by Carol Berg
“Now,” he said, in what could have only been moments. Or perhaps I merely lost sense in the meantime. “It looks black and thick, as you said. No fumes rising in the reflection. Shall we?”
I nodded, unable to speak. He used my own fingers to scoop up the reeking glob and put it to my mouth.
I convulsed. Howled. Drowned in fens of pain and pleasure…of guilt and shame and joyless rapture.
“What have you been up to?” The flower-scented Silos burst through the murk of my perceptions. He tugged at the ropes. Spent an inordinate time checking my hand bindings and fussing over the bloody marks about my wrists.
I raised my leaden eyelids to a glare of cloudy midmorning streaming through the open door. Gildas was nowhere in sight. I hadn’t noticed his going. Neither had I felt him tuck my fingers back into their shroud nor seen him pack away the guilty evidence that now poked reassuringly into my hip.
“Nightmares,” I said, my tongue thick. Had the world burst into end-times flames before my eyes, I would yet sink into blessed sleep, burying the remnants of my shame. I had never felt so drained. So heavy.
“You work spells in your dreams?” Silos dropped my limp appendages heavily onto my belly. “A good thing I came and not Caphur. Your clerical friend did not tuck the extra cord about your fingers. What has he done with you? He looked smug as an adder as he left.”
I closed my eyes and smiled. “Brother Gildas cleansed my soul. When the Bastard Prince eats it, he will suffer a flux.” As I’d learned on the journey to Palinur, Silos’s skills at detection were less impressive than his lightning bolts.
“You are a fool, plebeiu. And the Sinduria is a greater one to indulge you. Perhaps when I tell her you’re working magic with the Karish, she’ll reconsider. Last night she petitioned the Registry for your transfer to her custody, saying this contract your father has arranged is evidence of madness in the Cartamandua line. Her petition was refused.” He sniffed the air and poked about the bedcovers.
Shadows chilled my comfortable warmth at his mention of the future. “She’s wrong”—my father was not mad, only soul-dead—“but I’ll not tell anyone that. Tell her I can keep secrets.”
Secrets. Only as I said the word did it penetrate my iron skull that Thalassa had unraveled her tongue-block. I had talked with Jullian and my grandfather of Danae, even speaking the word lighthouse to the boy. I dragged my heavy arms across my face and whispered the word into my sleeve just to make sure.
Surely this meant my sister trusted me; Abbot Luviar trusted me. Blessed Jullian had sent Gildas to succor me. And Gildas had promised they’d come to my rescue. Perhaps they did need me for their plan. In a wash of unreasoning euphoria, I smiled into my sleeve and mumbled louder, “Need to sleep now.”
Silos unknotted the ropes and tossed them aside. I giggled like one of my little sisters.
“Too late, plebeiu. Prince Osriel’s man has arrived earlier than expected.” He shook me again.
Eventually his insistent prodding stole my good feeling. Dully I dragged my cold, heavy body to sitting. As my hands were yet cocooned in silken cords, I persuaded Silos to help me take a piss in the jar. He refused to wipe the crusted drool from my face.
“You should not have frightened off your valets,” he said, his mouth curled in distaste. “Though I suppose you’d best learn to groom yourself anyway. I doubt the Bastard Prince will provide you a bodyservant.”
Stupid Silos. What did he think I’d been doing for twelve years? Of course, I’d had my hands to use. Perhaps this prince would just cut them off. I pressed my wrist against my mouth to contain my rising gorge. No, no, the Bastard wanted my magic. He was paying for it.
Scarcely able to stay upright, I straightened my garments with my elbows and wiped my face with my sleeve…three times before I realized the offending substance remaining on my face was merely my skin. The open-necked purple and black tunic hung loose over my wool shirt, and they had provided me no belt.
When Silos held up the silver half mask, I could not summon control enough to disguise my loathing. And pride seemed unutterably foolish at the moment. “Ah, domé,” I whispered, begging, “not that one. Please, I cannot breathe in it.”
“Your new master provided a silk mask for the journey and a standard pureblood cloak,” he said apologetically, “but, as you are yet under Registry restriction, you must be delivered wearing this and the recondeur’s yellow. Your protocols within Prince Osriel’s house will be his choice, of course.”
