[fan] diviners trilogy - complete series

by Nicolette Andrews

  “So the time has come, Maea. How I have waited for this moment.” Johai came closer. He stepped around Adair’s body. His movements were languid. He was taking his time, drawing out the moment before we both knew I would be forced to act. Elenna was still as a statue beside me. I reached out for her hand. Her skin was aflame, but I felt the trickle of power entering my body, burning my veins and filling me with the power of all the diviners who had gone before me. I saw their faces flash in front of me, from my mother and my grandmother to the first of our line. She had a round face and round violet eyes. Her hair was curly and black, her skin like porcelain. It is time, she seemed to whisper to me. I took a step out from behind the basin and revealed the swell of my pregnant body.

  The cocky smile Johai wore faltered. He had not been prepared for this. “Whose seed filled your belly, diviner? Do you think I will spare you because you are with child? You are wrong.”

  “It is yours,” I said. The power was filling me, imbuing me with strength. Just a few more moments and I will be prepared.

  He stared at me for a long moment. “That is not possible.”

  “Yes. Elenna put a spell on you so that you would sleep within Johai, and it was then that I lay with Johai and conceived our daughter, a diviner.” I laid my hand on my stomach. My daughter was kicking, twisting in the womb as if she were fighting to break free. She feels the power. Maybe she is even sharing the visions with me.

  He shook his head and took a step back from me. “No. This is not how it should be! Hundreds of times we have played this game, and always it ends the same.”

  He was in a rage. He pulled a sword from his scabbard and swung it through the air, fighting an invisible foe.

  “This time is different.” I let go of Elenna’s hand and stepped forward.

  Johai stared at me, eyes wide, his pupils dilated so I could not see the whites of his eyes but for a small white outline. He held his sword loosely in his hand. I took the sword from him and tossed it across the room. He did not fight me. His eyes were fixated upon me. I felt the power surging through me, guiding my steps. I reached up and placed my hands on his cheeks. I felt the stubble of his cheeks beneath my palms and looked into the eyes of the man I loved, possessed by an ancient spirit of unimaginable evil.

  “I am going to save you. I am the circle unbroken.” I kissed him, and the energy Elenna had imparted unto me erupted from me and channeled into Johai.

  He tried to pull away. He groaned and thrashed, but I held onto his face, letting the power mingle and flow between us. I felt as if we would both burst into flames. White light filled my vision, and for a few moments I felt nothing but fire and heard the pounding of drums.

  Then the pain ended, and everything was silent. I blinked and opened my eyes on a cottage by the sea. A young woman sat outside the cottage door, with a net that she seemed to be mending. Her long fingers twisted in the cording of the net and made sense of the knots and tangles before her. There was a trail that led up to the cottage, and a horse clattered up the lane, upturning mud in its wake. A young man reined up a few feet from the woman. He looked down at her from horseback. He was well dressed in brocade, with a long cape over his shoulders. On his head he wore a cap with a long feather. The woman had not looked up at him once since he arrived.

  “Woman, I am looking for the harbor,” the man said in a commanding tone.

  She continued to untangle the net and did not look up from her work.

  The young man huffed and said again, “You shall answer your betters when they speak to you.”

  Again she ignored him, but there was a smile tugging the corner of her lips. He growled under his breath and climbed down from the horse. His shoes were splattered with dirt as he squelched in the mud. And he groaned to see it. He walked over to the woman, squatting down in front of her.

  “Are you deaf and mute?”

  She looked up at him with wide violet eyes. “No, just someone who believes she has some worth.”

  He took a step back, perhaps taken aback by her words or maybe it was her beauty. Either way his next words were much kinder. “Pardon my rudeness. I am in a rush, you see. There is a man I must see about a ship.”

  She stood up and brushed the dirt from her skirt. “Are you sailing away somewhere?” she asked with a wistful air.

  “Not yet, I’m having a ship built, one that will sail farther than any other has before.” He smiled, and when he did, it made his sapphire-colored eyes sparkle.

  “I’ve always wanted to sail across the sea,” she remarked. “The harbor is a few leagues north of here. Follow this road, and you shall reach it soon enough.” She turned to go inside without another word.

  The man watched her walk away before shaking his head and returning to his mount. He rode away but not without a few more backwards glances in the cottage’s direction.

  The day changed, and the man came again. He stopped by the cottage, making small talk. This happened several times over. At first the woman was cold to him, but he began to bring her violets and strings of pearls and other trinkets. She warmed to him when he bought fish and baskets from her—anything to talk to her, to see her smile. After buying his third bushel of fish from her, he began to ride away, but before the cottage was out of sight, he rode back and knocked on her door.

  She answered with a perplexed expression. “Is there something else you needed?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated and fiddled with his hat, which he gripped with both hands in front of him. “I am sailing on the morrow, and I wanted to know if you would come with me.”

  She smiled. “You would take a simple fisherman’s daughter on your adventure?”

  He blushed. “I would, if you will be patient with me. I know I can be rash and rude, but I think we might make a good pair.”

