by Jenna Glass
She bristled at the condescension, but he was, of course, right. Even if she’d grown up as a crown prince, given all the education that a potential heir to the throne might receive, she would still be a young and inexperienced sovereign. She might feel as if she’d sat on the throne for half her lifetime, but it had only been a little more than a year and a half, and for part of that time she had considered her reign temporary.
And yet even acknowledging her inexperience, she was sure she’d done the right thing. If Zarsha could have seen the look on his uncle’s face or heard his voice, he’d have known the man was not bluffing.
“I am the Queen of Rhozinolm,” she said quietly. “I made the only responsible decision I could make under the circumstances. If there is anything I can do to help your retainers—whether in an official capacity or not—I will not hesitate to do it. But the contracts are signed, and the wedding preparations will begin immediately. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, but if not…” She sighed heavily. “If not, then that is the price I will have to pay for defending my kingdom.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Iris stood hesitating on the rim of the Well, her hands shaking, for an eternity. Melcor scowled and loomed over her, growling, “What are you waiting for, woman?”
Mairah held her breath, for the moment of truth was almost upon her. Hope and terror waged war in her breast. Iris looked from one face to another, finally making eye contact with Mairah and making the guilt stab deeper.
Mairah tried for a soft, encouraging smile. “It will all be over soon,” she said gently. “You will long be remembered and revered for your heroism.”
Iris took a long, deep breath. Then, her spine straightened and the fear left her eyes. She smiled, and it was as though she had suddenly thrown off a mask. The frightened sacrifice who numbed her fear with drink vanished, replaced by a woman who was filled with strength and power despite her illness.
“You really don’t remember me, do you, Lord Melcor?” she asked with a shake of her head. Melcor frowned in puzzlement, and Iris chuckled. “No, of course you don’t, else you would never have dared to put a knife in my hand. You probably wouldn’t have recognized me even without the changes the wasting sickness has made. After all, you’ve savaged so many women of the Harbor District that you can hardly be expected to keep track.”
“W-what?” Melcor stammered, his eyes widening in alarm.
Mairah’s mouth went dry as it dawned on her that none of her visions had shown her exactly what was going to happen next. She’d seen the moments before the casting of the spell and after, but never the moment of truth itself. And right now, her sacrificial lamb did not look like she intended to play her assigned role.
Iris laughed, a hint of madness creeping into her voice. “I hardly dared to believe you were truly going to give me this opportunity,” she said, hefting the knife. “Unarmed and unguarded.” She sighed with what seemed like satisfaction, though Mairah thought there was still a hint of fear in her eyes.
“No!” Mairah cried, stepping forward just as Iris sprang. Behind her, she heard Delnamal’s shout of protest as well, but Iris ignored them both.
The knife slashed through the air. With a bleat of alarm, Melcor held his hands up in front of him and hastily tried to back away. Iris screamed like a vengeful demon. It seemed impossible that a woman so frail and sickly could attack with such ferocity. The knife cut into one of Melcor’s arms, and he couldn’t seem to help his instinctive need to pull away, leaving his chest momentarily unguarded.
Iris took advantage of the opening, plunging the knife into his chest and drawing a howl of agony.
“Melcor!” Delnamal yelled in distress, but he made no move to help his friend and secretary, standing indecisively on the other side of the low fence and flapping his arms about as if he could make it all go away.
Mairah was not at all unhappy to see Melcor in pain and bleeding heavily. It was actually convenient for her escape plan that Iris had already removed him as a threat. But she still needed that special Kai, for she was certain that Delnamal would blame her for this debacle even though it was Melcor himself who had obtained the sacrifice. She started forward once more, wondering if she could somehow convince Iris to go through with the sacrifice once Melcor was dead. It would be an easier death than whatever execution Delnamal would devise for her.
Melcor had recovered from the initial shock of being stabbed, and when Iris tried to plunge the knife in a second time, he caught her wrist. Blood drenched his doublet and had splashed over Iris’s clothes and face. His skin had gone nearly gray, and his knees seemed ready to give way beneath him, but he still had enough strength left to wrench Iris’s wrist so hard that the woman screeched in pain. The knife went flying from her hand, and she attempted to twist away from his grip.
Mairah watched in horror as Iris slipped in the splatters of blood at her feet and fell backward. Melcor, his hand still gripping her wrist, fell with her, his body crashing into hers. And sending them both, teetering, toward the edge of the Well.
Mairah reached out a hand helplessly, too far away to reach either one of them. Delnamal screamed a denial, though he had not moved from his place.
For one heartbeat, Mairah thought that it would be all right. Melcor finally let go of Iris’s wrist, and she thought they might both somehow regain their footing. But Iris fell, and with a scream of mingled fear and victory, she grabbed a handful of Melcor’s doublet and pulled him in after her.
“No!” Mairah and Delnamal both screamed together, for very different reasons. Mairah assumed Delnamal was lamenting the death of his friend and secretary, while also feeling sorry for himself because his plan to “cure” the Curse had gone so horribly wrong.
