A Dark Sacrifice

by Madeline Howard

  But the actual choice of a boat he left to Ruan and Aell. While they made their final selection and paid out a handful of his coins, he and Skerry said farewell to his men. Orri and the rest had insisted they would accompany their prince to the ends of the earth if he should ask; nevertheless, they were all of them obviously relieved when he refused them.

  In the confusion of their departure, Sindérian found an opportunity to slip away and wander along the shore beyond the houses, still debating within herself.

  My fault, she thought. Without me, everyone would have made it out of the marshes days ago. Why didn’t I warn them I was under a curse? And how can I possibly justify continuing to expose them to my danger?

  Ahead of her, the last level rays of sunlight turned the beach to dull silver; driftwood lay scattered above the tideline like the runes of some forgotten spell. Yet even as she watched the little green waves come in with a hiss and go out again, dragging sand with them, she was keenly aware of other, invisible tides that would shape the rest of her journey.

  The power she feared most was ebbing as the moon diminished, but it was still formidable. And who was she to set her own limited experience against Ouriána’s will, linked as it was to the primal forces of the sea? Indeed, where was safety, where was refuge for anyone, if Ouriána could subvert the very elements?

  With the inner Sight, she saw her own death in a hundred different guises: crushed under stones, shattered by a fall, strangled in her own hair—so vivid was that image, Sindérian put a hand to her throat—but most of her deaths involved drowning. She could see herself sinking, sinking through fathoms of clear green water, the surface of the sea like a shining roof overhead. She could see her own bones lying on the sandy ocean floor.

  The sea flicked out a narrow tongue and licked at her boots. At the same time, she felt something nudge at her mind, the very lightest touch. Startled, and then alarmed, she gathered up her skirts and backed away from the water.

  But the second time Faolein’s voice spoke more clearly. Sindérian swung around, her head tilted to the skies and her heart lifted at the sight of a single pair of dark wings speeding over the marshes, coming closer and closer with every wing-beat. When he was over the beach, the sparrowhawk began descending in a long, beautiful glide. Then she felt the familiar prickle of his talons as he landed on her upraised arm.

  I bring greetings from King Ristil, he said. He hopes that his son will understand why he was unable to keep his end of the bargain. When I last saw him, he was in the midst of a skirmish with Eisenlonder settlers.

  Sindérian received this information without surprise; it was no more or less than what she had expected since encountering all of those new settlements along the way.

  Turning back toward the village, she gave him a brief account of what they had learned in the alehouse, what the princes planned to do next. She had wandered farther down the beach than she had realized, until the village was only a dark smudge against a sky that looked like it had been powdered with gold leaf. She had a long trudge back in the loose sand; even so, she did not tell her father everything that was on her mind.

  There was no need, for he sifted through her words with uncanny precision, swiftly drawing his own conclusions from what she had not said. You have no intention of going with the others. You intend to find your own way across the channel—alone.

  Reluctantly, Sindérian admitted it. And once she confessed to that much, the rest came out in a rush, everything she had been concealing since they were wrecked on the coast: the aniffath—the ill luck she carried with her—the revelation that came to her while she was wandering through the marshes. This time she held nothing back. But if she meant to unburden herself, there still remained a cold lump of guilt and fear. My company will be even more perilous in a boat out on the water. Unless I am much mistaken, Prince Kivik and Lord Skerry can’t swim a stroke.

  The hawk walked up her arm to perch on her shoulder. I wish you had told me these things before. Such matters are—complex. An aniffath is not like any other curse: it grows and changes, reaches out to engulf others for whom it was never intended. By this time we are all of us almost certainly hopelessly enmeshed.

  Sindérian caught her breath, came to a sudden stop. My fault, then, for keeping silent. At the very least, I might have saved the Skyrran princes.

