“What?”
“Here. I’ll do it.” And holding the woman’s nose, she leaned over, put her mouth over the heir’s and blew. She paused, then repeated. And again. And again. Korin, now covered in mud himself, began to lose hope. The Heir-Empir blew once more, and Korin was about to stop her when Tuane took a gulp of air all by herself. She coughed, and the girl rolled her onto her side. Heir Tuane continued to cough between gasps for air, but…she lived.
He’d trusted in the powers of a young hermit, and the fact that this girl, who might be Garla’s next Empir, had harnessed the might of almighty nature astonished more than frightened him. He stared at her as she hovered over Heir Tuane, aware of a loyalty expanding in his chest unlike any he’d ever felt before, and knew he’d found in this girl—no, this woman—the potential of a leader of proportions he couldn’t possibly define now nor, perhaps, ever. She helped Tuane, her coughing spasms relenting, to sit up, and as she sat with one hand supporting Tuane’s back, she looked straight into Korin’s eyes. At that moment, although he couldn’t admit it to himself, more than just his allegiance was sworn.
CHAPTER NINE
A WATCHER, A PLOTTER
AND PATIENT CAUTION
Opseth Geranda had set out for a ride that morning on her gentle mare, Bauble, with the intent of forgetting last night’s difficult business, but one memory refused to rest quiet. Her assurances to the boy notwithstanding, she’d failed to complete the deed undetected, and this complicated matters for both Heir Ariel and herself. Most likely the foolish, magic-fearing nobles of Garla would ignore the claims of one lowly necropath, but it wasn’t quite the negligible risk she’d led the soon-to-be Empir to believe. If the necropath convinced Holder Corday of the push—and he would not be hard to convince—Corday would come after the boy and might even discover the identity of the pusher. That prospect concerned her deeply, and no matter how hard she tried, no matter how long she rode, she couldn’t escape that truth.
Opseth lived well, but she kept her expenses in check. She did this not because she feared depleting her assets but out of respect for the greater wealth of anonymity. She could do whatever she pleased as long as only a select few knew what she could do. Her work across the river in Avaret with the young Empir must never mingle with her life here in Saktoff. Here, everyone—even her spouse—believed that her wealth came from old family investments. Hence, a threat to her obscurity was a very direct threat to her and to everything she held dear.
She pulled the horse to a halt, stared out at the hills to the north and shook her head. She had come up with only one solution—seek out and confront the necropath in the ether. She had promised her royal benefactor to keep watch on the hermit, but she must do more than watch. Destroy the witness, and the peril will vanish as well.
Opseth turned the mare back towards the stable and kicked her into her feisty little canter. Normally, she took pleasure in Bauble’s jaunty run, but she barely noticed it now. She rode all the way home, only one goal in mind, and after passing the horse off to the stable hand, she strode through her near-palace of a home and into the room dedicated to her work. She drew the draperies against the mid-afternoon light and closed the door to intrusions from her spouse and family. She lit a lone candle in defense against absolute darkness, sat down in her chair and reached out for the soul she’d encountered the night before, to the essence of the necropath who had discovered the truth. Once she could locate this hindrance to Ariel’s otherwise irrefutable right to the ascension, she’d anchor herself and then back away, returning often over time until the necropath’s defenses softened at the familiarity of her touch. Only then would she strike, at a moment of supreme vulnerability, leaving this sole witness dead or, at the very least, permanently incapable of a comprehensible thought.
She breathed and found center, just as the hermits of Solsta—and briefly, of Rossla—had taught her a long time ago. All that she knew had come from them. All she could do—that had grown from within after she’d abandoned the confining, rigid Rule of the Order. Freed of restriction, Opseth had discovered she could reach minds previously secured anywhere in the known regions. She could sense the uses of magic, although she seldom felt the need to pursue the babble of signals the hermits of the world sent out as they practiced their craft. Instead, she screened what she could so as not to be incapacitated by it all, to protect herself from her own omniscience.
