The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3)

by H. Anthe Davis

  Two long arms latched around her, and it took a suppression of instinct to keep her hand off Serindas. Instead she let Lark lean on her heavily, the girl hissing with indignation, and released her own tension in a laugh against the gloved hand.

  “Don't you listen to anything she says!” exclaimed Lark. “She's full of— She's wrong!”

  The wraith watched them with clear bafflement.

  Dasira pushed away her muzzling hand, still smiling. It felt strange to allow anyone such liberties, but as Ilshenrir had said, they were friends. She didn't know how it had happened, but it felt real. “All right, if you can't admit it, I won't expose you further, as long as you keep your slander to yourself.”

  “My lips are sealed, you horrible woman.”

  “I am still unsure what you meant,” said Ilshenrir.

  In response, Lark slipped between him and Dasira and took him by the rough-garbed arm, beaming forcedly. “Why don't you teach me some more magic? You said Cob said I should learn, and I don't see a problem with it, so...”

  The wraith blinked. “While we walk? Let me think...”

  Dasira dropped back, smirking in response to Lark's glare. As the arcane chatter began, she let her gaze drift across their surroundings, skipping from mountains to salt-pans to any outcropping or lump or curve in the sand that might indicate lurking wildlife.

  Finally, she turned her gaze northwest toward Crystal Valley. As a child, she had wanted to seek it because it presented the greatest challenge to any Riddish warrior: a rite of passage; a trial of strength and endurance; a journey to the boundary between life and death, between bravery and foolhardiness. All in the service of becoming a man.

  In a way, she supposed she had gotten her wish.

  *****

  They made camp that evening among half-buried ruins, circling a pile of glowing stones that Ilshenrir and Lark had infused with enough heat to serve as a cook-fire. They kept it going with Lark's magic-practice, the light just sufficient to define their faces against the black curtain of the night.

  “You make it look easy,” said Fiora as she dipped water from the simmering pot. Dasira observed by habit; everyone else already had their cups, though Ilshenrir seemed disinterested in the charade tonight. His eyes, slightly luminous, stayed on Lark's hands at all times.

  “It is,” he said as the Shadow girl gripped a new stone and furrowed her brows in concentration. “Energy exists around us at all times, from sources biological, meteorological, celestial and tectonic. We draw upon it with every motion. In the higher realms, it is free to be spun at will; here in the depths, great sections have solidified and are inaccessible to my kind. Still, we find sufficient ambient energy for our purposes.”

  “Yes, but I always thought it required a lot of...finger-wiggling,” said Fiora, setting back in her spot. From her rucksack, she pulled a small pouch and tapped dried leaves into the mug, then added from the tin of tea. “You know, books and incantations and whatever else they teach at the Citadel.”

  Ilshenrir smiled faintly, still watching the stone. “I have not been to the Citadel, but it is...a school, yes? I imagine that it has adapted certain routines to keep the students from harming themselves. Even we caiohene can mishandle energies and be damaged; it must be far more dangerous for mortals. Finger-wiggling, as you say, may be a method of focus.”

  “So you can just do it all with your mind?”

  “Certainly, though some effects are made easier by the...manipulation of the aperture.” He raised his gloved hand, then curled the fingers down to one. “I gather energy into myself and project it through my facets. It is more focused if I narrow it. Additionally, if I am weaving, I can create separate strands via the divisions of flesh.” He opened his hand and made a slight, elegant gesture that drew colors in the air, a different one from each fingertip.

  “But...so the finger-wiggling is important?” said Fiora, frowning.

  “It has its uses. But there are no 'spells'. Energy can be set to any purpose, limited only by the will of its wielder. Likewise, the only foci are those set by the wielder.”

  “I think this one is done,” murmured Lark, lifting her glowing stone.

  The wraith took it gently. Though it glowed as if molten, her palms were undamaged and his glove did not singe, and as he set it onto the pile, it dimmed slightly while the ones around it brightened. Selecting an unused stone from a second pile, he set it in her hands and she grimaced but focused.

