The Councillor

by E. J. Beaton

  Two hundred steps, she thought, gazing at the trees on the peak. Better than a thousand. Jale knew what he was about.

  She set one foot on the first step and began to climb. Derset walked swiftly to her side, and the others divided into pairs. The last two hundred steps did not seem like a great distance, but the pain sliced into her after just a few minutes—it was different this time—an ache spread through all of her, from her fingertips to her toes. The daggers multiplied. Keep moving, she told herself. Just keep moving, and it’ll pass.

  She was nearly there, at the spot where soldiers from the first armies had shot down the chimera, and she was going to see it, even if it took all the strength in her body not to wince. The pain tripled, and she fought to put one foot in front of the other. It would be wise to ask the group to pause until the pain dispersed, but she had not come this far to stop, even for a few minutes, and she kept hobbling up the stairs in the sun.

  “Are you all right, my lady?” Derset said, as her foot struck the edge of one step.

  “This sun is enough to make anyone falter.” Lysande wobbled, but managed to right herself. “Only a few more stairs to the spot. I am determined to stand where Oblitara did.”

  “So long as you don’t die on a hilltop like Oblitara did.” The trench in his forehead deepened. “Heatstroke is a serious thing.”

  Eight steps left. Then seven . . . six . . . five. The fourth was nearly another stumble, but she gritted her teeth hard enough to keep her body upright. Three steps to go . . . then two . . .

  She had mounted the last stair when she felt the pain cut through her. The knives sliced into her flesh, her lungs, her throat, and her head: it was as if they had entered every part of her, ribboning her veins.

  She reached for Derset’s arm and nearly grabbed hold of him, but her legs gave way. Her body toppled backward.

  Somebody caught her, but not in time for her head to avoid the ground. She could hear Litany’s shriek, and Derset’s cry of “my lady,” and Cassia shouting at someone to get water.

  The last thing she saw was the pure, vibrating blue of the Lyrian sky, before everything faded.

  Blackness. Blackness for hours, or was it days? She tried to open her eyes, but the pain felt so excruciating that even moving an eyelid was agony. The only choice was sleep. In the blackness she still felt the daggers in her veins, but when she dreamed, their points receded and she could breathe again.

  She found herself walking in Axium Forest, on the first morning Sarelin had taken her there. The queen had sent the guards away, and they were talking alone, the shadows of blackfoot branches striping their faces, the smell of animal scat rising, the two of them moving along the trails of pawprints until their voices sank into subsoil. At last, Sarelin put a finger to her lips and pointed. Lysande saw a brown shape move between two trunks; the bear walked toward the queen on its hind legs, its jaws wet.

  Sarelin stepped forward to meet it. The animal slowed to watch her, bear opposite human: ten feet of muscle and dark, lustrous fur, facing down a figure in silver armor.

  The two gazed at each other, and Sarelin drew a dagger from her sheath. The queen steadied her aim and threw. A hit. Then three more. The bear opened its mouth—bellowed—and crashed onto wet soil, leaving the forest reeling so that Lysande could feel the earth shaking, could see the sweat on Sarelin’s brow as she sheathed her dagger.

  “Powerful bastard.” The queen shook her head and walked over to the huge body, now still. “I saw him on the last hunt, too, but I let him get away. Suppose I sort of got attached to him.”

  “Why kill him, then?”

  Sarelin’s smile, as she turned to Lysande, betrayed a hint of sadness. “Any soldier can kill something she hates. You don’t feel pain when you destroy an enemy. It’s the natural thing to do. It’s only when you kill something you’ve come to love that you learn how to lead.” She walked back to Lysande and clapped her on the shoulder. “One day, you’ll understand that, Lys.”

  The agony in her veins returned, and the blackness shrouded her again. She drifted down a river where there was no light, only waves of pain, lapping at a shore she could never reach.

  The next time she accompanied Sarelin, it was not through sight, but through touch. A pair of familiar hands lifted her up and placed her into a carriage. She could feel the warm presence of a body on the seat beside her and hear a ringing voice. “There she is, the girl with the quill.” Laughter—the scent of thick perfume, of the kind that royals and nobles wore—and Sarelin’s arm wrapped around her shoulders.