No protections in a recondeur’s contract. My master could require that I wear this mask forever. My stomach clenched. Sweat dribbled down my back and sides as the pressure of Silos’s hand on my shoulder buckled my wobbling knees. He latched the band about my neck and secured the strip over my head, leaving me half blind, half deaf, and completely muted. Suffocating.
I panicked, trying to clear my clogging nostril, trying to suck enough air through the exposed half of my tight-bound mouth that I would not die. I scraped my arms across my face as if I could dislodge the hateful metal, and when I could not, I slung my bundled fists wildly into Silos, dug my feet into the rug, and lunged forward. My grandfather’s whimpers and screams drifted through the open doorway as they did in every hour in that house.
“Settle, plebeiu,” said Silos. He grasped my flailing arms and shoved me down again. “Settle. You’ve plenty of air, if you’ll just calm down.”
His firm assurances eventually slowed my heart, and my gratitude set me weeping. He knelt to shackle my ankles, then hoisted me up and propelled me through the door.
The unending symphony of madness from the corner apartments accompanied our journey through the courtyards and arches. Poor devil. I sniffled like a sentimental drunkard. I’m as mad as you, Capatronn. They’ll lock me up in my own filth, too.
Ssst…Silos. My sister beckoned to us from a grape arbor threaded with dead vines. We’re here to save him.
Silos did not turn his head. I slowed, glancing over my shoulders. Seeing with only one useful eye made everything seem flat and out of proportion.
I bumped Silos’s shoulder and nodded toward Thalassa, who now crouched behind a statue of Erdru with his goat’s legs. Or were they her goat’s legs?
The temple guard prodded me to keep walking. I stepped in front of him, forcing him to stop, grunting, jerking my head, and pointing my hands toward my sister. Look at her. Are you blind?
Silos paused and spun in a slow circle, stopping only when he faced me again. “Stop playing, plebeiu. I don’t know what you want.”
I whipped my eyes back to the statue. And then to the arbor. Thalassa had vanished. Far behind me, my grandfather cackled. Frenzied, the voice of my fear sealed behind the metal half lips of my mask, I dodged in front of Silos again, pounding my bundled hands on his temple badge and then on my own chest.
“No, plebeiu. I cannot take you to the temple.”
Grasping my shoulders, he turned me around and gave me a gentle shove toward the main house. Halting again, I tried to show Silos where Abbot Luviar perched beside a crow on a lichen-covered column. Then I pointed out Gildas, grinning from behind a dormant tree.
“What is it, plebeiu? What’s wrong with you? Move along.”
I hobbled forward. Blinked. The garden was empty of all but me and my jailer.
One more glance over my shoulder. The naked man sat cross-legged, tucked into the frost-glazed shrubbery, his gleaming dragon sigils silver in the morning haze. Eyes the crisp gold of autumn aspen observed us. Curious. Disdainful. The world blurred as I turned away, my throat swollen with grief. Illusions. Visions. Not real.
We passed through an arched gate and into the house.
Crystal lamps chased the gray morning from the columned reception room. I blotted my damp face on my sleeve and forced myself calm, trying to grasp what was real. I was surrounded by the familiar—the richly colored tapestries that my ancestors had brought from Aurellia, the luminous marble statue of Kemen and his belt of stars, wrought
by some Pyrrhan master centuries ago, and the enameled urns and gilt caskets brought from exotic Syanar and set here on pedestals shaped like bundles of reeds. Beneath my feet gleamed the silver and blue mosaic tiles that my grandfather had salvaged from a ruined temple on the isle of Caraskan, shipped to Navronne, and reassembled here to display the order of sun, moon, and earth.
Just beyond the vulgar and exotic display of my family’s wealth shone the burnished breastplates of four well-armed warriors who flanked the doorway to the outer courts. The warriors stood at attention, lances at rest, their surcoats the rich, dark green of holly leaves and blazoned with the silver wolf of Evanore, a white trilliot under its paw.
Silos closed and locked the inner door behind me. Holy gods…whoever you are…please wake me from this nightmare. Where were distracting visions when I needed them most?
