I picked a tin pot from a shelf and dipped it in the rain-fed basin, which was filled to the spillholes with water. Then I set the pot on the stove to heat. At the back of the room two doorways led into sleeping chambers lined with pallets. We wouldn’t lack for space; the hideaway had been built to shelter twenty soldiers, from the days when Longhold held a much larger garrison.
I stripped off my wet cloak and hung it from one of the empty weapon racks to dry. Pulling off my boots, I set them near the stove, checking for signs of damage first. Then my socks joined the cloak drying on the rack.
I gestured to the sleeping rooms. “There’s privacy if you need it. Change out of your wet clothes. We’ll be staying here until the rain stops. Likely two or three days.”
In an hour we had all changed into dry clothes. I served a porridge of grain and fruit, and steaming mugs of bitter chickory. I had added more fuel to the stove and set dried beans soaking for morning.
My two charges seemed headed in opposite directions. Ketya, with the resilience of her nineteen years, seemed to gain energy with the meal and rest. She had perked up visibly, and had spent time exploring the chamber and cleaning herself in one of the private rooms. Now she seemed almost meditative, as if puzzling over problems and solutions in her mind.
Which is probably exactly what she is doing, I thought. She might be young, but Ketya was the daughter of Ananya’s cleverest administrator; her mother had been one of its most talented channelers. It wouldn’t pay to underestimate her. She was young and inexperienced, but I knew that with the proper tools she could solve problems beyond my knowledge.
Her father, by contrast, seemed to be fading badly. Whether the strain of not showing weakness in front of his daughter and me had weakened him or whether the shock of the last few days had finally sunk in, I didn’t know. But the journey—only the beginnings of our journey, really—seemed to have aged the chancellor. He wore the fatigue badly, his eyes drooping as we ate. As far as I could tell, the chancellor wasn’t faking tiredness. Ketya had to support him when they walked to the bedchamber I had chosen for them.
I straightened the outer room unnecessarily for a little while, then wrote in my lifebook before retreating to my own room. I unrolled my bedding onto one of the ten pallets. I would have given a lot to have another professional soldier along with us. It would have added substantially to the chances of getting my charges to Whitmount alive.
I lay awake thinking for a while, but knew what I really needed was rest. There will be time to think and plan tomorrow. You rescued who you could, and for tonight at least, they are safe.
* * * *
The click of the other bedroom door opening and closing awakened me. I heard soft steps going into the main room, then the rustling of papers.
What is the chancellor doing now? I decided to wait a little while before investigating further. There wasn’t much harm the chancellor could do from here. I could feel the keyring against my fingertips, so the chancellor couldn’t unlock the heavy door we had come in by. Presumably the chancellor didn’t know about the other, secret way out of the hideaway—but even if he did, my bedroll and pallet lay on top of the entrance.
The rustling of papers continued.
I listened for a little while longer before curiosity finally got the best of me.
Picking up my blade, I stood up silently and padded to the door. The door opened quietly.
Not what I expected.
Ketya looked up from a pile of papers with a guilty expression. Relief crossed her face when she saw me, and not her father.
She sat crosslegged near the stove, where the light from the candles illuminated most evenly. The case that I had seen her take from her father’s chambers in the palace lay open next to her thigh. Card-sized sheets of ancient vellum, inscribed on both sides in neat, tiny letters, had been unfolded and lay strewn around her legs. She held one close to her face, looking at one passage, while her other hand marked a passage on a different card.
“Give me a few minutes,” she whispered. “I’m trying to find something.”
I nodded. Walking over to the stove I put water on to heat, then retreated to a bench and sat watching.
After those first words, she went almost silent, mumbling a little to herself as she read in the candlelight, referring back and forth to certain passages. Occasionally she glanced furtively at the closed door to her father’s room. My presence didn’t seem to bother her, though.
When she looked up, Ketya had an oddly inquisitive look. “I need to ask you a few questions about what you saw in the palace. Can you answer a few things?” she asked me.
“I can try.”
“You didn’t see any signs of gods themselves, right? Or their personal bodyguards?”
“No, just godlings. Messengers and soldiers, but no gods or high-ranking vassals.”
“How many kinds of messengers did you see?”
“Just two. An ironback and a silverwing.”
“Do you know if they both served different gods, or the same god?”
I thought back to the markings on the godlings. “The same god, I think. Although I couldn’t tell you which one.”
She asked many more questions, increasingly specific, to the point where I started to worry that her father would wake up. She had noticed a lot more than I realized in our flight from the palace. Terrified or not, she had paid attention to what was going on around us.
“What’s this about?” I finally asked.
“I’ve been starting to wonder about what’s going on. It may not be what we think it is. I wanted to check some things against the Talisman first before I made any assumptions. I was pretty sure I remembered the exact clauses, but I had to double check.”
“You memorized the Talisman treaty?”
“Yes, of course.” She brushed a hand through her long hair in a moment of shyness, knotting it back behind her head. “The important thing is what I think I found.”
