by NS Dolkart
“Phaedra is a wizard, Narky, and she has learned to be more devious than her predecessors. Armies will not find her. Karassa tried to kill her, and failed. Only you, her friend, can disarm her. Only you can complete this task.”
The act of breathing was getting harder. Narky felt the weight of the grave on his chest, the taste of earth on his tongue, the tickle of maggots in his skin. His God’s presence was suffocating him.
“I cannot stay longer,” Ravennis acknowledged. “Men were not designed, as their cousins were, to bear Our presence. Only one last thing: name your successor as high priest. Renounce your station and leave your vestments behind, for they are the trappings that make you most visible to the Others. Those who would protect Phaedra must not see you, and so I withdraw My ownership over your body. Until your task is complete, you belong to no God.”
Narky’s body awoke with a jolt. He fell out of bed, coughing soil and maggots onto the floor. He could see their pale bodies in the dim light of morning, wiggling. He could hear Grace and Ptera gasping in the bed above – the Lord Below’s presence must have weighed on them too. But they recovered before his heaving ended, and when he looked up with watery eyes, both were staring at him.
“Pa,” Grace said, but stopped there, hugging his mother tightly.
“I’m sorry,” Narky said, gazing into Ptera’s frightened eyes. “I’m sorry, I… I have to leave.”
He pulled off his nightrobe and looked about for his clothes, but they were all black, all symbols of his priesthood. What did he still own that didn’t mark him as his God’s servant? Only the nightrobe.
“Narky!” Ptera gasped, her eyes wide. She was pointing at him.
He looked down, half-expecting to see more maggots bursting from his skin. But there were no maggots: his skin was smooth and black, healthy and unscarred. The symbol of Ravennis was gone.
He put his nightrobe back on. “Wake everyone, and we can meet in the library. I’m no longer fit to be high priest.”
Narky had never seen his wife look so haunted. “Were you wrong about the prophecy?”
“No, I was right. I was too right.”
“Then how can He reject you now? How could He spit you out after you served Him so faithfully?”
Narky couldn’t answer her. What if Phaedra’s protectors were watching?
“Gather the priests,” he said.
Ptera moved to the door, but Grace let go his hold of her and ran to Narky. “Don’t leave!” he cried.
Grace was nine today. Narky silently cursed the fates, though he dared not curse their keeper. First his mother, now him; first him, now Grace. It was too heartbreaking, too appropriate, too disgusting.
“I’m going to come back,” Narky told his son, though his doubts were far stronger than his faith. “I’m going to regain our God’s favor, and then I’ll come back and we can be together forever. It’s… it’s just a trial. It’s a test of faith, for both of us.”
“What will you do?”
Narky swallowed. Poor Phaedra.
“Whatever I need to do.”
28
Phaedra
It was dawn when Phaedra set foot on Tarphaean soil. She had learned to expect the time change, but no foreknowledge could make her body adjust to the disorientation of stepping from night to day in the blink of an eye. She wondered whether time actually ran faster in the elves’ world than here, or whether it was only the skyquakes making it skip ahead relative to this one. Nobody there had aged significantly more than she had expected them to, and yet, the days and nights had been aligned the first time she traveled to the fairies’ world, and now they were decidedly not. She had spent two weeks with Hunter and Psander just now – how long had she been away from Tarphae?
The mists around her billowed and swirled as she walked, her staff probing the uneven ground. There were beds at the farmhouse on the banks of the Sennaroot, and though she didn’t feel tired quite yet, the walk would be long enough to change that. It would be a good first stop, and for all that she dreaded it, she thought returning to that place might benefit her. It would be good to see it liberated, free of pirates and their captured slaves. She didn’t know if she would find it empty or if there would be Atunaean soldiers camped there. She wasn’t sure which she preferred. A crowd of people would give her none of the privacy and quiet solitude she wanted right now, but an empty farmhouse would force her to face her memories of the place alone.