Into her center she slid, a powerful soul in search of another with power, and she located the little hermit in a moment of power. What timing, Opseth thought. Vulnerable, the hermit yielded herself up to Opseth, allowing her to secure a connection unnoticed and unrecognized. And when Opseth had done what she’d set out to do, when she’d established a hold on the necropath’s mind, she retreated, brought herself back to her dark room in the mid-afternoon, and she smiled. Preoccupied with her own pursuits, the necropath hadn’t suspected a thing.
Lisen stared at the captain, his face spattered with mud, his eyes the dreamiest brown Lisen had ever gazed into. He stared back at her, and as she held the heir up, something like lightning buzzed through her—something she knew must remain unspoken, her desires to the contrary. So, with a shake of her head, she broke the connection and turned her attention to the nearly drowned woman in her arms. But her brain still hummed, and she knew beyond words that she’d won the loyalty of this captain forever. He would never fear her for her gifts again as long as she never gave him reason to believe she’d misused them.
Heir Tuane continued to cough, so Lisen leaned in to put her ear to the woman’s back. Without any idea of what she should hear, she wondered why she attempted to assess the heir’s breathing at all. She’d learned CPR from the Red Cross a few years back but had no idea what to listen for in lungs potentially damaged by mud.
“I held my breath,” Heir Tuane managed through her hacking. “Until the captain here grabbed me.” She started to laugh which only brought on more coughing.
Lisen sat up and scooted around to sit almost in front of the woman. “You’re all right?”
Heir Tuane nodded and began scraping the rain-loosened mud from her arms and her legs. She turned to the captain. “How did you find me?”
“Ask her,” the captain replied, nodding towards Lisen.
Lisen shrugged. “It was just a hermit thing. I reached out with my mind and found you.” Yeah, she thought to herself, like I had any idea what I was doing.
“And then she held back the slide,” the captain added softly. “It was the damnedest thing,” he continued as though he were talking to himself, but he gazed at Lisen in amazement.
Lisen had no idea how she’d done it, and the captain’s reaction rattled her. She didn’t even know where she’d found the nerve to insist—before she’d even tried—that she could find the heir and that together she and the captain would actually be able to save her. “But you’re all right,” she said, patting Heir Tuane’s muddy hands. “Thank the Creators.”
“Yes, thank the Creators,” the captain replied absently, and he rose to look around, his hands on his hips. “My lords, we have to get away from the slide. If it expands….” Lisen and Heir Tuane scooted back to firmer ground. “And we have to find shelter while we wait this out,” he continued.
Lisen, working to remove the mud from the heir’s back, looked up at the captain. “I think there’s a retreat not far from here. There’s a fork a little ways on. The retreat is at the dead end to the right.” She paused, noting how her Swiss-cheese memory provided her with the oddest pieces of information precisely when she needed them. “I don’t think it’s much, just a shack really, but it should keep us dry.”
“Heir Tuane?” the captain said, and the heir looked up. “Can you ride?”
“I think so. Where’s my horse?” Heir Tuane asked.
“Down there,” he replied nodding towards the bottom of the slide. “It wasn’t as lucky as you.”
Heir Tuane looked out over the cliff and down. “Oh. Poor Red.”<
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“I’ll redistribute the gear, and you can ride the pony,” the captain said as he stepped away towards the remaining animals.
“No,” Lisen said. “She can take my horse. I’ll do better on the pony anyway.” Lisen stood and offered Heir Tuane her hand. “My lord?”
“Oh, please. Call me Jozan. You’ve earned it, and besides, you outrank me.” She took Lisen’s hand and rose swiftly, grabbing more tightly as she did so, seeking balance.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Lisen asked.
“Ow, my hip.” She took a step forward, testing it, and smiled as it took her weight. “No. It’s all right. Hurts like a bad tooth, but it works. Let’s get out of here.”
The captain had already begun divvying out the pony’s baggage, and by the time Lisen had helped Heir Tuane limp her way to the horses, he had everything repacked and ready to go. He helped Heir Tuane up onto the horse that had been Lisen’s, Lisen mounted the pony unassisted, and the three of them resumed their journey up the pass through the mountains. To Lisen’s relief, they actually found the retreat, and they holed up until the rain finally stopped. The heir—Jozan, as she insisted Lisen call her—used the time to remove as much of the mud as she could from her hair and her person. Then she changed into a cleaner, if not necessarily drier, tunic as well as undergarment. She left her riding leathers outside in the rain for a bit to rinse them off, then brought them back inside to dry. When the sun emerged, so did they, the summit still their goal before nightfall.
