The Lost Daughters

by Leigh Grossman

  One possible answer dawned on me: Had the savior of Davynen lost his mind? I’d seen it happen to soldiers who couldn’t face the reality of what they had done, or of what they had failed to do. They seemed normal and pleasant, but utterly disconnected from reality. I’d had my own disconnection with reality, as I was only now rediscovering. Maybe the demons that had driven me from the battlefield had taken hold of him.

  The chancellor was perhaps the last person I ever expected to see that way. But as I knew from my still-incomplete memories, bravery and cleverness were not always enough to prevent doubts and fears from taking possession of your mind.

  Some of those broken soldiers healed, I knew. And the chancellor would be needed in the upcoming war—war not just with the armies of the Central Alliance, but apparently with the gods themselves.

  “Lord Chancellor, you need to come with us,” I said.

  “Out of the question. My place is here in the palace. My duty is to remain here.”

  The clothes belied that, I thought. But I chose my words carefully. “It is not safe here, your lordship. The palace is flooding. We need to take you to safety.”

  “I will be perfectly safe.” The chancellor still hadn’t opened the door fully. I could see sealed crates and packages on the floor behind him. Wherever the chancellor thought he was going, he hadn’t planned on traveling light.

  Ketya came up from behind me. “Father,” she said simply, and pushed her way through the door.

  The chancellor opened his mouth to say something, but Ketya and I had entered his chambers already.

  Candle lanterns lit the main room dimly, though it seemed bright after the near-darkness of the rest of the palace. What had been an immaculate chamber looked untidy now; if the chancellor had been packing for a trip he hadn’t bothered straightening after the lights went out. A pile of boxes and bundles stood just inside the doorway, ready to be carried downstairs for whatever trip the chancellor fancied he was taking. Lying across the topmost bundle I saw an elaborately worked golden card-case, a fancier version of the kind used to protect field manuals and nautical charts.

  “Father, we have to go,” Ketya said. The chancellor’s expression shifted from puzzlement to displeasure.

  “You will not go anywhere dressed in those rags,” he said. “Go into the other room and change. Some of your old clothes are still here. I burned the ones you had outgrown.”

  Ketya looked at him blankly and touched her tunic. Her hand came back wet with the Empress’s blood. For a moment her face welled up as if about to cry. Then she swallowed hard, nodded, and walked into the other room without a word.

  After a few moments of rustling, she emerged wearing drier clothes: a belted tunic over a shirt and loose trousers. A pair of well-worn low boots replaced her ruined formal shoes. She had scrubbed her face and hands, and pulled her long hair back out of her face and bound it with a bit of black velvet.

  “Now we need to go,” she said to her father.

  “I will go nowhere,” he said, his back to her. The chancellor faced the front door, as if waiting for another knock. Ketya walked toward him, past the pile of crates and packages. Then she lifted one of the candle lanterns. “Sperrin, help him please.”

  I took the chancellor’s elbow and guided him toward the door, nudging it open with his foot. The chancellor shook me off and took a step, then froze.

  He stood transfixed in the open doorway, staring at the bodies of the dead Central Alliance soldiers on the landing below.

  Ketya followed his gaze. “Father, it isn’t safe. We have to go.”

  This time the chancellor didn’t resist when I took his arm.

  Ketya

  I couldn’t understand why my father seemed so different. He hadn’t foreseen this disaster, but it wasn’t like him to wilt in the face of a reverse. This couldn’t have been the first cataclysmic event he’d been surprised by, and he’d turned the others into victories. Why, this time, wasn’t he rallying support, fighting back, finding some way to turn defeat into victory that even a god would never have thought of? That’s what my father always did.

  What made tonight different?

  Then I noticed something missing. The Mouse King suit no longer hung on the armoire.

