by Susan Forest
Her escape was a confession. They would know she’d overheard. Was dangerous.
But she’d barely stumbled across the city square, its bloody platform motionless in the starlight, into a narrow lane, when the world...left her.
She sat by a campfire in the snow in watery winter daylight. She was still dirty and hungry, but she wore a warm cloak. Horses were tethered in a rude corral and rough linen tents were scattered in a thick forest. Flakes fell from a dull morning sky. Colm—the same man she’d met in Spruce Falls, but thinner now, with dark rings circling his eyes—sat across from her, and a score of other men slept, talked in hushed tones, or silently polished swords. Curious. But she was grateful: none seemed to take more notice of her, than of one another.
She opened her eyes.
Now, she was warm and lying in a soft bed beneath a velvet canopy. Mama’s room. Mama sat by her, waiting. It was the night Mama had made her do magic.
“When are you?” Mama took her hand.
“A dozen weeks...I think.” Meg wondered at the magic, yet understood her momentary window. “From when we left Archwood.”
Mama caressed her cheek. “My poor daughter. Are Janatelle and Rennikala—”
“They’re well. Alive, anyway.” She sat up and took Mama’s two forearms in her hands. “Mama, tell me—”
“I will curse this valley.” Mama nodded firmly in the dark. “If Artem takes it, I will curse it. I’ve been preparing the spells—”
Not madness! Not obsession, by the Gods! “Mama! What do I need to know? What’s glim?”
“You can release the curse I set, Meg. Only—”
And she was gone.
Lying awake in a summer field. Alone beneath a cerulean sky on grasses redolent with clover and marigolds, humming with bees. She wondered...
She’d stood so close to Wenid. He was the key, whispering in the king’s ear. Should she have killed him? Reached out with her magic and pinched a blood vessel in his heart?
Gods, too dangerous.
But did her life matter, really? If she could save the magiels. Mama. Her sisters.
Could she kill?
The thought made her feel weak. No...no.
Yet...
Killing. Power. Might taking that life, that miserable life, be good?
Gods, no! She shook the thought back and rolled onto her stomach, heaving with nothing to disgorge.
CHAPTER 14
Meg woke like a drunkard in a doorway. Townsfolk bustled in the street. Voices nearby. Angry. Whispering...
“He can’t take the prayer stones.”
“He did. And our magiel.” They spoke of Artem.
And considered death to all magiels. She struggled to sit. Coldridge. She was back in Coldridge. Gods. Her stomach heaved. The plague that was High King Artem’s madness had taken over the world.
“There’re more of us than there is of him. I thought those hotheads were mad, but—”
“Bah, you can’t—”
What could Meg do? Nothing. She was one woman, one girl, and the high king had armies. Only the Gods could rectify this blight.
A clatter of footsteps and the knot of plotters scattered.
Soldiers?
Sunlight was poking fingers between buildings from the east. She had to hide. A hazy-skinned girl covered in bruises, one who’d overheard what she shouldn’t have. The king’s men—Larin’s and Artem’s—would be hunting.
“Janat.” Rennika’s whisper was clear against the tiny breaths and snores and mouse skitterings of the mill in the predawn gray.
Rennika hadn’t woken her. Janat had barely slept, and when she dozed, she only stood again in the crowd below the king’s platform, seeing the prayer stone smashed. Uncle Chirles. Her cousins. Sometimes Meg, or...herself. Rennika had whimpered in her arms most of the night. The child had been there too; she had seen what no child should ever see.
Rennika, still cuddled close, turned in her arms, speaking so those on mats or cloaks on the floor near them could not hear. Though, for that matter, many were likely also awake. “Where’s Meg?”
Poor thing. First Mama, her home, everything she knew. Then Nanna. Now...“I don’t know.” It was the last thing Janat wanted to tell her. To think, she and Meg squabbled, but she never thought Meg would be gone.
“I’m scared.” Rennika clung to her.
Abruptly, Janat could no longer lie on this floor. She had to move, to do something. “I’m going to look for her.” As quietly as she could, she rose and pushed on her boots.
