In other words, he could almost hear Detta mutter into his ear, he wants first shot and best prices at our spellwines.
Unlikely, considering Caul’s historic stance on magic. And yet, clearly that time had also passed. If they would barter their magic for his . . . likely not. But the opportunity would be there, as Ao would say.
“The details of the offer are as follows. The warship Fast Lance. The warship . . .”
Jerzy listened to the man list the ships that would be part of this flotilla, and wondered what Kaïnam’s reaction might be, if he were to agree . . . and what the prince might say if he refused.
HE FOUND THE prince in the courtyard, where Mahl had been sitting on the bench reading through dispatches, while Kaïnam, listening, dropped a handful of rounded stones, one by one, into the well. They plunked into the water deep below, the echo rising up the stone-built cistern. Jerzy listened to the echo, and judged the level of water to be within normal springtime range.
They stopped when Jerzy came out, letting him report on the courien.
Kaïnam heard him out, visibly tense. “He asked you to release me to his fleet?”
“In effect, yes.”
“The arrogant . . .” Kaïnam fumed for a few moments, and then gave an elegant shrug that downplayed what they all knew, that he had been dying inside the past few days since that magic-borne message, needing to be on his way home. “He is arrogant, but correct. Without me onboard, or at the very least my seal of safe-passage, they would be treated as invaders by my folk, even once they cleared out the actual invaders.”
And they offered him what he most desired: a way home.
“This offer comes suspiciously swift, days after they informed us of the Exiles’ attack and return.” Ao was polishing the side of his boot, worrying at a smear of mud that had dried on the leather, frowning at it as though it were the cause of all his concerns.
“If this is from the High King, we cannot refuse.” Jerzy was not certain if the mage could have responded so quickly, setting such an invitation up to entrap them in turn. More, it did not have the feel of the thoughts he had encountered, the blind, relentless greed he had felt. This was more subtle, nuanced, the difference between a growvine and aether, earth, and air.
“The courien says he was hired by a man in plaincloth, bearing coin, not a letter of funds. That, to me, suggests our friend in Caul,” Kaï said. “Either way, yes, I am not sure we have a choice.”
“Can you trust them not to be invaders in truth,” Mahault asked. “Once they’ve landed their fleet in your harbor?”
“Of course not,” Kaïnam said, dropping the last of the stones in his hand. “It’s just as likely I will become a royal hostage. But Caul is a pragmatic country, for all that they’re madmen. If my brother tells them he would sooner see kin die than give up his diadem, they will understand he means it. And without me, they have little chance of succeeding to get to that point: Atakus did not survive unmolested all these centuries by being easy to enter. Even after these Exiles broke through the veil, there are safeguards that likely still stand.” He paused, and looked at Jerzy. “Assuming that we do not believe that they, Caul, are in league with these Exiles?”
Jerzy shook his head, remembering again the feel of the mage’s thoughts in his head, the anger in his veins. “He shares with no one.”
Kaïnam dusted his hands, and leaned against the wall of the well, looking at Jerzy. His hair was tied back with a red kerchief, his clothing a plain shatnez weave that could have been worn by any farmer in The Berengia, and yet still he looked exotic, foreign. Jerzy blinked, as though expecting the sensation to pass, but it remained. Kaï’s face had taken on a different cast, the proud nose and angular shape suddenly at odds with those around him.
Malech had carried such a nose, but it had looked hawkish, not regal. The vines had shaped him into belonging here, just as Jerzy, despite his distant origins, belonged here. Just as Mahault never would. In that instant, Jerzy knew that Ao would never return to his trader-people, whatever else happened. Magic makes the man.
“Then I see no other option.”
“You’ll leave us?” Mahl asked, her voice tight with anger. “Now, when we finally—when Jerzy finally has a real sense of our enemy, when we can finally go on the offensive?”
For the first time, Kaïnam looked discomfited. “Mahl . . . I must.”
“Must what? Abandon us, walk away from our plans, our . . . we need you here!”
