The Seer - eARC

by Sonia Lyris

  The surround had grown thick enough that the details of the room—table, books, teacup—were dim, as if she she were wrapped in a heavy fog. She tried to cut through it with her focus. Nothing changed.

  What are you missing?

  She had assumed it was an attack. A touch to the gauze. It rippled around her fingers like fog over a mountaintop. She pushed a hand through and it parted. A step through and a look back at a slowly spinning funnel.

  Not an attack after all.

  The floor beneath her seemed to move without moving. He was sundering her orientation to ground, she realized, to stone and dirt. She lurched abruptly.

  All her lines. In a blink he had cut every one.

  She groped blindly to the tile floor underfoot. Tile—just stone, writ small, baked hard. Weaker, but it remembered the ground from which it had been drawn. Small tethers, then; her toes and fingertips quested into the floor.

  As he sipped at his teacup, she held tight to the tethers she’d found, and yanked on them all at once as if flying a kite, hoping to catch his attention while she cast around the room for something else to ground onto.

  There was a sharp shift as every one of these new tethers was severed.

  She let them go, instead latching onto the ceramic cup in his hand. It was common among mages to habitually and etherically mark and own those items they touched; the cup itself could be connected to her aetur’s power lines, in which case she could perhaps find some ground through it, through him, while searching for more.

  But as she reached fingers of thought for the ceramic in his hand he moved it suddenly, tossing the contents of the cup into the air. The liquid seemed to hang there a moment, then puffed suddenly out into a glistening fog, a thousand tiny mirrors all angled to catch the faint sunlight coming through the windows of the room, a hot flash of white that momentarily blinded her.

  She shut her eyes, the afterimage still bright against her lids, still casting about for something in reach that remembered the earth. But he was there, everywhere, making slick each thing so that her etheric fingers could not find purchase. She grasped again and again, slipping. Slipping.

  A loud knock at the door.

  “Enter,” said Keyretura.

  As he spoke he dropped every sluice, flash, and diversion. Maris found tile beneath her; copper and silver in the lamp; rings at the posts of the bed, pewter plates and a steel knife; a pitcher of glass; ceramic pipes between the walls; iron grating in the fireplace, and the stone hearth. In a moment she had touched and secured tethers to a hundred things, trickling down her ground through the walls to the earth beneath the palace.

  A sense of solidity filled her.

  Srel stepped into the room, ducking his head to Keyretura and Maris in that not-quite-bow people gave mages.

  “Forgive me, High Ones, I did not realize—”

  “What is it?” Keyretura asked.

  “The evening meal is ready for you. Shall I bring it or delay it, ser?”

  “Bring. With enough for my guest.”

  “I am not your guest,” Maris told him hotly, “and I will not eat with you.”

  “Then eat without me. Or go hungry.”

  She could feel him then, a touch within, so fast he was there and gone before she could respond or deflect, leaving a painful pressure in her stomach, making her keenly aware that she was, indeed, hungry.

  Another violation. Angrily she pushed out the door past Srel, and stopped in the hallway, breathing hard, too upset to steady anything, not heartbeat, not blood, not the sweat trickling down her back.

  After a moment, Srel emerged. He shut the door behind him and watched her a moment.

  “Maris,” he said gently. “Allow me to bring you food and wine. In the library, perhaps?”

  She managed a nod.

  In the library enough time passed for her to eat some of what Srel had brought her, and to find herself reading a small book in which she was quickly lost.

  It was a journal from some sixty years back, by a Perripin fiddler who had decided to traverse the then-boundaries of the empire, reporting on the places he visited and the people he met. She nibbled at what Srel had brought her, drank hot wine, and read. Lost in the graceful and alluring verse she almost forgot about Keyretura.

  Almost.

  He touched on the cord connecting them, and Maris was yanked out of the book. She put it away, feeling him come closer to the library with each step.

  “Well?” he asked, stepping inside. “What is your grievance, Maris?”

  She shook her head mutely.

  “You have come all this way to do what, then? Show me how well your new robes fit you? To discover that you are craven? Speak.”

  Even knowing he said this to provoke her did not stop it from working.

  “My parents,” she said bitterly.

  “Ah, that. If they had survived, Marisel, you would have abandoned the study to care for them, become another Broken, making their sacrifice for your contract worthless.”

  “My contract was not worth their lives.”

  “Clearly they disagreed.”

  “You are responsible for their deaths.”

  “To refrain from healing is not the same as killing. I did not save them. Nor did you.”

  “I didn’t have the skill to save them, and you knew that!”

  “But you do now. Because of them.”

  She felt fury warm her from head to toe. “You are a horror,” she told him. “A corruption.”

  “Insults,” he said, with a shrug. “Not even inventive ones. You disappoint me.”

  “Don’t I always? My grief to you, a hundred times, and a hundred times beyond that.”

  He made a warding gesture, an ancient Iliban sign. A superstition. An insult. The sides of his mouth curled in derision. “Is that your best?”

  The door to the library opened. Srel stood there, eyes wide, expression stark.

  “Forgive me, High Ones. The queen—there has been an attack.”