“Me, too.” Soundlessly, Rennika readied herself, and a sliver of gladness touched Janat. They crept from the mill.
Janat gripped Rennika’s hand and they made their way toward Market Square. Though it was early, people were in the street, but there was a new flavor to their vigilance, to their voices. Energy. Anger.
They approached the square through a narrow lane, empty but for a confusion of footprints in the snow, where a stack of crates had fallen and rats were gnawing on stinking turnips. The passage opened onto a larger road.
King’s soldiers.
Janat halted, Rennika bumping her from behind. She turned, covering her face. “Go back.”
Rennika shuffled a few steps and they scurried through the snow toward the bend in the lane. By Ranuat, don’t let the soldiers see my wavering skin.
The crunch of the ax resounded in Janat’s ears, and she saw again Uncle Chirles’s head arc...bounce—the brilliant red spray—
“Meg!” Rennika’s fingers slipped from hers.
Janat looked down the lane. Rennika was running toward a figure swathed in rags.
The figure turned, and Rennika threw her arms about it. A cry of happiness, and the figure returned Rennika’s embrace.
Janat let out a breath, unaware her lungs had ceased to function. She ran.
Meg blinked, freed a hand from Rennika’s grip and pushed it across Janat’s cheek as though proving to herself that Janat was there, real. A massive welt purpled her right cheek and her lip was split.
“Meg!” Janat cried in an undertone. “What happened? We were—”
“Let’s go.” Meg held both of them close, but propelled them down the cobbled street in the direction of the millhouse. She limped, but her expression, the glimpse Janat had seen, was grim.
“We thought the soldiers got you,” Rennika said, peeking up from the safety of Meg’s arm.
“I’m...fine.” But she wasn’t fine. She was scared.
“Where were you?” Janat insisted.
Meg pushed her to avoid a man moving slowly with a cane. “I got into the castle.”
The castle—to get help from Uncle Chirles. But Uncle Chirles was dead.
“King Larin can’t help us,” Meg said bitterly, still wary, still pushing them toward the mill. “He’s saving his own skin by helping King Artem.”
They’d come all this way. All this way. Janat felt the blow in her stomach. King Larin had to help them. “That can’t be.”
But someone had beaten Meg. The memory of the king’s soldier in Spruce Falls returned.
They reached the mill and Meg opened the door. A small group of refugees huddled at the far end in animated discussion. Meg held back from entering. “King Larin would turn us over in an instant. He’s given his own suite to Artem. His guards questioned me until the middle of the night. I barely got out.”
Janat shook her head slowly. Last summer. King Larin had given them a banquet, invited the titled landowners and richest merchants and tradesmen, slaughtered lambs and geese and partridge...
Meg closed the door behind them and spoke very low in the dark. “That could’ve been us,” she whispered. “In front of the crowd yesterday afternoon. Uncle Chirles and us, with our heads cut off.”
Meg and her sisters fled Coldridge.
They stayed for some time in a crowded basement with the constant itch of lice, in a town called Grassy Bluff, somewhere in the indeterminate borderlands between Teshe and Midell. Me
g listened—hard—to gossip and rumors, waiting for the decree that all those with mercurial skin were to be executed. That it did not come brought her no relief.
Sometime after midwinter there was talk of a council of commoners meeting at Black Earth Creek, and Meg knew Sulwyn must have been there, but she heard nothing firm of its resolves or actions.
She avoided shrines, usually guarded by suspicious soldiers, though she prayed each morning before she rose and each night before sleep. At these times, images flickered through her mind of her ordeal in King Larin’s dungeon; of Artem’s words, and Wenid’s. And when Meg woke in the night, her thoughts were not pious. Her mind turned over fancies of creeping through the corridors of the great hall at Holderford and the vengeance she would wreak on King Artem.
More and more frequently, Meg saw a faint blurring at the edge of her vision, and Sieura Barcley, a refugee and magiel fleeing some unnamed nightmare with her near-to-grown son, tilted her head to one side when Meg confessed she saw them. “Ghosts,” the older magiel murmured.