Lorain lay back against the blue-and-gold-tiled sidewall of the grand bath in the Keep and dreamed of growing accustomed to power and its pleasures. Ariel splashed about several feet away, but far enough from her that she remained unaffected by his antics. Below them, deep in the recesses of the Keep, slaves, begrimed and coated with sweat, stoked a furnace to keep the water where she reclined perfectly warm. Around Ariel and herself more slaves hovered, ready to rub them with perfumed oils or wrap their naked bodies in towels if they chose to rise from the water. But Lorain wasn’t about to move, yet. She felt too good, too pampered, too luxurious to ruin it all by emerging from the pool. One thing troubled her only. One perhaps inconsequential, but nagging thought. A question really. What is going on?
Ariel was acting as though the Keep and slaves belonged to him, as though he had nothing to fear from anyone reporting his activities to Empir Flandari upon her return. He was acting as though he were the Empir, and that worried Lorain. He’d taken her to his bed last night and had invited her to join him here today, unlike previously, when he’d maintained a dark veil of secrecy regarding his involvement with her. Why, then, did he suddenly no longer fear repercussions? He seemed a shade too secure, and she feared the answer her instincts were leading her to.
Ariel floated over to her, sank down to kiss her belly and then the opening of her pouch. Her body fluttered, reminding her of the fertility cycle she had only just barely completed, but she ignored it. Between his apparently blossoming power and his skills as a lover….
She sat up straight in the bath, and he surfaced from his attentions, spitting and sputtering as he shook the water from his auburn hair. She stared at him, eyes wide, unbelieving. She knew. She knew what she’d tried to avoid knowing.
“What’s wrong, Lorain?” he asked her.
“What have you done?”
“What?’ Still wrapped in his rapture, he acted dull, stupid even, the one thing she knew he was not, and she cupped his chin in her hand and softened her voice.
“What have you done, my lord?”
His brown eyes locked onto hers. “Done, Lorain?’
Here comes the subterfuge, she thought. No matter; she knew the truth now.
“I haven’t done a thing,” he lied.
“Then, allow me to rephrase my question.” She oozed sweetness. “What have you caused to be done?”
“These are matters best left to a private moment.” He rose up to his full height from the water, no longer a boy. “When we’re alone.”
“Slaves don’t matter,” she said, dismissing the servants with a hand gesture, sending them off to their hiding place somewhere in the kitchen. They scurried away, leaving their towels and jars of ointment behind, in case their lord and his companion chose to indulge themselves. “See, my lord. They vanish into nothingness at the wave of a hand. And now…we are…alone.” She reached out to him, took his hand and pulled him gently back down into the water and towards her. He kissed her as she wrapped her legs around him, and then she whispered in his ear. “What have you done?”
“Oh, Lorain,” he breathed, her charms dissolving him, “I mustn’t tell.” He gasped as she grabbed at one tender buttock. “But you’ll know soon enough. Ah.”
She allowed him to believe she still knew nothing, but the evil she believed lay hidden within him enfolded her in its treachery. She had to admire his nerve, but the act she suspected he’d committed sickened even her. It sped her own plans up, and tactically she, too, would profit. But if he had not been very, very careful, it could destroy him, taking all her hard work with him. She wished he had consulted her first; she would encourage him to do so in the future.
Once the storm passed, Lisen, Heir Tuane and the captain managed to reach the peak an hour or so past nightfall. There they made a simple camp, Lisen for one grateful they had not been reduced to a band of two. After a meal of soldier’s rations—basically something resembling beef jerky and water—Lisen lay down on the ground, tired but too cold to sleep, too tense to sleep, too much in the wrong body to sleep, and chased wayward thoughts around her brain. The sacrifices. Time wasted. Lives wasted. The taste of death filled her mouth. She would have spit it out, but she knew it would be with her forever.
