Raven s Strike

by Patricia Briggs

  “It could be a copy.” Lehr’s voice was subdued, hushed.

  “Maybe.” Hennea’s hand brushed it again. “Or it could be a fake—there’s no way to tell.”

  “I might be able to tell,” said Seraph slowly.

  “How?” asked Hennea.

  “I’m going to read its past.” She reached out to touch it, but Hennea jerked it away.

  “If it is that old, it is too dangerous.”

  “Dangerous how?” asked Lehr.

  Seraph gave an exasperated huff. “It’s a map, Hennea. I’ll be lucky if anyone has held it long enough to leave any kind of impression at all. Can you read objects?”

  “No.”

  “Well then.” Seraph pulled the map out of the other Raven’s hands and set it on the ground in front of her. “Now if I fall to the ground shrieking, feel free to take it away again.”

  “Mother? Are you sure you should do this?”

  She slanted a look at Lehr. “Allow me the courtesy of knowing my limits. Unless it was an object of worship, or someone used it to kill someone else, it will be fine.”

  Before someone else could object, Seraph sent tendrils of magic into the parchment.

  “It’s all right,” she told them when the map’s past came to her in whispered bits and pieces rather than an overwhelming wave.

  Aside from a few barely formed images, the newest history came to her first, though that was not always the case. She felt Hennea’s hands and the intense quiet that would have told her a Raven had held the map, even if she hadn’t known Hennea.

  “Volis had this.” She could feel the cold sweat on his palms and the fear someone might see him. “He stole it.” A new image, closer to her than the theft had been, and she knew that he hadn’t been able to read any of the maps. “He had thought something so carefully hidden away would have been important, but he could see nothing useful in a pile of old maps.”

  The map had been undisturbed for a long time. “It was hidden away, for safekeeping. For secret. A wizard holds it, a solsenti wizard—but he understands what he has because language is one of his gifts. A gift that has served him very well in his search for power, for . . .” She quit talking because she didn’t want to confuse her audience as her reading slipped from nearer past to older and back again. The years were so pale, sometimes it was hard to hold them.

  “Mother?”

  Seraph blinked up at Lehr’s familiar face.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. “This is a map made by an apprentice?” The word didn’t fit quite, but it was close. “A student, perhaps. He was disappointed because his teacher judged it harshly and made him redo part of it.” She touched a section in the upper right where he’d had to scrape the parchment and redraw.

  “How old is it, Mother?” breathed Rinnie. “Is it really from Colossae?”

  “It’s that old.” Seraph’s hands felt cold and heavy from the deep reading. “Once it passed out of the hands of the young man who made it, there was a succession of owners. They held it for such a short time, so long ago, and with such little passion that I could get no more than an impression of a lot of people.”

  She looked up to meet Hennea’s gaze and give her a small smile. “It’s emotion that leaves traces behind on things, and a map hardly inspires great passions of any kind. I can tell the age, but not much more for a long time. It was hidden or lost.”

  Seraph reached out and touched the satchel that had held the map very lightly with her fingertips and a thread of magic. “It was in this satchel, which is nearly as old.”

  Rinnie gave her prize a look of respect. “It doesn’t look old.”

  “The preservation spell,” murmured Hennea. “Things can last a long time with a good preservation spell, and the Colossae wizards’ magic was very good.”

  “They lay together in secret, the maps and the satchel, for hundreds of years. Then a woman, a solsenti wizard, held it and puzzled over it—she was hoping for treasure, I think. When she first held it as a young woman, but her last touch is dry and aged. She kept them in a secret place, and it lay there for a time, never managing to decipher what it was she held though she knew it was old. About two centuries ago it came into the hands of another wizard.”

  She swallowed and looked at the rest of the map scrolls lying about on the floor and touched them, looking for more answers. When she had read them all, she said, “He had a gift for languages. I saw the gates of Colossae, where he was searching for something he desired very badly—power? Not quite, but it was close enough.” She returned her fingers to the first map, the city map. “The next time he touched this he was held by the Stalker’s power; he was the Shadowed. He hid the maps somewhere secret, he didn’t need them anymore. Volis found them and took them—but he couldn’t read them.”

