“Jerek Brightwing, Luqs of Farama, welcomes the Faro of Panthers and gives her his permission to enter the Serpents Teeth.” Having delivered her official message, Juria could address Tonia Nast directly. “I did not think I would be seeing you so soon, Panther.”
“Nor I you, Bear. I’ll leave my Laxtor in charge in my absence and bring with me only my most senior Cohort Leader.”
“That will not be possible, Faro Nast. The Luqs wishes to see you—and only you. No one else is to enter with you.”
The Panther officers all began speaking at once, falling silent when Tonia Nast raised one hand. “I suppose it’s either trust you or go away?” There seemed to be a smile crinkling the corner of her mouth.
“That is precisely how the Luqs put it himself.” Juria turned and with a gesture indicated that Tonia should walk beside her.
“I’m surprised you don’t blindfold me,” Tonia Nast said as they passed through the entrance.
“There’s no need,” Juria said. “If things don’t go well, the Miners will simply close this entrance, and move the tunnels.”
The Faro of Panthers stopped between one step and the next. “Wouldn’t it be simpler to kill me?”
“Would it? I should think that would more likely bring all your Panthers down on us. We would waste our time avoiding them rather than fighting the Halians.”
Tonia resumed walking. “Yes. Yes, I suppose it would.”
“I THINK I can do it.” Ker sorted through the cards in her hand, grouping the suits together. She had neither Summer nor Winter cards. “In the past I’ve worked with a Mind-healer. I enable them to see the mist and they brush it away.” She picked up her kaff. Empty. Put it down again.
Once the deal came around to Baku, Ker triggered her Talent. Working on the girl’s aura would be easier if her attention was focused elsewhere. Mind-healers always used their own silver color—though they didn’t know it—so first Ker tried using her turquoise, flattened like a broom, to sweep away the red mist that hung over Baku’s aura. The turquoise passed through the red mist with no effect. Ker drummed her fingers on the tabletop. She didn’t have any silver in her aura, but she did have Feeler’s Gifts. Through the jewel.
Ker tossed her three of Spring down on top of Tel’s two of Winter, then watched him sweep up the trick. She gathered her red webbing around her, letting it change and shift through pattern after pattern. She felt she was on the right track, but what if using her jewel just strengthened whatever was trapping the girl? Ker had never used her jewel on anyone else, except that one time with Svann, and she’d hurt him. Ker frowned down at the cards in her hands and sighed.
Bakura’s mist shifted and resettled. Ker sat up straighter and sighed again, stronger, more forcefully. The mist spread outward, thinning. Ker blew more deliberately. The mist brushed away and disappeared.
“Huh. Like steam from a cup of kaff,” she said aloud.
“What?” Tel paused, holding a card halfway to the table. Baku sat up straighter, and she looked less pale.
Ker got to her feet, unable to sit still in the face of her success. “More kaff, anyone?”
She waited with one elbow on the bar, watching Ester serving mugs of kaff to four men seated at one of the round tables. Finished, her sister leaned her hip against the back of one man’s chair as she spoke to him, her tray tucked under her arm. Two of the men—including the one whose chair Ester leaned against—had the now-familiar scruffy look of ex-soldiers who were out of work. Eagles, Ker thought. Two of Ester’s own men, the ones who’d disguised and hidden her, and kept her safe.
Her own kaff arrived, but before Ker could pick it up, Tel joined her at the bar, signaling the man behind it to bring him one as well. He made no move to return to the table, where Baku was laying out the hand of Solitary Seasons called Green Jade. The princess looked better, less worn out, and Ker mentally gave herself a pat on the back. The first step in their escape was accomplished.
The barman set Tel’s kaff down and moved a discreet distance away.
“She’s looking better,” Tel said. “You going to try the net?”
Ker took a sip of her kaff, grimaced at the heat, and shook her head. “Let’s get away first. I’ve never really done it before, and I don’t want to try here and now.”