Jerzy felt the push of things unseen, growing below the surface. Mahault had walked away from her home city, her father and family, had seen the place where she was born fall to the mob, her father killed and her mother’s fate uncertain. The price of survival, of doing what she thought was right.
Jerzy wondered if she was more upset at Kaïnam’s having a home to return to than the fact that he was leaving.
“This is part of those plans, Mahl. You know that.” The prince’s voice was calm, too calm, and Mahault’s hands gripped the papers in her lap so tightly they crumpled around her fingers. “Taking Atakus was only a first step: they will launch their ships, Atakus’s ships, against us, next. Caul and Iaja have the only fleets able to compete, and Iaja has no interest in aligning with us. Caul does. They need me there to legitimatize their actions, and convince my brother to help protect the sea lanes from further attack.”
Mahault set her chin and looked away.
“Mahl. This is what we’ve been waiting for. No successful offense has only one line of attack. The Exiles forced Atakus into isolation to make them vulnerable, give them a base to launch their own attack from, it has to be. My people can secure the sea for us and hold off that attack, but only if they are free to do so.”
Jerzy watched, sensing that they were speaking a second language underneath that he could not understand, willing to let them work this out themselves.
The anger left Mahault’s voice, but she was still unhappy. “I don’t like it, you leaving us.”
“Neither do I.” The admission seemed to surprise Kaïnam, but he plowed forward. “I am a member of the royal family, Mahl. There are things I must do.”
“I know.” She didn’t look at him, but the lines of her body softened slightly. “Jerzy, is there any way we can keep in contact, faster than pigeons? If the Cauls have managed it, perhaps a spellwine that could . . .”
“Master Malech enspelled his mirror to create a passage through which we could speak, but I do not know how.” Again Jerzy felt the sting of an incomplete training, but it was a familiar pain, now, and overshadowed by the things he knew, wonderful, terrible things, that his master had not. “The Caulic messenger . . . I do not want to have to rely on them, or their magic, not knowing its source.” There was already one mage out there, working horrors. There had been vines on Caul, once, but they died out long ago. The Root—did it stretch to Caul as well, even now? If not vines, what had it seeped into, that magic? It was a question for the scholars of Altenne; Jerzy needed to worry about more immediate concerns. But he would not put his trust in this new magic.
“I agree,” Kaïnam said, responding only to what Jerzy had said out loud. “Allowing an ally to control correspondence is unwise. There is a windspell that carries messages,” he added, “but it is . . . unreliable.”
“Putting anything to the wind is risky,” Jerzy replied with a shrug. “You can direct weatherspells but you cannot control them, not the way you do fire or earth.” A drop of blood coaxed weathervines into obedience, gentled it for incanting. Blood-magic at the level the Exile Vineart used? Jerzy shuddered to think what he might accomplish, were he able to spread his malice on the winds via weathervines.
They would stop him. They had to stop him.
Mahault turned to Jerzy. “Your master reached you, before . . .”
“Used the Guardian as a conduit. Or the Guardian used him . . . I don’t know how it works. It can find me, but I don’t know if it could find you.”
Jerzy paused a momen
t, and the other two waited, watching him, but there was only silence from the dragon.
“You’re not part of the House,” he said, finally. If Kaï took Ao with him, perhaps the Guardian would use the connection through Ao’s grafted legs, but Jerzy couldn’t bring himself to suggest it. They would be struggling enough without Kaïnam’s steady sense and strong arm; he could not let Ao go as well. “I will try to enspell a mirror for you,” he said finally, “and we will make it part of the Agreement with Caul, that they allow it, to keep us in touch.”
“You trust them to hold to that?”
“As much as you trust them to allow you free run of their warship,” Jerzy said.
And that simply, it was settled.
“The meme-courier is waiting for a response,” Jerzy said. “Kaïnam, you will want to phrase it, on behalf of Atakus, and then I will give him my own response.”
Mahault watched Kaïnam stride to the door Jerzy had emerged from, not hesitating a second further. “You think this is wise?”