Meg’s spread hands, holding a skein of wool, lost their rhythm.
“Spirits of those who died with no death token.” A frown of grief touched Sieura Barcley’s eyes. “They’re drawn to death. Hungering to see if the mortal’s shadow will rise to one of the Heavens, in that final moment.” She stared past Meg, her own fingers stopped on the wool she balled. “Or linger here, on this lowest sphere, stretching thinner and thinner, hopeless. In pain and agony. Forever.” Her hands resumed. “We can see them. Worldings can’t.”
Meg touched the woman’s wrist, wondering who she’d seen perish, deprived of their death token. Then the moment passed and the woman smiled, and they finished spooling the skein.
As Sulwyn predicted, though, Meg and her sisters were able to melt into the masses of the dispossessed. They gained occasional work in sculleries or mills or farms—enough to fend off starvation. With her fine, fair hair and trusting brown eyes, Rennika made an excellent beggar and sometime thief.
But one day as the winter sunlight was growing stronger, an arrow shot from a rooftop killed King Artem’s general as he led replacements for the siege at Archwood. The shantytown and attics and basements were combed and any whose aspect met with a soldier’s displeasure was executed. The three of them, along with half the refugees in Grassy Bluff, fled to the countryside.
The King’s Road was no more than a mud track sparsely dotted with frightened villages. In none of these did the wanderers find welcome, work, or tolerance. Artem and Wenid had seen to that.
Wenid pulled the shawl closer around his shoulders. The wind, constant on the exposed ridge below Archwood’s wall, was not strong by mountain standards, though it was touched with glacier ice. The hollow on the lee of the ridge overlooking a wide valley captured warm winter sunshine, and his seat among the lichen-covered stones was softened by blankets. For once, the king’s magiel did not chafe at sitting; indeed, he had slept much of the morning. Along with a dozen soldiers, he’d been cursed by some foul meat or tidbit in last night’s supper and spent the early candlemarks vomiting. A healer had been called up from King Artem’s larger encampment in the valley but not yet arrived.
Gravel crunched and Wenid turned to see Artem making his way down from the ridge. The king sat on a slab of stone. “I followed your advice,” he preempted. “Magiels are being arrested on small pretexts, and what magiels are not filling my prisons, have vanished. Hiding.”
Wenid’s relationship with the king had never been friendly, possibly because Wenid did not grovel. But Wenid liked to believe their understanding was stronger for it; that Artem knew he would get an honest opinion from his magiel. At the same time, though, Wenid knew he could be condemned for any advice he gave that missed its mark. Now appeared to be one of those times.
The king eyed him. “We barely arrive at the siege and you become ill. Are you like to die? One of my men who was cursed by the food is dead, and another’s on death’s door.”
Wenid returned his king’s sour look. “I will survive.”
“This time.”
Wenid squinted in the sunshine. He did not have the energy to parse out his king’s political machinations. “What concerns you, Your Majesty?”
“Only the power of my rule,” Artem said mildly. “The Ruby is no more than a bit of glass without a magiel to wield it.”
Wenid thrust his tongue into his cheek. “I am not about to die.”
“But you will someday.”
“Not today.”
“—and when you do, there is not a magiel of any of the Great Houses to pray with the Ruby.” The king snorted with derision. “They resent the destruction of their own prayer stones. And—surprise—their persecution.”
“Which you knew when you took me on,” Wenid shot back. “At the time, you felt the cost to be worth it.” Wenid let out a breath. By the One, he detested the fawning this obstinate king expected, the placating. But challenging Artem Delarcan directly only raised voices and tempers, and entrenched the king in his bullheaded position.
No, a softer tactic was best. “In any case, you would not want such a magiel.”
“No?” Artem’s brows shot up. “The Great Houses are not good enough?”
Wenid breathed to calm the rush of temper that bloomed in his chest. “And when you accompany a magiel to Heaven, Your Majesty,” he asked reasonably, “can you control his petition?”
