The little princess looked at Cazia’s face in horror. Cazia touched her eyes, nose, and mouth. There was no disfigurement there, no weeping sores or blood, only dirt and sweat.
“Kinz!” Ivy called behind her, then crawled forward to touch Cazia’s collar.
The servant squeezed beside Ivy in the tunnel. “Inzu’s Grace! Cazia, what have you done to yourself?”
“Am I bleeding?” Cazia was surprised to hear her own voice, which sounded as though she’d been crying for hours. But her grief and misery had barely begun to swell up inside her. She couldn’t understand why they were staring at her with such alarmed expressions. The urge to cast another spell to gentle her emotions was powerful, but she resisted.
Finally, it became too much for her. She began to sob. “My brother,” she said, the words coming out in a squeak. “I loved my brother so much, and I killed him.”
Ivy’s embrace was physically painful, but Cazia didn’t shake her off. She just sobbed, and wept, and her raw grief washed over her in terrible waves.
But at the same time, she felt removed from herself, analyzing things the way she had when Mahz flashed her pointed teeth. Cazia had always been one to analyze things. She couldn’t lose herself in anything, it seemed. Not even this.
Scholars should never show tears.
The tears stopped, then the embrace stopped. Cazia put on a brave expression, her skin still raw and tingling where Ivy had squeezed her. They ate, emptied their canteens, and let Cazia fill them again. When she cast the Fifth Gift to refill the canteens for later, her misery did not ease much at all, not like it had when she cast the Eleventh Gift.
She returned to her digging, still unclear why Ivy and Kinz had been so upset when they saw her face. It didn’t seem important.
She continued casting the Eleventh Gift through the rest of the day, stopping only when the light faded through the thin break into the outside world. Cazia created another chamber for them to sleep in, then endured their worried looks while they ate.
Great Way, but she felt miserable, and only the Gifts could ease her pain. Exhausted, she fell asleep, and her nightmares were just as awful as the previous night’s.
She woke in a terror several times. At dawn, she was parched and exhausted. Fine. A few bad dreams could make her life unpleasant after all. She drained both canteens and tried to force herself to sleep again but couldn’t.
When daylight came, they ate their morning meal in uncomfortable silence. The sound of Ivy and Kinz’s chewing and breathing irritated Cazia to the point that she wanted to scream.
“Cazia,” the princess said, speaking as though she was addressing an irrational person, “we must turn back.”
“Go right ahead.” She sounded stronger than she felt.
“No, you must turn back! You can not do to yourself again what you did yesterday.”
Cazia sighed. “No, it’s all right.” It’s not all right. “I was just careless. I cast the same spell too many times in a row, and that made my emotions a little difficult to control. Today, I’ll vary things a little and I’ll be fine.”
Both girls looked at her skeptically, but Kinz had a chillier, more analytical edge. “Have you never done something like this before?”
“I’m still in training,” Cazia admitted. “I’m quite capable, but I don’t know every spell yet.” Adding the word yet seemed like fruitless hope, but she said it anyway. There was probably no one left in the world who would teach her magic.
Ivy shook her head. “We are still worried about you.”
They had no right to worry about her. “What did you see last night? Why were you so upset when you saw me?”
Kinz answered as though it was a subject she had discussed with Ivy in depth while Cazia slept. “You are the girl who betrays your every thought by your expression. Do you recognize the truth of this? Your face makes lively, and everyone can know your mind in every grimace or roll of your eyes--even when you make to watch us while pretending you do not.”
Cazia didn’t know how to respond, so she drained the canteen instead.
“But,” Kinz continued, “last night your face was utterly slack and devoid of life. You looked like the moving corpse.”
Like Doctor Whitestalk.
“My cousin had a man who was kicked in the head during a fight,” Ivy said. “The skull broke and he very nearly died, but after he recovered, he never really returned. The memory, the sense of humor, everything that made him who he was had all been destroyed. Cazia, last night your expression looked just like that. I thought your magic had destroyed your brain.”
“Well, it didn’t.”
“But you looked terrible,” Kinz insisted. “How much farther do you make to take us? All the way over the mountains? I like you and do not think you are Cursed. Yet. But if you do not stop, you may make yourself so!”
Cazia looked down at her hands. They were trembling slightly. What did Kinz know? “I expected this to be hard,” Cazia lied. Could they really tell what she was thinking? She looked down at her lap and kept her face still. “But I forgot that I’m supposed to vary the spells. I was just too eager. I’ll go slower today. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“I will worry anyway,” the princess said.
“We have heard you,” Kinz said as though conceding the point, “but do not forget that you have made to block the tunnel behind us.”
Cazia took a deep breath so she would not laugh. She’d forgotten about that.
“This is why you have not conquered us all, yes?” Kinz asked. “Your magic is powerful, but the toll it would take if you used it all the time would destroy you. This is why you can not make every crop the feast, or collapse the mountain, or build the wall to block the Sweeps.” She fell silent for a moment. “We have seen your Cursed Ones at work.”
Cazia wasn’t sure she would like where this conversation was going. “Have you?”
“We spy on you,” Ivy said blandly. “You spy on us. It is how things are.”