  Only now did Maris became aware of urgent shouts becoming louder. Keyretura’s gaze was suddenly distant.

  “So there has.” He looked at Maris. “I will be busy for a time, but you will wait for me.”

  “I do not stay or go at your pleasure.”

  “Again, the evidence seems to indicate otherwise.”

  He followed Srel out the door and was gone.

  When at last the fever pitch of agitation caused by the attempt on the queen’s life eased, Maris was in the bath.

  It could, she reasoned, be her last one.

  And Keyretura? He would find her when he was ready. It had always been thus: asleep or awake, fed or hungry, naked or clothed, her aetur would come. Lecture. Press. Demand. Test.

  Every day for twenty long years.

  A bell passed. Then another. With the water cooling she was trying to decide between ending the luxurious immersion or ringing for more boiling water. The door opened and Keyretura stepped in.

  “The queen?” she asked him.

  “The matter is settled.” He studied her a long moment. Then, his voice low, he said: “So be it, Marisel: if you prefer to depart rather than continue this engagement, I will allow it. But be gone before moonrise.”

  She stood from the tub, dripping.

  What was this? A trick? Or was he truly dismissing her?

  “Dirina and Pas,” she said. “Tell me where they are.”

  He walked to the door, paused, his back to her.

  “No.”

  He left.

  * * *

  She dressed hurriedly, eager to be gone before he changed his mind. She walked the now-darkened halls, navigating her way as much by memory as sight. At a window she paused to look at the night sky.

  Be gone before moonrise.

  Simple enough instructions. She would leave her belongings and the horse; it could all be replaced. She would walk. Be gone from this city and from Keyretura.

  At each quick step down quiet palace stairways
, she listened for him, expecting the touch that meant he had changed his mind. She paused at the palace doors, watched by wary guards who, it was clear, would do nothing to get in her way.

  She took the palace grounds one quick step after another. At the gates, cloaked in shadow, she slipped by unnoticed.

  Nothing stopped her feet on the well-maintained cobbles of the great square. No taste of him. The line between them was quiet.

  Perhaps she was free.

  At the huge center fountain, the basin of carved marble, water played out in arcs in all directions. While down-city, the poor struggled to find water they could drink, here in the realm of wealth, water flowed freely all night long. For a time she stood there, watching the streams cascade into the pool below.

  She turned in place to gaze over the rooflines of the Great Houses, darkly silhouetted against the starry sky. There, she thought, estimating where the moon would rise.

  What was she doing? What was wrong with her?

  Be gone before moonrise.

  She would not allow him to order her around, she decided. Never again. He could command her to go, but she did not have to—

  Childish foolishness, this was. Let him command. Go.

  Yet she stayed another moment and then another, watching the roofline where she expected the moon to rise.

  Dirina. Pas. She could not simply abandon them to him.

  But even that was not the real reason she stayed.

  At last, a point of glowing white slid up and over the huge mansion’s roofline, exactly where she had anticipated. In moments it grew into a glowing, curved white blade, the rising halfmoon coming free of its cover.

  She felt him then, standing at the edge of the square, and she took a step away from the fountain, away from the palace, away from him, fear driving her fast footfalls. Nothing, etheric or otherwise, barred her way. No leash snapped tight from her gut. Maybe she could still leave.

  He had not moved. He had not spoken.

  But instead of leaving, she stopped at the edge of the square. She realized how weary she was of her own terror. The connection between them, the one that she had been trying to escape these many years, was not merely an etheric one.

  Turning, she walked toward him, stopping a few paces away. “Aetur, let the Iliban go. They have done nothing to offend you. Please don’t make them pay for my mistakes.”

  “They pay for the seer’s mistakes, not yours, and their lives are of no consequence to me.”

  “Their lives matter to me. Tell what I must do to save them.”

  “Show me what you have learned in the years since you were created.”

  Pinpoints of light came from distant shadowy corners, like flashes at the edge of vision. Why he did this, she did not know, but from her earliest memories, this was one of the signs that a hard testing was to come, leaving her sobbing, bleeding. Aching in body, spirit, mind.

  Pain. So much pain.

  No, that was the past.

  She whirled in place, trailing her outstretched fingers, pointing downward, dropping tens and then hundreds of lines of flow into the stone-covered square, down into the dirt and farther into the basalt below. He would cut these ties in moments, so she must quickly find another plan. What?

  Suddenly, a hold on her right wrist. A pull, a yank, as if a mountain lion had clamped onto her forearm, locked down, crushing bones, rending and tearing her flesh. She cried out in pain, making a quick set of changes inside her body to temporarily dampen the agony, a practice she knew from her work with mothers birthing their young. She sank her grounding lines into the earth through the mangled arm as well as the good one; life would carry magic no matter how broken it was, until the very moment when it began to rot.

  His next attack would come soon. What to do? What did she know that he did not?

  As she finished her turn, drawing power from the earth, she sent it back down through the lines she had made, flinging the ends farther and farther from herself so that they trailed out to cross him at his feet, ankles, legs, thinking to disrupt his intention, even a little bit, to give herself time to find the next step to surviving this.

