* * * *
The remaining original forgers of the Zygradon worked with Ceera for three days, studying the bowl and their own bonds to it, to prepare to loosen their ties to the bowl of star-metal. Volition was the key, she and Mrillis agreed. They had to believe this step was necessary, and they had to be willing to surrender control to Mrillis.
The Valors who had handled Braenlicach were next in the same task, and those who had helped forge the sword. Their bonds were looser, they had less control or no control or even awareness, depending on the strength of their imbrose. It was noted with grim dismay that none of the Valors Endor had chosen and trained answered the summons. Every one of them had vanished into the Taywauk Mountains almost the same day Triska and Endor fled the Stronghold. It was a given that Endor had been preparing for this day for years. If one of the Valors who had served with him had dared come to the Stronghold to participate in the ceremony, he would have been denied entrance, simply because of who his master had been all this time.
Last came Athrar, bringing the sword itself, because it had to be bound to Mrillis like the Zygradon, or the enemy might find a way to grasp one loose Thread, find one spot where control wasn't complete, where the shield of the power wasn't solid or thick enough.
They spent an entire day studying the sword, following the lines of Threads leading out from it, trying to identify which ones belonged to Triska and Endor. They didn't do anything when they found them, because they wanted to avoid warning the rebel siblings.
"I think it is fitting that there is a sword," Athrar said, when they emerged from Ceera's workroom and declared themselves ready. After a good night of rest, they would begin in the morning. "You will use it to cut their bonds altogether, won't you?" The young king smiled grimly when several in the group stared at him, astonished at his perceptiveness.
"Indeed, there is nothing we could imagine that could cut a Thread except a blade of star-metal," Ceera said. She smiled sadly, her weariness dulling her eyes, and rested both hands on his shoulders to study his face. He obliged by bending his knees so they were eye-to-eye. "What happened to the dear, clever boy who was like my little brother? I think I should be afraid of what we have done to make you the man you are."
"The Estall sent you to teach me and bring me close to momentous things, to prepare me for this day and hour," he responded, and bowed his head in salute to her.
Ceera blinked away a threat of tears and kissed his forehead.
* * * *
They gathered at sunrise, at the top of the cliffs looking out over the Northern Sea. Athrar stood in the center, holding Braenlicach, unsheathed, pointing down into the Zygradon but not touching it. His Valors stood around him, facing outward, the weakest in imbrose standing the closest to the two powerful objects, the strongest standing next to the Rey'kil who had been involved only in the forging of the sword. The surviving forgers of the Zygradon stood spaced around them at the compass points, and Mrillis and Ceera walked around them in a circle, keeping exactly halfway across the circle from each other.
As they walked, circling the others, Ceera sang the morning prayers, begging the Estall to bless their attempt. When she repeated the song, the others joined in. Mrillis kept silent, concentrating on the Threads as they became more visible with each circuit of the gathering.
With every heartbeat, the humming of power generated by the Zygradon and Braenlicach being in such close proximity grew stronger, louder, vibrating in his bones. At the fourth repetition of the morning song, a visible, silvery glow with rainbow streaks at the edges of his vision filled the air, and loose hair slowly rose up in coronas around every uncovered head.
Starting with the third repetition of the prayer songs, all the visible Threads gradually caught on Mrillis' and Ceera's limbs, twining around them like thread on a spindle. Mrillis never stumbled, though to his inner vision he was hobbled with thick, glowing masses that felt lighter than air and buzzed against his skin like a thousand captive honeybees.
"Estall bless us!" Ceera shouted at the end of the final chorus and held up her hands.
Athrar let go of the sword, but instead of falling into the bowl, the Threads lifted it from his hand and flung it through the air, up and over those standing around him, to smack into Ceera's upraised hands. She swung down.
Braenlicach flashed and the light that shot from the blade's edge severed all the Threads wrapped around Ceera. Mrillis reached out with will and mind and body and snatched the writhing, sparkling ends of the Threads even as they tried to reattach their severed halves.
