by NS Dolkart
“Then why did you ask for the mushrooms?” Hunter asked, leaning his sickle against a wall and folding his arms. “Phaedra wouldn’t have known to take them if you hadn’t asked for them first.”
Psander gave him a look of such anger that initially Hunter thought she might punish him with that elf magic. But once more, the wizard controlled herself.
“No,” she said, “she wouldn’t have. I gave her a list of various magical ingredients, any of which could be used in a multitude of ways. But I tell the truth when I say that I had no specific plan at the time to harvest the villagers’ latent magic.
“You will remember, Hunter, that I sent you and your friends to the mountains specifically in order to gather calardium ore, which can be used as a power source in numerous ways. When presented with blueglows as well, I hit upon the idea of the magic-siphoning pendants. I did not realize at the time that the combination would be poisonous, but though I should perhaps apologize for my mistake, I will not apologize for lying, as I did not lie.”
“Is that so?” Ketsa said. “Well, go ahead and apologize for your mistake. We’re waiting.”
Psander met Ketsa’s gaze for a few long moments before she shrugged. “I apologize. I did not know.”
Could such an apology be accepted? The moments stretched themselves out. Psander’s shrug had turned what might otherwise have sounded heartfelt suspect, and now it was up to Ketsa to decide whether to accept the apology in good faith or press for one that was more earnest. Hunter wasn’t sure Psander was even capable of more earnestness.
Finally, Ketsa nodded. “Go on.”
“When the Tarphaeans came back from their next voyage with an offer to leave that world and its vengeful Gods, I did not consult with anyone before choosing to accept the offer. That should not surprise or horrify you, as we were besieged by a massive army at the time, and the pendants had weakened you all such that it would have made no sense to expect reasoned thought from you. Faced with annihilation or a journey to this world, I made the choice for all of us. It was the right choice.”
“The fairies say it’s what caused the skyquakes,” Tritika pointed out.
“True, and I did not know that either at the time. It is possible that I should have let us all die there. But I can’t be sure of that even now, and so I will not apologize for it.”
“You’re disgusting,” Atella hissed. Her voice was almost too full of venom for her low tone, but looking over Hunter saw that Persada was now asleep in her arms. “You poisoned my husband, you poisoned our whole village. You tried to poison me and my children too – we’d have all died if Persada hadn’t spilled my cup. You should have been trying to save us, and you poisoned us instead. How dare you pick and choose what to apologize for, as if haggling could make you less evil? How dare you?”
Atella’s father put a hand on her free shoulder. He and Atella both had tears in their eyes. Hunter turned to Psander to find her looking uncertain. She didn’t understand. Somehow, she didn’t understand.
“I had no better option that I could see,” she said. “I am sorry it came to that.”
“You’re sorry it came to that,” Atella repeated. “You just told the elves you were sorry they attacked because you wanted to trust them. You never cared if we lived or died, you never cared what we thought or how we felt. We were never people to you.”
“Of course you’re people,” Psander said with a frown, “and if I didn’t care what you thought, I wouldn’t have had to pretend to be a man for the better part of a year. Make sense, Atella, I know you’re capable of it.”
Her words met with stunned silence. It was finally dawning on the villagers that Psander had not been persecuting them personally all these years, that she had not been devaluing their lives any more than she had devalued the lives of the islanders or the Gallant Ones. They had seen her invite Hunter and his friends into her tower for private meetings, seen them accept beds there, and they had thought she treated the islanders humanely. The questioning looks they cast his way asked him if Psander had always been like this, even to him. Of course she had. It almost broke his heart to realize that it had taken them so long to find out. She had treated the villagers as tools not because she felt they were uniquely worthless, but because she treated everyone that way. Nobody was a person to her.
It was Eskon who broke the silence. “If the Gods will it,” he said, “we’ll be back in our world soon. When that day comes, we will leave you here to feed yourself. We’re not your slaves. We’ll take our food and our tools with us, and you’ll have to learn how to farm, or starve.”
The other villagers nodded approvingly. The trial was over.
“No need,” Psander said. “You may have this place. I bequeath it to you, and my library to Phaedra. Even if my plan works and the worlds combine, I will not survive the transition. The Gods will destroy me, and if I stay here, They will destroy this place too. The elf magic in the walls render it far too conspicuous for me to hide as I did before. So, I will leave. I would rather die alone than have the Gods destroy my work along with me. You may stay if you so wish. The power I stole from the elves should keep them at bay for as long as these walls stand, whether I live or not.”
If Psander was expecting gratitude, she did not get it. The villagers only shook their heads at each other, and Ketsa said, “We won’t be staying.” After that, Atella went to put her children to bed, and the others dispersed.
“Well,” Psander said, “at least that’s at an end. I don’t expect they’ll be of much use now. We shall have to transfer the library ourselves.”
“Will you pay me for my services?” Hunter asked.
“Excuse me?”
He took a deep breath. “The scroll I saved.”
“Ah, yes. For Phaedra. That will have to wait until after the library is transferred. The recovery will take weeks.”
Hunter shook his head. “No. You can’t do that to me. What if there’s never time?”
