Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  All four men barely fit inside. The chamber had four scarred chairs that looked as if they belonged in the servants’ quarters. Alexander pushed one against the door, and the guard sat on it, facing them. Nicholas and Stephen took two other chairs. Nicholas’s father remained standing.

  “What happened?” Nicholas asked. “Why did you end that? They weren’t done.”

  “We have enough information to begin plans,” his father said. “We need to get to those Fey as quickly as we can. We have the advantage of surprise.”

  “If those men are right,” Stephen said, “we would need hundreds of fighters.”

  “Not with enough holy water,” Nicholas said. “We send in some fast-moving people. Maybe even that whole secret construct they have would disappear if touched. We don’t know.”

  “What if those men are wrong?” Stephen asked. “Then what?”

  “Then nothing,” Nicholas’s father said. “We have lost nothing.”

  “I think we should go with a small force, observe, and see if the men are right,” Nicholas said. “Then if they are, we get enough holy water to drown the place and do a two-pronged attack, one with arrows and the other with men carrying the vials. We could rout them in no time.”

  “Stephen?” his father asked.

  “I still think we should gather as many men as we can and send them in. We are safer in larger numbers.”

  His father templed his fingers and put them against his lips. “We don’t know what kind of powers this secret place gives them,” he said. “We shouldn’t risk a lot of our own people until we have knowledge. If we can defeat them in one attack, fine. If not—“

  “We have tipped our hand. They will know that we can get them, that we know where their secret place is,” Stephen said.

  “I suspect they already know that,” Nicholas said. “The men said their scout knew he was being followed.”

  “But he wouldn’t have gone in if he thought they saw him,” his father said. “We’ll have to act quickly. Stephen, I want you to fetch Monte. We’ll have a meeting after dinner tonight and finalize plans. Then we’ll send out a force after dark.”

  “At night?” Nicholas asked.

  “They said lights surround the door. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess,” Nicholas said. Something was odd about this conversation. It left him unsettled.

  “All right, Sire,” Stephen said. He stood and bowed. The guard got up and moved the chair away from the door. Nicholas’s father stood and watched Stephen walk through the audience chamber. Then he dismissed the guard and eased the door closed.

  “What was that?” Nicholas asked. “I have never seen you make plans on such little information.”

  His father grinned. “War councils are supposed to act quickly.”

  “But not that quickly. We don’t know everything.”

  His father shrugged. “We know enough.”

  Nicholas tilted his head back and watched his father. He leaned against the door as if he didn’t want anyone to come in.

  Nicholas took a deep breath before asking, “What’s really going on? What are you trying to do?”

  His father stared at him for the longest time. His blue eyes seemed to look right through Nicholas. Nicholas remembered the look from his boyhood—that steel-eyed gaze that commanded Nicholas to confess anything he had done wrong. His father opened his mouth once, then closed it.

  “Father?” Nicholas said.

  His father ran a hand over his face and sighed. “This is an important opportunity for us, Nicholas,” he said. “We have to make the most of it.”

  “But why Stephen and me? Why not wait for the other lords, have a council?”

  “There isn’t time, son,” his father said. His voice was sad. “We’re all out of time.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  The Fey Lamps glowed from the ceiling and the walls, lighting the small cabin like the sun. Caseo stood on the wooden floor, hands behind his back, staring at the lamps. The souls inside were still bright after a week of use. That fact had disturbed him for a year. These people were untouched by magick, indeed, seemed to have no magick of their own, and yet they had defeated the Fey with a poison more potent than anything Caseo had seen before.

  He walked to the cold fireplace and leaned against it. He had insisted, when Rugar had given permission for Warders to have a building for their work, that the fireplace be made of stone. Caseo picked the stones himself—at some risk—late at night on the banks of the Cardidas. He wanted stones no bigger than a man’s head and no smaller than a man’s fist. Their shape had to be almost square, and he permitted no carving to make them fit. He had supervised the Domestic who had made the mortar, adding different protective spells into each batch.

  Aside from the Fey lights and the stools scattered about, the room was sparsely furnished. A Domestic had made a rug for the floor that they kept rolled up against the wall. This place was not made for comfort, but for work. Critical work.

  The table in the center of the room was made from wood, again with Caseo’s supervision. He had followed the team of tree cutters into the forest and picked out the tree himself. He had chosen one that was strong and vibrant, hoping those qualities would transfer into the table itself. They seemed to.

  Finally he let himself look at the vial on the tabletop. Its cut-glass sides sparkled in the bright light. One of the other Warders had called it beautiful, but he saw no beauty in it. In the last year that vial had become a personal enemy. The only spell with a secret that he couldn’t break.