  “So what're you doin'?” said Cob, his first sign of interest since they'd made camp.

  “A simple method of practice. She absorbs ambient energy through her breath, through her skin, then channels it from her core into her limbs, from whence it enters the stone. It is how I cleared myself of the crystallization that afflicts my kind, which is as much a stagnation of energy as it is a physical ailment. In humans, it is a taxing effort, but it teaches the sensation of the flow—an essential part of energy-handing.”

  Cob nodded slowly. “Like handlin' water. Well-behaved if you work it right.”

  “Yes. Energy does not want to hurt you. It does not care about you at all. It simply wishes to transfer from a point of higher concentration to one of lower. As a mage, one must learn to let that happen before one can manipulate the parameters.”

  “But you can't do it if you're a godfollower, right?” said Fiora. “Because of the god-connection. And you can't do it if you're a skinchanger, because of the spirit?”

  “Yes. Skinchangers are localized segments of their singular beast-spirit. If the beast-spirit disdains the practice of magic, then no skinchanger can attempt it. Likewise for the elementals, I believe.”

  “Then how come Enkhaelen can do magic? Shouldn't the Ravager be able to stop him?”

  “In theory, yes. From my observations of Cob and the Guardian, it should be capable of overriding him as necessary—will, soul and all. However, having experienced his assault at the manor...” Ilshenrir tapped his marred cheek, inhuman eyes shifting slightly in thought. “It was more like a subjugation than a spirit's attack. Perhaps the Ravager has devoured so many of us that it has become somewhat caiohene itself.”

  Cob shook his head. “I saw a fragment of it in the manor, and there was nothin' caiohene about it. No crystals, jus' wings and claws and teeth. Same when it manifested on him.”

  “Did he use magic while in its manifestation?”

  “No, he jus' went for my face in a frenzy. So maybe it does suppress magic, it jus' doesn't suppress him?”

  “And he's using it, not vice versa?” said Fiora. “That explains why it wants him dead.”

  “The Guardian says elemental-bloods get stuck in its craw. So yeah, he's got control and he won't die, and he's usin' whatever wraith-magic it knows for his own purposes.”

  “If only we knew someone who was familiar with him,” said Fiora, then stared pointedly at Dasira.

  Annoyed, Dasira held up her free hand. Until now, she had been content to stay quiet and watch the salt-plains as much as her companions. She did not consider herself nostalgic, but the old harsh scent of it made it hard not to recall her first life. “I've never been privy to his mage-stuff. Nor did I care. But if you start thinking you understand him, you've probably been tricked.”

  “He never told you anything?”

  She snorted derisively.

  Frowning, Fiora sat forward, the stone-light accenting her stubborn jaw. “If you dislike him so much, why did you work for him? He obviously didn't bind you all that tight.”

  “Nothing better to do.”

  “What about your family? Your home?”

  A brittle laugh left her lips before she could stop it. Suddenly all eyes were on her, and she scowled, wanting to play it off as nothing but unable to keep the words inside. “Why would I go back to them? They were the ones who sent me.”

  The girl blinked. Beside her, Cob's face tightened. “What do you mean, sent you?” said Fiora. “To be converted?”

  “No. Look, it's
not relevant. I don't know anything useful about him.”

  “Tell me,” said Cob, and in his low voice she felt a force, a compulsion. She looked away, not wanting to be pinned by those dark eyes and all too aware that she had never told him much about herself—and nearly nothing of her life before Darilan.

  He never asked, she thought. Why bother now?

  “Are you ashamed?” said Fiora.

  It was like being prodded with a hot iron. Dasira sat up straight and glared at the girl. “You want another punch in the teeth?”

  “You didn't deliver last time. I doubt you'd manage now.”

  “Fiora,” said Cob tersely. The girl glowered, then sat back to sullenly sip her tea.

  Dasira shut her mouth, hoping this would be the end of it, but then Cob's gaze turned to her with a fixity she knew she couldn't escape. “You don't want to know,” she told him.

  “I do.”

  “I don't want to talk about it.”

