by Unknown
Lithra was aging.
* * * *
Over the following week, Lithra grew agitated to a degree I had never before seen. She had always been quick-tempered, but she had the cook whipped for over-salting the soup. When a footman stepped on her hem as she dismounted from a carriage, she threatened to have him castrated. Knowing how his predecessor had ended up, he pissed himself on the spot.
She was quick to snap at me when I arrived in the courtyard the next morning for our daily stroll.
"About time you arrived."
I was startled to see her there. I was in fact early. The countess usually lingered at breakfast—a meal sometimes not taken until noon.
I curtsied. "Your pardon, m'lady."
She held her body stiffly. Her eyes were bloodshot. Had she not slept? Nor eaten?
She launched herself down the main garden path. With my shorter legs, I had to scurry to keep up. I found myself staring at the nape of her neck. The hair was grey at the roots, and the skin cobwebbed by fine wrinkles. By now, she looked to be at least sixty.
Or perhaps only fifty. She seemed older because she had grown plain. I had not realized before that the magic that maintained her youth was also responsible for her beauty.
I glanced back, anticipating the company of servants or one of the guests the countess sometimes invited to keep her amused, but no one emerged from the manor. Soon we could not even see the building through the foliage.
"You have seen the changes in my appearance," she said.
The statement came without warning. I trembled as I answered. "Yes, m'lady. I have."
"All will be well. I need another dose of the Wine of Consorts."
"The-" I tripped on the raised edge of a flagstone, and nearly fell. "Did I hear you say-?"
"The Wine of Consorts. One of the Elixirs of the Numinous Mages."
"Everyone says the art of making those was lost."
"That is what they say."
Yet Lithra had mastered at least one of them. She was telling me she was at the level of the sorcerers of legend.
"I can hear your mind working," Lithra said. "You are remembering the nature of the great potions."
She had read me. Just as existence is expressed in solid, liquid, and gas, the highest magic bestows its abundance in three aspects—the internal, the external, and the threshold between. Plainly, in Lithra's case, the bounty of the internal aspect was her enduring youth. Her body had been altered so that it no longer suffered the effects of passing time. Her beauty was surely the bounty of the threshold. It wasn't that her form itself had grown lovely, but a glamour affected the way observers perceived it.
That left the bounty of the external. "You have some kind of power over the world around you, or over the people around you," I said.
"Yes. But if you haven't guessed what it is, I shan't tell you. I am already sharing more than I care to." She extended her hands. "Do you see how they shake?"
"Yes." I had already noticed the tremors.
"I need you to be my hands. I can't trust my grip. Were it not for that, I would not have brought you along. Be thankful you learn anything at all today."
"Yes, m'lady."
It was an odd place to be in. My fingers were short, like the rest of me, and the countess had on occasion been displeased with my dexterity.
"Is it always like this?" I asked. "Do you have to endure this decline?"
"It was safe to take a new dose weeks ago. It is because of my partner that the timing is so inconvenient." She spat into the hedge. "May he dine on goose dung at every meal."
"Your partner?"
We stopped. Lithra fixed her stare upon me. "You will repeat none of what I am about to tell you, do you understand?"
"As you command, m'lady."
At the quickness of my answer, she grew more calm.
"The Wine of Consorts is called that because it must be made from a pair of catalysts—one supplied by a female, the other by a male. In a few minutes we will rendezvous with my ally. I would be happy never to have to look at him again, but I do not have that option."
We continued on in silence. I was too stunned to dare more questions. Lithra was the last person I would have expected to have a partner of any sort, let alone one whose contribution was so key to her success and station in life.
She ignored the usual meandering garden paths and mazes and led us onward in as straight a route as we could take toward the edge of the estate, where it melted into the bog. The groomed landscape fell away. We shifted to a gamekeeper's track, a narrow thread of native clay that forced us to lift our skirts to make it through the nettles and berry brambles. The stench of simmering peat grew stronger.
"Do you smell the frogs?" my pa used to say as we returned from our regular treks to the market henge. Lithra's manor house was surrounded by garden flowers and every room scented with bouquets or spiced candles. It was only when I ventured out into this amphibian miasma that I felt at home.
The morning sun was banishing the mists as we reached the end of the path. Ahead lay an expanse of lagoons, shallows, drowned trees, islets, and brush. Slightly to our left a short pier thrust into the deeper channel that bounded this fringe of the marsh. A dinghy was tied to it. Standing on the dock, arms folded and head high, as if he were commanding the gloom to lift, was a large man.
Our movement made no real sound that I heard, but he turned toward us immediately, his right hand darting to the hilt of his sheathed sword. He moved like a fighting man.
He relaxed as he saw who had come. He removed his nondescript travelling cloak and tossed it, along with a campaign duffel, into the boat.
The attire he had revealed was far from nondescript. His shirt was finest silk. His tunic was linen, embroidered with such intricate detail it must have taken a seamstress months to complete the needlework. Many of the colors were more vivid than can be teased from plant dyes, requiring sorcery to achieve.
A warrior he might be, but he was no common soldier. Even at this distance, I recognized his likeness from the proclamations his scribes and messengers had distributed through the land. He was Obur. The King.
