by Sarah Zettel
“There must be another way.” Medeoan stalked to the darkest corner of the room. “Another person to use. It does not have to be Mikkel.”
I called to your son, the Firebird had said. He almost heard me. She closed her eyes against that memory.
“If you so order, Grand Majesty,” said Kalami behind her. “But I ask you, if he lives, can you ever free Mikkel? Will the lords master and oblasts understand your need, the empire’s need, if he speaks of what was done?”
Medeoan opened her eyes again and saw stone and shadow. That was all she wanted: dark stone and cool shadow. How had she come to this? How had she come to be this person? It was Hastinapura, and it was Hung-Tse. They had robbed her of everything. Now they would take her only son, and if she could not sacrifice him, then they would take her empire. For Kalami was right again. The opportunists among the lords master would twist what she had done. She could try to bind Mikkel’s thoughts on this matter, tie a knot in his memory of the events leading to his enchantment, but such things took a delicacy of skill that she was no longer certain she possessed. Kalami might to be able to do it, or Bridget, once she was properly taught. But such a spell must constantly be renewed as the subject grew and changed. Then there was the greatest truth of all sorcery: any spell that could be woven could be broken.
Medeoan turned to face Kalami, but did not step out of the shelter of the cool stones and the shadows. “There is a locked chest in the treasury. My father showed it to me when I was a girl. There is in it a pair of white linen sheets. They may serve our need in this.” She reached for her bundle of keys and sorted through them, removing two from the ring. The first was a great key of twisted iron, which she kissed. The other was small and silver. She it touched to the iron key and then kissed it.
“Your hands may hold these now,” she said, extending them to Kalami. “Bring them back when you have retrieved the linens.” Kalami took the keys and reverenced. “They are bound in a red ribbon. Be careful you do not break it.”
“All shall be as you say, Grand Majesty.” Kalami reverenced once more, and Medeoan dismissed him with a wave.
Even when he had left, she stayed where she was as if the faint shadows in this corner could hide her from what she was about to do.
It was either extremely fitting or monstrously perverse that Kalami should be the one to counsel her that she must see Mikkel to his death. Kalami had been the one who enabled her to give him life.
“I must have an heir,” she had said to her three court sorcerers. “He must be of my blood. Isavalta must be ruled by one whose loyalties are undivided and who feels the power of their obligations in heart and bone.”
Her two men of Isavalta had shaken their heads. “There is no way in this world a mortal may interfere,” said the first; Ivramand had been his name. “If Vyshko and Vyshemir will not favor you …” He had spread his hands. “It is said that Avanasy fathered a child upon a woman from another shore of the Silent Lands. Perhaps a man could be found — ”
“And what blood would my child then have?” snapped Medeoan. “How would we know? No.”
“There is no way to change the nature of your flesh and spirit,” said the second, Nestroid. “You might perhaps make a bargain with the Baba Yaga …”
“No,” she had answered flatly. “There can be no bargains, not in this. This child must be mine alone and free of all other ties.”
Kalami had lifted his head. He had looked so strange to her then, a dark man in her fair court, a pair of black eyes amid the blue. He was new to his post, a peace offering to the island of Tuukos, and she had not heard him speak six words together since he had taken the oath of loyalty to her.
“There is a way, Majesty,” he said quietly. “I can see this thing done.”
And he had given his first order to her, and she had obeyed, dismissing the other two sorcerers so that they might speak alone.
“You must pick a consort,” Kalami had said. “Marry him, and see the marriage consummated on the wedding night. In nine months, you will bear a son. But be aware, Majesty, that in those same nine months, your consort, whoever he may be, will fail and die.”
Medeoan remembered the calm with which she had heard those words. She had been surprised only at how willing she was to sacrifice a life for Isavalta.
“How is this?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “I know of no such charm.”
Kalami’s answering smile was thin. “It is not a thing of Isavalta’s learning. It is something I heard of on Tuukos. But if Your Majesty Imperial will trust me, you will have your son.”