Jerzy exhaled harshly, looking to the sky rather than meeting her worried gaze. “None of this is wise, Mahl. But it’s what we have to do.” He paused, and then gave her the only comfort he knew. “Seeds scatter. Roots remain.” Longer than any of them had suspected.
She nodded. “And Kaïnam was right, rot him.” She had started using Ao’s favorite swear, although it made Jerzy flinch used this close to the yards. “We need more than one line of attack, ourselves. Jer, I have an idea. . . .”
THE COLLEGIUM WAS the size of a large town, or a small city, from the outer gate to the practice fields and the gardens that stretched down to the river, farmed by students as part of their meditation hours. Zatim’s mother had been the god of the growing season, his father the lord of the Harvest, and spending time with their hands in the soil was as much a part of a Washer’s training as learning Zatim’s Commands and warnings. Hallways and classrooms, the Library and the training fields, the dormitories and the stables, all were open to any visitor who came seeking knowledge. Even the kitchens were open to any who might wish to walk through, although the cooks’ tempers were often uncertain.
There was one place in the entire Collegium that was not open. One place that most residents knew existed, but had never seen.
The Cellar.
It ran underneath the Collegium itself, stone-walled tunnels and square-carved rooms like a maze, lined with wooden racks that were carefully labeled with a number that corresponded to a large leather-bound journal. The ink in that journal was browned with age in the earlier pages, a more vibrant black in the last, and noted almost five hundred years’ worth of spellwines, bought, tested, annotated, and stored by the Spellkeeper of the day.
In a normal year, only a handful of Washers might access the wide, shallow steps into the antechamber. That afternoon, the sun casting long shadows behind them, four went down together. Brothers Ranklin, Omar, Isaac, and Neth.
There had been no meeting, no calling for opinions. Ranklin had appeared at his rooms, fixed him with that gaze that could still make Neth feel fourteen and uncertain again, and told him what would happen.
He had wanted to voice his dissent, to protest this madness, but it would have been pointless and kept him from being allowed to participate. So long as he was on the scene, Neth still held a faint hope that he might be able to control things, keep events from spiraling out of control.
Ranklin had taught most of the current brothers when they were gangly children, and was not fooled by Neth’s acquiescence; yet he had included Neth in the group, anyway.
They were come to find a spellwine that would put an end to the chaos rising outside, bring the world back into order again.
The air was much cooler, below ground, away from the sun’s reach, and the space echoed with deliberate silence, broken now by their presence.
“Brothers.” The Spellkeeper was surprisingly young, lean and dark haired, rising from his desk with a grace that Neth was not sure he could have mirrored. His voice was rusty from disuse, but his pleasure on seeing them was real. “This is an unexpected but welcome pleasure. How may I assist you today?”
“We have need to look through your records,” Ranklin said. “For a very specific spellwine.”
“Of course. I will need the Vineart’s name, and legacy.”
“We do not know.”
That stopped the Spellkeeper mid-movement, even as he was reaching to open the great volume on his desk.
“Ah. That . . . is considerably more difficult,” he said regretfully, but with what Neth thought was a touch of anticipation in his voice. “What information do you have? Region? Legacy? Century?”
“It would be in the earlier archives,” Omar offered. His ebony skin seemed a trifle ashen, although it could as easily have been the lighting as nerves.
The Spellkeeper had a definite gleam in his eye now, even in the dim spell-lights that illuminated the antechamber. “Indeed? An Ancient wine.”
He had probably never done more than walk past those archives; there was no call for so-named Ancient wines, in this world.
“The Magewine,” Isaac said. “The ercenbalt Magewine.”
“Ah.” The Spellkeeper let his hand rest on the tooled leather cover of the volume and breathed the still air in, out, and then in again. “Ah,” he said again.
Not only ancient, but legendary. Vineart unknown. Legacy unknown. Only the name remained, less a proper name than a description, given by the scholars of Altenne long after the fact. Ercenbalt. Roughly translated, it meant “the courage of last hope.” What it truly meant was “when all else fails.”