  He must be wearing it, I realized. The implications of that took a moment to sink in. Those are the suits Tenia said were used to speak to the gods. And he didn’t deny it when I asked him about it. So he did see this coming. He must have somehow anticipated the attack and been sure he could stop it. And he failed, and the Empress died as a result.

  Not just the Empress. The Empress and the whole royal family.

  My thoughts were running away with me now. He might even have said something that made it worse. This must have crushed him.

  All my life, ever since my mother died, my father was the one strong figure I could count on. He was the one who was going to protect me when everyone else was gone.

  Now everyone else is gone, and he is the one who needs protecting. It’s time I grow up and do my duty to my father. If I can’t serve the Empress, I will have to serve him instead.

  I scrubbed my face and hands again—I hadn’t actually gotten much of the blood off when I tried to clean them in the throne room—and dressed carefully in traveling clothes. I returned Tenia’s talisman deck to the small of my back, where it had hidden all night. The cards were soaked, I was sure. But what else did I have to remember my best friend by?

  I saw my father’s eyes and the guardsman’s eyes on me as I stepped back into the cluttered main room, with its stacked crates of books and personal effects that we would be leaving behind. And then I saw the Talisman of Truce itself, sitting on top of a crate as if forgotten.

  He means to leave it behind, I realized. Has his mind been so shattered that he’s forgotten how important it is?

  Up until that point, I had assumed that we would get my father out and nurse him back to health and then he would talk to the god or gods who had done this and fix things. But he would need Ananya’s original copy of the treaty to do that. Without it they would never talk to him.

  For the first time, I realized that he might never heal. That for once in my life, my father might not be able to fix a problem. As I passed by the crates I palmed the Talisman and replaced it with Tenia’s talisman deck, disguising the motion by picking up one of the candle lanterns so they followed my other hand. Mala would have been proud: Even with their eyes on me, neither my father nor the guardsman saw a thing. In the dimness of the candlelit room, the two cases looked identical. And picking up a lantern was sensible enough that it raised no questions.

  Leaving behind the only keepsake I had from Tenia hurt almost as much as having the magic wrenched from me.

  It took all my strength to keep my eyes forward and not glance back at the deck as Sperrin took my father’s arm. Both of them were smart and decades more experienced than me. I didn’t dare give them a hint that I had the Talisman until I knew how they would react. If my father made a scene it could kill us all. And it might reveal to the guardsman the real motivations for what I was going to have to do next.

  Somebody is going to need to talk to the gods if we’re ever going to get out of this, and it probably shouldn’t be me. But if I leave the Talisman behind it won’t be anybody. And I’ll need a suit that someone can talk to the gods in, too, because my father may not recover, and if he doesn’t he isn’t about to give up the one he is wearing to whoever is able to do the talking. In spite of everything, for a moment I felt something closer to pride than sadness. And I know just where I can get another suit.

  I hated to leave Tenia behind, but in that moment, I felt almost as if she was there. What would you do, Tenia? I wanted to ask. But then I realized that was the wrong question, if I wanted to survive and do my part to help fix this disaster.

  What would you expect your chancellor to do, Tenia?

  Forcing myself not to take a last glance at the gilded card case on top of the packing
crates, I followed Sperrin and my father from the chamber.

  Sperrin

  Ketya hooded the lantern except for the barest sliver of light. It illuminated just enough for us to silently make our way through the dark, windowless galleries that led toward the tower bridge. From within the stoneworks that enclosed the bridge we would be able to see most of the city without being seen ourselves. More important, several sheltered stairways led downward to the High Road, the raised causeway that ran along the inside of the city walls. Built up over generations, the High Road would still be above the level of floodwaters, even if the levees had failed completely.

  If the levees had failed completely, there were a lot of people dead in the city tonight. I’d grown more pessimistic as I’d worked my way through the castle, finding only the two survivors. Most of the attacking godservants had already moved on. There had been whole cities massacred in the early years of the Holy War, I knew. That had been done by armies of gods and their servants, not by the comparative handful I’d seen signs of here. But that didn’t mean there weren’t others I hadn’t seen.