  She laughed. “I suppose you will need me to teach you how to behave in polite company, then.”

  They rode away together to the harbor, where a great ship awaited them. Settlers with chickens, cows, and all their worldly possessions filed onto the ship. The fisherman’s daughter stood on the prow of the ship, and the wind pulled its fingers through her hair. The young man stood beside her and reached for her hand. At first she looked down at the touch before bringing his fingers to her lips and kissing his knuckles. They rode across oceans, fared against storms, and finally landed on a sandy shore with high cliffs and gulls crying overhead.

  The newcomers settled the land, and the young man and the fisherman’s daughter started a community there. A village sprouted up along the shore. Soon more and more settlers came and inhabited the land surrounding the village. The land was rich and fertile, and the settlers were content. There was trade with the natives, who were olive skinned with dark hair.

  “I was too ambitious. We sailed south to find a new world together, a place where we would start our own lives, our own new kingdom. Fate is cruel, however, and our happiness was short-lived,” a man said to me. His voice seemed familiar, but I was not certain where I had heard it before. “We built our homes, and at first, we got along with the natives. Then when the population grew, we decided it was time to create a government. I was elected as king, and we decided to build our palace on the cliff side overlooking the sea that my wife loved so much. It was to our folly; we chose poorly in that hillside. There was nothing there but a burrow deep in the ground, a chamber at the center of the earth with a stone basin. It seemed unused and forgotten. We thought it would do no harm to build there. Then after the palace was built, the old woman came.”

  A bent-over old woman with gray hair and nut-brown skin waddled up a slope to the doors of the newly made palace. It was crafted from white marble and boasted high walls and soldiers to guard it. The woman knocked on the palace gates and was escorted into the throne room of the palace. The king and queen sat on thrones side by side.

  The old woman pointed a finger at the pair of them. “You have brought doom upon yourselves. You built your palace on a holy place. You shall both b
e cursed for the disrespect you have shown the Goddess!” she shouted. Her voice echoed off the columns of the audience hall. The king seemed amused while the queen seemed troubled by her words.

  “Please tell us, what have we done wrong?” the queen asked.

  “This place was a holy place, sacred to the Mother and her priestesses. Those who went into the Sea Chamber could look into the water and were granted visions of the future. But no longer, the chamber has been sealed and the Mother’s voice cut off from her children.”

  “What if we were to open the chamber once again? Would that appease your Mother?” The king laughed.

  The old woman scowled at him. “Nothing you do will please the Mother, but if you send a woman to look at the water, perhaps a path can be found to fix these atrocities,” the old woman declared.

  “I took it upon myself to make right our wrong against the native people. We could not tear down our palace, but I could make sure they could reach their sacred chamber. We unearthed it, and a stairway was built to lead to it. I was among the first to look into the water’s surface, and therein I saw a future of great promise, one where our king, my husband, brought the natives and our settlers into a new age of harmony and peace. My false vision would be our undoing. It was a trap from the start,” a woman whispered to me as the image of the old woman faded away.

  The king sat at a council table with a group of men. They had the olive skin and dark hair of the natives. One of the men jumped to his feet and pointed a sword at the king. The king stood and drew his sword and slew the man in one stroke. The others shouted and pointed, bringing out their own swords, but the king’s men slaughtered them all. The queen entered the chamber to find the massacre left behind. Her eyes were wide with terror as she looked to her husband covered in blood. This was not the proud young man she had fallen in love with. It was as the old woman said; they were cursed. This place had corrupted them. It had made her husband into a deranged madman.

  “I sought out the old woman. I begged her to help us. She refused. She only laughed and said I had reaped what I had sown.”

  The young queen sat before the basin and watched the images dancing across the surface, each more terrible than the last. Her husband meanwhile led a battle against the natives. Blood was running like a river across the land. He had grown too ambitious, too powerful. The basin had warped him into a monster.

  “I wanted to stop him, to reclaim the man I loved. I sought the water for advice. I did not know what else to do. What I saw there made my blood run cold, but I knew I had to do it. There was only one way to stop the destruction he was bringing.”

  The woman stood in the Sea Chamber. It was the same circular room I now stood in, and water continued to drip into the basin. The water was dark, and the light coming from her torch seemed unable to penetrate the darkness of the water. The king came into the chamber. He wore armor and held a helmet under one arm.

  “Why have you summoned me here,” he said to her.

  “Because this war needs to end. Can you not see it is the curse of this basin? We must leave this place and never look back before we are lost,” she replied.

  “You’re mad. I do this all for you! For the kingdom we built together,” he shouted in reply.

  “I only want my husband back.”

  He scowled at her. “I am right here. You have been blinded by your visions; you cannot see what is plainly before you. Perhaps I should leave you locked within here. Would that make you happy?” He did not wait for her reply and instead walked towards the steps.

  She cried out as he tried to walk away. He ignored her pained cries. Before he could reach the door, she held aloft a dagger. She ran the blade across her palm, and into the water she let her blood drop.