Medeoan met his dark eyes and saw how steadily he stood. “If I choose a consort, he will be a man of high and noble birth,” she told him. “If he is to die, no suspicion must fall upon me, or you.”
Kalami did not blink or hesitate. “None will, Imperial Majesty. You have my word.”
So, she had married a second time. Jesif Osiprsyn Istokvin, lord master of Iesutbor oblast, had become the imperial consort. He had been a slender man with slender hands. Medeoan had long ago forgotten his face. The wedding night had been no trial, and all had been as Kalami promised. She had quickened, Mikkel had been safe delivered and Jesif had died after a long illness. Kalami had spent the time of Medeoan’s confinement making sure that a conspiracy between three other of the lords master on the Privy Council came to light. He even named the poison they had used to cause Jesif to sicken, but it was, of course, too late to save the consort’s life.
The three lords master were hanged from the walls of their own capitals. Medeoan searched her mind, and found she could not even recall their names. She had been holding Mikkel when news of their deaths had come, holding the future of Isavalta, and nothing else mattered.
A tear escaped her eye and trickled down her cheek. Forgive me, my son, she thought toward Mikkel. When you are whole in the Land of Death and Spirit, you will understand why I have done this, and you will forgive me.
• • •
Bridget awoke slowly. She heard a fire and smelled burning charcoal. She felt warmth on her skin, both the flickering heat of a blaze coming simultaneously from left and right and the soft, enveloping warmth of thick comforters and sheets.
And she heard things. The crackle of the fire, a distant whistling of wind, the creaking and settling of wood.
She did not open her eyes yet. She feared she might see foxes. After the crows had come, she had dreamed of foxes, huge and hairy, smelling rank, with green eyes and sharp teeth, and blood. They had bled, those foxes, and she had darned them with a needle and thread like a set of old socks.
Strange dreams. Frightening dreams. She wanted no more of them. She wanted to be home in the keeper’s quarters and wake to the glow of the light and the familiar dangers of Lake Superior.
But if you don’t want dreams, some distant, reasoning part of herself asked, why are you afraid to open your eyes?
“It’s all right, Bridget,” said a gentle voice beside her. “You can wake up. You are safe, I swear it.”
The light beyond her eyelids grew stronger, and the thought of retreating back into darkness, even the darkness inside her, became unbearable. Bridget forced her eyes open.
She lay on her back, staring up at a canopy of rich blue velvet supported by four posts each as thick around as her own waist. Carved and painted screens surrounded the bed, preventing her from seeing the rest of the room. The heat came from four braziers blazing with bright fires. More blue velvet covered her, and feather pillows and mattresses supported her. It was a queen’s bed. An empress’s.
That thought opened Bridget’s mind wide and all her memories raced back to her so quickly she gasped in pain. The crows were real, as were the foxes, and the things Sakra had said about her mother, and the way she had danced herself to freedom, and the feelings that overwhelmed her as she stitched the men’s skins closed, knowing all the time she was sewing foxes inside those living skins and yet reveling in her own power to do so …
“Easy,
Bridget, easy. You are safe.”
Hands grasped her shoulders and turned her until Bridget faced Valin.
“You have had a difficult journey but it is over,” he said, holding her firmly with both his hands and his gaze. “You are in the imperial palace of Vyshtavos now, and you are safe.”
Bridget swallowed with difficulty. Her throat was painfully dry. “Am I?” she croaked. “Are you sure?” She felt like a fool and a child, but she could not stop the question.
“I swear.” Kalami handed her a wooden tumbler of water and Bridget drank gratefully. “You are surrounded by stone and iron. I am with you. You are safe.”
“Even from what I seem to be carrying inside me?” she asked with a shaky laugh. “Can you swear to that as well?”
Kalami’s smile was gentle. “The only reason you are not safe from yourself is that you are not trained.” He ran his fingers along the edge of the velvet coverlet. “You have lived all your life weighted down by chains so you could not know your own strength. Now that you are free, you feel it, but you do not understand it. With understanding will come control, and you will see you have nothing to fear from yourself.”
Bridget looked away, sorting through the swirl of memories, trying to put each one in its place; the impossible things she had done and seen, the equally impossible things she had heard.