Icy fire shot through every nerve and vein and muscle fiber. With a bundle of Threads in one hand, and the severed half of that bundle in the other, he thrust them against his chest.
The world shattered into blinding white dust and shifted through the rainbow with dizzying speed while Mrillis waited for his heart to resume beating.
Chapter Twelve
"Mrillis?" Ceera's voice sounded ragged. Her small, warm hands stroked his face, his hair. Her lips brushed his eyelids, then rested on his mouth again. "Please, love, I know you're in there. I know you can hear me. Wake up."
Mrillis realized he had been hearing her voice for what felt like hours, maybe days, but the sound had made no sense, meant nothing to him, until then. He thought about opening his eyes, but it was too nice to lie here with his head pillowed on her lap and feel her soft, worried caresses.
Worried. Yes. He heard tears in her voice. She had to be growing tired of calling for him. What exactly had he done to worry her?
"Are we alone?" he whispered. His face hurt as he smiled.
"Of course not, you big oaf." She yanked on his hair, then soothed the sting with a caress and leaned down to kiss him again, harder, longer. "Why do you ask?"
"I want to celebrate." He opened his eyes, though they felt as if weights were tied to every eyelash.
"Mrillis?" Athrar entered his field of vision before Mrillis could figure out how to tip his head back to look at Ceera. "Are you all right? Can you get up? Should we carry you to your room?"
"How long was I unconscious?"
"Not too long, and forever." Ceera pressed her hands against the back of his shoulders, shoving to get him sitting upright.
The world spun around him and Mrillis grabbed onto her to steady himself. His stomach felt heavy, though he had eaten little to break his fast, and that was hours ago.
When he could blink the blurring from his eyes, Mrillis focused on a hazy glowing object sitting on the flat, swept surface of the cliff top, with the sword thrust into a crevice in the rock next to it, so it stood upright. He blinked, but the haze surrounding the object didn't clear away.
"Can you see it?" Ceera whispered.
He looked into her eyes, caught an image from her mind, and understood what concerned her most, now that he was awake and upright.
"We were wrong, and we were right." His face didn't hurt quite so much when he smiled this time. "I can see the Zygradon, but all the features are blurred."
* * * *
No reaction came from Endor and Triska to indicate they knew or even suspected their tie to the Zygradon through Braenlicach had broken. As the moons passed and turned into a year, then two, many forgot about the threat or simply assumed that the former Queen's Heir had lied when she claimed her bond grew stronger.
Mrillis remembered how Endor had fooled them all for so long, and he knew this peace was false. Endor was waiting, gathering his forces, hoarding his strength, and changing his tactics. Just as his father, the Nameless One, had done.
"For all we know," Ceera said, the night they arrived at the Warhawk's fortress to await the birth of Athrar and Ygerna's second son, Efrin, "the Nameless One did die that day Lady Le'esha led the attack. All his evil, his knowledge, his power, he passed on to Endor, who merely waited until he was grown and strong and established among us before he struck out."
Those who had always stood against Endor used the unpleasant revelation of his treachery,
and the need to take such drastic measures to protect the bowl and sword, to suggest that perhaps Mrillis, Ceera and even Master Breylon were too blinded by sentiment to properly lead the Rey'kil.
The Zygradon and Braenlicach proved their value in defending their makers, and a precedent was established in those days of political game playing. When someone challenged their wisdom, experience and ability to lead the Rey'kil, it was a simple matter to take the hand of the challenger and touch the bowl, to experience and sometimes even see it in all its concentrated power. Some tried to claim the Zygradon was all an illusion generated by the forgers, that the bowl did not truly exist, but there were too many witnesses who saw how Braenlicach burned with fire when Athrar brought it into the room where the bowl was safeguarded, for any doubt to last very long.
As the years passed, they learned that to take advantage of the multiplied power of the Threads through the Zygradon, Mrillis needed to be part of the process. The closer to the Zygradon someone was, the stronger the power they could pull from the bowl. By contrast, Mrillis discovered that his sense of the Zygradon grew stronger, the farther away from it he went. If he closed his eyes when he stood in the room that housed the bowl, he couldn't sense it at all.