  Do you think you could have dissuaded them from accompanying you, whatever you said? her father asked gently. And Prince Ruan, what would he have done? How long will you pretend not to know what he feels for you? He would never allow you to face this danger alone. As for the curse: that came about through no fault of your own. What were you to Ouriána before we left Leal? There can be little doubt we have Thaga to blame that she even knows you exist, and if I had not been supposed dead, her curse would have fallen on me. Think of that, when you feel inclined to blame yourself for anything that has happened.

  The knot in her chest began to unclench; her breathing came a little easier. How comforting it would be to believe what he told her! But it was always his way to think and hope for the best, hers to question and doubt.

  Faolein swiveled his head around to look her in the face. The hawk’s fierce yellow stare was nothing like the mild glance of the wizard. And suddenly she found herself wondering, as she had not wondered for many months, what changes he had experienced during that time they were apart after Saer. What had he seen and known when Thaga unmade his body and cast his spirit out into eternity, in these moments between unmaking and transformation? We are caught in a web of Ouriána’s weaving, and we can’t break free. But while she has chosen the threads and selected the pattern, be sure of this: hers is not the only hand on the shuttle: she may not be the one who determines the ultimate design. She has not grown so great that the stars or the seasons obey her; they are not hers and never will be. And there are other sorceries in the world, forces more potent than any our enemy knows or commands. Become their instrument.

  If you wish to save the others, Sindérian, you can’t be like the weathercock, changing your direction with every wind. Be the lightning rod instead. At the very least you can draw the danger away from our friends—at the best, you may take the power and direct it where you will.

  Long before midnight, they had loaded up the boat with supplies they bought in the village, and by the time the tide turned in the small hours, they were ready to depart.

  “I was beginning to think you would not be coming with us,” said Prince Ruan when he looked up from his place in the boat to see Sindérian standing on the pier, her face blazing like the moon.

  She swung over the side, landed softly in the boat beside him. “You are the one who always had doubts,” she replied, flashing him a bright, challenging smile. “I’ve always believed that chance or the Fates would throw some opportunity in our way. Why should I think any differently now?”

  Why indeed? thought Ruan, watching her take a seat near the bow, while the hawk landed on the gunwale beside her. The change in her was remarkable: all the color and light restored to her face; her eyes clear and confident. Yet, there was a steely edge to her smile, a hard brightness to her glance he had never seen there before. He would have given much to know what had passed between her and Faolein on her father’s return.

  Kivik and Skerry boarded next, one after the other, making valiant (but unsuccessful) attempts to hide their trepidation. Observing how they unconsciously flinched at every slight dip and roll, Ruan could only hope that neither would be sick once they reached rougher water.

  Aell loosed the rope and leaped into the boat; then he and Ruan took up the oars. For a time all was silent except for the gentle slap of water against the hull, the splash of oars breaking the surface. When the village was only a faint, dark blur in the distance, Ruan took charge of the tiller while Aell put up the weatherbeaten sail. They sailed for what remained of the night, always with a light, following wind.

  Morning dawned wet and misty grey, though the fog burned off quickly a
nd they continued on at a good clip for many hours over the sunlit waves. A meal of cold fowl, hard biscuits, and seaweed-flavored ale put heart into everyone, and as no one, so far, had shown any disposition toward seasickness, it began to look as if the the voyage would be a short and uneventful one.

  But in the early afternoon, more ominous signs began to appear. Clouds began to boil up on the horizon; the wind increased and the light darkened. Gulls whirled overhead, caught in the vortex of the air.

  Even so, the storm caught them unprepared, it hit so suddenly and with such force. Within minutes, the wind was screaming in their ears. Rains lashed at them, and greater and greater waves battered the hapless little boat. No natural storm could possibly have moved so swiftly. There was barely time to take down the sail.

  Struggling with the rudder to hold a steady course, Ruan tried to pierce the curtain of rain up ahead. But it was too dense, like a solid wall of falling water; even the far-seeing eyes of the Faey could not penetrate it. The boat reeled, now leaning so far to one side that it seemed she would capsize, then tipping the other way. With every wave that washed over her, with the weight of water that she had already taken on, he thought that she must surely sink. He believed it was only the will of the two wizards that had kept her afloat so long.