“Then perhaps Phaedra can perform the procedure herself.”
“Could she?”
After a long silence, Psander finally shook her head. “No, probably not. She doesn’t have the experience, and there are bound to be terms in that scroll that I haven’t taught her. Even if she could piece it all together, it would take years.”
“Then please. You carried all those books here somehow before you knew us; you must have a way of moving them without me.”
“Yes, but I was younger, and it was still supremely exhausting.”
“You have a court’s-worth of elf magic to work with now.”
Psander sighed. “Oh, very well then. Bring me the scroll. But give me a few days to study it, and in the meantime commence the work of bringing all the food stores to this room so that the books can be transferred to the store rooms in the cellar. Even with all this new magic at my command, I cannot be completely without your labor.”
Hunter wondered how true that was, but he said nothing. The important thing was that she had agreed to help him.
Now all he needed was the strength to go through with it.
Three days later, his muscles aching from the work of carrying books and barrels, sacks and casks, Hunter stood before Psander, trying to steel himself for what lay ahead. The stone table she had once had in her workshop was still outside, buried somewhere in the remains of the tower’s top stories, so instead Psander was busy “anchoring” the wooden table in her library so it wouldn’t move if he… thrashed, or something. Gods, why was he going through with this?
Because he wanted Phaedra, that was why.
Psander’s library was a place of aloof majesty no more: the shelves were bare, their contents stacked in enormous piles all across the floor. Pyramids of scroll cases, flanked by towers of codices to keep them from collapsing, stood as strange monuments to Psander’s success as a collector. Not for the first time, Hunter wondered how Psander had transported all these books in the years before she built the fortress.
�
�You’re ready?”
Hunter nodded. “Yes.”
“You realize, this will likely be quite painful. The scroll names two spells for easing the pain but does not describe either. All the elf-magic at my disposal cannot help with that – it can only hold you in place while I work. Do not be surprised if the pain is more than what you bargained for.”
“I understand.”
“You will also have to pull up that tunic.”
Yes, of course. Hunter had known as much, but there was such a difference between knowing and doing. There was no part of his choice that didn’t make Hunter feel intensely vulnerable, but the fact that he would be exposing himself to Psander was among the worst.
“This should be stable now,” Psander said, giving the table a pat. “When you’re ready.”
Hunter closed his eyes, took a deep breath, shuddered. At last, he climbed onto the wooden table and lay down. At least it wasn’t cold, as the stone one would have been. With an uncomfortable tug, he pulled up his tunic.
Psander said nothing, absent Gods be thanked, only placed the scroll beside his left leg, weighed it down with a pair of stones, and proceeded with her preparations. He felt something brush his leg and tried to sit up but found that the air around him had solidified into a barrier. When Psander raised his knees with her hands and pushed his legs out of her way, the barrier let her through and then hardened immediately once she had let go. Hunter winced and squeezed his eyes shut. This was going to be awful.
He felt Psander’s hands working, shifting him about, pinching and pulling back on his most sensitive skin, shaving him with a razor – and then a sudden sharp scratch, followed closely by a sensation of wetness. He wondered at first if she had cut him with the razor, if he was bleeding, but then that horrible scratching returned accompanied by a tickling to his leg, and he realized that she was drawing on him with a quill.
“Please,” he gasped. “Just… be careful.”
Psander ignored him and kept up her scratching, pausing now and then to dip her pen in the ink or, worse, to blow on him so that it would dry faster. He hoped she finished with this part quickly.
He soon had reason to regret that thought. With a sudden, swift motion, Psander pinched his nether skin with both hands and pulled it open. The pain shot up his legs and back, an unbearable white-hot sensation that banished all thought from his mind. His body pressed against the barrier of elf magic, trying to protect itself. His teeth clenched until his jaw hurt, and his voice strained in his throat. He thought he would vomit.
Psander was still manipulating him with her fingers, humming to herself as she did so. Then, with a click of her tongue, she somehow closed him up again. He could feel his skin mending itself, and the pain lessened considerably, though it did not vanish. There were tears in Hunter’s eyes. He thought he smelled burning.
“Good,” Psander said. “That’s one.”
Hunter didn’t even have time to plead with her before the pain returned, this time on the other side. “Two” was just as horrible as “one,” but, thankfully, just as fast. Within a minute or two, Psander had finished her work and was rolling up her scroll again.
“You can move now,” she said.
Hunter moaned. “It’s over?”
The wizard smirked and wiped her hands on a rag. “Unless you have a third testicle hidden somewhere.”
Hunter wiped his eyes with his sleeve and sat up tentatively. He felt like he had been kicked between the legs, and the searing pain of her spell, though no longer debilitating, still echoed there. He braved a look at the site, dreading what he would see. The scars were a good deal smaller than he’d imagined. They were still cuts, really, and had yet to fully close, but though they glistened they were not bleeding. That was something, then.
“Well,” Psander said, “I must admit I never thought I would use that scroll. I ought to thank you for the opportunity. That went quite well.”
