The tension between us was gone for that season. Whenever I would turn to her and say something that would normally lead to a misunderstanding, she would say “We’re going to have a baby,” and that would be much more important than whatever either of us had been thinking. I did the same thing. We met with tailors who made baby clothes, interviewed what seemed like dozens of potential nurses, and planned the nursery together. We agreed on very little other than how excited and nervous we were about the arrival of our daughter-to-be. I have never been happier when I wasn’t in battle.
When Nolene handed me our newborn daughter and I held her for the first time, I had never before loved anyone so much as I did Lynniene. But I also never loved my wife so much as in that moment, when we shared something that hadn’t been pushed on us by the Empress. Maybe the feeling didn’t linger, and soon Sefa and I again found ourselves happier apart than together. But no one can say we never loved each other, no matter what Sefa convinced herself of later.
I don’t think of Sefa as she was the last time I saw her—an empty, angry shell. I think of her as she was during that one season we spent together caring about each other first, sandwiched between all those years of caring for the Empress’s wishes first.
Chapter 2
Ketya
Delamyen Province: Thirteen years before the Loss
I was probably six or so when my mother first explained magic to me. Up until then I’d just taken it for granted, as all kids do. My mother told it like a fairy tale, and forever after, even the most everyday magic has had a sort of fairy tale quality for me. I think it was the only fairy tale she ever told me—my mother was very proud of how focused she was on real-world problems, and she left dreaming and storytelling to my nurses.
But I guess you can’t explain magic to a six-year-old without a bit of dreaming.
“Once,” she told me, “the gods walked among us, and people worshipped them. Some of the gods even lived in the same lands as people, in huge palaces filled with giants and pixies and other fey creatures.
“But after a long time, the people and the gods quarreled, and it turned into a long war, the one we call the Holy War. After many years of fighting, most of the places where people lived had been destroyed, but the gods still couldn’t make the people give up and go back to worshipping them. And some of the gods had been crippled or lost their power as well. So the people and the gods finally decided to end the war.
“The gods agreed to leave the lands of the people, and never come back unless they were invited. And they agreed to provide people with magic, which would flow through the queen or empress of each land. In return, the people agreed that they would give up their own magic, the kind they had hurt some of the gods with. And they agreed that the ruler of each land would have the blood of a god in her veins, so she would have a connection with the god who was giving up his or her own power to provide magic to a human land. And she would give up her own name to the gods in return for the gift of magic—the gods got extra power from human names, and tricking people into giving them up was one of the things the war had been fought about. But in the end giving up a few names was a small price to free our land from the gods.”
“How do we know the gods won’t come back again, Mama?”
“Because they promised and they have to keep their promises. Gods aren’t like people. They can’t tell lies.” She was wrong, but at six, I believed her.
“Why would a god give up her own magic for us? Are names that important?”
“I don’t know: It happened a long time before I was born. We had worshipped them once and maybe some of them still cared about us, even after all the fighting. I know that some of them volunteered to give up their powers for us. There’s a sad story in the Book of Gods about Senne, who had to leave her lover Kedessen so that she could give her powers to our Empress. And the Empress passes magic along to women like me, who have been trained as channelers.”
“So only girls can use magic?” I asked.
She pushed my hair back out of my eyes. The gesture felt a little unnatural: She rarely touched me, and wasn’t really used to reaching out that way. “Only women in Ananya,” my mother answered. “The training takes many years. The Empress chooses who will become a channeler, and where she is assigned. If a woman has a lot of channeling power she might help with wars and fighting, or move cable-carriages and ships between cities. Or if she’s less powerful she might light buildings and streetlamps, or keep water heated in a bathhouse or mansion. The more experienced a channeler is, the more things she can do at once, but she will never get any more powerful than that first day the Empress gives magic to her.”
That was getting a little over my head. I knew my mother was a channeler and that she was important, but I didn’t really know what she did.
“Will I be a channeler like you someday, Mama?”
“Of course you will. You will be a very powerful channeler, just like your mother.” She was mostly wrong about that, too, although in the end I guess maybe she wasn’t.
But by that time my mother had been dead for years, and she was the one member of my immediate family who died before finding out that gods could lie to you. Or that there were betrayals far worse than being lied to by a god.
Ketya
The Siege of Davynen: Thirteen years before the Loss
I hate to say this, because it turned out to be so important in retrospect, but to a seven-year-old who got dragged to a lot of battles and state occasions, Davynen didn’t make much of an impression on me. Especially since it was what happened after the battle that really ended up changing everything for me and my family.
I remember there was mud everywhere, and some crumbling walls in the distance where the fighting itself must have been happening. There was a big encampment in the muddy fields, with a lot of soldiers everywhere whom my parents didn’t seem to like, which made the soldiers seem scary to me, even though I knew they were supposed to be on our side. In the middle of the whole thing was a big wooden stage, which my parents climbed up the stairs to since it was the only place out of the mud.