  Sindérian stood upright in the bow, shouting back at the wind; how she maintained her balance, he did not know, nor how she kept from being flung over the side. At one point, Ruan saw Faolein fighting the air and almost being blown away, before finally landing on his daughter’s shoulder. Poor Skerry had finally succumbed to seasickness; he was down on hands and knees retching helplessly into the bottom of the boat. Aell and Kivik were frantically bailing.

  Giving up his battle with the rudder, Ruan went to help them. Once or twice, he looked back toward Sindérian to see how she was faring. Her hair was streaming with water, the green cloak clung to her like seaweed; she looked more like a mermaid than anything belonging to the land. He thought he could hear her chanting the same lledrion over and over, and had just enough knowledge of the Old Tongue to guess what she was doing: not trying to command the elements but wooing them, not adding to the turmoil with a counterspell but trying to create a safe passage within the storm.

  The boat bucked and rolled; she fell into a trough between the waves and hit the water with stunning force. Between the hammer of the wind and the anvil of the sea, it seemed they would all be flattened. Somehow they stayed afloat. In between singing her lledrion to court the elements, Sindérian must have been working spells to keep the boat from breaking up.

  But by now she must be hoarse with shouting, exhausted with her efforts to bring them safely through; Ruan doubted she could keep it up much longer.

  18

  In Apharos on Phaôrax, the Empress surprised everyone by grieving nine days for the son she had never seemed to value while he was alive.

  It was not a desperate grief, and not, perhaps, a very deep one, but it was human, and therefore a revelation to those around her. Sometimes, it appeared, the goddess within gave way to the woman and the mother.

  The funeral ceremonies were elaborate. The entire court went into black, the women covering their faces with gauzy veils as though they had all been simultaneously widowed. Indeed, some of them had taken a tender interest in the gallant and handsome young Prince, a passion none had dared to express during his lifetime, considering he was more often than not out of his mother’s favor. While Ouriána herself spent most of her time brooding in an upper chamber, or else sitting in the throne room—dry-eyed, inscrutable, the tresses of her auburn hair coiling like serpents—a golden coffin (minus, of course, a body) was paraded through the streets, and rituals and additional sacrifices were performed each day inside the sprawling monstrosity that was the New Temple. At night torchlit processions trooped through the city, and the lights in the streets made patterns as complex and various as the Hidden Stars.

  Even before the Prince’s death, it had been a season of curious omens and bewildering portents. Unexpected manifestations appeared throughout the city and across the island kingdom: ghosts and phantom music and stranger things besides. The three acolytes who had gone into seclusion many weeks before were seen in public for the first time, their transformation complete. They emerged white-haired, tallow-faced, garbed in priestly scarlet. It had been twenty years since the Empress last had twelve Furiádhin to do her bidding, and the fact that they were restored to their original numbers was one even the most devout found somehow disconcerting.

  But on the tenth day, Ouriána began to recover, her very natural bereavement giving way to a vast irritation at what she was beginning to regard as a monstrous inconvenience.

  “Two sons dead. Guindeluc and Cuillioc gone, and only that fool Meriasec remaining,” she said to Noz, her Lord Chancellor. The grotesque little hunchback had known and served her in the days of her relatively obscure youth—when she was not even a king’s daughter, but only a royal niece waiting to be displaced in the succession by male cousins as yet unborn—and she occasionally confided to him things she would never have spoken in public. It was no part of her policy to acknowledge that sons of hers might have proved unsatisfactory—though acknowledged or not, everyone always knew.