  “I bind my life to the water, and with it I give these gifts to those that follow after me. Until the day you see the error of your ways, you will remain suspended in time, forever to roam without a body.”

  Light emerged from the basin, and for a moment I could see nothing but bright light. When the light faded, the king’s body lay sprawled upon the ground, lifeless. The queen fell to her knees and wept.

  The pair faded, but the chamber remained. The woman stepped out from the shadows. The vision cleared, and we were standing in the Sea Chamber, but it was empty but for the two of us. “We thought we had been given a great gift in the basin, and in the end it was our demise. We should never have built our palace here. I realized too late, and my descendants have paid the price of it ever since. The Mother’s memory is long, but she is willing to forgive as well. That is why she gave me you, the one who will break the cycle.” The first looked at me with a commingling of joy and sadness.

  “Why did you show me this now?” I asked.

  She sighed. “You were destined to end it. You must see the beginning in order to end this tale. Bring him to rest as I could not,” the first diviner said. She was the true first, not an amalgamation of all the diviners before but the true first of my line. She was a fisherman’s daughter and the first Queen of Danhad.

  “Why me? What makes me special?”

  She smiled and brushed my cheek with her hand. “You are born of the old and the new. You carry both our homeland and the native people. You will protect this sacred place and teach your daughter to do the same. You are the priestess reborn. We forgot over time, and we let the old rituals die, but you have been trained in the old ways and you know the new. You are the key.”

  “Because I loved Johai, and he sealed my memories, and because I wanted to save him…” I recited my mother’s words to me from long ago.

  She nodded. “Go. He is waiting.” She motioned to the stairwell.

  I climbed the stairs, unencumbered by my pregnant belly. Time moved like water, and I found the light left strange shadows on the wall. I knew what I had to do. The palace was as I knew it, yet slightly altered. The paintings were different. The style just a bit dated. I walked down the hall to the window where I had often met my mother in my dreams. He was standing there, looking out to the sea.

  The specter turned to face me. He was not the cloaked figure with a mask I had seen in my dreams. He was a young man. In many ways he looked like Johai. They had the same thin lips, a long face and sapphire eyes. His hair was dark and tied in a tail at the base of his neck.

  “So you’ve trapped me with my old memories. Is this how you planned to defeat me?” he said. I realized why his voice had sounded familiar. It was the voice of the specter in my dreams, but with less menace and more humanity.

  “You once told me that we were destined for one another. Is that because you loved the first of my line?”

  He chuckled softly. “Yes, I loved her and lost her. She betrayed me as you all have.” He turned to face me. “Except you. You were the first to try to save me.”

  “We could end it. End the cycle. End the pain.”

  He gripped the windowsill, his hands white knuckled. “Never. Not until the task is complete.”

  “She is waiting for you. She has not crossed. She has lingered by the gateway, waiting for you. The power corrupted you, but she knows deep down you are as you were.”

  He turned towards me. “Do not think to win me with sweet words, diviner. My wife—what was my wife—is gone, just as I am no longer the man that loved her.”

  I gasped as he reached out for me. “This ends here.”

  Whatever momentary reverie we shared was over. He grabbed me. I stumbled back as his hands closed around my throat. He recoiled suddenly as if burned. In fact, his hand was smoking red and raw where it had touched my skin.

  “Why can I not touch you?” he hissed.

  I was as baffled as he. I tried to touch him and found the same effect. My very touch burned him. I felt power coursing through me, the same power Elenna had filled me with. This is too much. If I cannot control it, it will burn me from the inside. My mother’s face flashed before my eyes and then my grandmother and the line of diviners going back to the first. This m
oment had been a long time coming. The circle would be broken at last.

  Where there had once been a window out onto the sea, there was now a door, and Elenna held it open for me. Beyond the gate I heard thousands of voices, and hands were reaching, grabbing and tugging at Elenna’s ankles, and just beyond, the mask of the specter, the remainder of his soul, what he would have brought forth to try to destroy everything. If I did not stop him, that thing would come from beyond the veil. Elenna watched me serenely as I wrestled with the specter, trying to pull him to the gateway. I grabbed at his clothes and his face. I pulled him close to me and pressed my hands to his face. He screamed in agony. I pushed him back towards the gateway, and as we moved closer, the voices grew stronger.

  He fought me, clawing at my skin and tearing my hair in an attempt to get away.

  “No, I will not go through,” he screamed.

  As we drew closer, his form changed and shifted, as if I were looking at him underwater, and where there had been one man, now there was two. Johai and the specter were bound together by a crimson thread. Johai looked at me. His hair was pale as moonlight, and an enigmatic smile pulled at the corner of his lips. I hesitated, and he reached out for me. He pushed the hair back from my face, and I fought the tears that threatened to overwhelm me.

  “I love you. Do not forget that.”

  The specter’s foot slipped, and he was grabbed by a grasping hand from beyond the gate. It pulled both him and Johai towards it. I cried out and tried to hold onto Johai, but he was slipping through my fingers.