Kinz continued. “We see your researches. We see the power of your spells, but it has been much debated among the clans and Indregai emissaries why you have not used them more, and why your people make weaker versions of the spells in inanimate objects. My own father was convinced that you were bound by the will of Inzu.”
“Please,” Cazia blurted out. “Until I met you, I never even heard of Inzu.”
Kinz’s lips pressed close together for a moment, then she said, “Then I wish for you the blessing of the one true god.”
“Oh, good,” Ivy interrupted. “A religious discussion. These always turn out so well in my father’s councils.”
Kinz looked at a spot on the ceiling. “I was just making the innocent observation.”
“Well, then,” Cazia said. “Here’s another: I have a death sentence on me because I am here with both of you.” Should this have frightened her? It didn’t. “Do you understand? Scholars never travel without bodyguards, and those guards are trained to slay scholars before they fall into foreign hands. They protect imperial secrets above all else, and scholars as long as it seems feasible. What you have already learned--which is not nearly enough to cast a spell of your own--would have me dragged to the Scholars’ Tower, whipped, and then hung. Or stoned to death. I’m told they sometimes kill women by stoning.”
Ivy was very still and her eyes were very wide. “We know about this.”
“I’m throwing my whole life away to do this,” Cazia said, and as the words came out of her mouth, they gave power to the half-formed thoughts that had haunted her for days. Even if she wanted to turn back, even if there was someplace to turn back to, she couldn’t.
Colchua had already died, and Pagesh, too. If there was something she could do to fight the Enemy that had claimed them, she would risk everything. How could she do anything less?
How could she do less than hollow herself out?
“Nonsense,” Ivy said. “I am engaged to the Peradaini king! He will be restored; I
believe this. And even if he were not a fair man--and you know better than I do that he is--as the queen, I would forbid any punishment against you.”
Cazia spoke gently. “Little sister, even if none of this had happened and your wedding had gone as planned, I don’t think you would have had the power to save my life. You would have been another hostage.”
For once, Ivy did not know what to say. Kinz sighed, irritated. “This is how she sees the world. We are all made hostages to be taken.”
“No,” Ivy said. “She is the hostage. She has been one the entire life.” Ivy leaned forward and touched Cazia’s hand. It took all of Cazia’s willpower to avoid snatching it away. “Big sister,” the princess said, “I will follow you anywhere.”
It took real force of will, but Cazia smiled at her. “Let’s get ready.”
Cazia turned toward the wall. The rock-breaking spell was ready in her mind, almost as if it had been waiting for her. She cast.
A large section of the wall crumbled, falling toward her in a mini-avalanche. All three of them began to cough from the dust, and Cazia realized she’d put too much power into the spell. As annoying as it was to crawl over the larger stones in her long hiking skirts, dust might choke them to death.
She began the spell again, vaguely aware that it might be polite to apologize. This time she widened the opening into the outside world. The light and fresh air was welcome and there were no eagles visible in the dawn light. She stuck her head through the gap but couldn’t see how much farther she had to go. The daylight felt raw against her face, but she knew the spell would ease her discomfort.
She cast ten more times before switching to the water spell. Kinz gave her the canteen to fill, then she drank from it. She also took more time between spells, slowly sweeping the tumbling rocks around and behind her, shoving them against one side of the tunnel. Ten more spells and she created another lightstone. Ten more and she fired a broken rock out over the Sweeps like a dart.
It helped. Raw grief still surged through her between spells, but the deadening effects of casting them became fainter.
So she kept going, trying to keep careful watch over her mental state the way a shepherd watched her flock. Minute by minute, spell by spell, she couldn’t detect any change in herself, but as the long day wore on, she had to admit that each spell left her feeling more dead inside. Worse, the ever-growing sense of grief and longing became so strong, it nearly overwhelmed her between spells. Casting slowly became a form of torture.
When the fading daylight shone horizontally through the gap in the wall, she realized that she was crying again. Ivy called her name and squeezed through the narrow tunnel to crawl beside her. She rubbed Cazia’s cheeks with her gritty hands as though trying to revive them, then embraced her tightly.
Cazia desperately needed the girl’s touch and found it unbearable at the same time. It was confining, comforting, it made her skin crawl, it made her want to scream. Worse, there was a tiny dead part of her that pondered how easy it would have been to kill them both. She could have just rolled over without breaking the embrace, carrying both of them through the narrow gap in the wall.
She wouldn’t do it. Of course she wouldn’t. But the thought had invaded her mind like an expeditionary force, and a tiny part of her examined the choice between killing them both or not with the same urgency that she might decide which boot to pull on first.
“Let me make a safe place to stop.” Cazia cast her spell a few more times, creating another hollowed-out flat enclosure large enough for them to sit upright and stretch out. At the far end, she made sure to break through the wall slightly...for ventilation.
Ivy set five lightstones around the chamber. Kinz pushed stones down the slope. Cazia sat quietly against the hard, sloping wall, watching them and trying to pretend she was invisible.