  There were other hands, too. Cool hands that pressed against her forehead and went away again. Hands that pushed her lips apart and gave her water. They held her when the pain finally stopped and when she swam back into the real world, pushing up through the blackness to break the surface.

  “Here you are at last,” a mellifluous voice said beside her. “Try to lie still. You’ve had a frightful ordeal; the physicians think it was heatstroke, the poor souls.”

  She opened her eyes. A drowsiness hung upon her, but no pains threatened to pierce her; she was lying on dozens of silk cushions in the suite in Lyria, with the mosquito net rolled up above her and the sun gushing in.

  Relief swamped her. It took a moment to see who had spoken.

  “I thought you’d forgotten about me.”

  Three’s smile was enigmatic as always. He pressed a hand to her forehead again and held it there for a few seconds. He looked somewhat out of place on the gilt chair beside her bed, attired in his plain brown cloak and triangular pendant.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to arrive,” he said. “I had to clear up a little altercation in the desert, as you know. Still, I made it here in time to keep you from prying eyes.”

  She was not in prison. Nor were her hands shackled in tempero cuffs. Relief gushed through her again. “Naturally, you stole into a guarded palace.”

  “Not I. Well, not first. Why have underlings if you can’t ask them to use their talents? My dear colleague Seven has Lyrian features, a physician’s robe, and most useful of all, the power of inducing extreme good will. The guards on the door were pleased to see her. Seven even managed to persuade your attendant that she was being kept informed of your progress, with regular reports.” He smiled.

  Lysande imagined Litany returning and returning to the suite doors, and swallowed.

  “By the way, your friend, the merchant Charice, sends her wishes. It was hard to tell if our offer of safety would be enough for her—she keeps her cards very close—but then again, she has played many rounds with a scholar.” Three’s smile deepened. “Coincidentally, she has loaned us some potions that are quite hard to come by.”

  Charice. Of course. The way he spoke, it was as if Lysande had never needed to worry about her. It was one thing to see Charice fighting alongside the Shadows; it was quite another to hear the word safe pronounced, like a dotted i or a crossed f, as if the matter were resolved. Yet in that pronouncement she sensed a little too much surety, and she wondered if Three knew that Charice lived her life in unfinished clauses.

  Leaving the questions for now, she tried to sit up, but her head weighed her down, a ball of lead fixed to a twig, and she was forced to settle back on the pillows.

  “You will feel weak for a few hours.” Three patted her forehead again. “The symptoms of this condition include heightened senses, so acute that they will occasionally drive you to distraction, and the ability to kill with a flick of your hands. Of course, you’ll have to hide these symptoms for the rest of your life, so the scales even out—in a manner of speaking.”

  “You knew I was an elemental.”

  “I guessed.” He pulled his chair closer to the bed. “But I did not expect my suspicion to be confirmed before the Sapphire Ball. Least of all two days before. Lie back, my dear, and allow me to offer you some of this honeyed gateau; I could not p
rocure snap-flower strips, nor the starfruit that you like so much.”

  After she had swallowed the piece of cake, she flexed her arms, tested her toes and fingers, and measured her exhalations. Nothing seemed unusual. It might be obvious on the outside, though—the extent of the change she had been through might be sketched onto her features through dark circles under her eyes, a pallor in her cheeks, the red of sleepless nights splashed across her eyeballs—what if everyone sensed the underlying cause and closed in upon her? As she was considering this possibility, Three’s words sank in at last.

  Two days until the ball, she thought. That means I’ve been asleep . . .

  “You have been sprawled on that bed for over a week.” He seemed to have read her mind. Or was he simply reading her expression? “It takes time for one’s body to transform into a weapon of mortifying force. Lord Derset has been asking after you, most solicitously. And the Irriqi nearly broke down the door. There is also this,” he produced a small bag of black velvet, “from Prince Fontaine.”

