Alena knew that didn’t necessarily matter.
She paused at one of the doors. Had she not been here before, she doubted she would have recognized it as his, but she had been on the other side of this door and had sat there watching as Wyath had nearly died. This was the place.
But there was no one here.
Bayan rested her hand on the door. She tipped her head off to the side and frowned. “There is a shaping here, one with much power,” she said softly. “It’s… something like what I’ve sensed from Cheneth.”
Alena stared at the door. Had Cheneth known Bayan would detect his shaping? The blasted man thought that he had everything under control, but he’d hidden what he had been able to do for so long that few knew. Bayan, though, would have managed to detect his shaping and would have known the intent.
Alena knocked.
She stood back, waiting for an answer, uncertain if there would be one.
When the door opened, Oliver glanced into the hall. He was a massive man, his belly straining even the loose fabric of his robes, and his eyes widened briefly. He reached into a pocket of his robe and pulled out a long, slender metal rod that he pointed in her direction.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Oliver,” she started.
His face screwed up into a grim expression, and he swung the rod to point at Bayan. “You. Who are you?”
Bayan was a strong woman. Alena had seen the way that she handled the sudden strangeness of the barracks, and she had managed to withstand the punishment that Alena subjected her to, but she blanched suddenly when the metal rod was shoved in her face.
“Bayan Hultan.”
Oliver stabbed the rod from Bayan to Alena, swinging it like some sort of short sword. In his pudgy hands, it looked ridiculous.
She reached to swat it away, but he jerked his hand back and jabbed it at her.
“Blast you, Oliver! Cheneth sent us to help.” She said the last with something of a whisper. She didn’t know how well known Cheneth’s name might be, but she didn’t want to risk exposing them too soon.
He pulled the metal rod back, his hand shaking. “Come in, but be careful with the body.”
Oliver turned his back on her and hurried into the room, leaving Alena and Bayan staring after him. Neither spoke for long moments.
“Did he say body?” Bayan finally said.
“I think he did,” Alena answered.
“But he’s a healer.”
“Apparently not this time.”
As Alena stepped into the room, she worried they were already too late.
17
Alena
When we were children, Jasn and I played a game with our fathers call Andrin. In it, stones were placed in sequence, and the pattern mattered with determining the winner. Our fathers were both skilled, and neither of us would ever win. There are times when I feel as if I am only a stone on a game board, and wonder who might be playing us.
—Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors
“What happened?” she asked.
Oliver sighed and ran a thick hand across his brow. Every so often, his attention shifted to the body on the floor. Alena couldn’t help but look down as well. The woman lying there had glassy eyes and fine features, but it was the knife protruding from her chest was still shocking.
Could Oliver really have done this?
“I’ve told you what happened. The council is compromised. Listen, Alena, I believe you are who you claim. I tested you, so I don’t think that you managed to hide that from me, but this is bigger than what you know.”
He’d tested her? How?
Was that the strange metal rod, the one he refused to take his hand off?
“Cheneth told us you were concerned about the council. That’s why we’re here.”
“Concerned? I think that’s a bit of an understatement, don’t you, especially given the circumstances.”
“I’m not sure I know the circumstances.” Alena glanced over at Bayan, who stood at the window, staring out over the city. Oliver’s rooms were high up in the tower, in a place befitting a man of his station, and Alena remembered how she had been surprised by how small the city looked from this high. It was different even than the way that it appeared when she shaped herself in the air. This was both removed and a part of the city, a strange clash of perspectives.
“As I have said, the council is compromised. I was summoned before them, where they tested me. I managed to escape, and asked Eldridge for help. Your Cheneth answered, and he gave me this.”
“What is it?” Bayan asked.
Oliver shook his head, his jowls shaking wildly as he did. “I don’t know what he would call it, but I call it a spirit stick. It lets you shape spirit.”
Alena smiled. “Spirit? There is no shaping of spirit.”
“No?” Oliver pulled the metal rod from his pocket and pointed it at her.
Alena felt the pressure of his shaping, but nothing more than that.
“You miss him,” Oliver said. “You think of him more than you feel that you should.”
Alena’s smile faded, noting that Oliver spoke with more urgency than he had when she’d been here last. “Who?”
Oliver lowered the spirit stick. “Volth. He’s in your mind. Layered there, right at the surface. I could dig deeper—I think I know the trick of it—but doing so takes time we don’t have.”
Alena flushed at the idea of Oliver able to reach into her mind. If that were possible, a person’s innermost thoughts would never be safe. There would be no way to conceal anything, to hide embarrassment or memories. She could think of nothing darker than using something like that.
“And Cheneth gave this to you?” Alena asked.
“Yes, didn’t I say that?”
The door opened, and another woman hurried in. She was small and thin and her eyes darted around the room before settling on Oliver as he stood with the spirit stick in hand.