  “If not now, then when?”

  Never, she wanted to say. But Lark was watching too, the stone darkening in her hands, and in their young faces she read an interest—an innocence—she hadn't encountered in ages. And she realized that, in all the world, only two people knew the truth of her.

  Enkhaelen and the Emperor.

  That couldn't stand.

  She looked down into her half-drunk cup of tea, the leaves whirling as if caught in a slow storm. It was difficult to gather these thoughts. More than half her life had been dedicated to burying them under corpses.

  “My name is Vedaceirra Cerithe te'Navrin,” she said, because that seemed like a good place to start. “I was born on the fifth of Theramel, 109 Imperial Reckoning. I am now sixty-two years old.

  “My clan, the Navrin, are merited nobles—thus the te' honorific. Merit is gained through the Testing, run every six years at the Little Salt Sea north of Crystal Valley, where all the jeten—the warriors—vie for one of the twelve noble merits or the royal merit.

  “Every jeten participates. The clan with the most victories becomes royal, the next twelve become nobles—or retain nobility if they already had it—and the rest become subordinates. A King is selected from the royal clan to represent us all to the Emperor.

  “I always wanted to be jeten and fight for the kingship. That's not strange for the Riddish; we have very distinct roles for...I guess you'd say men and women, but for us it's protectors and protected. Jeten and jendae. Most women are jendae and most men jeten, yes, but it's a choice made at the age of majority. It has nothing to do with how you're born. Our current King was born female, but he chose to be jeten, so he is.

  “Unfortunately, I was the only female child in the main clan family. My father believed he needed a jendae to marry off politically—to cement ties with some non-Riddish nobility to give us a fallback plan should we ever lose merit—and so he barred me from declaring myself jeten. That's not unheard-of, but even then it was considered old-fashioned. A throwback to the clan-wars when we bent to necessity, not personal preference.

  “I was seventeen, still under his thumb, when the Emperor made another attempt at intermarrying us and the Trivesteans, to get us to stop fighting. My father volunteered me. I had no choice.

  “I was the youngest, but the other jendae were no happier about marrying Trivesteans. They pitied me though. Sometimes we'd send choice-women along with the born-women on these stupid mandates, because the Trivesteans are so bound up in their codes of conduct that they can't refuse or annul a marriage or harm their marriage partner even if they suddenly discover that she has a dick—“

  “Seriously?” said Lark. “Why would your people do that?”

  Dasira smiled. “Spite. But we don't send choice-men. It's against the whole concept of jeten and jendae. The other women knew I'd been wronged, but since I was still underage, I had no right of refusal. They tried to help, though. There was a princess from the King's clan among us, so they assigned me to her as sort of an aide and bodyguard.

  “She didn't like her intended husband at all. And she was a westerner—one of the Snake clans like me—so she didn't feel the same sort of family obligation that wolf-kin do. The two of us plus a few other western ladies decided we'd poison the Trivesteans.

  “We thought it would be easy, because we were young and oh so terribly clever. And the plan had its good points. The Riddish are hardier than the Trivesteans, and tolerant of the toxic salts, so we decided that I would poison every plate at the wedding feast. When we all fell ill and the Trivesteans died, we would blame it on the cooks.

  “Frankly, I didn't care if everyone died. So I did it.

  “But I piked it up. They handed me the salts and I dosed everything, but I did the guards' food more lightly because they ate first and I didn't want them to keel over so fast that the bridegrooms got spooked. Well, the grooms succumbed as intended, and we brides got miserably sick, but the guards recovered fast and figured out my involvement. They...”

  The words dried up, and for a moment she sat staring at the fire-stones, wishing she could go back in time and stop herself. No one spoke, no one breathed, until it was almost like she was alone with the past—here on the salt, under the bleak stars.

  Finally, she said, “They were Sapphires. That's important. If they were our clansmen, we might have had a chance, but the Sapphire shuffles its Riddish soldiers around so much that they're never with their own clans—they're all lone wolves, out for themselves and nothing else. And the Trivestean Sapphires among them were either too sick or too angry to stop them.