When the space had been cleared and the packs opened, Kinz asked Cazia about her brother. So Cazia told them about Colchua: how he’d loved to climb--until Lar’s brother had died in a fall, and he’d never climbed again--how he’d joked with them all, how competitive he was in the gym and cooperative in his lessons. How he sang. People looked up to him, but he’d always deferred to Lar. Not just because Lar was an Italga and a prince of the empire, but because Col loved him and believed in him.
Then she told them the story of the Festival in Peradain. She told them how The Blessing had appeared, suddenly overwhelming everyone. How she and her friends had fled. How Lar had insisted on rescuing his betrothed, and Cazia had supported him for fear that Vilavivianna’s death would lead to war with the Alliance.
When she got to the part where Col was bitten on the rooftop, Ivy began to cry.
Cazia herself did not. She was talking about the most painful moments of her life, but they had no effect on the longing, loneliness, and sorrow swelling within her. It was almost as though those emotions belonged to someone else and had never been about her own pain at all.
She told them about the grunt in the courtyard but left out the part where the last king of Peradain had been bitten, too. It almost seemed silly to keep that secret here, especially since Ivy already knew it, but she did.
Then she told them about killing the grunt without realizing who he was. And how proud she’d felt. Thankfully, they didn’t insult her intelligence by insisting she couldn’t have known and it wasn’t her fault. Of course she didn’t know, and of course that didn’t make things better.
“And now the raptors are here, those gigantic eagles.” Cazia tried to sound as if nothing mattered more than this. “We have to find out if they’re connected. There’s no one else.”
They did not speak for a little while. Finally, Kinz asked permission to sing a song, then sang it. Cazia touched her translation stone and listened to enough to realize she was singing about the wind. She passed the stone to Ivy, then lay back and let the unintelligible words wash over her.
It wasn’t a terrible song but it was very simple. A child’s song. Ivy went next and her song was not much better. Still, it suited her because it was a little girl’s song.
After the two of them had taken turns a few times, Cazia felt a sudden urge to sing “River Overrunning,” Old Stoneface’s song. She had never sung it in front of him, of course, but she’d learned it years before.
So she sang it, her voice a little raw and uncertain, but her grief gave her power, and the dead feeling the spells had created gave her the detachment to control the melody. Because it was about watching helplessly while the people you loved were killed, she had to pause partway through to gather herself. When she finished, she saw Kinz and Ivy staring at her with wide, astonished eyes.
Ivy had started crying again. In her astonishment, Kinz said, “How could the people capable of such brutality also create such beautiful art?”
Our spear points command your bodies. Our songs command your hearts. But Cazia couldn’t bring herself to say that. She couldn’t even make herself say Fire take you, not after that song. Instead, she lay back and closed her eyes. It was a long time before she fell asleep, and her dreams were full of flames, and gods, and falls from terrible heights.
She woke in darkness. The other girls snored gently nearby and she could hear the wind whistling through the ventilation hole she’d made, but the magic in the lightstones had faded. When Lar had been her age, he could make lightstones that lasted a moon’s cycle, but she’d never gotten the hang of it.
The urge to do more magic was powerful. She felt more tired than ever and utterly detached from her own life. Worse, she knew she would break down crying again if she just sat there doing nothing. At least if she started digging again, the magic would dull the pain.
Which would make her another kind of hostage...not that she had a choice.
She peered through the ventilation hole at the dark eastern sky. There was no way to tell when dawn would come. Cazia crossed her arms and scowled down at the starlit lands below. The waving grasses made it look like a stormy ocean dotted with tiny fo
rests.
And they were high, but she still could not tell how much farther there was to go. She was hungry, too, but did nothing about it. She was in control of herself, and it felt good.
She stretched out on the floor again and tried to sleep; it was no use. She remembered the moment Pagesh had shoved Jagia into her arms, and the sight of her brother dangling from the rope at the bottom of the cart, and the way Queen Amlian had died. It should have made her break down weeping, but it didn’t.
She ate, then decided to be satisfied with her current level of self-denial. She started casting her spell again.
Ivy and Kinz woke while she was pushing the rubble through the gap in the wall. They didn’t complain, just sighed, ate a little bit themselves, and began to pack up their things.
Cazia went slowly, trying to find a balance between repeated castings of a single spell, rest time between spells, and variety. Soon, she switched to casting a water spell as every eighth spell, then every seventh, then she created a lightstone, a burst of fire and a fresh spray of water every fifth. Still, as she swept the stones through the gap in the cliff, she could not hold back tears of longing.
They were not her tears, she finally understood. They were the tears of this new thing--this force--that filled her now. The magic she had been casting was living inside her head, making everything she touched feel like a slap, every sound seem like a shout. But because it didn’t care, she didn’t care, either. Her own suffering meant nothing. All that mattered was that she continue.
As she cast the Eleventh Gift over and over, she felt herself becoming the impossibly high precipice she’d fallen from in her dreams.
Then, suddenly, she cast her spell again and, after the rocks had fallen around her, found herself staring up at the sky.
“Ah!” She scrambled out of the hole. The thin, chilly wind was rough against her skin. The stars were still bright in the western sky, but the eastern horizon glowed orange and red. She stepped away from the hole to give Ivy room to come through, and that brought her close to the edge of the cliff.
The Way Into Chaos Page 33