  The view from the bridge would tell me if the High Road would let us get to one of the inland gates. If we could get to an inland gate, we could escape the city on the river side, where we could count on cover from attackers.

  We moved quietly. Ketya ranged slightly ahead with the light while I guided her father. I noticed when she’d concealed the card case in her clothes, replacing it with an identical one she’d already carried. She’d taken it right in front of me, so whatever the case contained, she hid it from her father, not from me.

  The chancellor followed along pliably as long as I kept a hand on him. All of us knew this part of the palace well; heavily trafficked during the day, it fell quiet during evening and overnight hours. Now, in the early morning, it would normally be coming back to life, full of servants with bundles and carts and messengers on their two-wheeled scooters rushing through the passages to prepare for when the palace would awaken.

  We met nothing alive in the galleries that led to the tower bridge. Even the bodies lay widely separated, a handful of servants cut down from behind while fleeing. All bore the marks of godsent blades, not Central Alliance weapons.

  Nothing I saw added much to my understanding of the twin invasions of the palace.

  Ketya

  Every child in Ananya knew the story of the Holy War and its aftermath. Both sides had claimed victory, with some justification. The gods and their servants had withdrawn to their own homeland, reachable only through passageways that no one without the blood of gods in their veins could find. In exchange for this withdrawal, every human land would be ruled by a queen or empress descended from one or another of the gods. The rulers would live and die as humans, and each kingdom would benefit from the magic of the gods, flowing through each of those queens. No god or godservant would return to the lands of humanity, except by the express invitation of one of the five principal empresses or her chosen representative. Each of those five was given a copy of the Talisman of Truce. The symbol of the war’s end, the cards that made up each Talisman contained the complete text of the truce with the gods. They also served as a symbol of the compact that even the gods would have to honor if it were presented to them.

  Most girls learned the story and perhaps had to memorize the preamble to the treaty to recite at Talisman Day festivals. That was the end of their education in the peace settlement that ended the Holy War. But my father was very proud of his role as guarantor of the treaty. As chancellor, he held the physical Talisman in the Empress’s name, and was responsible for making sure that Ananya upheld its obligations to the gods under the treaty. To impress his daughter with the magnitude of his duty, he’d required that I memorize all of the treaty’s 267 clauses. It took me more than a year, but I had done it. Even now, years later, I could quote most of the Talisman from memory.

  Which didn’t really explain why I now had the Talisman concealed between blouse and tunic, at the small of my back. I didn’t really have an explanation for that—in the dimness I had begun to doubt my motives again. I knew that we couldn’t leave the treaty behind in the tower when we left. But wouldn’t a word to my father have sufficed to remind him, no matter how upset he was? Instead I’d picked up the case and hidden it from him, almost like lying to him.

  Despite the near-lie, I drew a certain comfort from feeling the Talisman against my back as we approached the bridge. I could almost pretend I still carried Tenia’s deck, that I still had a part of her with me. Barely any light remained from the guttering candle. Entombed in this dead palace, I needed every possible comfort.

  The tower bridge had been added to the palace more than a century ago. The bridge connected the towers that housed the then fast-expanding Ananyan Empire’s administrative officers without impeding the flow of information by forcing messengers to descend from one tower and climb another to pass documents between ministers. In recent years bridge traffic had fallen dramatically, replaced by a magically powered network of polished wooden tubes along which laquered cylinders containing documents sped more quickly than any messenger. However, the bridge remained a convenient passageway between towers, and the sweeping views of the city combined with its comparative seclusion made it a popular lovers’ walk.

  The white stone blocks that made up the bridge causeway glowed faintly pink from morning sunlight coming through tall, narrow window bays. The harborside windows overlooked and defended the High Road. Sperrin strode quickly to the nearest window bay, releasing my father, who stood like a wax-museum statue in the middle of the covered causeway.