"That is because it is easier to see your feet than to see your own eye," Ceera teased, when he remarked on the discovery, half in complaint.
"I can't really envision the Zygradon as part of my feet," he retorted.
"Could you stand in the bowl, Papa?" Emrillian asked, eyes wide with shock at the very idea.
"There's no need." He sat down next to her at the table in the front room of their quarters, where their daughter, nearly ten, practiced her handwriting with a carbon stick and scraps of parchment. "I can still draw power from it, and I stand between it and any who would attack and try to steal its power. " He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and teasingly tugged on her long, pale braid. "I'm just worried about what we would do if it was ever stolen from us. How could I find something I couldn't see?"
"How can anybody steal it from us if they can't see it?"
"She has you there," Ceera said, and stuck her tongue out at him when Mrillis scowled mockingly at her.
He had to admit Emrillian was right. How could someone steal what they couldn't see or even pick up? Still, a niggling doubt lingered at the edges of his mind, springing on him with worries at unexpected times. Endor and Triska had enslaved others and forced them to destroy their imbrose for the sake of blood magic, and used that blood magic to attack. No one could find them, after all this time. Who knew what magic they had devised between them, and if they could find a way to enslave the forgers of the Zygradon, or their descendants, and steal the Zygradon through them?
* * * *
In the deepest part of the winter, the year Emrillian turned ten and Belissa turned four, Triska returned to the Stronghold. Emaciated, half out of her mind with fever, ragged and terrified--and accompanied by her two-year-old daughter, Trevissa.
She confessed to enslaving the Rey'kil who had attacked Athrar and Braenlicach, and confessed to forcing them to use blood magic. She was so eager to confess her crimes, even things no one had suspected her of, she babbled even during her lucid moments. Endor was to blame. He had controlled her, first with bullying and criticism, then showering her with praise and approval and affection, and then when she questioned him, with magic. She told how Endor had used her to shield him when he killed Nixtan and Loereen, trying to steal their bond with the Zygradon. She told how he had tormented her when she let her emotions control her, and so endangered her fragile bond with Braenlicach.
Triska offered to let them use the mind-searching magic they had used on the men she had enslaved and forced to kill themselves, to prove that what she said was true.
"The problem," Nainan said, when Ceera and her advisors gathered to discuss the situation, "is that she might have offered, knowing chances were good we wouldn't test her."
"I don't follow," Deyral said. He had come in place of Master Breylon, who had been in poor health all winter.
"If someone offered to let you search all their memories, knowing you had magic that would reveal all, wouldn't you simply assume that they did it because they were speaking the truth? Wouldn't your tendency be to forego the test?"
"Well, yes. Usually. But she has to know that we don't trust her, that such an offer couldn't sway us. She is taking a risk that we don't trust her."
"And she has to know that we will sit and natter and twist our minds into knots over the puzzle and paradox for hours, even days," Ceera said with a weary, bitter chuckle. "Yet why would she take the risk, if she weren't innocent?"
"The child. She knows even if she is lying and we test her and discover her lies, we will take the child in and shelter her," Nainan said. She offered the gathered counselors a shrug and a sad smile. "My niece. I know what it is like to be controlled by Endor, to be tossed aside like a broken, useless tool. If I didn't already have a place among you, I might have retreated to somewhere distant and solitary to lick my wounds and hide my shame, when he finally let go of me. Triska likely has done that. But she half-killed herself, coming at the worst of winter, for the sake of her child."
Mrillis wondered if the toddler's presence was merely part of the masquerade, the pretense. It was a clever deception, if it was one. Triska risked everything, especially the potential of power not yet revealed in Trevissa, by coming here to people who could only consider her an enemy. And yet what if she had been enslaved just as completely as Nainan had been? Could Triska's growing nastiness and selfishness, before that final break, have been her own attempt to have herself replaced as Ceera's heir, and for Endor to abandon her as useless?