“How are you feeling?” asked Valin.
Bridget bit back a short laugh. It was a simple question, for which she had no simple answer. She decided to concentrate on the physical.
“Tired, but otherwise well. I think.” She had no pain, certainly. All her limbs seemed to be in their proper arrangement.
“Tell me what happened to you, Bridget, after we lost you.”
Bridget faced him again, and blinked. Her vision was strangely blurred. She seemed to see a reflection of Valin’s face lying on top of the real face. The reflection turned his smile into a scowl, and furrowed his broad brow with impatience. She blinked again, and the reflection was gone.
A trick of the fire and candles, she tried to tell herself, but her mind refused to be convinced.
“Tell me, Bridget,” he urged, touching her hand. Obviously, he took her hesitation as unwillingness to talk about something unpleasant. His skin was smooth, she noted, unroughened by work, unlike Sakra’s.
Why am I thinking of him now? Bridget shook her head.
“Please, I need to know,” said Valin, once again misreading her.
“No … that is I …” Feeling absurd, Bridget waved away his words and hers. “Of course I’ll tell you.” And perhaps, for a change, you will tell me something useful.
The sharpness of the thought surprised her, but Bridget was accustomed to trusting her own mind. She did not want to believe Valin had been playing her false, especially as she had placed herself entirely in his hands; but he had not been truly open with her either, that much was plain. Fear, useless and cold, quivered inside her.
He saved your life, she reminded herself. He did not abandon you to the foxes and the crows. He needs you. If nothing else, he will keep you safe.
So, as best she could, she told him how the dwarf-crows had carried her through the frozen wood to Sakra’s refuge. She watched fury darken his face as she told him of the truth spell laid on her, and how she had danced herself an escape. Fury changed to amazement, and then to concern, as she talked about waking up in the land of the foxes and how she had healed the three wounded creatures.
When she finished, much to her surprise, Valin reached out one trembling hand and brushed it softly against her unbound hair. “You are so wondrous,” he murmured. “Your power is like nothing else.”
Bridget bridled at the familiarity of the gesture. “I’m glad you’re pleased,” she said tartly, pushing herself up higher on the pillows. “I should hope you would find me as advertised.”
Either the words or their tone brought Valin back to himself. He removed his hand quickly. “You don’t understand … you …” He got to his feet and paced along the side of the bed, searching for words.
“Listen to me,” he said, laying one hand against the bedpost. “You have seen magic worked. You know that in order to take shape, the raw power must be bound by a weaving, or a knot, some sort of tangible pattern. You understand this?”
Bridget nodded.
He folded his hands behind his back, tapping one against the other, a gesture of nervousness or impatience, Bridget couldn’t tell which. “The complexity of the spell, and the amount of power that can be bound, greatly depends on the materials chosen and the skill of the sorcerer.” His mouth stretched into a sardonic smile. “Any fool with a glimmer of power and a modicum of patience can make a spell from thread or rope, or even clay. The most difficult spells to work are those that require one of the hardest elements, such as metal or stone, or the most ineffable, such as fire or air.” He spread his hands. “What you did in freeing yourself from Sakra was to weave a pattern from nothing but the air around you, without even smoke or flame to help you bind the power you called forth. It is something only the most legendary of sorcerers can do. I’ve never even seen it. To do such a thing without training or preparation …” He shook his head. “I would have said it was impossible.”
The sheer wonder in his voice as he spoke took Bridget aback. It also, she was ashamed to admit, touched her vanity.
Ridiculous. To be pleased over something you did not understand and could not control. But there it was.
“So,” she said, smoothing down her covers. “You are pleased with me?”
“Pleased?” Valin choked on the word. “Bridget …” He stepped close beside her, and lifted his hand as if he meant to take hers, but he hesitated. “Bridget, when I found you, I expected power, and I knew beauty, but such courage and such a wellspring of soul …” Words failed him and his hand dipped closer to hers, but he caught himself before his fingertips could do more than brush against her. Instead, he held her with his deep, black eyes. “You are incomparable. I could never have dreamed of meeting such a one as you.”
