his convenience, he may release the boy to our guest’s protection.”
She held my wrists and smiled, sending spiders’ feet creeping up my back. “Sleep well, and do not think to deny Malena again. She is strong and faithful, and it is my will that she catch your seed.”
Chapter 24
Leaving Sila’s chamber felt like crawling out of a grave. Jakome led me to the tower stair, only to have Sila call him back to her door for one more message—a summons for Gildas to join her for the evening meal.
As I awaited my jailer’s return, the downward stair gaped dark in front of me. I wished an apology to those who languished below. One more day, Lord Prince, I said. One more day, Stearc. Let me get Jullian and then I’ll find a way down to you. More than any bloodline, book, or tool, this world needed something of innocence preserved.
“Come, Grandam. I will take you back to your room.” As Jakome sauntered back toward me, Sila led her grandmother down the gallery. The old woman moved in a halting, rolling gait, leaning heavily on Sila’s arm and a walking stick. Surely some cruelty had blighted her life to nurture such malevolence.
Of a sudden, the world held its breath…as bits and pieces of our strange interview peppered my thoughts like wind-driven sand. “What’s wrong with the old woman?” I whispered, not expecting an answer.