As she walked, her hand found the belt around her waist. It was nice to feel that connection to Hunter, grounding and sustaining her. The glow of their kiss in the dark hadn’t left her yet – she could almost feel his arms still around her. Someday, she must have more of that.
She could hardly believe her luck that he had waited all these years, even after what she had said to him the last time. She knew he had always wanted children – his behavior with the elves’ captives had told her as much, as had his admiring looks during Bandu’s pregnancy – and she marveled that he had chosen her over fatherhood. It had been far too much to hope for, and yet reality had exceeded those hopes.
Was he sacrificing too much? Would he even go through with it? She thought he would, that was the amazing thing, and yet it was also the whole problem. Hunter was too practiced at self-denial. Phaedra would never forget the way he had collapsed in the mountains, how he had neglected his own needs to the point of fainting. He was doing it again, she was sure he was. You had to watch out for Hunter, or no one would.
Well, she had tried telling him he couldn’t have her, and it had made no difference. He’d just kept searching until he found a solution, and it was as good a solution as she could have hoped for. It solved their biggest problem: it gave her permission to want him back. She just wished she didn’t have to feel so guilty for getting what she wanted.
When she came upon the pirates’ settlement, she found it to be far more than a barn and a farmhouse. Where once the reclamation of Tarphaean farmland had been rudimentary, over the past decade a true colony had sprung up on the banks of the Sennaroot. A water mill had been repaired upriver, and extra houses and barns had been raised to accommodate all the people and livestock. Some of Mura’s recruits must have been true farmers, or else his raids had captured some, because the colony had clearly thrived. Sheep, cattle, and goats stood within fenced-in pastures, cut off from the fields of young wheat that flanked the river. A pair of dinghies lay upside-down on the shore, waiting for their next trip across.
The colony hadn’t been abandoned, even after the Atunaean victory. Phaedra could see people out and about, herding livestock or baking in the outdoor ovens that someone out here must have built in the last few years. It took Phaedra a moment to realize that nearly everyone she could see was an islander. Her homeland resembled itself better that way – hence her belated noting of the fact – but what had happened to Mura’s continental prisoners? She didn’t think he had raided the islands exclusively.
She was also surprised by how many of those she saw were women and children. Phaedra had been the only woman here, those many years ago, but apparently the pirates had captured or recruited a good deal more since then. She hoped at least some of them had been willing recruits. She shuddered to think how all those children had gotten here.
Phaedra herself was attracting plenty of attention. People were staring and pointing, and soon a group of four Atunaean soldiers came to meet her.
“Welcome, Wizard Phaedra,” said the only one wearing a breastplate. He must have been wealthy to own one. “Your presence honors us, though some may feel otherwise.”
Phaedra blinked. Was he warning her?
“Thank you. How long have I been away?”
“Our victory over the pirates was ten days ago. Does one lose track of time so quickly in the forest?”
“I haven’t spent all this time in the forest,” Phaedra told him, “nor have I spent it all on Tarphae. But I’m back now, and I need some rest before I return to the continent. Tell me, did all the
se people choose to stay here?”
The man shrugged. “Where else would they go? Some have been here for years. Many are pirates’ consorts, and would have been executed if we didn’t value their work. Besides, Karsanye isn’t the port it once was – the only ships coming and going right now are from Atuna. Those who are islanders, or Parakese, or from elsewhere along the coast… it would take real money for them to get home from here, and they have none. The pirates’ stores of coin have gone to the High Council to pay for the rebuilding of our fleet, and this here is land we fought and died for – it’s nobody’s to sell besides the Council’s. These people have their freedom, but they have nothing else to their names. We let them stay in return for their work.”