  Sperrin took a step back, his face grim.

  I knew what that expression meant, but I stepped forward into the nearest window bay anyway.

  Through the window I could see the submerged neighborhoods between the harbor and the city’s walls. A few taller buildings poked through the surface, but most houses had sunk beneath the water. The levees seemed to have been swept away entirely. In the city’s walled sections the streets had flooded, but parts of most houses stood above the flood. Several of the great towers had collapsed completely, undermined by floodwaters. A cable-carriage had smashed into the top of the same berthing tower I had arrived on less than a day ago: The cables had snapped, leaving the tower sagging and the carriage floating upside down beside it.

  But I could see people clinging to roofs, and rescue boats rowing through the flooded streets.

  Three great warships floated at anchor in the inner harbor, flying the four-colored flag of the Central Alliance. Soldiers crowded the decks, and longboats crewed by soldiers rowed back and forth filled with looted treasures from the city. Someone must have released the great chain that blocked the harbor to large ships, I realized. That berricade was designed to remain even if all the city’s magical defenses failed. Who could give such an order? I wondered briefly if it had something to do with the commotion that Tenia had told me about right before the ceremony. My father would know, but I couldn’t exactly ask him.

  But more than mere chains protected the harbor. The magic that had protected the Drowned City held back more than just ocean waters. As I watched, one of the longboats listed suddenly and then capsized. Soldiers floundered in the water, only to be pulled under.

  A mast on one of the warships creaked loudly as a great black tentacle wrapped around it and began to pull. A second tentacle emerged from the harbor depths. Flicking back and forth across the warship’s deck, it threw a half dozen soldiers into the water before wrapping around another mast. Soldiers on the deck chopped frantically at the tentacles with their blades and sea-axes as the deck began to tilt. The other two ships cut their anchor cables and began making their way out of the harbor, wakes churning behind them as the ships’ channelers started their screws turning. The Alliance ships left their longboats behind as more dark tentacles emerged from the thrashing water to capsize the beleaguered ship and pull it under.

  Nearer to the palace walls,
refugees clogged the High Road. Water lapped against the walls beyond the road. Now and again a tentacle reached over the wall and grabbed some luckless refugee from the road, pulling them screaming into the water. But for the most part the sea creatures concentrated on the feast in the harbor, and on the floating corpses of people caught in their beds when the floodwaters burst through the levees.

  The godservants seemed to have departed with the coming of the dawn, the only hopeful sign. With the retreat of the Central Alliance ships, the survivors would be able to rescue the living, and dispose of any dead that evaded the sea monsters.

  “Should we help with the rescues?” I asked, my voice shaky.

  I knew the answer, but didn’t want to be the one who said it out loud.

  Sperrin shook his head. “We leave. You may be the only channeler left alive in the country. And your father, despite his present condition, is an important official. We get you to safety, to someplace where you won’t be killed before we’ve figured out what happened and can launch a counterattack.”

  That seemed like an odd use of we, until I realized Sperrin meant the army. He still thought of himself as a field soldier, not a palace guard. Which is probably the only reason we are alive, I knew.

  Reluctantly, I nodded. It felt like we should be helping, but I had no idea what I could do to help here. I had certainly trained in disaster assistance at the Empress’s Academy—but everything I had learned required magic. I had no idea how to move debris or perform rescues without magical assistance. Somewhere else, with a little time to think, I might be able to help piece together what had happened, and how to start fixing it. But here and now, my father and I were liabilities, people who wouldn’t be helpful in the recovery efforts but who would need to be guarded and fed at the cost of precious resources.

  None of this made any sense.

  The gods were forbidden to come here without an invitation. That prohibition had stood for centuries. Fickle as they were, gods did not break their treaties. And the Empress and her family were of the gods’ own blood, in a direct line from the goddess Senne, who had given up her own powers so that her descendents would enjoy her magic instead.