"He is your partner?" I gasped.
"Yes," the countess replied.
I suppose I might have guessed, if I'd had more than a few minutes to speculate. There were only a few dozen known immortals in the land, and surely her partner had to be one of them. But the king?
His gaze settled upon me as we approached. I was unaccustomed to such scrutiny from a male. I felt as though my gown and shift had evaporated, leaving me naked in front of him. The feeling was not unpleasant.
"Who is this young fawn?" he asked.
"My potion wench."
I curtsied. He smiled. I blushed.
"Let's be done with this," the countess declared, clambering down the ladder and into the dinghy.
"After you," the king said.
My hand trembled as I took his. He held me securely as I lowered myself down. I felt...royal.
"Control yourself," the countess snapped. "He's just a man."
Obur began untying the knots that secured the vessel to the dock. "She knows that's not true." He winked at me. Despite what my mistress had demanded, I blushed again.
"Stop smiling," Lithra told me.
And instantly, my lips flattened. Suddenly. As if of their own accord.
All at once, I understood why.
"That was foolish of you," the king told Lithra as he stepped into the dinghy and gave us a push away from shore. "Now she knows."
For eight years, I had obeyed Lithra unfailingly. When she was harsh—which was nearly all the time—I saw her venom as justified. When she treated servants and visitors poorly, I saw it as their fault, and—though my opinion was of course never solicited—I took her side.
Loyalty. That was the final gift the Wine of Consorts had given her. She commanded the loyalty of those around her. Only now, with the magic growing weak, could I even summon the perspective needed to be a
ware of the compulsion I had been under.
"You be silent," the countess told the king. But he just laughed. That was when I understood the rest—he was immune. He was the one person who could freely choose to be disloyal to her.
Obur took the center bench and picked up the oars. My mistress and I faced him, side by side on the aft bench.
"Well?" he asked.
Lithra pointed. "That channel. Keep to the north as we skirt the mangroves."
So even Obur did not know where we were going. This did not surprise me. It would not have been like Lithra to keep her catalyst within her own manor, where a thief—or an untrustworthy partner—might succeed in locating it. It was hidden more elaborately than that.
The king propelled us on with steady, powerful strokes. We rounded the first bend and the dock vanished behind the mangrove tangle. Ravens called out to warn of humans penetrating the marsh. Turtles abandoned their logs as we approached, to hide in the clouds of algae.
"You've looked better," Obur commented.
Lithra bristled. "I have you to thank."
He chuckled. He stroked his close-cropped beard. It was shot with grey, but only a little. The elixir's grace had not yet abandoned him as much as it had Lithra.
"Perhaps you should have inhaled more deeply last time we were together," he said.
"If I failed to do so, it was because I was holding my nose at the need to be next to you."
"Have care, my orchid in the mire. Or I will think you do not love your king."
"Spare me your blathering," she replied.
A muscle in his jaw twitched, and for an instant, I thought he would pick up an oar and pound her across the skull. Nevertheless his voice was mild as he said, "Your wench wonders how you keep me coming back each time, when you nurse me on such sour milk."
Hair rose on the nape of my neck. He had precisely described how I viewed their bickering. Could he see within me?
Yes. That must be it. People said the king could sense what vassals and courtiers were sincere in their support of him, and that he had an uncanny ability to ferret out traitors. Some believed this insight sprang from a magical source, like his youthfulness. It appeared they were right. It seems the Wine of Consorts had given him the ability to see the true desires and opinions of those around him—his bounty of the external.
Lithra, though, was opaque to him. That irked him.
Surely at one time they had been on good terms. Had time alone changed their attitudes? Or was it that Lithra couldn't bear the thought of someone she couldn't sway, and he couldn't bear the uncertainty of not knowing if a person near him was arranging to betray him?
All I could do was stare at the power of the king's hands as he gripped and pulled on the oars, and know I would be afraid of attempting to betray such a man. If I ever did and the plan went awry, he would be the most dangerous of enemies.
He studied me. I saw him ferret out my mood, sense my conclusion. He smiled again.
And then he frowned at Lithra. Did she have some trap in mind for him? If so, I didn't know. And therefore, Obur couldn't know, either. It was her secret to have.
"We are going very far in this time," Obur observed after an hour of threading through the lacework of navigable channels. I heard suspicion in his tone.
"I am just following the scent," she replied, "and it has led us this way. It's not much farther. I can tell we're close."
In fact, another quarter hour dragged by. But then, as we rounded a cluster of cattail reeds, Lithra let out a pent-up breath.
"There."
Ahead lay a fallen cypress, one broken, half-rotted limb jutting well above the waterline. From a beetle niche grew a large, strikingly handsome bog lily, its stalk strung like foxglove with blooms, their hue saffron near the crest, deepening to copper at the base. The flowers were like cups, and each hung low, bowed down by unnaturally heavy loads of nectar.
As well as I knew the swamp, I had never seen such a flower.
"It blooms only when I need it to," Lithra explained to me, with not a little pride in her tone. "And never in the same part of the bog."