Change. No one could possibly know the meaning of the word the way she did. Not after what she’d been through. Change. What a joke. At the age of ten they’d convinced her, with hardly any explanation at all, to allow herself to be transported to a world she’d never known before, her memories of the world she’d known taken from her. Now that was change.
She’d loved Earth. She’d loved all the gadgets, which people here would fear as magical tools rather than products of evolving knowledge. She’d loved her friends and missed them and her parents. Not my parents, the Holts, who were as good as dead to her. Thoughts of them overwhelmed her with an aching hole in her heart that would never close.
Then, without any compassion whatsoever, Eloise had yanked her back to Garla. It was time, or so Eloise had claimed. Piss and vinegar, that’s what Daisy Holt would have said. And this time Lisen had been aware of everything—everything that had been done to her, including the alteration to her anatomy. Change. What a concept.
Then, one night later came the revelation, the all-too-unpleasant disclosure, that she wasn’t Lisen the almost-hermit. She was the Heir of Garla, her real mother had just been murdered, and now she was on the run with a young noble and a captain of the Emperi Guard. Never again would anyone in her presence be safe.
Beside her lay Heir Tuane, their heads a few feet from the fire. She still lived, but how? How did I know what to do, how to do it? Lisen wondered. What had compelled her to believe that she could do it? Because Lisen Holt, still very much alive and active in this Lisen’s soul, believed none of it. Except if it weren’t true, what the hell was Heir Tuane doing lying there beside her, sleeping, breathing…living? One for the good guys, she thought wryly.
The captain lay across from them, his back to the heat. Did he sleep? Lisen couldn’t tell. Perhaps he kept watch without telling them. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he felt there was no need for a watch on a mountain top in northern Prea. Then again, perhaps he did feel a need. Either way, he lay with his back to the fire and hence to them.
“Aaaaaaiiiieee…” She grabbed her head. A stabbing pain had broken through her musings, leaving her breathless, unable to think.
“Lisen?”
“My Liege?”
She heard both voices, bu
t the throbbing at her temples blinded her with its ferocity.
“What is it?”
“Are you all right?”
Again, both male and female voices. “Pain,” she replied. “My head.” She heard them both speaking but couldn’t distinguish who said what and she wondered if this were how a migraine felt.
“Damn. My healing herbs went down with Red,” Jozan grumbled.
“Perhaps if you sat up, my Liege.”
“No.” Lisen pressed the sides of her head hoping to do something to ease the torture, but to no avail. And then….
It was over, leaving only a memory behind.
“It’s all right,” she said, sitting up. “It’s all right. It’s gone.” She shook her head, rubbed her temples and breathed deeply. Not a migraine after all, she thought. It hadn’t lasted anywhere near long enough.
“It’s gone?” Heir Tuane asked.
“So it seems,” Lisen replied.
“I don’t like this, my Liege,” the captain said with caution.
“Why? It was a headache. I’m fine now,” she insisted.
“It’s a magic thing, I’ll warrant,” he murmured.
“No. It was just a headache. Don’t you get headaches, Captain?”
“Not ones that come and go as swiftly as this one.” He shook his head, remained at her side a moment longer, then finally left for the other side of the fire.
Just a headache, Lisen thought to herself, lying down. With a pat on Lisen’s shoulder, Heir Tuane lay down again beside her, and soon Lisen fell asleep.
“Excellent,” Opseth said with satisfaction as she opened her eyes and returned to her own world, to the quiet room with the lone candle burning against the night. She breathed deeply several times, a smile on her lips. She’d reached the little necropath, had insinuated herself into the vulnerable mind so effectively that she’d caused pain, and, in the process, she had brushed past something but had not paused long enough to shed light upon what she’d found. Instead she had departed swiftly, leaving no clue of her passage behind. The necropath suspected nothing, and Opseth would wait and take further action when the time came. Later. Much later. Nothing tragic must befall the poor hermit too soon after discovering a watcher in the servant’s mind. Corday would grow doubly suspicious and would never give up looking for those responsible. No, it could wait. Opseth could wait, until just the right moment, a moment removed from last night’s activities and yet well before any suspicions could evolve into accusations.
Fractured (Lisen of Solsta Book 1) Page 11