Master of Crows

by Grace Draven

  That night in the inn, while Gurn slept near the door of their room and Martise slumbered on her pallet nearby, Silhara prepared one of his hand pipes and took a calming smoke by the window. Below him, Eastern Prime slowly darkened, lamps winking out as pubs closed and households went to bed. Beyond the town, the bay sang its tidal lullaby, rocking ships to sleep.

  He’d congratulated himself on the deal he’d struck with Fors. For all his blustering, the man knew the quality of Silhara’s product and the demand for it. Even with the generous payment he’d given the mage, he’d still make a hefty profit off sales to the city’s population.

  The heavy weight of the coin purse tied at his waist reassured him. He’d done well, and though the purse would be significantly lighter once he paid the vendors Gurn had bartered with, they were set for another season. His reputation had its uses, his Gift its reward, but neither made food appear on the table. Only hard labor, stealing or the blessing of aristo birthright did that. Silhara was intimately acquainted with the first two and scornful of the third.

  A rustle of blankets made him look to where Martise slept. She sat up, saw him at the window and rose. A stray beam of moonlight revealed the shadow of slender thighs and the curve of a breast beneath her leine before she wrapped her long shawl around her and padded to him. Her bare feet shone ivory in the dark. He thought them pretty. She smelled good too—of sleep and warm female.

  He pointed to Corruption’s star, now hovering over the bay. His voice was soft. “The Kurman no longer guide their flocks to the Brecken Falls. Corruption has left its mark. The rivers are salted, and the falls themselves fouled. Crops are dying; trees are dying, and livestock as well. The towns are emptying of people seeking food and refuge in the greater cities.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Corruption hopes to rule the world again. What is there to rule if all are dead and the lands laid waste?

  “It’s called siege, apprentice. Starve your enemies, bring them so low that the promise of the simplest necessity will seem a gift from the gods. With enough patience you can break a man to the point he will do anything you command.” He puffed on his pipe. “Effective if unoriginal.”

  “Do you think Conclave will find a way to stop the god?”

  “I doubt it. The priesthood’s greatest weakness is its vanity. They’ll scour their libraries looking for the one spell that will kill the god, but they can’t use what their forbears used. Corruption has had more than a thousand years to consider how he’ll defeat his adversaries if they try again. The priests won’t look beyond their own walls for a solution. They are Conclave, keepers of all the knowledge and arcane worth having.” His smile was mocking. “At least those things they consider important.”

  She rubbed the end of her braid with her fingers. Silhara imagined what all that red-hued hair would look like flowing free over her shoulders and down her back. “Will you tell them what you found at Iwehvenn?”

  “Yes, but will they listen? I am no admirer of the priests, nor they of me. To listen, you have to trust, or at least respect.”

  He puffed on the pipe, waiting for the real reason she’d joined him at the window.

  Her eyes, their copper color darkened to obsidian in the moon’s cold light, reflected gratitude and the remnants of shame. “Today, at the market…”

  Silhara held up a hand, and she fell silent. “When I was nine, my mother serviced a wealthy merchant every week.” His lip curled into a sneer. “He’d deign to descend into the wharf filth and pay for an hour of her time, sometimes a full night. She always sent me away when he came to our room.” He pointed the pipe stem at Martise. “Understand, I was born to a houri, raised around other hourin and almost became one myself.” Martise’s expression showed no contempt at his revelation.

  “I wasn’t an innocent about the nature of her profession. She wasn’t protecting my childhood.” An old revulsion, mixed with rage, burned within. “The merchant was an odd sort and sought my mother out repeatedly. The last time she pushed me out the door, I waited in an alcove, then sneaked back into the room.” The pipe stem threatened to snap in his fingers. “He had her crawling on her hands and knees naked, following him around and kissing the floor where he stepped.” Martise gasped and covered her mouth, her eyes shining with pity and horror. “He didn’t take her, didn’t touch her, and didn’t let her touch him. He gained his pleasure by hearing her call herself names, tell him what undeserving scum she was, and how lucky she was to breathe the same air he did.”