  For a moment she wondered at his intention. Surely, if he had wanted her dead, she would be dead?

  He might be toying with her. There was still time to die.

  As the lines crossed his body, he slowed, but only a little, stepped over them, as if treading knee-high ocean swells.

  A blink and then another. A line of not-quite light came from him, a strange mix of true light and the various etherics surrounding them both. It wrapped around her in dull silver, as if the moon’s light had been bled to make spider-silk and she were being cocooned. In moments she felt it tighten, closing off the night’s bands of grays.

  Almost a pleasant sensation, like her warm bath. She was reminded of Gallelon’s snug embrace. Babies were swaddled thus in soft blankets, to reassure, to comfort. Deep inside her was that memory, and some part of her was calmed.

  Trickery, to take down her guard. She tried to shake away her body’s sense of rightness in this cocoon, but it held tight. Then it was too tight, gone from warm embrace to suffocating wrap.

  In a flash, her air was gone. She struggled to poke holes in the surrounding cocoon so that she could breathe.

  But no, she realized, as a new motion began, that had not been the attack, only the base for it. Now she felt his touch on her head, neck, and shoulders, delicately worming its way inside her body as she sought her grounding tethers, but they were gone, cut away in this prison of light, no stone or tile in reach. Not so much as a speck of dirt.

  It was oddly simple to still her emotions. She no longer needed to fear his coming for her, because he was here. No cause to fear death, either; if he wanted her dead, she would be dead. Her terror of him, such a constant companion these many years, was gone.

  But his attack was not. A three-pronged assault came at her, all at once: the blood to her brain slowed, a rapid patter at her heart, and a near-whine inside her head that signaled a coming shock.

  Killing blows, each one, any one of which she might be able to deflect or undo. But all three together? It was beyond her.

  Had been beyond her, she told herself, in the days when he held her contract.

  All right, then: one at a time. She drew the growing spark into the bone of her head, spreading it across the hardest part of her. It would cost her a wretched headache later, but that was far preferable. At the tattoo-touch so deep inside her chest, her heart began to tighten and clench. She held the cramp in abeyance, struggling to keep both sides of the organ quiet one moment more, to help them remember their harmony together. When she released them, they beat in rhythm.

  Then the last attack, the simplest of the three. A rush of sound in her ears like a crashing waterfall. She struggled to stay conscious, head swimming as she dropped to one knee and then the other, hands flat on the ground, her vision darkening. In memory or imagination he laughed at her.

  To succumb to this simplest of the three was so very disappointing.

  And that was her error, she realized now, her thoughts slowing even further: she had been defending. Thinking him invulnerable, she had not attacked him, not at all.

  A foolish strategy. She could see that now.

  With the last of her focus she hurled at him a pinpoint of her will, like the finest of needles, piercing through the cocoon around her, sinking into his skin at the navel to find the delicate nerve that began there and wandered the body, the one that she knew so very well from her work with mothers and infants.

  There it was. All it needed was a good solid push, and—

  As she collapsed to the ground, she heard a sharp exhalation of surprise and pain from Keyretura. In the moment before she lost consciousness, she realized that she had never heard such a sound from him before.

  Her last thought was to wonder if it had anything to do with what she had done.

  Maris came awake, eagerly gulping air. Around her, the night wa
s dark and quiet.

  The cocoon of light was gone. The square was quiet. Maris leveraged herself up with her good arm, dizzy but alive, head and wrist pounding with pain. She looked around for Keyretura.

  He lay some distance away, one hand on his head, the other on his chest, breathing hard. Healing himself.

  Healing himself?

  Had she really gotten through his defenses and stopped his assault? She sat up, for a long moment staring at him in wonder.

  She had attacked her aetur. She might even have hurt him. An impossibility, she would have thought.

  Minutes went by as she watched him. He moved his hands to his stomach, then back up to his chest, neck, and head. She knew what he was doing: he was repairing the damage she’d done to that critical nerve. At last he put his hands down and looked over at her. To her surprise, he smiled.

  Another game?

  “I abhor you,” she told him.

  He chuckled. “At last, the unarmored truth.”

  With a hand to the ground he slowly pressed himself to stand, moving like an old man, and shuffled toward the fountain. There he took a deep breath and let it out slowly, gazing at the falling water. He gestured at the streams, fingers opening and curling as his hands turned.

  The sound of water ceased. A fog hung in the air around the large central marble pillar of sculpted flowers. Moonlight caught and spread among the fog, each tiny droplet of water becoming a turning, perfect prism. A mist of small diamonds, converting moonlight into millions of brilliant rainbow flashes.

  Her breath caught at this display. It was nothing like what he had done with the tea mid-air earlier; this was not blinding. It was magnificent.

  In Keyretura’s fine mansion where she had grown up, water and glass had taken sunlight across the day to make changing and exquisite paintings of light. She had thought herself inured to such marvels now, but he had never shown her anything so splendid as this. She had not realized he was capable of it.

  It put her in mind of Samnt and his hunger to see magic. She felt an unfamiliar craving to do this thing her aetur had done, to make something so beautiful.