THE CASK, WHEN located, was ancient as expected, but still solidly built, the wooden slats covered by layers of earthspells that protected against rot or decay. The sigil burned into the wood was one that Neth did not recognize, nor, according to the Spellkeeper, was it one listed in the journal of that century.
“We took in so many back then,” he said almost wistfully. “Those were the grand times, full of excitement and magic.”
Neth looked sideways at the Spellkeeper, as the others moved on ahead, the cask carefully loaded onto a wheeled cart. Clearly, he did not get aboveground much or listen to gossip at all. “Be careful what you desire,” he said dryly. “Else you might be cast into the middle of it, and find it not so much to your liking.”
“The decantation,” Omar asked impatiently.
The Spellkeeper went to the wall of his alcove, drawing out another journal, this one far older, the leather heavier worn than the current edition. “The writing is faded, and the language slightly archaic.”
“I thought that was part of your training,” Isaac said. Unlike Omar and Neth himself, he seemed almost too eager to do this. His voice was thin from the stress, but to the Spellkeeper it must have sounded like disdain. His body curved in on itself, shoulders rounding, elbows turned in as though to cuddle the journal, or protect it.
Ranklin stepped in, his age and status stopping the argument cold. “Brother, your training is not in doubt, merely our own nerves. What is the decantation, please?”
“Root, bind. Leaf, curl. Magic, still. Go.” He recited the words, and then shuddered. “It has the sound of an earthspell, but not the feel of it.”
Spellkeepers were chosen not for their memory or their patience, but for their sensitivity to the power within the wines; without it, it would be impossible to find anyone willing to spend their days down here, but Neth had always suspected that it made them slightly odd.
“You need not worry,” Ranklin said, his hand patting the younger man’s shoulder gently, the paper-dry skin nearly translucent against the dark red of his robe, before turning to lead the way back up the stairs, having achieved what he came for.
“It has been over a century since that cask was last broached,” the Spellkeeper said, frowning, still looking down at the journal page. “There is no guarantee that it will have remained intact. Be very careful with your testing.”
&nb
sp; “Of course.” Neth was professionally reassuring, his entire demeanor tuned to giving solace, and the Spellkeeper, despite knowing all that, bought into it.
Men, even Washers, did not want to burden themselves with worries.
THEY RECEIVED THE occasional odd looks from students and teachers as they moved through the formal gardens, but no one was foolish or foolhardy enough to stop and ask questions. Neth could only imagine that his expression was at least as grim as that of his companions.
Ranklin’s quarters had a door to the outside and a workroom that was their destination. His aide was there, looking anxious. Clearly he did not trust anyone other than himself with the old man. Neth had a moment’s uncharitable, suspicious thought: was the younger, untried Brother a member of the schism? Was he worried not for the old man’s well-being, but his own plots?
No. Ranklin was on the right side of things, for all that Neth disagreed with this decision. If his aide felt differently, he would have been wise to keep it to himself, and it was too late now.
“The Last Hope,” Ranklin said. “Such a terrible name for such a terrible spellwine. Too much focus on how we are remembered, and not enough on what we are doing now.”
“Are you saying we as a culture are pretentious, Brother?” Omar raised his nearly invisible eyebrows and waited for a response, clearly expecting a lecture such as they would have received as students.
“It would not be the worst thing I have said of our founders,” he replied, but the laughter was faint, worried. It reassured Neth, that the mood was uneasy rather than jubilant. If they who were set on this thing were unsure . . .
“Place the cask there,” Ranklin directed, taking a seat on the padded divan and resting his hands on his knees. He was old and fragile, but his eyes were still bright, and the mind was as sharp as it had ever been.
“Do you truly believe that this spellwine is . . . is the answer?”
Ranklin considered the question, as Neth had known he would, had expected no less of the old man, who had taught them all at one time or another. “The answer? No. But I do believe that it is an answer. Perhaps the only one we have.”
The Shattered Vine Page 27