The king’s nostrils flared.
“Even direct him to supplicate himself before the One God, rather than before one of the demons? Hmm?” Wenid asked. “I think not, or you would not have needed me.”
Artem leaned his elbows on his knees, breathing like a bull preparing to charge.
“I see your point, Sire.” Again, Wenid was more than reasonable. “I have no children. We need to plan my succession.”
The king nodded abruptly, as though he had reached a decision, and straightened. “It’s settled, then.” He stood. “Once you are well, you will return to Coldridge to view the magiels imprisoned there. Or Highglen, or Cataract Crag if you prefer, though Coldridge is the closest. Pick a likely one to train.” He turned to crunch back up to the camp.
“I think not.”
The king stopped, his air of satisfaction replaced by surprise. “No?”
“The same argument applies.” Wenid wondered where he had come by the energy to be articulate. “Some village magiel might protest he will carry out your wishes. But do you trust that he will erase a lifetime of beliefs in demon Gods once he is surrounded by the glory of Heaven?”
Doubt touched the king’s cheeks.
Wenid pressed on. “Do you trust that half-borns and bastard lines have the power to reach the highest sphere of Heaven where the One God resides?”
Artem thrust his jaw to one side. “Your policy of killing magiels—”
“Is sound,” Wenid said sharply.
“—will cripple us. Possibly sooner than later. And I see you offering no solution.”
“I will study on it.” The energy imparted by his anger had burned out, and immense fatigue rolled over Wenid like a wave.
“You are saying we need a full-blood magiel we can educate from birth,” Artem summarized.
Wenid closed his eyes and opened them again. “That...yes, that would work.”
“Then, you,” the king said, looming over him as he shifted his weight in preparation for leaving. “Will beget a child.”
CHAPTER 15
“Rennika!” Meg’s voice drifted on the breeze.
Rennika sprang to her feet and peered over the tall brush. The evening wind felt silken over the low hill on which she stood, easing her sunburned cheeks. Below, a stream wandered through a meadow dotted with a few thickets. Rennika didn’t know where they were. Some of their party said they were in Teshe, or Midell, or Gramarye. Some said they were in the vague borderlands somewhere between. Some towns they’d visited claimed to have no king at all, gone outlaw and paying no tribute. But
just now, the sun shone and spring had already come to these lower, softer lands. The view the Many Gods had laid out before her would’ve been perfect if it weren’t for the lingering stink of blood and the bodies lying in scattered heaps among its grasses.
“Is Janat with you?” Meg called as she marched up the hill from the collection of makeshift tents beside the brook, well upwind of the battlefield.
In their camp, a haunch, marinated and roasted all day in a pit, was being unearthed, and the aroma of the tender meat made Rennika instantly hungry. “Yes! We’re with Gweddien!”
Meg shaded her eyes against the westering sun. “Tell them your lesson’s done for today. We’re about to eat.” She turned and sauntered back to the gathering band.
Rennika crouched by the young magiel and touched the velvety plant in his hand. Like her and her sisters, Gweddien was born of one of the Great Houses and had lost his home. Unlike them, Gramarye had given up the Chrysocolla with little fight, though his father had died in prison. Gweddien and his mother had run from the executioner’s ax. He knew King Artem and his children, as Rennika and her sisters had, but here, in this foreign land, and within these camps, they never talked of those days.
“We heard,” Janat said. “What else can feverfew do?” she asked the gangly boy.
Gweddien stripped the leaves from the stalk. “Well, it eases pain in old folks’ knees and hips. And you can put it on insect bites. It works especially well for sufferers whose Tarot signifier is in the House of Cups.” He picked up the sack of herbs he’d collected and made his way down the hill toward the encampment, Janat following.
Janat sniffed the leaf she carried. “Smells bitter.”
Rennika trotted behind her.
“It’s a good plant, though,” the young man advised. “When we get to a big enough town, I’m going to make feverfew potions and sell them for money. Spells by worldlings never work.”