“You intend to just hold that all day?” the woman asked, tucking a loose strand of black hair behind her ears. “Dangerous to expose yourself like that.”
Oliver flushed. “Not exposed, Yanda. These two come from the same place as this,” he said, waving the spirit stick in the air.
Yanda turned and fixed Alena with a long stare, one that held power and strength, and even a hint of shaping. Then she shifted her focus to Bayan. When she attempted the same, Bayan resisted, building a shaping of her own—water and fire—to block what Yanda attempted.
“You have no need to shape me,” Bayan said.
“If there’s no need, then why do you resist?” Yanda asked.
“The same reason you think to use water against me.”
Alena had sensed that Yanda shaped, but she wouldn’t have known how to counter it. But Bayan, she had the ability to recognize the shaping—and block it. She had known the skill was powerful and understood Cheneth’s interest in understanding it better, but seeing how Bayan could use it, witnessing it herself, she couldn’t help but feel a hint of jealousy at the gift.
“Easy, Yanda,” Oliver said. “You three don’t need to fight over me.”
Yanda spun, and Alena thought the little woman might actually strike him, but she crossed her arms over her chest and shot him a hard glare instead. “Have you decided what you’re going to do with the body? You can’t simply throw her out the window.”
Oliver knelt in front of the dead woman, moving with surprising agility for a man his size. “I’ve learned all I can from her. This might appear to be Margo, but it is not, in fact, her.”
“How can this be anyone but the person you thought it was?” Alena asked.
“The same way Hester was not Hester. Once I managed to sever the shaping he used to conceal himself, it was clear it wasn’t anyone I recognized. Blasted man got away from me, though, and we haven’t seen him since.”
“You’re saying the council is comprised of people who aren’t who you think?” Bayan asked.
“Well, I can’t help it I didn’t have your spirit stick when Margo attacked me. Had you been willing to let me borrow it, I might have been able to hold her down. But this is fine, too.”
“Like you said,” Oliver answered, “we have to get rid of the body now.”
Alena glanced at the two healers, surprised at the casual way that they spoke. They were both full members of the Order, but with what she’d seen of Oliver, he might have barely enough strength with the other elements to have been raised to the Order. His talent was with water.
“Step back,” she said.
Oliver glanced at Yanda and shrugged.
Alena pulled on shaping of fire, drawing more strength than others in the tower could manage. The connection to the draasin, now that the hatchling had been born, had strengthened that ability in some ways. She held fire tightly, binding it in such a way that she forced it into the body only, allowing it to consume the corpse, but then pulled it back, withdrawing fire as it burned. Holding onto the shaping in this way kept much else of the room from burning and allowed her to sweep the resultant ash along as she did.
“There,” she said, the shaping complete. “Now you have taken care of it.”
Yanda watched Alena for a moment and then nodded. “You’ll have to sweep that. You could dump it out the window.”
“The window? That would just pour this woman’s ashes onto someone’s head,” Oliver said.
“What do you have in mind? Send it on a gust of wind. You have enough strength for that, don’t you think?”
“With wind? I had to make it in the Order somehow, didn’t I?”
“You have plenty of strength with water.”
“I’m not all that shabby with wind, either.” As if to prove it, Oliver created a funnel of wind that dragged the ash toward his hearth. Some of it caught in the air, and Alena added a touch of shaping to guide it, augmenting what Oliver managed. The blasted man didn’t even recognize what she did. “See?” he said. “In the hearth.”
Oliver wiped his hands on his robe and stuffed the spirit stick back into his pocket. “Burning bodies can’t be the reason that you’re here,” he said to Alena. “So why are you here?”
She glanced from Oliver to Yanda, no longer certain why Cheneth had sent her here. It couldn’t be simply to help Oliver. The man seemed to have things reasonably under control. But there had to be some reason that Cheneth intended for them to be here, and likely one that he hadn’t shared with her.
“Wait,” she said, realizing what Oliver had said earlier. “You said she pretended to be one of the council. How many of the council have been compromised?”
Oliver glanced at Yanda and then over to Alena. “That we know about? Just the two. But if these two have been compromised, then the others might have been as well. I haven’t had a chance to take the spirit stick to test the others.”
Alena looked around the room. Two councilors of the Order missing. One of those two was dead—and now cremated. The other councilors possibly involved. And the Commander still absent.
She didn’t need Cheneth here with her to know what he would ask of her, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.
“You sneaky bastard,” she whispered.
Oliver looked over, cutting off his conversation with Yanda. “Excuse me?”
“You asked why Cheneth sent us. I thought it was to help you, but I think he knew you would have everything in control.”
“Then why would he have sent you?”
Alena sighed and shook her head. “I think he intends for me to confront the council.”