  The sharp edges of the stone cut into his back. The Fey lights gave off no scent, so the room smelled of his own sweat. He had been there for a day with no fire because he still wasn’t sure what temperature extremes might do to the water inside the vial. That could be the next experiment. He wasn’t sure of that either.

  Also, the room’s chill helped keep him awake. With the defeat of the fifth ship, the only hope the Fey had was to conquer this poison. Or to find a way around it. He and the other Warders were the only ones qualified to find that solution.

  They had used half the bottle this year, working drop by drop. One Warder had died and—the Powers forgive them—the rest had watched with fascination. They had even studied his twisted body to see what they could learn from it. It had been grisly work, and they had all noted that the liquid had somehow changed the very fabric of his being. Not just his skin molded and changed, but his bones, his internal organs, everything that made him into a living, breathing being had been altered.

  The slowness frustrated him more than anything. He had been in the cabin since he’d heard the news about the last ship, mostly staring at that bottle as if it held the answer—though he knew it didn’t. Fey had died from water held in other containers as well. No, something about this water was different from any other water he had encountered. Different from any other water on Blue Isle, so far as he could tell. The Fey drank from the Cardidas to no ill effect. They had found another stream not far from the Shadowlands, and its water was fine as well.

  Somehow the Islanders had altered this water. Whatever they had done, he would find because in it was the secret he was looking for.

  He wished he had a way of examining each drop of water as he would look at a clump of dirt. A man could see the elements in dirt. He could get it wet and test various aspects of it. But water, unless it had something floating in it, was not as easily read. This water had nothing floating. That had been the first thing he looked for.

  What they had done was to experiment on tissue from Fey cadavers, and a few samples taken from living Fey. That, at least, had yielded some results. He found that the solution, if diluted, had slower effects and sometimes not quite as dangerous effects. He wasn’t sure how to use that information in battle, unless some enterprising Fey could get to the supply of poison and dilute it. But if they could do that, then they could just as easily get rid of it or substitute real water.

  Their most significa
nt finding was that if the solution was washed off with real water quickly, the damage to the tissue was minimal. That, at least, had a practical application, one he had presented to Rugar. If someone was injured in battle with a weapon dipped into the poison, or injured by the poison itself, cleaning the wound very, very quickly would ensure minimal damage.

  Rugar had not applied that finding to the ship heading to the Stone Guardians. Warriors do not have time to wash themselves in the middle of battle, he had said. We need a better solution than that.

  Caseo planned to speak to him again. The solution they had found was better than none.

  He touched the edge of the table. The wood was warm and firm against his fingertips. Although he had been alone with the vial a hundred times since they had come to the Shadowlands, he had never touched it. He was afraid that somehow even the bottle itself would contaminate him.

  Perhaps it already had. The bottle was all he thought about. He even dreamed of the poison. He hadn’t worked on new spells since they had come to the Shadowlands, and even his interest in reviewing innovations made by others had lessened.

  He felt that until they had solved this problem, there was no point in working toward a future. Until they conquered the poison in this bottle, the Fey had no future at all.

  FORTY

  His rooms were cold. Matthias sighed, looked up from the book he had been studying, and noted that the sun had set. He reached for the velvet bellpull and gave it a firm yank. The Aud should have been there before dark to light the fire and close the tapestries. Lately, though, the service in the Tabernacle had got particularly bad. He blamed some of it on the turnover. Auds were leaving the city to join country villages. They figured they would be safer there. They were probably right.

  He lit his lamp and continued his study. The book he was poring over had particularly bad hand-lettering, but he felt it worthwhile. He had been studying all the old texts, looking for clues to the questions the Rocaan had asked him on the night of the invasion. So far he had found few references to the physical representatives of the Soldiers of the Enemy. Most references were to their symbolic meaning.

  This particular text, though, was a history of the Tabernacle itself, written a century before. What fascinated Matthias were all the hidden areas of the Tabernacle, built for various monastic and special purposes. He had not had a chance to ask the Rocaan if he knew of these areas, and he wasn’t sure he was going to. But he was taking notes. He planned to investigate all the secret areas himself.

  When he heard the expected knock on the door, he gathered his papers and marked his place before he bade the Aud to enter. He swiveled in his chair and was startled to see Porciluna.

  “You should stand when a colleague enters the room, you know,” Porciluna said.

  On Porciluna the Elder’s black robe looked expensive. His filigree sword rested on the top of the mound that was his stomach. His sash was not tied so much as wrapped around him, a slash of red on the black. Despite the hardships of the last year, Porciluna still looked like a creature of leisure, and Matthias hated him for that. Matthias had lost a considerable amount of weight, which he couldn’t afford, and noted each morning when he did his toilet that a new worry line appeared in his face.