But Mairah remembered her vision of traveling through an Aaltah-turned-Wasteland, and she knew with a bitter certainty that this was what had caused it. She remembered the late Abbess of Aaltah explaining sacrificial Kai to her daughter, remembered her saying that masculine Kai—the death element—would poison the Well. And she knew with a bone-deep certainty that Melcor was powerful enough to generate Kai as he died, and that he was even now delivering that Kai into Aaltah’s Well.
Her plan had failed in the worst imaginable way. The vision had suggested that she could escape this cavern, but it had also shown her cowering in terror whenever she spotted another person. Delnamal might not be able to stop her from escaping, but he would be sure to tell all the world what she had done. There would be nowhere she could go where she would not be instantly recognized. How long could she survive slinking along in the bushes beside the road, diving for cover whenever another person came into view?
Women’s Well might have welcomed her back if she had temporarily disabled the people of Aaltah by closing their Mindseye, but even Aaltah’s greatest enemy would revile her if they believed her responsible for making a new Wasteland where a once great kingdom had stood.
Sobbing, Mairah turned to look at the cavern’s exit. Delnamal was standing stunned and ashen-faced on one side, and she was certain she could easily dart past him. The Well began to make a low, ominous rumbling noise, and beneath her feet, she felt a quiver. The tone of its low hum changed, deepening and somehow taking on a darker tone.
“No,” she hiccuped, shaking her head as if she could make everything go away. She turned to run, then came up short, remembering her early lessons at the Abbey about the miracle of foresight. According to canon—and this was true whether one worshipped the Mother or the Mother of All—visions always showed a future the viewer was capable of affecting.
Perhaps that merely meant Mairah could have avoided this if only she hadn’t agreed to cast a spell on the Well. But she’d had her vision of the new Wasteland after she’d committed to casting it. And if there was a sentience behind the visions, surely it wouldn’t have expected her to condemn herself to the slow and torturous death that a
waited her if she’d refused at the last moment.
With another gasp, Mairah glanced over at the bag of potions and notes she’d brought with her. The bag that contained both the potion to close the Mindseye and the purgative that she hoped would be its antidote.
The rumbling in the Well grew deeper, the luminants in the cavern dimming as the first bits of debris began to rain down from the ceiling. Delnamal had already turned to flee, though his bulk made him slow and awkward. She doubted he could make it up the stairs without several stops to rest.
Mairah swallowed hard and found herself moving not toward the exit but away. Toward the knife that rattled against the cavern floor.
The purgative potion would have no effect on the Well as of now, even if Mairah activated it. But what would happen if she added sacrificial Kai into the mix? The late Abbess of Aaltah had proven with impressive efficiency that sacrificial Kai could affect the Wellspring itself. If Mairah could add Kai to her purgative, might it purge Melcor’s Kai from the Well?
Mairah opened her Mindseye and let out another gasp of dismay. Moments ago when she’d activated her other potion, the chamber had been aglow with the flood of elements pouring out of the Well. But that glow was considerably dimmer now, the elements no longer so thick in the air. Even in the scant seconds she watched, she could see that the flow was continuing to slow.
She had no choice. She could not let a whole kingdom die just to save her own life.
This isn’t fair! a voice within her wailed. I don’t deserve to die!
But then when had what a person deserved ever mattered?
Mairah had lived with the consequences of ruining Lord Granlin. She had lived with her pangs of conscience at murdering Mother Wyebryn. She had lived with condemning poor Sister Melred to the inquisitor’s cruelty. But she could not live with destroying this Well. Especially not if the whole world knew she was to blame.
The knife slashed down and split her wrist open almost before she realized she’d decided to do it. She felt the blood that instantly soaked her sleeve, felt it dripping down her palm. Her heart beat frantically, pumping her blood out ever faster, and she waited for her Kai to form. Prayed for it to form, because the only evidence she had that this would work was that one vision of Mother Brynna explaining it.
The elements in the air seemed to be dwindling even more, the roar of the Well getting louder. She was running out of time.
Mairah slashed at her other wrist, a sob of pain and terror escaping her. She shivered in sudden cold as the freely flowing blood stole her warmth. And then, finally, something shimmered to life in the air in front of her. A large, jagged mote that looked like three different crystals fused together: one white, one red, one black.
There was no question that the mote was Kai, for no other element was crystalline in form. Which meant that Mairah was dying even now.
Knees and hands both shaking, Mairah reached out and nudged that mote of Kai into her purgative potion, activating it. She kept her Mindseye open, for she did not want to see the river of her blood, and groped her way blindly toward the rim of the Well, uncapping the potion as she approached.
The cap fell from her suddenly weak fingers, and her knees started to give way. She managed one final, staggering step forward, and her foot came down on empty air.
The open container of purgative still clutched in her hand, she fell into the depths of the Well.
* * *
—
From the moment Iris had first revealed that she was not, in fact, the willing sacrifice he had bought and paid for, Delnamal found himself rooted to the floor, barely able to think, much less move. Some distant part of his mind suggested that he should be trying to help his secretary…his friend. Surely two able-bodied men would be sufficient to restrain one desperately ill woman. But he didn’t have even a ceremonial blade on him, and everything happened so quickly…By the time he recognized the need for action, Melcor’s blood was already gushing.