It was ingenious. Most of the time, she had no need to hide or to guard the catalyst, because it simply didn't exist.
Obur ceased paddling, letting the boat ease to a gentle drift. This was enough to bring us right under the jutting branch. The king took hold of a knobby projection of the tree trunk and held us in place.
Lithra reached into the campaign duffel Obur had brought and withdrew three items—a flask, a funnel, and a chalice. She put the funnel into the mouth of the flask.
"Tip out the contents of the blooms," she said, handing me the items. They fit together so snugly that it was as if they were one piece. "And need I say? Be very careful."
I made my way to the prow. I had grown up riding in boats such as these and my balance was good, but nonetheless I concentrated on my steadiness. The lower blooms of the stalk were right at the height of my bosom. I decided to begin with those.
A butterfly sailed in. It hovered as if to sample the lily's provender, but it had no sooner come close enough to smell the full aroma than it shot away as if bitten.
I realized gnats and midges were no longer dancing around my face as they had throughout the journey. They were keeping at least four or five feet away from the flower. I saw none of their drowned carcasses in the pools of nectar. Nor any pollen or other impurities.
I tipped a bloom. Four or five drops of syrupy amber liquid fell into the funnel. I realized it would be a lengthy process. The bloom, the largest, was no larger than a pinkie thimble.
A searing pain, like pepper juice in a knife cut, soaked into my index finger and thumb, where the stickiness of the nectar clung. I blew air, but it only served to spread the stickiness a bit further, and added to the agony.
"Yes," Lithra said coolly. "I always hated that part. It's difficult not to get a little on one's skin. Don't be a baby. It will cause no permanent damage."
"You might have warned her," Obur remarked.
"Nothing teaches like experience," the countess replied.
I tried to be even more careful as I harvested the second and third blooms, but a trace more liquid touched my skin. I stifled a whimper. I was sure blisters were rising.
I wondered how something so caustic could be swallowed. Did it become palatable upon being combined with Obur's catalyst?
Abruptly, the answer came to me. One did not drink it. One breathed the fumes.
I said nothing. I was certain I did not want Lithra to know I'd guessed this aspect of the process.
"Well, child," she said. "Do not sit there chewing your curls."
I went back to work, trying to lose myself in the task so as not to notice the discomfort as much. Finally, when more than half the flower's yield had been depleted, Lithra said I had gathered enough.
She accepted the flask from me with care, conscious of her unsteady grip. There wasn't much opportunity to spill any, however. She immediately raised the flask to her mouth, exhaled into it, and tightened the cap.
The flask began to glow—not to the eye, not so that any non-mage would notice a difference, but I had no trouble sensing the aura. From the nods of satisfaction from Lithra and Obur, they perceived it even better than I. Within a few more minutes, Lithra's catalyst would be ready to be combined with Obur's.
How like her, to hide her treasure not only in place and time, but to require one last manipulation on her part to bring it to full strength.
"Your turn," the countess told the king.
He chuckled. "We will see. You might have to be patient."
"Perhaps this time you will choose a different benefit," Lithra grumbled. "One that will make this process easier."
"You would love to see me weakened. No. I will keep the same set of gifts. They have served me well. And being patient will do you good. Spirits know you don't get much practice."
Lithra shot him one of the glares I had borne the brunt of over the years
, though the puffiness of the bags beneath her eyes reduced the intensity of it. She tapped her finger against the flask. "Get on with it."
Obur drew his dagger. I hiccupped at the sight, but he did not point it at either of us. He splayed his thumb on the bench, nail side down, and placed the tip of the weapon in the center of the fleshiest part.
He pressed down hard.
His skin held. The knife did not penetrate.
"Hair in my soup would be more use than you," Lithra complained.
Obur shrugged. To me, he explained, "When the magic fades, it goes quickly. But until then, it is as strong as if I had just taken a dose."
"What were you trying to do?"
"His blood is the catalyst," Lithra said.
Obur grinned. "Can you think of a better way to keep it safe?" He jabbed his palm with the dagger. Again, the tip would not penetrate. The bounty of the threshold protected him. The tales of his invulnerability in battle were well-known.
"The sea folk raiders once coated their swords with oils their shamans swore would let them cut me. They tried and they tried. I killed two-thirds of them, and told the others to go back and kill their shamans. I'm told they took my advice."
To pass the time, he told other tales. Lithra sighed and rolled her eyes. After he had described his plans to seize the mines of the southerners on his next campaign, he handed me the dagger and laid his thumb down again.
"Put all your weight into it," he told me.
I was not sure I, small as I was, could press any harder with all my weight than he could with his one arm, but I took the knife, set it on his thumb, and bore down.
At first, the skin held. Then the very sharpest part of the tip sank down a fraction more. A bead of blood formed.
"That will do," he said. He took back his knife. "Hold out the chalice."
I did so. He held his thumb out and squeezed three drops into its gleaming gold receptacle.
The power in the drops radiated over me. It made me sway. Obur liked that.
But I kept the chalice extended.
"No more is needed." Obur said. "Unlike some, my potions are concentrated."
Lithra sniffed. "You just don't like to bleed."