Phaedra did not respond. This man and his friends might be the new overseers, but the problem went back to the High Council and, truly, beyond the council to the Atunaean national spirit. It was such typical Atunaean logic, self-serving and mercantile, that turned slaves into landless, penniless servants of the state. Phaedra wouldn’t be surprised if they were eventually sold to rich Atunaeans right along with the land. Any Atunaeans among the pirates’ slaves had likely been rescued and returned to their families, but these people had been liberated in name only.
If she’d had time for such things, Phaedra might have gone to the High Council and insisted that these lands and their inhabitants belonged to her as the primary liberator of Tarphae. Then she could have at least turned the land over to those who worked it before she went on her way. But she knew enough from her father’s tales of working with Atunaeans that it would take weeks, possibly months for the Council to resolve such an argument, and those were weeks and months that Phaedra didn’t have.
So she found her way to a bed and collapsed there, only taking the time to ward the door shut before she lost consciousness. When she awoke in late afternoon, she gathered herself and left for Karsanye.
There would be no ships leaving for Atuna at night, but that didn’t worry Phaedra. Admiral Sett had promised to arrange for her to have a boat, and even if he had forgotten, there was sure to be a ship soon enough. Atuna would continue to capitalize on its newfound access to Tarphae. If any ship was docked in Karsanye tonight, Phaedra could light a signal for them to let her aboard. The fact that she would not be reaching Karsanye before nightfall wasn’t much of a concern either, since she could use Psander’s spell for a moonlit path if the way got too dark.
Phaedra didn’t follow the Sennaroot all the way to its outlet in Karsanye Bay – the river had too many twists and turns to be the fastest way unless one had a boat. She proceeded instead down the road, which was still uneven and somewhat perilous on account of that long-ago earthquake. Her staff, as always, was her best friend here, though she used Hunter’s belt too, just in case. She caressed it, reminding it of how Hunter had caught her during Tarphae’s earthquake, saving her from a widening fissure, and after that the belt briefly tightened its grip on her whenever she was about to step poorly. It gave her less than a second’s warning, but even that much was helpful.
There was indeed a ship moored at the docks when Phaedra arrived, a two-masted merchant ship with a deep draft. Phaedra wondered for a moment what a merchant ship could be bringing the settlers, but then realized that it was more likely waiting to carry a cargo off the island. That soldier had done her the service of reminding her that Atuna hadn’t sent its ships just to eliminate the pirates, but also to conquer and despoil her homeland.
The night watchman cried out in surprise when her light appeared, but let her aboard when he heard her voice.
“You’ll have to talk to the captain about where to sleep.”
The captain, a brown and weathered Atunaean, treated her arrival with some suspicion. Nonetheless, he accepted her presence and gave her a hammock strung up in the hold for privacy. “We leave on tomorrow’s tide,” he said. “I thank you for your service against the pirates.”
The tone of his voice told her what she hadn’t gotten from the soldier’s comment: the Atunaeans blamed her for the loss of their ships and men just as surely as they were willing to capitalize on her victory.
She climbed down to the hold and found it stacked with guardian tree logs, still dripping from their journey down the river. Of course. Here was one more way that Atuna meant to pay itself back for its losses against Mura: by stripping Phaedra’s homeland of its natural resources. Atunaean shipbuilders were about to become very busy.
When she was alone, Phaedra conjured her ghostly flame and lay in her hammock to read the books Psander had given her. She started with the scrolls on eschatology, judging herself too distracted for the book on prayer magic. The trouble with reading to the light of one’s own magic was that any task requiring too much concentration would make the light flicker and die – the more involved the material, the worse the conditions for reading it would be. The academic wizards had been a jealous, elitist community, and their writing was just as much designed to weed out ambitious hedge wizards or intimidate each other than it was to illuminate its subject. The harder an academic tome was to decipher, the more respect its author would have gained by producing it. It would be dreadful to read that sort of stuff by magiclight.
The eschatologies were not as taxing. Judging by the prayer at the beginning of each, they had been compiled by an Atellan friar who had taken an interest in the way different peoples conceived of the end times. His writing, aimed at Atellan scholars and not wizardly ones, was accessible rather than intentionally obtuse.