“What did you find?”
“Well, we’ve been assuming the treaty was broken—but what if it wasn’t?”
I shook my head in puzzlement. “I thought gods had to honor their word? Is it one of those treaties where they can break the spirit of the treaty but not the letter?”
“Not exactly. They do have to honor the treaty, spirit and letter both, but if a god wanted to lie to your face, he could. As long as you didn’t have standing in the treaty.”
“I will keep that in mind if I ever meet a god.”
She kept referring back and forth for a while, before carefully rearranging the cards of the Talisman and placing them back in their case. “I really wanted to work this out tonight, but my head is swimming,” she said. “I need to think about it some more, and sleep. Thanks for sitting up with me.”
“Glad for the company,” I said. And in a way I was. Watching her, I could wonder what my daughter might be like, what my daughter might be doing right now.
Ketya
The Mountain Road: Five days after the Loss
The next morning, I finally felt ready to talk about it. It took longer than I expected, since I had to work up the nerve to talk about it in front of my father. We had already eaten breakfast and cleaned up. I could sense Sperrin’s silent encouragement. Finally, I took a deep breath and forced myself to start speaking.
“So I think I’ve figured something out,” I said. “At first I thought the...the attack on the palace was the start of a new Holy War. But it isn’t. I think this was just one god and his messengers that did this. Maybe some god that hated the god our Empress was descended from.”
“Hated her enough to break the compact?” Sperrin raised an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of hate.”
“That’s if the compact was broken. Maybe someone with standing in the treaty invited them.” I knew I was on dangerous ground here.
“Such as who? The Empress. Your father?” Sperrin turned to my father. “Did you invite gods to come kill all of us? Did the Empress ask them to kill
her?”
My father gave him a look. “Do not mock our loss,” he said, then turned away from them again.
“I’ll take that as a no,” said Sperrin. “What about withholding magic from us while still sending it to the Central Alliance? That way the gods could decide which countries rose and fell. That would fit what we saw, though I don’t see why the gods would care for some of us over others. Maybe it’s a way to get people to worship them, by giving or withholding gifts or weapons.”
I shook my head no. “It’s compelling, but if that happened all the gods would need to have been involved. Most of them, anyway. And the negotiators thought of that while negotiating the treaty. There’s no way to reconcile that with clause 202:
“Magic shall flow evenly to all human lands herein.
By the terms of this treaty it may not flow
more fruitfully to one than another.
Nor may impediments be offered to some and held from others.
Neither worship nor favors may be required beyond those enumerated here.
Magic shall flow regardless of personal conflicts
as long as the royal line shall exist;
In the failure of that a new line may be established
provided a complaint is made by a party with valid concerns
(those parties enumerated above, c. 4)
and negotiated with the consent of concerned parties
with the utmost speed.
And it shall fall on the ones who have violated this clause
or caused it to be violated
to pay the utmost price of repairing it
no matter how dear.”
“Does that mean there’s a way to fix it?” Sperrin asked. “That’s what it sounds like.”
“Yes, but there’s a list of conditions in clause 4 that apply,” I answered. “You have to have been appointed to a position by the Empress or her designate, and you have to have given up your name to the gods like the Empress and chancellor do while they serve. For a long time after the war there were several assistant chancellors who were never allowed to be in the same part of the country in case a disaster like this happened, but the gods seemed to be keeping their word and the assistant chancellors kept trying to start civil wars or assassinate the chancellor or each other. Finally they discontinued them.” Somehow I felt more confident when talking about the treaty. As painful and hunger-inducing as memorizing it had been, it left me without any of the self-doubts I felt in areas like magic where I knew I couldn’t measure up to expectations.
“So who would qualify to actually talk to the gods?” asked Sperrin. “Is there a list somewhere?”
“Well...definitely my father.” I thought about the language of clause 4 carefully. “I’m not sure there is anyone else. But there are contingencies for times when all the appropriate parties are dead. I guess it happened during the war a few times. I think that with the right dress and knowledge of the Talisman”—and with one of the original copies as well, but I wasn’t about to say that out loud—“someone appointed by a powerful civil leader would be listened to, or at least heard out. But it would be best if my father could do it.”
My father sat listening quietly, his expression unchanging. He seemed to stare past us, like a housecat ignoring its owners and staring at a tiny crevice that it knows prey will emerge from if it waits long enough.
“Whether your father can do his usual brilliant service in his present condition seems like an...open question,” said Sperrin.
“That’s why I am focusing on the question of what happened, and leaving the question of how to fix it until things are less unsettled.” I couldn’t help glancing at my father. “I just can’t understand who outside of the royal family and my father would be able to talk to them, or who would want to.”
“Could someone have impersonated a member of the royal family? Maybe someone from the Central Alliance, using magic?”
“Perhaps...” I started, then stopped. “It would be awfully hard to fool them with their own magic unless they wanted to be fooled. But perhaps the gods accepted someone as a speaker for the Empress who wasn’t entitled to the position.”