I was bored and clingy and no one stopped me from climbing up after them. Once I was up there I held on to my mother’s leg and wouldn’t let go, especially when row after row of scary soldiers lined up in front of the stage. The rest of it was all kind of a blur until the prisoner’s head exploded and then I just buried my head into my mother’s leg until it was time to go.
We left for home right after the battle ended, before the celebrations finished, even before the governor arrived. Only years later did I realize that was a deliberate stratagem on my father’s part. Leaving so soon didn’t really surprise me either—I was old enough to be used to arbitrary comings and goings. What did surprise me was the news that we would be taking a vacation at my mother’s family’s chateau.
Although both of my parents traveled a lot, we didn’t travel as a family much: Even overnight trips were rare, special things. I think this might be the only long trip with both parents that I remember.
If my parents ever told me the name of the place I didn’t remember it, just that we were going to the lake. My mother’s extended family owned a spa for the use of family members on the lake; Years later when I returned to a place that might have been it, all the family members who might have confirmed it were either dead or trying to kill me, so I never did find out for sure.
My mother’s family, all descended from the goddess Bayinna, was large and powerful, with spas and bathhouses for family use scattered across the provinces where most of them lived. But after my mother died, my father didn’t get along with her family anymore, so I never got to go back, or ask about it. Even if he had gotten along with them, there was no more time for vacations after she died.
This trip was before my mother even got sick, though. We were going to have a genuine family trip, for a whole month. The packing went on for days, with my nurse and her assistant and a man I didn’t really know—one of the gar
deners, I think—all working together to pack the big trunks with everything from the nursery that I would need.
I had been to the big cable-carriage station before: Sometimes my nurse took me there to meet my father or mother when one of them was coming home from a trip. And sometimes we just went to watch the massive carriages come and go, sliding along beneath the great metal cable that supported them high above the ground and carried the magic that moved the network of cable-carriages over mountains and between cities. A good channeler could move a cable-carriage more than a tenday’s walk before another relay had to pick it up; my mother had sent carriages half as far again when she had worked the great stations as a young channeler.
Usually we took a streetcar to the station, but with all of our baggage, my family rented an ox-cart instead. The cart plodded along slowly, much slower than the magically powered streetcars. I loved it because I got to ride high at the top of the pile of trunks in the open back of the cart with a broad view of the wide streets and white stone houses, instead of in a crowd of people on the streetcar where the window seats were always taken. It seemed like the ox-cart would never make it up the steep road to the hilltop cable-car station, but somehow it did. Then porters were unloading all of the trunks and I got to go into one of the giant cable-carriages for the first time.
We had a sleeping compartment for my parents and one for the servants with a sitting room between them. I was supposed to sleep on a couch in the sitting room, but I think I barely dozed the whole trip. I spent most of it kneeling backward on the couch with my nose pressed firmly to the window as the ground went by far below. The carriage rocked slightly from side to side as it moved along the cable. I would count pylons as we passed them; then the carriage would seem to go gently downhill until it reached the halfway point to the next pylon and began to climb again. My father spent most of the trip working and sorting papers at the gilded drop-leaf table in the center of the sitting room, and normally I would have wanted to know what he was doing and gotten underfoot. But this trip I just watched the scenery and enjoyed the way the carriage rocked like a swimmer as it moved. I even saw my father smile at me when he glanced up and saw me playing on the couch. I don’t remember ever seeing him happier than on that trip. From time to time he even got up and briefly pointed out features of the terrain passing beneath us before returning to his table.
I could see the broad lake like a mirror while we were still a long way off. When the cable-carriage arrived, someone at the spa had sent a private streetcar for us, with its own porters in spa livery to take our trunks and bundles. The streetcar had velvet-covered seats at the front for us, and I got a window all my own for the ride downhill to the lakeside spa.
From there things turned into a whirlwind. Dinner was in a huge, glittering room filled with thick red carpets. Chandeliers of cut glass, each piece glowing with channeled magic, slowly revolved above us. We sat at the longest table I had ever seen, surrounded by strangers who all seemed to know my mother. By that time my head was spinning, and I’m not sure I even made it through dinner awake. I remember course after course, each one fancier than the one before, and I think the last few I may have dreamed.
I woke up in a soft featherbed. It swung gently as I moved, suspended by ropes from the bedframe, and the swinging made me feel like I was back in the cable-carriage. Both of my parents had already gone for the day by the time my nurse brought me down to the same plush dining room for a late breakfast. My father was lecturing at some sort of school near the lake—one of the academies for civil servants, I think. He couldn’t bring himself to just take a vacation—he needed to be working, loved to be working. That didn’t start when my mother died, it just intensified. And my mother had dozens of friends and relatives she hadn’t seen for years, and only a month to catch up with them before more years of separation. As it turned out, because of her illness, it was the last time she saw most of them.