  “Can you see him?” whispered Hennea urgently. “Lark tell me you can see who it is.”

  Seraph shook her head in frustration. “No. I get scattered impressions and a glimpse of a young man’s face, but not enough to identify him. He just didn’t leave enough of himself behind. I can tell you he became the Stalker’s child almost two centuries ago.”

  Hennea swallowed her urgency behind her usual cool facade, though she was paler than normal. “We’ve not had one get so old since the Unnamed King.”

  “There have been more?” asked Lehr.

  Seraph nodded. “I know of three . . . four including this one. The Unnamed King was the second. The first one left Colossae with the Elder Wizards who became the Travelers.”

  “This is the sixth,” said Hennea. “That I know of anyway. After the Unnamed King, we knew the signs to watch for. Death follows the Shadowed. I don’t see how this one has been hidden from us for so long. Are you certain of the time, Seraph?”

  “I may be off ten or fifteen years either way, but not more than that.” She shared Hennea’s apprehension. The Shadowed, like those who were tainted, gained power over the years. “There were the plagues a couple of decades ago—one killed Isolde’s clan except for my brother and me. There were other clans lightened of their members, too.” She hesitated. “The Path started killing Travelers for their Orders about the same time.”

  “That is not a coincidence,” agreed Hennea. “Maybe we have grown so few over the last few generations that no one noticed the patterns of death.”

  “Mother,” said Lehr suddenly. “If the Shadowed touched other things here, could you tell?”

  Hennea answered. “The Path’s Masters, the wizards who came and stole Tier away, left before the temple was finished. If the Shadowed was among them, he did not stay here. Only Volis used the rooms beyond the Great Chamber . . .” She cleared her throat. “Only Volis and I. I don’t think we’ll find anything else here on which the Shadowed left enough of an impression for Seraph to read anything.”

  “If we had not killed Volis, he could tell us where he got that map case,” mused Seraph.

  “I’ve apologized for that,” Hennea said.

  Seraph looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t like being tricked, Hennea. I never said he didn’t need killing.”

  She turned her attention back to the problem of finding the Shadowed. “However, I think if the Shadowed was able to hide what he was from Jes and Lehr for a time, if no Traveler has noticed his existence in two centuries, he has learned how to hide what he is. The impressions from the map are from when he was newly touched.”

  “He went to Colossae?” said Lehr. “I thought Colossae was destroyed.”

  “Sacrificed,” agreed Hennea. “But the stones were sealed to seal the bindings.”

  Seraph hadn’t heard that part before. “What does that mean?”

  Hennea smiled suddenly. “I don’t know. What did you see from the maps?”

  “The Shadowed saw Colossae,” Seraph said. “So the city must still stand.”

  “Do all the Shadowed go to Colossae to become what they are?” asked Rinnie.

  “I don’t know,” Seraph sa
id, turning to Hennea.

  “I’ve never heard that,” Hennea said. “I don’t know how many people outside of the Travelers even know there was ever a city like Colossae.”

  “Have any of the Shadowed been Travelers?” asked Lehr.

  “No,” Seraph said firmly.

  “The first one was,” Hennea reminded her. “If he came out of Colossae.”

  “No,” Seraph said. “He was a Colossae wizard.”

  Hennea smiled again. “That’s slicing the roast pretty thinly, don’t you think? We are all descendants of the Colossae wizards.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Seraph slowly. “I’ve always thought it was no accident that solsenti wizards are the only ones who have been driven to become Shadowed.”

  “You sound as if they are not making their own choices,” said Hennea. “Are you making excuses for them?”