Sperrin didn’t seem convinced, even though he’d offered the suggestion. “That would still be a violation, wouldn’t it? Maybe more than one. Don’t the gods require some proof of who they’re speaking to?”
I knew exactly what proof they required. I could have quoted the passage from clause 242 of the treaty that specified how messengers would be verified. My father had made me recite it often enough. And they would also need the Talisman that I carried secretly. It would have had to be stolen from a guarded display case, or from my father’s room. Even my father was never supposed to leave it unattended unless it was under guard, but I knew the Empress would never impose that kind of restriction on her most trusted adviser.
Could that carelessness have caused all of this? Those Alliance soldiers Sperrin had killed—had they been guarding the spy who had stolen the Talisman and then returned it to my father’s room, perhaps while my father was outside dealing with the harbor mishap?
And I couldn’t exactly claim that stealing the Talisman had been difficult when I’d done it myself, with no more training than a cook’s daughter could give me in an afternoon.
I wished my father would help me figure this out. He knew the treaty and all the loopholes. He had studied the gods themselves. Had even spoken to one before my mother’s death. He could solve this.
If he would talk to us. If he hadn’t gone mad.
“Besides,” Sperrin said, “someone would need to be mad enough to want to betray the empire, and sane enough to pull it off. And to fool the gods, no less.”
“They might not have been that hard to fool,” I tried. “As long as the terms were followed, if it was what a god wanted to hear, he or she might not have stopped to double check. If the spy chose the right god.”
“I can see why a god might want to do that. Maybe out of revenge, or just for fun or out of boredom. But what would the person who approached the god get out of it? It doesn’t make any sense,” said Sperrin. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re right,” I said. “There’s some piece that I’m still missing. But I really do think it was just one god, not all of them.”
“Maybe. That would change things. It might be possible to talk to the gods if only one of them attacked, since they would still be bound by the treaty. And there seems to be a procedure for fixing it, if you can interpret eight hundred-year-old poetry correctly. But”—he actually smiled as he said this, I think without realizing—“it also means that everyone else but us will still have magic. We already saw that in the palace and with the raiding ships in the harbor, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. The Central Alliance will certainly try to invade, with no channelers to support our border troops. Probably they’re invading already.”
Why did he look almost happy about it? He was in his element, with a war to fight and people to kill, but did he have to enjoy it so much? But he was trying to help.
I drew a breath. “At the Academy...there were books on the Talisman. Is there a library like that at Whitmount? Maybe someone who can help figure this out?”
“I’m sure they’re already working on it,” Sperrin said. “Maybe they’ve already solved it. Or the information we bring may be the key to the answer.
And of course, we were just sitting here talking, not traveling at all. The satisfaction I’d felt in reciting the treaty melted away, like a prisoner under one of my father’s stares. Frustration filled me instead. “How long will it take us to get there?”
“Depends when the rain stops. And on how well you and your father hold up in the mountains. Two weeks at the outside, I would think. Depending on what dangers are on the road.”
He’s doing it again, I thought, talking about how we’re probably going to die. And he’s smiling. Then I realized: He likes the dangers. And my father has always thrived on risk too. Maybe Sperr
in honestly doesn’t think what he’s saying is discouraging.
In the corner, my father spat out the shell from a seed. Other than the one outburst he hadn’t said anything to us since he awoke.
I desperately needed his help. And even though I seemed to always say the wrong thing and make him angry, I really missed him.
I wish he would come back to himself soon. I know what we lost was a huge blow, but I’ve lost as much as he has and I’m holding it together. Shouldn’t we be able to draw strength from each other in the midst of our losses? But that’s never been his way, however much I wish it was. The part of me that thinks that way came from my mother.
And really, that was the problem, I knew. Despite all the years that had passed and all the things I’d done—maybe even because I became a channeler and followed in my mother’s footsteps—my father was always going to see me as a symbol of my mother’s death. This journey would be much easier for him if I wasn’t there.
I wish he could be comforted that his daughter somehow managed to live through this disaster alongside him. I wish we could work together to somehow restore some of what’s been lost. Might as well wish that I didn’t represent all of those losses to him.
I saw him look my way and dropped my eyes to avoid making contact. At least I’ll do what I can to avoid making things any harder for him.
* * * *
After we breakfasted in uncomfortable silence, my father retreated to his room while Sperrin sat on a bench next to the stove and carved. He had taken a pair of the wooden knives from the weapon racks and whittled at them singlemindedly, dipping the wood in a pot of boiling water on the stove every few minutes.
Slowly, the practice knives took on a longer, more slender shape.
He held up a knife to test its weight and feel against the one he was carving.
Unsatisfied, he went back to shaping the practice knives.
I had a sudden suspicion. I reached down to my boot. The knives he had given me were gone. I hadn’t even realized he had taken them. How did he do that?
I suspected that was something he intended for me to learn.
The Lost Daughters Page 19