Bridget felt her cheeks begin to heat up, and turned her face swiftly away. His words worked their way inside her, down through the blankets of resolve, usefulness, and cold guilt, into the core of loneliness that they covered. It had been so very long since anyone had spoken to her with admiration in their voice, or touched her with any kind of tenderness. Her throat tightened around the sudden ache of longing that sprang up in her. She wanted him to take her hand, to touch her face, to tell her again of her beauty and her courage. She wanted …
Other memories came then. Memories of staring out across Lake Superior, searching the empty horizon for Asa’s sail. Days of feeling her belly grow with the fruit of that secret tenderness, of all the shame, and the misery and trying to hold on to the rock-hard certainty that Asa did love her, that he would come back for her and their baby, and all the desperate fear that he would not.
And still she wanted someone to touch her again as he had, to whisper to her as he had and draw her close.
She closed her eyes against all her wants. Long practice gave her the strength to draw them back down into her deepest self.
“What of the things Sakra said about my mother?” she asked. “And what I have heard of this person Avanasy?”
At this, Valin sighed and hung his head. “Ah. The legend of Avanasy and his lost child returns.” When he looked up, he was smiling fondly. “This is the way of it. Avanasy was a great sorcerer. He was, in fact, the teacher of the dowager empress, and as great in his loyalty to her as he was in his learning and skills.” His eyes grew distant, remembering and regretting.
“My mistress imperial ascended the throne while still in her youth. Both her parents were taken suddenly ill and died within days of each other. Some say it was nothing but an infectious fever. Some say it was poison. I don’t believe anyone knows.
“But Hung-Tse, our southern enemy, saw an innocent young girl ascend to the throne and they thought the time r
ipe for conquest. They sent spies to infiltrate the Isavaltan court. These spies kidnapped Medeoan and spirited her away to their imperial city, which they are pleased to call the Heart of the World, and they began plans for their invasion.
“While all was in confusion among the Isavaltan nobles, Avanasy set forth in search of the empress, and indeed, he found her, and between their two powers, they succeeded in freeing her.
“Now, the Nine Elders, the nine sorcerers who rule Hung-Tse with their puppet emperor, knew they could not defeat Isavalta in an honest war, so they decided to call up one of the great spirit powers of this world and let it loose to do what damage it could before they hazarded their soldiers’ lives on the battlefield.”
“A spirit power?” said Bridget. “Like the Vixen?”
Valin nodded. “The Vixen is one such. There are many. The one the Nine Elders summoned was the Phoenix, in Isavalta called the Firebird, an immortal bird of flame and magic.”
Bridget nodded. “We have stories of such things at home.”
“Then you can imagine the danger.” Valin perched on the edge of the bed. “Most of Isavalta’s cities are built of wood. What if it set the capital ablaze? What if it burned the fields? Or the supply trains of the armies?
“Medeoan and Avanasy were hiding in a friendly port city, gathering intelligence about the situation in Isavalta, and planning their strategies as to how to return Medeoan to her throne. They received word of the Nine Elders’ treachery, and hastened to return. When they did, they worked a mighty spell and wrought a cage for the immortal bird, trapping it inside.” Valin sounded awestruck at the very idea. Bridget’s imagination showed her a glowing red and gold bird inside a filigree cage, and she shivered at the power of the image. She had seen such a thing before, but she had seen so much recently she could not remember where the fiery bird had been.
Valin shook himself and brought his attention back to Bridget. “But in the making of that spell, Avanasy lost his life.” Valin bowed his head. “I honor the memory of so brave a servant of my mistress. But,” he said, his fond smile returning, “as you may imagine, many legends spring up around such a hero. One of the most persistent is that to gain the secret of how to cage the Phoenix, Avanasy traveled beyond the ends of the Land of Death and Spirit to another mortal world. There, he courted a sorceress of extreme power and beauty, who gave him the secret he needed. In return, he is said to have given her a child. That child is supposed to be living somewhere, waiting for a time of great need for Isavalta when it will return and save us all, as its father did.”