by Terah Edun
Raisa studied him quietly. “We shall see, princeling, we shall see. Humans have a way of…surprising you. My people can only hope your awakening as ruler will be a positive one.”
Sebastian blinked but simply said, “We can all hope for a better future.”
Thanar said with a bit of bite, “Anything’s more appealing than a madman, yes?”
Ciardis coughed.
But Sebastian said, “Well, there is that. When I ascend the throne, there’s no better way to rule than by doing the opposite of what Maradian did, then?”
Raisa gave him a sharp look while Ciardis muttered, “Try convincing the courts of that.”
“And your sheep of a public,” Thanar said blithely.
Sebastian sighed. “Yes, the court of public opinion, pun intended, will be a hard one.”
“One I’m sure you will be a practical charmer with,” Raisa said in a cutting tone. “My doubts don’t lie in your personal nature, Prince Heir Sebastian. You’ve proven yourself a formidable opponent who can attract the talents of many individuals heretofore seen as…undesirables.”
Ciardis stiffened and objected, “Hey!”
Thanar snorted. “Undesirables, huh? That’s the politest way I’ve ever heard someone reference my background and history.”
Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Do go on, Ambassador. Please.”
Raisa continued, unperturbed, “But beyond your core cohort, you have also found unrelenting enemies. It is those enemies and, even worse, those individuals, with no foundational opinion of you who you will have to rally to your cause. In the face of a public enamored with a previous ruler and incognizant of said ruler’s faults.”
Ciardis said, “Maradian was a monster.”
Raisa replied, “To you. But to his people, he was an average ruler. Neither outlandishly benevolent nor tyrannical in a practical sense. He lived in his palace by the sea and their day-to-day lives were not affected.”
Thanar said slowly, “I was locked away for some time, but I do believe the ambassador is correct. Your people, Sebastian, saw neither feast nor famine. Their corresponding opinion of the Emperor who presided over such a…idyllic period will certainly have been good.”
Sebastian said, “I am aware of my people’s perceptions of their Emperor. For a long time, I, too, held those same perceptions. It wasn’t until the veil was lifted from my eyes, sometimes repeatedly—” he looked directly at Ciardis Weathervane “—that I was shown the light, so to speak.”
Feeling compelled to speak, Ciardis said, “But of things you’ve seen. Things you’ve awakened to…”
She couldn’t go on.
Thanar finished her unspoken thought. “Are unfit for the public gaze. Whether they be political torture or contracted murders, some things should stay in the shadows.”
Sebastian raised his chin in challenge. “Like a certain Empress’s ley-line scheme during the civil wars?”
Thanar gave him a brittle smile. “Nice analogy, princeling, but it doesn’t really work here. What’s good for the empire, is good for the public. Anything to avert or end a war will be seen as beneficial in your people’s eyes. It’s the cloak-and-dagger maneuvers, the literal bloody deaths in alleyways that you cannot reveal.”
Sebastian’s face went neutral. “Then it seems I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
Voice resolute, Ciardis stepped forward and squeezed the prince heir’s hanging hand. “We’re in between a rock and a hard place.”
Sebastian slowly curled his fingers around hers as the dawn rays broke through the windows of the palace bedroom. “I could think of no one better to have by my side, my Lady Companion.”
Ciardis gave him a smile that said he had done well. Quite well.
30
Raisa shifted her hand so her fingertips no longer just grazed the edge where the mirror’s glass met the frame. Instead, they pressed into it and then through it—almost as if the glass were water and that water was being displaced in ripples. Then waves.
Ciardis watched with mild fascination, expecting the “show” to be over shortly. Raisa was a dragon, after all, and gate or not, it was still essentially a simple door.
A door that needed to be shut.
A nagging feeling flitted at the edge of the Weathervane’s mind.
A feeling that this reminded her of something or someone. The buzzing grew and became persistent and she realized it was tied to the same feeling she’d felt during Amani’s attack, but worse than that…it went even deeper into her past. It touched something just on the edge of her memories.
Ciardis’s arms crossed uneasily over her chest, but she didn’t want to break anyone’s concentration, especially Raisa’s, by speaking up. She didn’t have anything to speak up about. A feeling, an itch even, wasn’t a reason. It was a distraction.
So she shook it off.
Even as her mind went back to another time.
As Raisa did her work, Ciardis’s memories took her back to a scene she had long since forgotten—back to when she had watched another dangerously deceptive female mage work wonders with magic.
That time, it had been Vana and a purple-tipped spear.
She used her power like a weapon, Ciardis mused. It was when she broke into that boy’s mind in Ameles, I think.
Then Ciardis paused and really remembered, No, it was after that. After we found Barren.
Lord Meres Kinsight flashed into Ciardis’s mind, in memories so bright she felt as if this had happened yesterday instead of years ago.
“…he could be shadow-touched,” Meres had said grimly.
As they all watched the ambassador attend to her magic in real time, Raisa slowly drew her hand back from the mirror. The tips of her claws were pressed together tightly. Almost as close as one would have them when drawing a thread through the eye of a needle.
Ciardis narrowed her own gaze.
“A dark thread,” said Thanar in an appreciative murmur beside them.