Phaedra had never been particularly interested in eschatology, but knowing what she knew now, the scrolls became a fascinating read. Some version of the Yarek appeared in most, but its description was radically different depending on the religion. The Mayaran tales spoke of a monster with a long snout that would drink rivers and oceans, crumbling the parched earth to dust before Mayar’s storm burst it from within and formed a new world out of the mud. The Pelthans thought a great creature of chaos and injustice would tilt the world off balance, shaking the followers of other faiths into the void before Pelthas dealt it a killing blow and righted the world again. Everyone conceived of their own Gods as the heroes of a final battle, which was especially ironic and bittersweet when Phaedra read of Gods who had already perished. The stallion God of the northern plains had been slain by Magor, yet His followers had once believed that He could defeat their version of the Yarek. The lesson for Phaedra was clear enough: there were elements of truth to each God’s tale, but their triumphant endings were entirely delusional.
Magor’s tale was particularly telling. In it, Magor was the Yarek, growing in power until the other Gods became fearful and all turned on Him at once. Nobody would survive the war, but the resulting chaos would birth a new Magor and a new world that would remain wilderness forever.
The parallel between the end times as conceived by Elkinar’s priests in Anardis and Ravennis’ priests in Laarna gave her pause. In both versions, the world had to die before it could be reborn, and in remarkably similar ways. As the Laarnese had had it, Ravennis would someday unravel all the threads of fate and begin a new tapestry, weaving reality just by arranging the same threads differently. Elkinar, in the meantime, would slay the world Himself and, when it had decomposed, bring forth something new out of its remains. Neither God was seen as battling against the world’s end, but rather welcoming it as an opportunity for renewal. Was this agreement a sign that the two Gods really had been one all along? Or only that they had existed in contested territory, such that the swallowing of one by the other was inevitable? For once, Phaedra saw more evidence for the former. Narky would be pleased, if she ever got the chance to tell him.
Phaedra was almost ready to sleep when she came upon the friar’s description of the Dragon Touched myth, where an ancient monster would plant itself in the world’s selfishness. God Most High would destroy it and all those whose selfishness had let it take root, and only full repentance could sway Him.
Phaedra had to re
ad the account twice before she could fully fathom its implications. If this was the myth passed down to the Dragon Touched from their ancestors, then Salemis had known. The dragon had known that rescuing him would bring about the world’s end, and he had gone through with it anyway. He hadn’t even warned them.
Had he known the end would come so soon? She thought so. The Dragon Knight’s prophecy, the one that had foretold Phaedra and her friends, had been in elven verse. That meant it hadn’t come directly from God Most High but rather from Salemis, whispered through the mesh. If Salemis had been aware of the prophecy, if he had been its originator, then he must have expected that the plan to rescue him would hasten the final battle. I see now the end to all things once planned. Right in the midst of verses about the islanders, the prophecy had mentioned the end of the world. Phaedra, optimistic fool that she was, had read the prophecy narrowly. She had focused so much on the words “once planned” that she had missed the true implications of the verse. It had called for the end to all things. “Once planned” was no consolation, because God Most High had planned everything. He had let the Lower Gods help with this younger world, but both worlds were His, and now both would end.
Phaedra’s light winked out. Her concentration was shattered. Was her mission a fool’s errand? Would it only hasten her world’s destruction? She wished she could ask Salemis, but the dragon had escaped into the heavens over a decade ago, just as soon as he’d given the Dragon Touched his last words of advice.
Coward. Up there, he might well escape the consequences.
But wait, what had been the point of that advice if all hope was gone? If none could survive the “end to all things once planned,” it shouldn’t matter whether the Dragon Touched formed their own nation again or remained forever hidden in the outskirts of Ardis. If Salemis had bothered to visit his descendants and give them advice, there had to be a point to all of that.