Hunter nodded dumbly and eased himself off the table, surprised that he could still move. The tunic fell down over his loins again as he stumbled away from her, walking with his legs as far apart as possible. That helped a little – he could certainly do without chafing – but he felt he needed pressure too. The scroll had suggested a tight loin cloth, but he didn’t know how to tie one.
“It says not to do anything strenuous for two weeks,” Psander called after him.
“I know,” he said. “I read it.”
He navigated the stairs as carefully as he could, feeling swollen and bruised. When he reached his straw mattress, tucked in between sacks of wheat on the floor of the great hall, he collapsed onto it with a groan. They were all sleeping down here now, judging it the safest room in the face of the next quake and the one after that. Hunter curled up on his mattress, drew his linens around him, and shut his eyes.
Well, Phaedra, it’s done. Now all we have to do is survive.
32
Kilion Highservant
Kilion sat quietly in his chair, stunned by what Phaedra had told him. At first, he had thought there must be some mistake. How could it be that he, Kilion son of Hessina, would be a witness to the world’s end? If all this was true, why would God Most High elevate his line, his mother’s line, to the high priesthood, and not even tell them?
But of course, He was telling them. He had sent a trusted servant across a continent, an ocean, and a barrier of worlds, so that she might come to this place bearing this news. That the Lord Above had chosen to send His message this way, rather than in a dream or revelation, was irrelevant. It stung a bit, knowing that his God had not seen fit to honor Kilion with this directly, but if Kilion had learned anything from his mother,it was that pride was for other people.
He had grown up in the shadow of his dead siblings. A scrawny, sickly teen at the time of the purge, he had hidden with his mother when the Red Priest came, while his older brothers and sisters died fighting. At every moment of triumph that he could remember, his mother had grown wistful, wondering what they and their children might have achieved had they not been cut down. He had wondered right along with her, sure that whatever he could accomplish, they would have done better.
He still felt that way sometimes.
Kilion knew that for all his learning, for all his thought and insight, for all his skill as a priest and a leader, he had received the high priesthood by default and not for his merits. His wife called that humility; he called it honesty.
Mother had known it as well as he did. Even on her deathbed, her eyes shut against the struggle of dying, Hessina had squeezed his hand and said, “Don’t be too proud of yourself. It shouldn’t be any accomplishment for a man to outlive his mother.”
Kilion had learned to accept that achievement and merit were two different things, and he had tried to teach that wisdom to his children and let them know that he would love and support them regardless of what they achieved.
He worried that Malkon might have learned the lesson too well. The boy – no, he was a man now – reveled in his position, and rarely tried his hardest at anything. Vella, in the meantime, had cast all her family’s standing aside and was trying to live on love alone. He respected that decision, but worried about the future. Whatever his successes as high priest, he had failed to raise a suitable heir.
But here was this angel, this messenger from God Most High, telling him that no heir would be needed, that the world in its current form would soon end and the time of repentance was at hand. It was not the relief from his concerns that he had hoped for.
Criton was arguing with Phaedra over the best way to avoid the disaster. “We have to cut down the Yarek,” he said. “If it’s weak enough, it won’t be able to pull our worlds together anymore. I’ll raise an army of axmen, and–”
“That won’t work,” Phaedra interrupted. “Castle Illweather went and ate all its elves, and the Yarek here is at least as strong. It’ll just kill your axmen and use the lot of you as fertilizer.”
“I’ve beaten Illweather before
. I think we ought to try. And if the Yarek kills us, let that be my sacrifice to save the rest. It’s my fault we went looking for Salemis in the first place – if God Most High is ready to end our world over its selfishness, then let me be the one to pay for its redemption!”
The wizard Phaedra shook her head. “No, Criton, this isn’t about us.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To learn the Dragon Touched prayers of repentance. I don’t think it’s enough for all of us to repent, when it’s not just about us. It’s about our whole world, and the Lower Gods, and more than anything, the Yarek. It’s the one that fought God Most High; I don’t think we can save this world without it. My plan is to ask the Yarek to repent for its war against our God so long ago. If it’s willing, I’m hoping to teach it a prayer spell.”
Criton scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. You’re telling me it makes sense to let the Yarek unify and just hope it won’t wage war against God Most High again? The Lower Gods are like rebellious children to Him, but the Yarek is God Most High’s enemy. I don’t like any plan that makes it stronger.”
“Psander and I tried weakening the connections between the worlds, and it didn’t work. We saw Illweather’s growth with our own eyes – nothing’s going to stop the Yarek from pulling our worlds together, Criton. But if we can combine the worlds peacefully, and convince the Yarek to repent rather than fight God Most High again, we can save this world and make it better.”
Criton turned to Kilion. “Tell Phaedra she’s lost her mind.”
Kilion looked from one to the other, both so certain that they were right. “Ancient prophecy tells us that our repentance can help bring the day when God Most High will destroy the Yarek. It says nothing of teaching the Yarek to repent.”
“A prophet named Salemis came to us not fifteen years ago,” Phaedra answered, “and he told me and Criton that God Most High had grown more merciful. So I understand your position, but a prophecy is just a message, and we have a more recent message to suggest that our God is willing to change His mind.”