  Silhara paused, caught between the need to purge the vile image from his system and trying not to retch from reliving the memory. A butterfly touch on his arm settled his seething emotions. Martise’s fingers rested against his sleeve, a whisper of comfort. His stomach calmed.

  “He came on the floor and made her lick it up, then pissed on her before he left.”

  Martise’s hand clenched his arm. “No child should have to witness that,” she hissed in the dark. “No woman should suffer it. That was a monster, not a man.”

  The past couldn’t be changed, but Silhara felt as if a suffocating weight slid off his chest. He’d exacted his revenge decades earlier, dealt street justice that gave no quarter. But only now did he feel as if the hideous shadow of that memory had lessened. He didn’t question why, after so much time, he chose to unburden himself to a woman whose purpose was ruled by Conclave. He had used it to make a point. It had transformed into something else. He trusted her to listen and not judge. She repaid him with a reassuring clasp. It was enough.

  “Monsters are as vulnerable as men. I followed the merchant when he left.” He filled his mouth with pipe smoke and blew it out the window, watching it float, serpentine, in the air before dissipating. “Taking a life leaves its mark on the soul. I bear no scar from taking his.”

  Martise removed her hand from his arm, and Silhara instantly missed her touch. “He deserved it, whatever you did to him. And more.”

  He remained silent, watching the ships rock in the bay.

  “You knew Balian spoke of me.”

  “I guessed. Men are not prone to wax poetic over a woman’s voice when they can talk about her breasts instead. She’d have to be exceptional for such to be remarked. Your voice is exceptional.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “What? Make him bleed?” Silhara shrugged. “I enjoy a good brawl, though he wasn’t much of a challenge. Your lover could learn a thing or two about knife fighting.”

  Her shadowed eyes flashed. “He isn’t my lover.”

  For reasons he refused to consider, he was glad the detestable Balian had been relegated to her past. “Gained a little wisdom, did you?”

  “Age and experience do that for a person.”

  “True. There should be some reward for creaking bones and gray hair.”

  He chuckled and she laughed softly. They stayed by the window for almost an hour after that, quiet, until Martise hid a yawn behind her hand and bid him goodnight.

  Now, the view at Neith was of plains and trees instead of sea, and he indulged in his smoke alone. Once, he welcomed such solitude, but things had changed. He missed those moments of camaraderie, the sense of companionship not even Gurn, despite his affable nature, could provide.

  The events at the market place continued to play in his memory. Silhara had rammed his dagger into Balian’s hand with relish, hoping he broke bone and severed tendons. While he despised the man for his insults, he couldn’t banish the images that rose in his mind—of him in Balian’s place, with Martise clothed only in sun and the loose fall of her hair, on her knees before him, her mouth taking him in a deep caress. He pressed a palm against his growing erection.

  She continually surprised him. Unremarkable on the surface, she was a study in contrasts. She jumped at her own shadow but faced down a lich to save him. He’d raced to her rescue when she’d screamed loud enough to bring the roof down, only to see her Gift hurl Corruption across the room. He no longer believe
d her naturally submissive. Quiet, yes, and good at hiding her emotions when she wished. But that lowered gaze had far less to do with acknowledging him as superior and more to do with hiding the fact she sometimes wanted to knock his teeth down his throat.

  And she served at Neith. Even knowing his reputation and the fact she’d be left alone with two men in an isolated redoubt with no hope of rescue should they decide to harm her, she’d come to him as his false apprentice. Cumbria must have promised her great rewards to risk so much. He’d first assumed money, but weeks spent in her company proved him wrong. Martise was motivated to act as the bishop’s eyes and ears, but the promise of coin wasn’t the lure.

  That pleased him. Such a woman, untroubled by his penury and the back-breaking labor of maintaining their survival, would do well here at Neith. The thought ran like melted snow through him. He tossed the huqqah hose aside in disgust.

  One kiss, powerful enough to incinerate every last scrap of his reason and fire his blood, had him mooning over a future neither possible nor wanted. Neith was crowded enough with him, Gurn and Cael in residence. The occasional houri, bought for a night, was enough feminine companionship.