He was standing as close to Raisa as Ciardis and Sebastian were. His attention just as rapt.
Though, Ciardis thought dryly, for an altogether different reason.
Thanar watched the dragon’s magic like a snake eyeing a field mouse that had wandered into its reach. Poised to strike. Poised to devour.
It would have been unsettling if so much wasn’t already at stake.
Deciding she was losing more concentration by not knowing what she was looking at than she would have by asking questions, Ciardis pitched her voice low to the daemoni prince. “Thanar?”
She could have asked him an actual question mind-to-mind but it was hard to form a question and not let him know just how clueless she felt mentally. So she spoke aloud and he already knew what she wanted. That wasn’t a benefit of the bond, though. Just common sense.
“It’s murdith,” Thanar said softly.
Ciardis heard rather than felt Sebastian shift his feet so he could better be a part of their conversation.
Thanar didn’t acknowledge him. Neither did Ciardis.
She wasn’t ignoring the prince heir per se, but she had learned that dividing her attention between the two when she wanted a specific thing from one of them was a foolish measure. Especially when Thanar held the card, and in this case the answers, to what she sought.
“The dark tendrils coming off her hands like moon vines uncurling toward their celestial benefactor,” Thanar said in a voice so low, she had to lean toward him to hear.
“Those are murdith?” she asked quietly as they watched the suspenseful drama playing out before them.
The vines, the murdith, danced on the edges of Raisa’s claws like puppets on strings.
Ciardis watched, fascinated, as the very concept of the murdith seemed to change with each passing moment. First they were straight and silky. Then they curled in on themselves like springs and blossomed with spikes. After lazily looping back and forth between Raisa’s fingers, they started their reformation all over again.
&nbs
p; The only thing that stayed the same was their placement on Raisa’s fingertips, though calling them that was generous, in Ciardis’s opinion. Right now the edges of the ambassador’s hands looked sharper than a serrated blade’s edge and far too deadly for someone who professed to be on a mission of peace and representation from her home empire.
Ciardis must have said something or cursed lightly, because Sebastian caught her eye and his lips twitched into a commiserating smile.
“Scary, isn’t it?” the prince heir said with a quirk of his eyebrow.
Ciardis shook her head and said in agreement, “Terrifying.”
But she didn’t move away.
And neither did he.
They’d long since learned that some of their most loyal allies were also some of the scariest mages imaginable…as well as some of the darkest.
Some things you got used to.
Some you didn’t.
This, for now, was one of the former.
Raisa jerked her fingers once in unison and the dark, inky murdith that had curled around her hand like a favorite cat jumped off and straight into the mirror.
They hit the glass like lances but didn’t shatter it.
Instead, they sunk into its depths, as smoothly as Raisa’s fingers had gone in before them.
It reminded Ciardis of the man she’d confronted after Barren’s mind had given up his secrets.
Shadow-touched, Ciardis thought as she watched a female who in her mind was not unlike Lady Vana Cloudbreaker do something that reminded Ciardis of a melding of the powers between two very different mages. One dark. One evil.
Which begged the question—on which end of the spectrum did the dragons lie?
And why was this one expending those magical efforts on an empire that did not call her a child of its own?
Memories rose as Ciardis recalled Vana standing over the boy as a voice exclaimed, “He could be shadow-touched.”
Then as now, she was watching a woman and a mage who was secretive, with darker layers than one imagined when first looking, but who also had proven herself to be capable of layers of loyalty.
Ciardis didn’t want to question that loyalty.
Although, to be honest, she had to query deep inside herself as to exactly what loyalties a powerful and wealthy dragon could have to a laundress who’d grown up an orphan of her small village.
Again the Weathervane’s mind flashed to Ameles. Vana sweeping the feet out from under a young boy with a clean kick.
His body having spasms in the assassin’s lap as she unlocked his mind with a brute force key.
But she had his permission, she consoled herself. But Ciardis Weathervane didn’t forget that permission could be given, consent could be given, by an individual who had not a clue what they were truly in for. It wasn’t that Barren had greatly trusted Vana as far as Ciardis could remember. It was that he would have done anything to protect his people, the people of the forest.
Ciardis recognized that sense of fatal self-destruction in herself as well. Like a tiny fire that grew ever slowly over time. It didn’t let her rest. It was unrelenting.
Her jaw tightened.
She couldn’t remember whether or not that fire, that passion, had led to Barren’s death.
Taking a deep breath, Ciardis counted to three, then slowly released it.
Closing her eyes briefly, she thought, Let’s find out.
She kept returning to her memories. Refusing to give up on a boy who had sacrificed his own mental wellbeing in the service of his people, his family. The least she could do in this scenario, in the seemingly endless time between one breath and the next…was remember him.
So she did.
Ciardis Weathervane stilled her mind and her heart.
She remembered everything.
They had stood in front of a golden barrier streaked with darkest strips of black that moved in waves.
When Ciardis had turned to Vana beside her, she remembered then what Vana had said. “The Shadow Mage can’t hide that his presence has been here—not while we stand so near Barren’s mage core.”
Ciardis didn’t have to wonder why that tidbit was important. It just was.