  He did not stand but set his pen down carefully so that he didn’t get ink on his hand. “Did we have business, Porciluna?”

  Porciluna pursed his lips and shook his head. “But I thought that you might want to know what happened today.”

  Matthias indicated a chair next to his. He turned his chair outward so that he could see Porciluna. Porciluna took the chair offered, sighing as he took the weight off his feet. Matthias clasped his hands in his lap. Usually when someone came to him, it meant a village hadn’t had enough holy water, or there had been yet another series of Fey-related deaths. Sometimes he thought this war would end only when there were no people left to kill.

  “What?” he asked, his hands clasped so tightly, he could feel the strain in his fingers.

  “The Rocaan insisted on doing another ceremony for the honored dead.”

  Matthias let out breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

  “He left his own sword at the grave sites, even though I warned him it would be stolen and sold, and he is not talking sense.” Porciluna smoothed the strands of hair on his balding head. A touch of color rose in his cheeks.

  “What’s he saying now?” Matthias asked softly.

  “That his actions caused the Fey to come. His sinning caused all of this.”

  Matthias picked up his pen and put it in its holder. He would get no more work done this day.

  Porciluna grabbed his arm. “How can you be so calm? Don’t you see what’s happening here?”

  “I see a lot of things happening,” Matthias said. “None of them good.”

  Porciluna’s palm was damp. His grip tightened on Matthias. Matthias looked down at the hand, and Porciluna let go. He smoothed his hand on his own robe. “I am worried, Matthias. The Rocaan doesn’t seem to be in his right mind. He is letting affairs of the Church slip. He spends too much time in that cell of his. He presides over funeral ceremonies best left to others, and now this.”

  “He’s been talking like this since the invasion,” Matthias said.

  Porciluna shook his head. “No. Not like this. He has asked theological questions and had us digging through texts for answers. But something in the way he acted this time. I feel as if he plans to make a change. He plans to do something that he believes will make the Fey leave. Something . . . crazy.” He spoke the last word so softly, Matthias almost didn’t hear it.

  Bile rose in Matthias’s throat, and he swallowed to keep it down. One more stress. One stress too many. The one he wanted to ignore. “You think the Rocaan has lost his mind?”

  “I see little of the man I used to know,” Porciluna said.

  A knock on the door made them both jump. They glanced at each other—who could have heard them?—and then Matthias remembered the Aud he had called.

  “Come in,” he said.

  The door opened, and the Aud shuffled in, carrying a candle. Its tiny flame made Matthias realize how dark the room had become. He could see only Porciluna in the light given off by the lamp on his desk. The rest of the room was in shadows.

  “I thought I had orders to light the Elders’ rooms when darkness fell,” Matthias said sharply.

  “My apologies, Respected Sir. I am not usually in charge of the rooms. Your man seems to have disappeared.”

  Another one. This was disturbing him as well. “All right, then. I want the tapestries done, here and in the other Elders’ quarters, as well as the lights, and lighting the night fires. Make sure that someone has taken care of the Rocaan as well.”

  “As you wish, Respected Sir.” The Aud went to the first lamp and lit it.

  The brightness in the room increased, revealing the velvet sofa, the ornate chairs flanking a table decorated with tiny swords. The Aud went from light to light until a softness filled the room. Then he pulled and fastened the tapestries in front of the windows, blocking out the darkness and replacing it with scenes from the Roca’s life.

  Matthias and Porciluna watched the Aud move from place to place, saying nothing. Once the Aud glanced over his shoulder at them, and then continued, as if he found their behavior strange. Finally he crouched in front of the fireplace and pulled pieces of wood together to build a fire. The small thumps and shufflings he made were the only sounds in the room.

  Matthias looked away, grateful for the respite from the conversation. He had been ignoring the Rocaan, and the problems there, worrying more about the Fey and the future. It had been easy to stay away from the old man; he didn’t seem to be comfortable around Matthias these days, as if he blamed Matthias for all the decisions he had made during the invasion. Matthias should have realized that someday the problem would come back to him, since he was the one the Rocaan had trusted with the secret of holy water. On the day of the invasion Mat
thias had been the Rocaan’s choice to succeed him. Matthias doubted if the Rocaan felt that way now.

  Wood snapped behind him, and the faintest scent of smoke filled the air. He turned. The Aud was replacing the grate. Then he stood, wiped his hands on his robe, and bowed his head. “Anything else, Respected Sir?” he asked.

  “Not in here,” Matthias said, hoping that the Aud heard his pointed reminder to remember the other chambers.

  The Aud nodded again, then let himself out.

  Once the door had clicked shut, Porciluna said, “All the little things seem to be coming apart.”