“And speaking of escapes—” Tel picked up his own kaff and nodded at the barman. “Trying the gate at dusk when it’s about to close feels like a mistake.”
“I agree that normally we’d want to take advantage of the cover of a crowd, but there’s nothing normal about this.” Ker glanced sideways at Baku. “The invisibility trick is too risky.” The Princess Imperial frowned at her cards, took a sip from her mug, and wrinkled her nose. She still wasn’t used to the taste of kaff. When she saw Ker looking at her, she blushed and lowered her eyes again. The girl also wasn’t used to people being able to see the expression on her face.
“It worked for you.” Tel was nothing if not persistent. Ker regretted for what felt like the two hundredth time telling him how she’d magicked herself past the guards.
“It almost didn’t, and I was only magicking myself. What if I can’t do it for all three of us? I want to try something else, refocusing the guards’ attention or—I don’t know—putting them all to sleep. I won’t be able to do that if there’s a crowd of other people. Don’t you think other people are bound to notice if the guards all suddenly fall asleep?”
Baku’s head lifted, and she froze with a seven of Autumn raised in her hand. A small line appeared between her sculpted eyebrows. She put down the card as if she didn’t know she was doing it. “Kerida, I think—”
Ester had also turned toward the door. The way she put her free hand on the shoulder of the man whose chair she’d been leaning on was unmistakably intended to keep him seated.
Tel looked between Ker and the princess, his eyebrows raised. Ker held out her hand, palm down. Her left hand had gone almost automatically to the pouch holding her jewel. Paraste. She muted the auras immediately around her, and sure enough, a mass of swirling colors shone through the inn’s main door as if it wasn’t there. Swirling colors including some red. Just a jeweled soldier? she asked herself. Or a Shekayrin? She nodded to Tel, caught Ester’s eye, and tipped her chin at the door, holding up four fingers.
The door opened, and Ker started to relax, until the three gray-clad soldiers coming in were followed by a man wearing the blue tunic and black cloak of a Shekayrin. Not just a jeweled soldier then, but the jeweler himself.
Baku was still looking at her, eyes opened wide, and Ker shook her head minutely. Stay where you are, she thought, and Baku’s shoulders lowered as if she’d heard her. The soldiers fanned out, one coming to the bar, one going to the back door, and the third edging through the tables until he could stand with his back to the fireplace. Their auras showed no signs of tampering. Ker set her mug of kaff on the bar top as quietly as she could. She ran her hand along the edge of the bar top, as if wiping off dust, reaching out to smooth down the intruders’ auras at the same time. The three soldiers relaxed, but the Shekayrin showed no change at all.
Ker gritted her teeth. If it turned out she couldn’t influence the mage the same way she did ordinary people, they were all in trouble. His aura was a bit dull, she thought, but not from anything she’d done. The red especially wasn’t as bright and clear as Svann’s. When the man’s face turned in her direction, she saw a Rose around his left eye. What was a Rose doing here with soldiers? From what Svann had told her about the capabilities of the various schools, she would have expected a Poppy.
The room hadn’t been all that noisy to begin with, but now the silence made Ker’s ears hurt. No one spoke, but as the guards did nothing more than stand quietly, shoulders began to relax, and the flicking of a card and the click of dice meant that the gamers at least were returning to their play.
Baku kept her eyes down,
laying out fresh cards. Her hands were steady, not a tremor showing.
The Rose Shekayrin walked all the way to the back of the room, his head sweeping to the right and left. He held up one finger to Ester, who approached him wiping her hands on the bar towel slung over her shoulder. He didn’t wait to see whether she’d stopped, though she had. When he reached the end of the room, he turned and paced slowly back again, his finger still raised, as if he was telling the whole room to wait. He frowned in exactly the way someone does when he’s wrong and doesn’t want to admit it.
This time his path took him a little closer to their table. His eyes passed over the princess the same way they’d passed over everyone else. He didn’t notice Baku’s shoulders stiffen as he glanced at the cards in her hands and continued walking.