  Seraph didn’t bother arguing with the disapproval in Hennea’s voice. “It must be a terrible thing to be a solsenti wizard. Every little cantrip is a combination of ritual and components. Some wizards live their whole lives knowing they have enormous potential for power, but able to do only little magics for lack of knowledge. Most are not that unlucky, but for every major spell they have to spend hours in preparation and years in study. And here we are, we Ravens, flying free where they must crawl. It must be galling.”

  “You look for excuses where there are none,” commented Hennea dryly. “Though I suppose you are right, and so should be grateful most solsenti wizards don’t know enough about the Stalker to be dangerous.”

  She started rerolling a map as she finished speaking. Seraph took another and rolled it as well. When all of them were stored in the satchel, Hennea closed the buckles and handed the map case to Rinnie.

  “You have maps to a world long lost, Cormorant,” she said. “This bag is spelled by one of the Elder Wizards of Colossae. It is a treasure entrusted to you.”

  Jes stuck his head into the room. “I found something,” he said.

  Tier expected the tavern to be nearly empty, but it was full of strangers, mostly hired swords, he thought. They were probably from some merchant’s caravan just passing through.

  Maneuvering around the extra people, he found an unoccupied table in a corner and took a seat. Regil, the tavern owner, saw him and rushed over.

  “Tier, welcome,” he said. “I was just hoping you or Ciro would be stopping through to keep this lot occupied. Our midday meal is bread from your sister’s ovens and fresh sausage—and you are welcome to it if you’ll sing.”

  Tier smiled. “I’d be happy to, but I was helping my sister this morning. I didn’t bring my lute.”

  “Would mine work?” asked Regil.

  “That would be fine,” Tier agreed.

  Regil grinned. “I was worried I’d have to entertain them myself, and I have other things to do.” He looked behind Tier for just an instant. “Master Willon, Tier will keep your men from too much trouble.”

  Tier turned in his chair, to see the old merchant standing just behind him. “Willon, good to see you. I thought you’d be in Taela yet a while.”

  Regil backed a few courteous steps away, then turned and hustled off in the direction of the stairway to his apartment. Willon took the seat on the other side of Tier’s narrow table.

  “Once I heard some secret society had been brought low by Travelers, I figured Seraph had managed your rescue without my help.” Willon grinned. “I had just heard the first whisper of rumor that made me think you might have been stored in the Emperor’s palace itself, when the news of the Path’s demise hit the streets. Seraph obviously had no need of my help—not that I was surprised. Your wife is a very capable person. My cousin had a trading trip scheduled through this way, so I caught an escort with his men. I’m getting too old to enjoy the big city; my old bones prefer Redern.”

  “I’m planning on growing old here, myself.” Tier smiled when he said it, though his heart worried Seraph would not be here to grow old with him.

  “Disappointing,” Hennea commented, peering into Jes’s secret room.

  “You’d expect any place that Volis went to such trouble to hide would have something in it.” Lehr brushed his hands on his tunic to rid them of the tingle of the power he’d used to open the lock on the hidden door Jes had found.

  Seraph had thought it would have been magic he used, but it wasn’t—at least it wasn’t the same kind of magic that came to her call. Falcon’s secrets, she thought, and smiled. It was a good thing that Brewydd had known more of the Falcon’s Order than she did. She’d forgotten that locks and gates were something the Hunters did well—Brewydd had told them it had something to do with traps being a Hunter’s art. Whatever the reason, Lehr seemed to enjoyed being able to open whatever locks came his way. If it hadn’t been for him, for his tracking and lock picking skills both, they’d never have made it through the palace to the cell where Tier had been held.

  Rinnie squeezed past Lehr and Hennea and darted into the room. “It’s empty.”

  “Sorry,” said Jes.

  “Not at all.” Seraph couldn’t see the interior of the room, but if it was big enough to hold Rinnie, it would be big enough for her purposes. “This is the perfect place to put the books on magic until we decide what to do with them. Lehr can spell the door shut, and Hennea or I’ll put a ‘don’t look at me’ on the removable panel. It’ll be safe as a lamb in the fold.”