It showed that a mage could hide within the depths of another mage. Within that person’s very mage core. She hadn’t forgotten that bit of information, necessarily; it just hadn’t shown itself as highly relevant again in her life…until now.
Ciardis stuck to her instincts. If something was telling her that the memory was important, she had to trust that it was. So she pushed harder. Harder for more memories. Harder for more insight.
She remembered watching Vana swoop and dance, tumble and fall as she combated the Shadow Mage’s presence. And she won.
Well, that’s good, Ciardis thought in relief. That’s good. She may have had trouble but she overcame it.
And quite frankly…Vana had seemed like she was far more outmatched at that time than Raisa was even coming close to appearing. The dragon clearly had the upper hand out of these two situations.
As Ciardis’s heart stopped racing, she had to wonder what had made her so uneasy.
And then she suddenly understood.
It wasn’t that the Shadow Mage had fought the aggressor from so far away. It was the fact he’d done it while simultaneously trying to shut down Barren’s mind.
To kill him like a farmer snapped a lame horse’s neck.
Because he could.
Because he would have killed Vana and Ciardis in the process from the backlash alone.
Being in a mage’s mind as it died was not something Ciardis had heard of many surviving. She and Vana certainly wouldn’t have at that time. But Vana had beat him.
Even as Vana fought, though, the walls of the magic surrounding them had pulsed fiercely—a tremor Vana had seen in many mages just before they crumpled to the ground with their hearts beating erratically in their chests. Dead in the next moment.
As her heartbeat picked back up, Ciardis had to wonder if Raisa was aware of just how much danger she was in. Because if a mage could kill another mage through a mental truss, what could they do to one through a simple, inanimate object? And if the connection between the shadow mage and this darkness was real…were did that put the goddess who was coming to end all of their lives in this web of evil?
As she reopened her eyes with a suddenly dry mouth and a sense of foreboding in her gut, Ciardis stared at the ambassador who was opening a gate to what looked like the seventh dimension. Raisa was clearly exuding power and concentration before her. She was also exuding effort. So much so that Ciardis Weathervane wondered just how long she could keep this up. How long before her draconic-magic well ran dry?
Did dragons even have finite stores of magic like humans did?
Where did all of Raisa’s power come from?
Those were just some of the questions at the top of Ciardis’s mind, but as she remembered Barren’s sacrifice, she also had to wonder how Raisa was benefitting from this. Barren had saved his people from a Shadow Mage. Ciardis wanted to save her empire from destruction by a vengeful god. But Raisa? The dragon had no stake in this situation. The gods, as far as Ciardis knew, had no wrathful vendetta against the dragons. She had to wonder if they could even cross the seas, being not so much living beings made of magic like the dragons who still had difficulties with the voyage, but actual embodiments of pure energy.
The type of energy that would be torn apart in the swift mage currents that drifted over the ocean like treacherous undercurrents and would trap any unwary mage in their grasp. Hence the reason few other than dragons, and even they did it sparsely, traveled across oceans. Hence the need for Kasten ships.
It made Ciardis wonder what the dragon who so often stood at her side, who even bent the rules for their tête-à-têtes, was getting from the relationship. It made her wonder what the dragon who called her sarin had in store—for Ciardis…and for them all.
She would be a fool not to wonder.
But she would be even more of a fool to interrupt a mage at work.
So Ciardis Weathervane quieted her thoughts and cleared her consciousness.
She’d been doing a lot of that lately.
“I can’t warn her if I don’t know what to warn her about,” she half snapped to herself under her breath.
She tried to find the key. It wasn’t just in the direct memories of what she had faced alongside Vana while in the boy Barren’s mind. It was hidden.
Hidden in the shadows and the crevices of the darkness that had tried to overpower an assassin who at the time Ciardis had thought was unbeatable at the time. It was whispering like a promise as the Shadow Mage’s tendrils crept like snakes through the forests, and from behind fallen alley doors, and between pedestrians’ hurrying feet.
A mouse scurrying into a trap.
A snake ready to launch its vicious fangs.
And suddenly, like a shock—Ciardis knew.
She surged up out of her mental depths faster than she ever had before.
She felt charged with power. With lightning. With purpose.
But when she emerged, it was already too late.
The palace was falling apart around her.
Again.
And just as before, Ciardis Weathervane had managed to get a front row seat to the festivities.
It’s just my lucky day, she thought.
By the time Ciardis snapped out of her memories, she had begun to feel a hum. But it wasn’t coming from anyone’s throat.
The very palace was vibrating, or at least the room around them was. As the Weathervane looked up and around with unease, she had to wonder what was next.
She hadn’t had much chance to actually take stock of her quarters, but the domed ceiling was losing patches of plaster as it quacked. Ciardis was fairly sure that was unnatural.
Head moving back and forth fast, Ciardis followed the spider crack that spread with astonishing speed up the wall and across the ceiling. A beautiful fresco was ruined in seconds.
She was wondering if now would be a good time to run and get out, when Raisa jerked her hand back out of the mirror. But her palm wasn’t empty this time.
Her fists gripped a black mass of twisting murdith like she was holding a whole nest of snakes.