Melcor wasn’t going to survive that wound anyway, he told himself to excuse his inaction. Iris’s knife had dug deep, and even if Delnamal had rushed to restrain her, Melcor would almost certainly have bled to death before help could arrive. After all, Delnamal had dismissed all the guards who might come to the rescue, and it would take a painfully long time for him to drag himself back up the steep stairways they had descended and find someone else to help. Certainly he wasn’t capable of carrying Melcor to safety.
It was already far too late by the time Delnamal took a single hesitant step toward the struggling duo. Mairahsol seemed to be running to their aid—almost certainly only because she wanted to preserve her willing sacrifice—but neither she nor Delnamal got very close before Melcor and Iris plummeted into the depths of the Well.
Delnamal blinked and shook his head as if it would wake him from a dream, and even as he did so, he noticed that the Well was making an ominous rumbling sound and that its habitual hum had taken on a darker, deeper note. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and his heart seemed to stutter in his chest.
Mairahsol had claimed the Kai from a willing female sacrifice would cause her spell to affect the Wellspring itself. But Iris hadn’t been bleeding and dying when she fell in, and Melcor had. While Melcor hadn’t been gifted enough magically for a career at the Academy, his bloodline had been strong, and he had not been without power. Certainly he was the kind of man who would generate Kai during that knife’s-edge balance between life and death.
Kai was the terror of the battlefield, the reason soldiers were trained to dispatch any mortally wounded enemy immediately. A man who possessed a sufficiently powerful Kai spell and had the wherewithal to trigger it while in the throes of death could wipe out half an army if that army wasn’t properly shielded. So what might a mote of men’s Kai do when plunged into the depths of a Well?
Swallowing hard, Delnamal took first one step backward, then another, as the rumbling from the Well got louder. The earth beneath his feet was vibrating, and bits of debris began dropping from the ceiling.
When the late Abbess of Aaltah had cast her Curse, the changes in the Wellspring had triggered an earthquake felt throughout all of Seven Wells. Thousands had died, and Delnamal was nearly frozen in terror at the thought that the same thing might happen now.
The earth continued to vibrate, but it did not buck and pitch wildly as it had on the night of the earthquake. Even so, there was a loud cracking sound from above Delnamal’s head, and a small trickle of dust and pebbles showered the floor.
The trickle was enough to unfreeze Delnamal’s feet, and he finally turned and ran—as best his bulk would allow—toward the cavern entrance. There were more cracks and dust and pebbles, and Delnamal could swear the door was receding, no matter how hard he pumped his arms and legs. His breath wheezed in and out of his lungs, and his heart seemed lodged in his throat. A pebble bounced stingingly off his shoulder. Fearing he might die before he reached the door, he stopped for just a moment to open his Mindseye and pluck out a mote of Rho to activate the shield spell in his signet ring.
He meant to close his Mindseye immediately and resume his ponderous sprint toward the exit, but he could not help noticing how much thinner the veil of elements was than it should be. He had no particular gift for magic, and yet even with his middling talent, when his Mindseye was open, the Well chamber was usually awash with motes so thick his worldly vision did not function at all. Right now, the air was so thin he could see the aura of Rho surrounding Mairahsol’s body, could see her running not toward the exit, but toward the Well.
Mindseye still open, he saw her throw herself into the maw of the Well.
There was a searing flash of light, followed immediately by what sounded like a peal of thunder. When Delnamal tried to suck in a breath, he could find no hint of air. A cloud of darkness rose up from the depths of the Well. He gaped at it in horror as the cloud shot towa
rd him. With his Mindseye open, he could clearly see the glistening, crystalline motes of Kai that made up that cloud. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, of all different colors. More Kai than he ever imagined existed. Coming toward him!
Finally regaining some hint of his wits, Delnamal closed his Mindseye and rushed toward the doorway once more. Everything within him screamed that he dared not let that cloud envelop him.
The exit was only an arm’s-length away when something slammed into him from behind, the impact lifting him off his feet and shoving him through the door. The far wall of the anteroom raced toward him, and he put up his hands in an effort to soften the impact, knowing his shield spell could not withstand the force.
He managed only the briefest scream of pain as his hands splintered and his body collided with the stone wall.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Alys lowered herself heavily into the nearest chair, unable to sort out the riot of emotions that was rampaging in her breast. Tynthanal, the long letter from Lord Aldnor still clutched in one fist, paced the room as if unable to hold still.
This was the first time she and her brother had been alone in a room together since the wedding, and when he had presented himself at her residence and requested a private meeting, she had hoped it meant he was finally prepared to forgive her for arranging the marriage with Kailee. But his purpose had been something completely different—and completely unimaginable.
“He’s really dead?” Alys asked in a breathy whisper, her eyes burning with tears she refused to shed. On the one hand, she was fiercely glad that Delnamal had perished, glad that he no longer drew breath while her own daughter was more than a year in her grave. On the other hand, she had now lost all hope of exacting her own revenge. Every lovely fantasy of making her half-brother suffer, of letting him stew in the resentment and humiliation of being defeated and condemned by the woman he had hated for all his life, had vanished.