  She ignored the look he was giving her, and taking the bag, she traced the curves of an object inside it, pretending not to guess at its nature. “I don’t feel like a weapon of mortifying force. My arms feel like limp lettuce.”

  Even if there was a weapon hidden inside her, it could hardly be strong enough to protect her against everyone in the realm who would detest her.

  “It would be unnaturally convenient if there were no gap between maturation and the emergence of your powers. This is what we call the transition,” Three said. “Two days before the ball, and you are at the height of volatility: a jet of water or a ball of fire might burst out of you at any moment. You must not drink any more scale for at least a week. I do not imply that you may use night-quartz and expel the contents of your stomach, either—we are talking about a program of outright abstinence.”

  “Scale,” Lysande repeated, thickly.

  “Oh, yes, my dear, we are quite aware of your little habit.”

  “But I—” She felt a panic stronger than that she had experienced during her maturation. Shame suffused her body.

  “Forgive me, but we have no time to go into it. No more scale until your powers develop. You are dangerous, not only to others, but to yourself. A state of heightened physical stimulus would only exacerbate the problem.” He paused, looking at her, but did not elaborate. “We have infiltrated Rayonnant Palace, and my colleagues can take you through the methods to control your powers, but it is a practical lesson. It cannot be taught until you have your element.”

  Had Three really spotted clues that she was elemental? How did he know about the scale? Was it really true that a jet of water might just burst out of her? It was always when you had no time to think that questions came. As they arrived one by one, she noticed that he was fumbling under the brim of his hat and pulling out a piece of paper.

  “You are different now—and yet you are the same—but we must leave that till after the ball. There is something we must deal with first.” He held out the page.

  “Three.” She had only just remembered. “I know what Charice knows, about the White Queen. And I suppose you have the right to know that we met twice in Rhime.”

  From his unsurprised expression, she knew that she had guessed right about the extent of his knowledge—the information he had hinted at, about Sarelin and the White Queen, when she first met him—and she knew, too, that Charice would have bargained for her safety with other offerings.

  “If Mea Tacitus was a Brey—Sarelin’s cousin—we have a chip of diamond that may be worth an enormity,” she said.

  “In my opinion, whether it is a diamond or not remains unclear.”

  It would have been so easy to argue. She knew that Three had experience in this, and experience granted the upper hand, and yet . . . if only she had time to do as she pleased, to analyze what Mea Tacitus’ childhood serving Sarelin meant and how they could use it. Biting down on her words, she took the page.

  The gray veins in the paper told her that this note had been inked from the Periclean States. Runic symbols formed lines of even length, dominating the page in black ink. Unlike the other letters she had read, it was not translated, and she felt a small relief at having something tangible to work with, something aside from shame and anxiety to focus on. That Three knew about the scale . . . she had a horrible feeling that he knew about the night Derset had visited her chamber, too, and worst of all, that he could read her thoughts about Luca.

  Why was it that some interactions imprinted themselves in your mind like a seal pressing into wax? She could not recall what she had said to Derset on the ship, yet she perfectly recalled the flare of interest across Luca’s countenance when she had grabbed his wrist, and his remarks: You have a crushing grip, Prior . . . I never said that I disliked it.

  “Seven worked very hard to catch that messenger dove and duplicate the note. She took care to send the bird flying off again, as if nothing had ever been intercepted. Yet for such a coup, our efforts to translate have proved fruitless.” Three almost managed to suppress the hopeful note in his voice. “Perhaps your not-inconsiderable abilities can be of some use.”

  It was time to direct her thoughts onto the task. This proved less simple than she had expected. She forced herself to concentrate. The runes that covered the paper were not any alphabet identified by the crown: the shapes were curving yet jagged at the ends, a hybrid of two kinds of ancient glyphs, so rare that she had only come across them in one poetry book in Sarelin’s library. She had stored away the meaning of each in her mind, yet she did not feel content to proceed without checking them against a reliable source, and she worked to translate the message with a quill and the Compendium of Ancient Languages, fetched from the desk. It felt like butting a mountain with her shoulder, but the translation stimulated her in a way that she needed.