He stopped only three paces away, standing with his head tilted as if listening to something no one else could hear. He turned slowly and approached Baku’s table again. Ker saw the girl’s knuckles whiten as the mage came closer, and she finally pulled her hands back from the cards and put them in her lap under the table.
Ker stiffened, her own hands forming fists, as she came to the same realization that Baku had. The princess’ face and hair had always been covered in public; it was only her hands that everyone had seen, and her hands were giving her away now.
The Rose Shekayrin slowed to a stop next to Baku’s chair. Ker edged forward, drawing her aura together, ready to shield or strike as needed. The soldier at the fireplace moved forward, stopping only at the mage’s signal.
“Well. Honored One.” He joined his hands in front of him. “Come with me now, and we will pretend this little adventure did not occur. Your punishment would be minor.”
“You mean yours would be.” Obviously, she thought there was no point in denial, but Baku’s voice hardly trembled. Unless you could see the way the girl’s aura shivered in its net, Ker thought, you wouldn’t notice.
The Shekayrin raised his jewel in his left hand, and a blanket of red floated like a hovering hawk over the princess. More by instinct than design, Ker threw some of her own colors between the Shekayrin and his prey, dipping them into the red like a ladle into a pot and swirling it away. The look of startled affront on the mage’s face as he felt his attack slipping was almost funny. Until he turned and raised his jewel toward Ker. He couldn’t be sure what or who had interfered with his attack, but something, maybe the look on her face, or the way she stood, told him Ker had something to do with it.
She braced herself, but suddenly Ester was between them, sweeping Ker’s feet out from under her. Ker went down, years of military training helping her to fall properly, without banging her head on the stone floor. It was then she saw that the bolt of red meant for her, invisible to everyone else, had struck Ester instead. On reaching her, the bolt transformed into a net that caught the colors of her aura like a hunter’s net catches birds, and tightened, shrinking until it snuffed the aura out, and Ester slumped to the floor.
Without thought, though later she knew she’d cried out, Ker struggled to her feet, standing over her sister. Taking her cue from the other man, Ker flung out her hands, the gesture setting her aura free. She could only hope that being able to see the auras, and the webways of the jewels, would give her an advantage over the Rose. She’d defeated Svann once, and she could defeat this one.
But not in the same way, she realized, as she struggled with the red net that both held and supported the mage’s aura. When she’d fought with Svann, she’d held his jewel herself. She’d torn Svann’s net completely loose, like a gardener pulling up a plant. Svann had been given back his jewel, and like that plant, he managed to reroot his net, though it grew in a slightly different shape. Ker didn’t want that; she wanted this mage to wither and die.
She snatched out her own jewel, and her own pattern, nimble and changing, fending off the Rose’s next attack while she sent all her colors directly at his aura at once, directly for the core of red at its center. Her own jewel glowed brighter, the angles of her own facets slipping, changing, from one shape to another, until her web mimicked the Shekayrin’s exactly. And then she saw it, the weak point. She took hold of the red web at the man’s core, and concentrated.
Nothing. Ker wavered. The Rose Shekayrin moved toward her, his jewel directly in front of him like a shield, and Ker felt herself pushed physically, until the edge of the bar hit her in the back. But movement wasn’t a Rose’s strength. Baring her teeth and gripping her own jewel more tightly, Ker stepped forward over Ester. Abandoning caution, calculation, she closed all her colors on the man’s inner web at once and smashed the strands apart like a child destroying a sandcastle. The red web shredded, disintegrating in her hands, and the man dropped, his hand falling open and his jewel rolling free onto the floor.
Ker dashed forward, afraid that someone else might pick it up. When she reached it, however, the jewel no longer shone with its interior glow of red. It had turned entirely black and looked like nothing more than a chunk of charcoal carved into a jewel shape. Ker squatted down on her heels and picked up the stone with the tips of her fingers. Like charcoal, it weighed nothing. On impulse she closed her fist around it, crumbling it in her hand.
“Kerida!”