“This is he?” The words scoured skin and soul like windblown sleet.
The speaker walked in alongside my father. Though the mailed forearms that bulged from his holly-green surcoat were formidable, and his thighs might have been piers for Caedmon’s Bridge, it was his face that caused my bowels to seize. Where half of mine was encased in graven silver, half of his was fleshless scars, leathery creases and ruptures surely caused by burning oil or systematic beatings with hot irons that destroyed flesh and sinew and underlying bone. The eye buried within this horror was but a dark slit. The other, fathomless in its emptiness and limitless in its disdain, briskly scoured my sorry turnout.
When Silos prodded my back, I bowed ungracefully to my father and the visitor at once. The planets beneath my feet spun in their paths.
“Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine,” said my father. “A male pureblood of seven-and-twenty years, his bloodlines registered before birth, witnessed and verified through ten generations. Contracted for unspecified service to His Grace, the Duc of Evanore, for lifetime duration.”
Of course, this grotesque man was not the prince. Osriel was the youngest of the three brothers, close to my own age. This man’s hair, trimmed close to his skull, was mottled gray.
He clasped his gloved hands behind his back, well away from the sword sheathed at one hip and the Evanori battle-ax ready at the other. “Recalcitrant, you said. Incorrigible. But I did not expect shackles in his family home. Is he violent, mad, or merely undisciplined?” He did not sound as if he cared which.
“Not mad,” said my father. “Undisciplined certainly. The hand bindings prevent his triggering any spellworking. The shackles prevent him trying to escape his duty. He has willingly participated in armed combat, so I would put no violence past him. Mardane Voushanti, I clearly spelled out his history when we spoke yesterday.”
Unfair! I yelled inside. To hint at violence to this stranger when I can’t defend myself.
“It is no matter,” said Voushanti, returning his gaze from my father to me. “My lord imposes his own discipline. He anticipates training a pureblood to his service, a pleasure he has not yet indulged as he has always found the standard contracts too restrictive. Now if your documents are in order…we are in a hurry.”
At a small desk of polished rosewood, my father unrolled the scroll he had sealed at dinner. Mardane Voushanti flicked a finger at one of the warriors, who opened the door. A servant carried in an iron casket and deposited it on the desk. The Evanori lord accepted the scroll. He exchanged bows with my father. And thus was I sold like a slab of meat. Silos’s iron hand gripped my arm, else I would have run, shackles or no, flaccid limbs or no, madness or no.
An excruciating cramp shot through my arms and shoulders, followed by a wash of heat and a shuddering release—an instant’s euphoria before my spirits plunged to the depths, as if an uncrushed nivat seed had only now dissolved to work its perverse magic. One rapturous sensation, swept away in a heartbeat, leaving me dizzy…hungry. The doulon, unmistakably. I had never experienced such a momentary burst, more than an hour after the use.
Matters moved quickly. The lord refused wine. They murmured farewells. My father did not speak to me, but watched calmly as the four warriors brushed Silos aside and herded me into the weak and frigid daylight of the outer courtyard.
The warriors unshackled my feet and lifted me onto a horse, binding my wrists to the pommel and feet to the stirrups. A groom sawed at reins and halter as the demon beast thrashed and bucked. Every one of the grooms and warriors cursed and swore until the mardane himself came and laid a hand on the vile equine’s head, quieting it for the moment.
Even before we rode away into the midday gloom, the door to the house was shut and the lamps extinguished—as was all light within me. No one had come to my rescue.
The shock of noise and activity as we left the secure walls and wards of my family home was almost enough to banish my waking stupor. Bells clanged in frantic warning from every tower. Panicked citizens mobbed the streets, loading wagons, herding children, geese, and pigs toward the lower city, as if they might escape the coming change, or toward the citadel, as if their missing prince might magically develop a spine and save them. Bayard’s hammer was falling.
Voushanti rode in front of me, his snow-dusted back stiff and straight. One Evanori warrior rode to either side and two more behind. Wind blustered and whined through the streets, carrying the scents of ash and offal, stirring up eddies of new snow on stoops and walls, and whipping Navronne’s white trilliot that yet flew alone on the heights, two days after Perryn’s fall.