What I fear, Ceera confided privately to him, is the chance that Endor follows his father's example, and that little girl has been sent among us to wait years before she attacks.
In the end, they tested Triska, examining several key memories to prove that she spoke the truth. Some of the cruelties and crimes Endor practiced on her and forced her to perform were far worse than she had said in her delirious confessions. She wept with exhaustion and pain, and smiled when the examination ended.
Triska asked to be assigned among the healers and showed a particular fondness for children. She doted on her niece and begged Nainan to adopt Trevissa, if anything ever happened to her. She never said it in so many words, but her fear of Endor's vengeance was clear to everyone.
Trevissa was a happy, healthy little girl who preferred to be with her mother, and soon became a pet to the workers in the healer rooms and the workrooms where the Stronghold's renowned healing potions were made. Triska admitted that her little girl had no experience with other children, and slowly, uneasily recounted the days of exile with Endor, in the mountains at the south of Lygroes, surrounded by traitor Rey'kil and the Encindi barbarians who followed Endor.
One thing she never talked of, never offered, and pretended not to hear when someone asked, was the identity of Trevissa's father.
* * * *
In later years, Mrillis looked back on this time of peace and wished they hadn't grown so comfortable, bordering on complacent. He searched their actions, the records of council meetings and decisions and actions taken, spy reports, and the records of Valors and minor enchanters who dedicated themselves to finding Endor and his band of rebels and barbarians. He could easily wish they had done something different, taken a different course, but honest examination showed him there was little they could have changed.
Master Breylon turned the guardianship of Wynystrys over to Deyral, and spent his time divided between Athrar's sons as their tutor, and playing favorite grandfather to the children of the Stronghold. Emrillian and Belissa were his special ones, and since Trevissa was always with her cousin, and Belissa was always with Emrillian, the third girl was included in their treats and extra lessons.
The children born to the forgers of the sword and the bowl could see the Zygradon. Proximity and constant ex
posure to either object made the bond stronger, and it became a practice in time for all the children to be brought before the Zygradon at their fifth birthing day, to be tested. Those who showed sensitivity, especially those who made the bowl glow and caused a ripple of power among the Threads, stayed in the Stronghold for training. They would be the next generation to guard and use the bowl for the benefit of Lygroes.
Emrillian and Belissa were among the strongest, and Athrar's son, Cafral showed promise when he grew older. He did not come to the Stronghold, because his destiny and duty kept him with his father to train to be Warhawk someday. His brother, Efrin, could make Braenlicach flicker with dim blue fire when he grasped the hilt, but that was all. When the boy understood the implications, that he had imbrose, but not enough to do more than heal minor wounds and start fires, he laughed and claimed to be relieved. He would be a warrior, his brother's Warlord, just as their grandfather had been Warlord to Afron Warhawk.
Valors came to the Stronghold for training and for periodic testing of their imbrose, to see if it had grown, and to train them further if it had. They caused a stir among the girls and even some of the young women of the Stronghold, when they arrived. Some devoted more energy to charming the girls than they did to their lessons. These, Ceera sent back to Athrar with the recommendation they be given light duties, without much responsibility or access to star-metal. The ones who saved their flirting and dancing for after their lessons gained her approval. One in particular stood out among her students; Pyris, a distant cousin of Athrar. No one was surprised when he was named leader of the Valors, the summer after Emrillian turned nineteen.
Ceera and Mrillis were surprised, however, when they went on a picnic with Emrillian to celebrate Midsummer, and their daughter calmly announced she intended to marry Pyris.
"Does he know this?" Ceera asked, after a long pause.
Mrillis wracked his brains, trying to recall any special attention the tall, broad-shouldered Valor had paid to his daughter. Emrillian usually didn't linger in the hallways with the other girls, hoping for a glimpse of the Valors going to classes or down to the Lake of Ice to practice their imbrose. He supposed his daughter's seeming indifference should have been a warning sign.
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