  As for Meriasec, if Cuillioc had been but a pale copy of his brilliant, dazzling older brother, her youngest son was even less than that. A bully with a streak of cowardice, he was spineless and compliant in the presence of his mother. Meriasec’s servility, meant to please her, had just the opposite effect, and Cuillioc’s questioning mind, his struggles to reconcile his somewhat misguided principles with his obedience to her, had been, she realized belatedly, much more to her taste. His loyalty, so painfully genuine, meant something, and now that Cuillioc was gone, she discovered in him something irreplaceable.

  In her rage and confusion she began to pace through the palace. Such was the force of her personality that when she was angry, her presence filled a room until all those present felt crushed by it. Waiting women blanched at the sight of her; the young squires and pages, suddenly discovering they were needed elsewhere, went scurrying off to unnamed duties on the other side of the palace; and Prince Meriasec, with rare discretion, absented himself altogether.

  But on the eleventh day she put her three sons, living and dead, from her mind and turned her green-eyed basilisk’s gaze elsewhere.

  “How can it be, with five hundred of the city guard and half that many spies scouring the city for a single drunken juggler, the man nevertheless continues to elude them?” She turned her baleful regard on the six red-robed priests she had summoned to one of her private chambers.

  “It is possible that he is no longer in the city,” said six-fingered Vitré tentatively. He and his companions smelled strongly of smoke, and there was a subtler odor about them of religious fervor and superstition. Stains of a darker crimson marred the hems of their robes and their hanging sleeves, for though Ouriána had put aside her grief, the official period of mourning was to last a fortnight and the sacrifices continued. “Possible that he left before the search for him even began.”

  “If that is so,” she replied ominously, “the sorcerers and seers you have no doubt employed to look for him should have learned at least that much by now.”

  Vitré and his companions shifted uneasily. “There has been an—unforeseen difficulty,” he said. “It appears that Maelor, as he was known in the city, was not the name he was given at birth. Even he does not seem to have known his true one, and you will appreciate the difficulty of casting a seeking spell where the name is unknown.”

  Ouriána ground her teeth. “The task is beneath me, but I am beginning to think if I want the man found I will have to look for him myself. His possessions, if he had any, whatever hovel he lived in—these things were searched thoroughly for any clue to his whereabouts?”

  “Searched and scryed by your own seers. And there is this.” Vitré took a hesitant step forward, knelt at the Empress’s feet,
and offered her a worn and dirty rag of fabric. “A scrap of the blanket he slept in, in case you might wish…”

  Ouriána wrapped her long, smooth fingers around the threadbare bit of cloth. Her nostrils flared, as though taking some scent. “He was not much of a magician, if he knew no better than to leave something so personal behind.”

  Scioleann cleared his throat. “They say the old man had a habit of misplacing more than his name, and especially whatever knowledge of magic he once possessed. No one seems to know whether or not he was ever a true adept, although the spells he performed that day in the marketplace—” A slicing movement of her hand chopped the sentence short.

  “His spells that day would argue there is more to the man than anyone suspected, yes.” As her glance moved from one face to the next, each of the priests in turn had the uncomfortable sensation that there was not nearly enough air in the room. “And the disruption he caused has not yet dissipated. Quite the opposite. Noz tells me that his spies hear far too many whispers of former days and the Old Religion. These things will not be allowed to continue.”

  The Furiádhin prostrated themselves at her feet, signifying their obedience.

  In the palace at Apharos there was a chamber at the top of the highest and most isolated of the nine towers, where even Ouriána’s priests were never permitted to go. To enter, it was necessary to pass seven stout doors, locked and sealed and bespelled, which required seven different keys, and seven different names, and seven different charms to open.

  In that many-sided room full of strange devices, she kept the greatest treasure of her house and lineage—which in former days, before her apotheosis, had also been the source of their temporal power—the Talir en Nydra, the pearl-grey Dragonstones. They rested, each one in an intricately worked silver stand, directly in front of the twelve windows. On the tiled floor was a map of the known world with a great lurid stain at the center, the mark of Ouriána’s most ambitious spell-casting, when she broke the Thäerian fleet twenty years ago and crippled her own power for many seasons in doing so.