  “They said we deserved it. I was the only fighter among us and they beat me down first, and then they separated us and did...what clanless men do. What most jeten do when they catch jendae from other clans. That was the worst, that it was our own people. The Trivesteans don't think that way; they just kill. It's one of the reasons I never went back unless ordered.

  “Anyway, when they finally dragged us before an Imperial judge—days, weeks later, I don't even know—our pretense was gone. I...can't remember if I told on the princess and the other westerners, or if someone else did. But the sentence was passed on all of us, to be cleansed by the Palace.

  “Our captors were in no hurry to get us there. I think they only did it because the first of us started showing.

  “I knew about mine. Most of the others had caught as well; Riddishwomen are nothing if not fertile. But I think that when I walked into the throne room, I was mad. I had become convinced that no matter what happened, I would be reborn in my child. My son. I would be the jeten that my soul had intended, untainted by my crimes.

  “The Emperor looked down on us with this strange smile, and offered to pardon the princess if she would be his wife. She accepted. The rest of us were...swallowed.

  “I lost him then. My Lerien, my second chance. And I fought my way out, because I would not go the way the jendae had gone—I refused. I was not done yet. If I couldn't be reborn, then I was not ready to die.”

  She closed her eyes, remembering the breach. The caul tearing away from around her. The hand on her shaking shoulder.

  “Instead, I became this,” she said, tugging up her sleeve to show the leathery black bracer. “And the princess became the Empress, and the ladies who survived the conversion became her handmaidens. I don't know why the Emperor did it. Maybe it was just an opportunity he couldn't pass up—some grand horrific experiment in human frailty. Or maybe he really did want a wife. A son of his own.

  “Anyway, he declared us cleansed and had our crimes struck from the record, and when some of the soldiers talked about it later, he had them assassinated. By me.

  “It's been nearly forty-five years. Only a few of the soldiers are still alive. I used to visit them if I had a mission in the area—borrow the body of a friend or confidant of theirs and do to them what they did to us. But it became...unsporting. Time took its toll on everyone but me.

  “Then, five years ago, I got a new assignment. And now I'm here.”

&nb
sp; She looked up at them, feeling almost defiant, and saw exactly the expressions of shock she had expected. Mustering a smile, she said, “You know what I am. Don't pretend surprise.”

  For a long moment, no one spoke. Then Fiora sat forward and said slowly, “So you think you're a man...does that mean you like girls?”

  Lark went rigid and snapped, “That's the first thing you ask her? What's wrong with you?”

  “I'm just curious!”

  Dasira snorted, incredulous yet feeling her own tension break. “Why, are you propositioning me?”

  The girl blushed. “No, I...I was... I think I admire you now.”

  “Admire?” said Cob, looking askance at his lover. “What's there to admire about that?”

  “She survived, she got stronger, and she avenged herself. If I was in that situation—“

  “You'd do back to others what they did t'you?”

  “Maybe. I can't fault her.”

  Cob's face grew stony, but before he could speak, Arik said, “Why not just kill them?” His pewtery-grey brows were bent deeply over his pale eyes, which searched Dasira's expression as if seeking some revelation.

  Dasira shrugged. “It didn't seem like enough. You can't regret things when you're dead. As my sisters-in-punishment started to die off, I guess I needed our victimizers to suffer for it. Plus I had no idea which one fathered Lerien, so I just did them all.”

  “The women died?” said Fiora, alarmed. “What killed them?”

  “Pregnancy. Lagalaina can't bear children safely. Seems Enkhaelen isn't as good a maker as he could be.”

  Fiora went white. “So after all of that, and the Palace and everything, they just...”

  “They were remade as seducers, enthrallers. Enkhaelen and the Emperor share a sick sense of humor. You met one, Cob. Anniavela—though actually she's the only one left now. The others were sent to gain the favor of the lords and petty kings, and they all eventually ended up like that. To his credit, Enkhaelen tried to fix the problem, but the Emperor made him stop; he wanted to see if the babies would be viable. But they all died too.”