Movement at the edge of her vision brought Ker’s head up in time to see the guards advancing on her from their stations at doors and fireplace. With her own jewel still in her hand, she expanded her web outward, pushing the men back and pinning them to the walls, where they stood staring, blank-eyed. She rose to her feet, brushing off the dark residue of the jewel on her trousers. She had to brace her knees to stop from sitting down again. “Anyone who never wants to be questioned about this, now’s the time to leave.”
Later, she thought that it was a testimony to how well the place was run that everyone moved swiftly out the rear door.
“What did you do to him?” Tel crossed to her side, steadying her with a firm hand under her elbow.
“Never mind that. What did he do to Ester?” Ker knelt at her sister’s side, breath caught in her throat. All she could think of was Sala of Dez, dead and empty at the hand of Svann, when he’d been their enemy. Ester had no aura, nothing, no colors at all. That meant . . . but no, there was a pulse, and her sister was breathing. Ker took a deep breath herself. “She’s alive.”
“Wait, do not rejoice so quickly.” Baku knelt beside her. She lifted Ester’s eyelids, one at a time, but they could only see the whites. She picked up her hand and let it drop, limp, back to her chest.
“What is it?” Tel said from over them.
Baku looked up, her face pale, her eyes bleak. “I have read of this. It is a training procedure, to train Shekayrin in the use of netting with the stone. At first, they are likely to destroy the target person, but they develop control eventually.”
Of course they destroy. They can’t see the Daughter-cursed net. They would have to do all their work with inner discipline and control.
Baku lifted her eyes once more to Ker’s face. “This was meant for you, but this woman stepped between.”
Ker answered the unspoken question. “My sister.”
Baku’s face froze, her eyes softening.
Ker tapped her fingers against her thigh. “Netting” was the mages’ version of what the Halls of Law called “dampening,” used as the ultimate punishment—or control—of Talents who could not conform to the Law. “What’s happened to Ester?” she asked now. “Her aura is gone, not just netted like yours.” Ker described to them what she had seen, the net closing on Ester’s aura until it was snuffed out.
Baku frowned, her brows drawn down. “Your sister is not a mage. I would imagine that the Rose wanted to use the net to confine or control your magic, but in her case . . .” The princess stopped, shaking her head.
“There was no magic to confine.” How was her voice so even? “It didn’t stop closing in, because there was nothing there
to stop it.” Ker took hold of Baku’s shoulder, turning her until they were face-to-face. “If the net had hit me, instead of her, I would have been . . . like you?”
“Left whole.” Baku nodded. “Your Gifts confined, but otherwise yourself, I believe so. At least—” She shrugged. “When they spoke of netting, they had no idea they were speaking of something that could be perceived as a net by those who had the right Gift.”
“Can we get her back? Remove the net?” If she could find it. Right now, Ker saw nothing at all in her sister. But to leave her like this was unthinkable. Ester was a soldier, and she’d rather be dead than this unseeing, unknowing lump of flesh.
Baku folded her hands at her waist. “It is what I hope for myself, but my knowledge is limited. I do not know whether it has ever been done,” she admitted finally.
Ker thought of Svann and his scholarship. If anyone would know, it would be a Sunflower Shekayrin.
Kerida: Svann! Svann, are you there? Wake up.
But he shouldn’t be asleep, not at this time of day. Ker tried again, but there was still no answer.
<
The light touch of Baku’s fingertips on Ker’s arm brought her back. The princess’ dark eyes were full of determination. “Jerek said that if it could be done, you would be the one to do it, Kerida Nast.”
Before Ker had a chance to respond, Tel cut in. “What about him?” He jerked his chin at where the Rose Shekayrin lay in a heap like a discarded rag doll. “Is he dead?”
“His aura is intact, except . . .” She squinted as if that would help her Flash more clearly. “The red’s gone,” she said. “Gone completely, not just hidden.”
“Is that not the color you associate with our magic? The color that you have yourself, that enables you to use the soul stone?”
Gift of Griffins Page 26