  His eyes closed. He told himself the residual effects of her Gift sliding over him—through him—brought on that embrace. But he didn’t believe his own lies. He kissed her because he wanted her, because he admired her. Because he wanted more than just the ethereal essence of her lingering on his tongue once her Gift withdrew. He’d kissed her on impulse, lured by the tempting curve of her lips and the slight feel of her in his arms. He’d expected her to retreat from his onslaught. Gentleness was not in his nature, and he was desperate to taste her. But she hadn’t recoiled from his rough embrace, responding instead with a passion to equal his own. Only a small inner voice stopped him from taking her to the bed, lowering his breeches and climbing atop her.

  Spy. Cumbria’s means to trap you.

  Silhara put out the coals in the huqqah. He always listened to that voice. It had saved him countless times. A quiet woman who missed nothing and remembered everything might well catch him in a heresy guaranteed to get him hauled before a Conclave tribunal, especially if she took on the role of lover as well as apprentice. So far, he’d been lucky his clashes with Corruption had been confined to his bedchamber—a room Martise had not yet entered. He’d seen the lurking suspicion in her eyes when she asked if he thought the avatar reborn. If she ever witnessed Corruption’s brief possessions of him, he was damned. He’d have to kill her to protect himself, and he now recoiled at the possibility.

  Outside, the sun still bathed the west in streaks of red and orange, but Neith’s hallways were already swallowed in darkness. Silhara passed through their shadows as he strode to the library.

  Silhouetted in the light of candles, Martise bent over a page of notes, scratching away furiously with her quill. She glanced up when he entered and offered him a tentative smile.

  She held up a sheaf of parchment. “I’ve found more on the ritual, what fed its power. The hill where they trapped Amunsa was sacred ground, a pocket of Old Magic still existing outside the Waste.”

  He dragged a stool next to hers and sat down. His nostrils twitched. Orange flower and mint. Gurn had filched his perfume stores again and given a fragrance to Martise. His lips curved. His servant could be quite the charmer.

  He took the paper and scanned the writing. “Ferrin’s Tor is such a place. The shepherds who graze their sheep there swear the ewes that eat the grass growing on the hill bear the healthiest lambs with the best wool. Anything more on Birdixan?”

  “A little, though I can’t decipher the meaning.” She handed him two more sheets from her stack. “Each time Birdixan is described as invoking power against Amunsa, this symbol is included next to his name. None of the other mage-kings have that symbol—or any symbol for that matter—by their names. Near the end, when Birdixan dies, the symbol no longer appears.”

  Silhara read the translated text and frowned. Like Birdixan’s name, the symbol, an interlocking pair of cubes bisected with lines, was familiar.

  “I’ve seen this somewhere. On a temple wall or tattooed on a priest. You don’t recognize it?”

  She shook her head. “No. I can only guess it isn’t Helenese. They favor more curving designs. This is square and very angular. The script of the Glimmer peoples is a series of squares and lines. I can read and speak four dialects of Glimming and have never come across anything like this, so I hesitate to make a comparison.”

  Silhara stared at the symbol. “Birdixan here is described as a southern king. I think it’s more than a coincidence the symbol and this unsung king are reminiscent of the far lands.” He read more. One passage caught his eye, a sentence almost unnoticed in the ritual’s florid descriptions. Birdixan “swallowed” the god before the ritual even began. Unease crawled across his soul on spider legs.

  He rose from his seat. “I have some Glimming tomes. Mostly obscure poetry.” He winced. “Horrible stuff, but my mentor liked it and collected every bit he could get his hands on. Maybe it will help.”

  They worked in silence for the next three hours. Martise’s lamp dimmed, and Silhara, nauseated from reading several pages of saccharine odes to whiny, over-pampered women, put aside his books and rubbed his eyes. Martise still hunched over the table, scribbling. She paused, lowered her quill and shook the stiffness out of her hand.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Nothing worthwhile unless you’re interested in family lines. I’ve translated at least twenty generations of ancestors for three of the kings.” She gave him a tired smile. “They were a prolific group.”