  “Then we don’t have to carry them all.” Jes gave her a bright grin. “Lehr and I,” he said. “We would have had to carry them all. Two trips for all these books. Through the town to home, then back through the town to here. Back through the town and home again. There aren’t so many Traveler books as there are wizard ones. Through the town just one more time.”

  “You’ll still have the stairs,” Hennea pointed out dryly as she started back down the narrow hallway.

  “Only one set. Easy.” Jes bounced passed her and ran up the stairway.

  When Lehr decided to go exploring with Jes, Seraph relented and let Rinnie go with them. There weren’t so many books in the library that she and Hennea couldn’t take care of them.

  “We’ll get more done,” she said, after the others had left.

  “They’re not so bad,” Hennea said.

  “Just not used to being cooped up.” Seraph tapped her finger lightly on the page of the book she’d been paging through. “I’ve seen this book before, I think.” She closed her eyes to aid her memory. “It was in a different language, but I recognize the illustrations.”

  “In Isolde’s library?”

  “I don’t know,” Seraph said. “For the first ten winters after Jes was born, I worked my way through the library of every mermora that came to me.”

  Seraph opened her eyes and set aside the book. “I had Isolde’s after my brother died,” she said. “Once I settled at the farm with Tier, I think I had three more. By the time Jes was nine, I had twenty-five. I went through all twenty-five libraries before I admitted my father was right when he told me that the Elder Wizards did not include anything about the Orders in their writings.”

  “You didn’t say anything about that when Brewydd had us go through Rongier’s library on the way to Taela.”

  “Rongier the Librarian might have had books in his library that the wizards in my first twenty-five didn’t,” Seraph said. “Then, too, you and Brewydd know different languages than I do. We didn’t find anything—but we might have.”

  Hennea stared off into space for a moment. “That was unusual, wasn’t it? How many Travelers, whatever their Order, do you suppose can read in any language other than our own and Common Tongue? To the Elder Wizards those libraries were invaluable, but for a Raven they are mostly just a reminder of what Travelers once were, good only for invoking on ceremonial occasions.”

  “It sometimes seems to me that most of my life I’ve spent shaking my head, and saying, ‘What are the chances?’ ” Seraph fought to imitate Hennea’s calm and push away
her anger. “My whole clan dies except for my brother and me—the very last of the descendants of Isolde the Silent. Then he is murdered, and I am rescued by the only Ordered solsenti I’ve ever heard of.”

  “There are probably more of them out there,” Hennea murmured. “Who would look to see if a solsenti was Ordered?”

  “Even the solsenti would have noticed a Raven when they tried to train him to be a wizard,” Seraph said.

  “Really?” Hennea tilted her head. “I’m not so sure of that. Ravens can use ritual, chants, and components for spells. We just don’t need to unless we’re learning something we’ve never seen done before and can’t find the pattern of the magic any easier way. Affinities still apply. A mage whose affinity isn’t metalwork won’t be able to use magic to add virtue to a sword, whether he be Raven or just wizard. If a Raven thought he needed to use component and ritual, would he think to try spelling without it?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “What else has happened that is unusual?” Hennea turned back to the book she’d been looking at.

  Seraph looked at her hands. I should just stop the conversation here, she thought, because the rest of it is almost too painful to bear.

  “Tier and I had five children,” she told her hands. “One was stillborn, and Mehalla, who died when she was three years old. Jes is Eagle. Lehr is Guardian. Rinnie is Cormorant. Tier is Owl. I am Raven. What Order do you think my Mehalla who died of lung sickness bore?” She looked up as she asked the question.

  Hennea was staring at her. “Lark?”

  Seraph nodded. “I don’t know of any clans who had all six Orders, let alone a small family. I’ve never heard of any family who birthed only Ordered children. The Orders don’t follow parentage. That’s one of the few things we do know about the Order. So why is my whole family Ordered? And why do we all bear different Orders? There are many more Ravens than there are Larks, or even Cormorants and Eagles.”