We soon settled into a routine. During the days I mostly spent time at the lakeside beach with my nurse, where I played with other kids. Sometimes we would go in groups to the bathhouse or to see other attractions nearby: a woodland maze, fields of bright red jellflowers that snapped shut if you touched them, a hall filled with gilded statues of my mother’s ancestors. Mostly there were no parents around, just nurses and kids. In the evenings, before dinner in the glittering hall, I would see my parents and tell my father about all of the adventures I’d had during the day. My mother would sit nearby and write letters while she half-listened. I was used to spending evenings with my mother, but I was so excited to get to see my father every night. At home even when he wasn’t traveling he often had to work so late I wouldn’t get to see him before I had to go to bed. He idolized my mother, but when I think back now, I think they didn’t spend much time together, even when they were both home. Not until she got sick, anyway.
There were side-trips with my mother too, and visits to relatives who told me how much my mother meant to them, most of whom I never saw again. But mostly I remember the beach, and the sparkling dinners, and telling my father about my adventures. It was like a trip to another world, to what I thought the land of the gods must look like, filled with incredibly costumed people and spectacle. I had a lot of misconceptions as a seven-year-old, but it turned out I wasn’t entirely wrong.
When we boarded the cable-carriage to return home, it was like leaving a faerie world to which we could never return.
My father didn’t make the trip back with us. He took a different carriage in a different direction, on royal business. I didn’t see him again for weeks, which is when I found out that he’d been named provincial governor, in place of the one who had shown up to the victory celebrations at Davynen just in time to give the impression that he was taking undeserved credit for his subordinate’s good work.
Sperrin
The Kelpie Aqueduct: Twelve years before the Loss
Nemias looked grim as he entered the low blockhouse that had become the senior officer’s mess and our more-or-less official battle planning room—even though the battle had supposedly been won already, before the Empress had sent me here. He said a few words to the sentry outside the blockhouse, then closed and bolted the door behind him.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“It’s bad.” He shook his head. “I keep wondering why the Empress hasn’t given me a pretty little wife like you have, when we’ve fought in as many battles together, and then something like this happens and I know.”
“That’s not fair. You won a pretty little battle. If I were Empress I’d give you whatever wife you wanted.” I don’t think I’d ever seen Nemias upset like this. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year, but while I’d been breaking up an attempted Alliance combined land and sea attack at North Harbor, he had beaten back a diversionary attack in the mountains that formed Ananya’s spine, holding two passes with his Threecastle Tomcats, one other regiment of regulars, a scout regiment, and some hastily formed companies of pioneers.
Several weeks of guerrilla attacks and skirmishes threatened to undo his victory, however; a worrisome enough possibility that the Empress had asked me to leave the mopping up at North Harbor to my senior captain and take the fastest transportation I could to the fortresses that protected the vital aqueduct, picking up a fresh regiment of reinforcements on the way.
“It’s not a victory if I lose the peace.”
I shrugged. “Then I guess we’ll have to win. What’s going wrong? You’re the best campaign planner there is, so I know there’s no problem with training or logistics.”
“Not yet there isn’t,” Nemias said. “There will be soon, at the rate we’re bleeding soldiers and supplies now. What we really need is a tactician, and you’re a better one than me.”
I nodded. “So what can I help with?” Technically, since my promotion to overcaptain preceded his, I could have taken command. Which I suppose was what the Empress expected by sending me here. But Nemias and I were so used to working together
that we fell automatically into the same sort of joint command that had won the Glass Desert campaign.
“Do you remember that book you showed me that first time we talked in the library? Must have been almost fifteen years ago now.”
“I remember.”
“I laughed at you for studying that book, but I wish I’d come back and read it with you.”
“Why is that? As I recall, you needed to work on your footwork more than you needed help learning to fight ancient opponents.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But we’re fighting an ancient opponent now. I beat back that alliance army, but apparently they have friends among the fey. They’re getting bolder, and it’s going to start scaring the troops. Tonight I found four sentries replaced by bundles of twigs. Still in uniform at their posts and weapons sheathed. They never saw whatever got them.”
I smiled. “Sounds like fun.”
Nemias opened his mouth to make an angry response when he realized I wasn’t joking. Instead, he asked “What do you need?”
“I need your best company of scouts. Line soldiers won’t do: I need troopers who are fast and agile, like you used to be in your scout days. And the scout company with the regiment I brought isn’t good enough.”
He nodded. “The scout company attached to the Tomcats is good. Use them.”
“I will also need weapons. Old weapons. What’s the oldest depot you have here? Is there anything left from the Holy War fort?”
Again he nodded. “There’s the museum. The storeroom underneath it still has barrels of old blades soaking in oil. No one ever bothered to move them out after the war.” That didn’t surprise me. It would have been easier to build a new storehouse than to haul hundreds of barrels of old supplies out of the mountains when the war ended, just to dispose of them somewhere else. And the Army never got rid of anything if it could help it, not when it could be secreted away somewhere just in case it was needed again someday.
The Lost Daughters Page 3