  Silhara stretched in his chair and stood. “When you have a dozen wives and a few hundred concubines, you can expect to sire herds of children.” He came to stand before her. “We’ll work again tomorrow. Are you ready for your lesson?”

  Her expression was far less enthusiastic than when they first started to work with her Gift. She sighed. “Yes, though I’m afraid it will be a waste of your time. What good is a Gift if you can’t use it for spells?”

  He understood her frustration. They’d worked on her control of her Gift since their return from Eastern Prime. She’d been successful in summoning it and directing its emergence. However, he remained puzzled that none of the spells she attempted worked. Her recitation was flawless, her execution as good as his, but nothing happened. They’d tried every type of spell. Movement. She still couldn’t levitate. Fire and water invocations. The fire burning cheerily in the library’s hearth didn’t even flicker when she tried summoning the flames. And the water remained in the goblet. Silhara even encouraged her to sing, bracing himself for the inevitable abuse on his ears, just in case her voice had improved and her Gift was spell singing. After a few notes, he stopped her, certain that whatever magic her Gift controlled, spell song wasn’t it.

  She stood up to face him, her shoulders slumped with weariness.

  “Don’t sulk,” he said. “It doesn’t flatter you.”

  His caustic remark worked to snap her out of her melancholy. Her gaze dropped to the floor, but her shoulders were stiff, as if she restrained the urge to slap him.

  Silhara smiled. “We’ll try something different tonight.”

  She gaped at him when he pulled out his boot dagger and ran the blade’s sharp edge over his palm. Blood ran in trickling paths over his hand, sliding between his fingers to drip on the floor. He held out his stained hand to her.

  “Heal this.”

  Untroubled by the blood, she took his hand, holding it between hers. Her callused palms were warm on his skin, stroking. He listened as she recited one healing spell after another. Her eyes closed in concentration. So focused on trying to invoke something that might heal his wound, she lost control of her Gift. Instant heat suffused Silhara’s body. Undiluted magery seeped into his pores, his spirit, even as his hand ached and blood dripped from his fingers. His Gift swelled within him, feeding off her power.

&
nbsp; Martise, beguiled by her Gift as much as Silhara, raised his hand and placed it on her chest above her breast. The heartbeat against his bloodied palm echoed the one thudding in his head. Though he’d distance himself from the allure of her Gift, he was bewitched by how it transformed her. Her appearance didn’t change. The same pointed chin and small nose, russet hair and pale mouth. But all were enhanced, embellished and made beautiful by her magery.

  He almost succumbed to temptation, to slide his hand over her tunic until he cupped her small breast. Luckily, the sting in his palm kept him clear-headed enough to fight down his desire and pull his hand away, leaving a red smear on her skin and a broken bond between them. Her moan, strained and stuttered, worked its own magic on him. She might as well have reached out and stroked his cock.

  She opened her eyes, saw his hand still bleeding. Her shoulders slumped. “It didn’t work.”

  “No. For all that your Gift can swat gods and liches like they’re mice in a cat’s paw, it doesn’t work with spells.”

  He stared at the blood on his palm and the smear across her skin. A marking of territory, a claiming, no matter that she’d placed his hand there in the first place. And while focused on healing him. A powerful need too hold, to proclaim that this pale woman, with her prosaic features and extraordinary spirit, was his gripped him suddenly.

  Terrified by his feelings, Silhara spun away and strode to the door. “We’re done here,” he said over his shoulder.

  Her tone was plaintive. “But your hand…”

  He paused but kept his back to her. “Is still bleeding. You can’t heal it. Go to bed, Martise.”

  He left, slamming the door behind him. The occasional plop of blood droplets striking the floor accompanied him as he pounded downstairs. The door connecting the great hall to the kitchen crashed against the opposite wall. Gurn’s domain was blacker than a crypt, but Silhara found his way unerringly to the cupboard housing the servant’s bottle of Peleta’s Fire. He swept cups off the shelves until he found a large goblet and poured himself a generous portion of spirits. His curse was loud and vicious when he banged his knee on the bench against the worktable and sat down.