  The result, when she had checked the runes three times over, appeared to be strings of figures. “It’s a cipher,” she said, looking across at Three. “Look here: punctuation marks among the numbers. I would bet that there are sentences buried beneath the code. But don’t get hopeful. I have no notion of how to crack it.”

  “Ah.” He reached for the page. “Then I shall pass it on.”

  Lysande sat up straight. “Leave it.”

  She was already bringing the paper closer to her face, holding it tightly. She had forgotten about the pair of symbols in the bottom-right corner of the page. 1, 12. Two numbers in modern Eliran script, but only there. Why the anomaly? Perhaps this pair of figures denoted a chapter and passage in the Silver Songs, or a hymn from one of the city prayer-books that would decode the message. It might be a book known only to the White Queen’s supporters, but that would require making several copies, and Lysande felt that that was something of a tiresome task for a woman on the run; for convenience’s sake, she would have chosen a book that circulated everywhere. She could not help noticing that it was becoming easier to think like the White Queen with every day that passed.

  Running through the Songs one by one, she pushed herself to think while her body was sore, with no scale to relieve the pain, and nothing came up from the verses that could be relevant. She loved the thorniness of the problem, though: the challenge of untangling the threads.

  The thought occurred to her that Luca might have knotted them, and a bolt of something warm and bright shot through her. It was frustration, she told herself. She would not permit it to be excitement.

  There was “open the way for the Conquest,” on paragraph twelve of the first book, but she couldn’t see how that helped her to make sense of these numbers, unless the code could be shot at with arrows or stabbed. She bit her lip. “And so she took one in every group of three”: the twelfth paragraph of the seventh book sounded more promising, but after putting together every third number, she was still looking at a string of meaningless figures.

  The Axium prayer-book
that Sarelin had kept by her bed, with its thick hide cover, came to mind. She chastised herself for not memorizing the hymns. There could be something in the History of the Chimeran War, though; in her head, she ran through the quotes she had noted down in her string-bound compilation on politics. This would make a useful lesson for An Ideal Queen, if she managed to succeed: The ideal ruler is not thwarted by a coded page.

  “No hope of cracking it, I suppose?” Three’s voice still had a distinct note of hope.

  “I shall need a few minutes more.”

  Or a few hours more. She glared at the 1 next to the 12, blaming the skinny numeral for her inadequacy. As she took note of the number’s appearance, she saw that there was a tiny stroke kicking up from the bottom-right of the stem, a mark almost too faint to be seen.

  Had she imagined it? She held the page closer again. No; it was still there.

  “It’s not ‘One, Twelve,’” she said. “It’s ‘L, Twelve.’ The number one’s got a line veering up at the bottom. I’ve seen ‘L, Two’ on one of Sarelin’s law-drafts, in reference to a place in the official text; I’d say this comes from the Legilium.” She leaned forward before remembering how much it hurt to move; her back protested shrilly. Even that could not stem her satisfaction. Threads of code separated in her fingers. “The numbers will correspond to letters starting from the beginning of the twelfth chapter.”

  Three clapped his hands. He looked as if he had found a lump of gold in a battered cooking pot. “The book of laws! Excellent work, Signore Prior. A good choice for a key, no doubt. Most city-rulers and nobles keep it nearby, in case they are suddenly required to evade their taxes. They are scrupulous when it comes to acting without scruple.”

  Who did that sound like, if not Luca? But she was not supposed to be focusing on him.

  “I don’t suppose you happen to have the Legilium at hand?” Three said.

  Vindication pricked at Lysande as she directed him to the chest of books that she had convinced Litany to pack. Three rummaged through the manuals and histories and poetry volumes to find the dog-eared Legilium. Lysande opened the law-book to the twelfth page: a chapter on the crime of using a magical power, she noted with an ironic smile. Skimming through the passage, she had just enough strength to hold the book beside the creased piece of paper, and once she could balance it, matching the key to the message was no problem; she counted the letters in her head and jotted down the right ones.