Few in the crowds wore Ardran purple. For the first time in three years, Bayard’s pikemen roved the city, their scarlet and blue badges spread like a fungus through every square, along the promenades and the grand steps that linked upper and lower city, and at every major street crossing. The orange head scarves of their Harrower allies colored the streets like splashes of sunflowers floating on rivers of brown and gray. Like a plague of locusts, those wearing the rags wrought destruction far beyond their size: smashing windows and doors, toppling carts and statuary, throwing burning torches into gaping shop fronts. Bayard’s men, better armed but outnumbered, made no move to stop them. The Harrowers believed cities corrupt. Given a free hand, they would level Palinur.
As we crossed the heart of the Vintners’ District, three men wearing orange rags upended a barrel into the public fountain. Acrid steam billowed and hissed. The black water heaved, sluggish, oozing. Three tar barrels lay empty beside the stained stonework.
Twelve districts. Twelve fountains. Valves and conduits bearing the city’s lifeblood.
Black smoke billowed from at least three directions. The three men lifted another barrel. No one stopped them. No one attempted to stay the burning.
I wanted to scream at those running away: They’ll not stop with the city! Vineyards. Villages. Aqueducts. Bridges. These lunatics will bring the end times. But spelled silver sealed my lips. My pleas and warnings bore no more sense than the snarling of a beast.
I clung to the saddle, my head rattling like a tin drum in a hailstorm, every sinew complaining as if I’d fought a ten-day battle. Twice more a rapturous burst took me away from the misery, only to abandon me in the same instant, sicker than ever. Never had I felt so wretched after a doulon. Had I told Gildas to wait until the fumes vanished? Or how many seeds to use? Holy gods, what if he’d used all of them? The desire to touch the green bag, to reassure myself that the supply was intact, soon became a torment. My hands twisted against the implacable silk that held both touch and magic at bay.
“Hold!” Voushanti drew rein sharply as we approached the broad causeway that led from the palace gates into the upper city. Drums rattled in the distance.
My horse balked and whinnied. A warrior grabbed my mount’s halter and dragged his head around, while I gripped the pommel with my wrists and forearms until my shoulders burned.
Hoofbeats approached, keeping cadence with the funereal drums. Leather creaked. Harness jangled. Not a hundred quercae in front of us, ranks of Ardran knights rode slowly down the causeway, past the fallen sta
tues that ringed the palace precincts. Swords sheathed, bereft of lance or mace, hundreds of them passed…the palace garrison…and behind the knights, mounted officers herded the massed men-at-arms, stripped of pikes and halberds, heading for the city gates. For surrender.
Here and there a wail of mourning rose in concert with the whining wind. Yes, mourn for Ardra, I thought, besieged with images of fertile vineyards and golden grain fields and the glories of long-ago summers. Mourn for Navronne. For our children’s children to be birthed under the Smith’s wreckage.
Yet what did all this signify if Navronne was returning to the primeval forest…if all cities were to end? As the mardane and his warriors led my horse back the way we had come, I hunched forward over the pommel and looked no more upon Ardra’s shame.
“By the night lords!” The mardane spat the oath through clenched jaw and reined in again.
A party of Bayard’s soldiers, bristling with lances, blocked the end of a narrow lane behind us. I blinked. At the head of the party rode a square-faced knight. At his side rode an iron-visaged woman, wearing light mail and a brown surcoat blazoned with orange.
“Identify yourselves, and declare why you should not stand down and yield your arms,” said the leader, his voice young and brash. The single blue band on his scarlet baldric proclaimed his inexperience. When the baldric began to crawl across his breast like a striped snake, I begged it silently to stop.
The few citizens abroad in the lane vanished into the side alleys and doorways. Voushanti rode forward on his own, stopping just short of the Moriangi. “I am Voushanti, Mardane Elestri, commander of His Grace Osriel of Evanore’s household guard, escorting my lord’s retainers. You’ve no cause to hinder us, young sir.”
“The Bastard does not honor the Gehoum,” snapped the woman, before the young knight could respond. “These men must disarm or pay forfeit.”