18
Jasn
Shadows spread toward Atenas. I am not quite ready to play my hand. This might be the only move I can make, and I need to ensure the stones are aligned before I set them rolling. If I move too soon, another move might counter mine.
—Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors
The page spread out on the wide oak table was covered with letters and symbols and other shapes that Jasn suspected had meaning, except he could not determine what any of them were. He leaned over it, using the pen he’d been given to try to copy the shapes that he saw, but there were intricacies that he couldn’t manage. Some of the shapes were simply too small for his eyes to focus on. He’d tried shaping a lens of water and then air to help him make out the forms of the patterns, but that had only distorted them more somehow.
“What have you seen here?”
Jasn looked up at Tobin. The man had a wide face with round cheeks colored a little redder than most men, and his head was nearly completely bald. In spite of that, there were things about him that reminded Jasn of Oliver.
“I can’t seem to master any of these,” he said. “The shapes are there, but they’re difficult for me to recreate.”
Tobin tapped the page with a long, slender pen. Jasn had watched him recreate the shapes several times, and there was a looping grace to the way that he made the marks, one that Jasn didn’t share. “You have to seal in the intent when you create them, but then, you know that.”
Katya had shared with Tobin the fact that Jasn knew some of the runes. After demonstrating all that he remembered from his time while in the barracks, Tobin had agreed that he would work with Jasn, though he hadn’t told him how tedious the work was. This was more repetition than anything, and forcing him to copy the same shapes over and over, as if Jasn didn’t have anything better to do.
But what did he have to do? Rehnar worked with him willingly. The old man continued to show Jasn how to summon water, repeating the same summoning again and again, to the point that Jasn now simply asked water to help him before he started the summons. They had moved on to earth, an element felt to be complementary to water, and one that he should be able to summon with nearly as much strength as he managed water, but for some reason, he continued to struggle with it.
Katya continued to meet with him, and he thought that she intended to teach him, but there wasn’t anything that she really did to teach. Rather, it was more a chance for the two of them to talk. Jasn felt the old attraction returning the more time that he spent with Katya, but she remained focused on what she had to do, and he suspected that involved ensuring that he had skill with shaping. After his time in the barracks, and the lessons that he’d learned from not only Alena, but from Cheneth, he proved to be a quick study.
And she knew that he could speak to the elementals. That left rune traps as the next area to learn. He had no talent that made him an Enlightened candidate, but there were three areas where he could continue to improve.
Only, he wished that he had more talent with these runes.
“These are a start,” Tobin said.
Jasn could tell that he was being condescending in a way, but also trying to be nice. “I used similar patterns to survive when stone started to fall around me,” he said. “I would have been crushed otherwise.”
Tobin scratched at his chin and nodded. “Yes. There is something to be said about the stress of necessity. Perhaps you will only know how to recreate some of these when your life depends on it.”
Jasn waited for him to smile, or show some sign that he might be joking, but that damned man never ever cracked a smile. How could he work with a man who had no sense of humor about the fact that the power that he used, the magical ability that he possessed, came from drawing a few complicated shapes?
Where was the power in that?
Jasn had followed Tobin when he’d demonstrated what he could do with his patterns. And he wasn’t even the one selected to sit on the Varden. How much more talented must that man be?
“I’d like to be able to understand what it is that I can do with these before I might get crushed under thousands of pounds of rock.”
“Oh, it’s not only rock that t
hese can protect you from. The right rune with just the right amount of element strength infused into it will protect you from fire, or water, or well… you understand. There is power in these runes.”
“Not the same as in a shaping.”
Tobin smiled at him and scratched at his chin again. “No? Why don’t you shape and I’ll create one of these runes, and we’ll see who does the faster job.”
“What do you mean?”
Tobin shrugged. “See if you can attack me.”
Jasn watched Tobin, waiting for the joke, but there was none. The blasted man was serious. “Alright,” he started.
As he did, he began to shape water, pulling from the elemental. At the same time, he mixed it with a summoning, almost unconsciously doing what Rehnar had been teaching him. The combination that he generated was powerful, and he readied to unleash it toward Tobin. There would be nothing that he did that would harm him, but he wanted to prove to Tobin that his shaping would overwhelm the power of rune traps.
Tobin made a few quick marks, but these were on the table itself.
As Jasn released the shaping, nothing happened.
That wasn’t quite true. He felt the shaping that he’d built, and he felt it as it attempted to strike Tobin, but it hit some invisible barrier and then simply dissipated.
Tobin smiled at him triumphantly. “See? There are other ways of calling power.”
“I never claimed there weren’t,” Jasn reminded him.
Tobin sniffed. “Perhaps not you, but there are enough who think that shaping, or summoning, is enough to overcome anything, but there are other ways to reach the prime energy of the world.”
“And what energy is that?”
“What energy?” Tobin repeated, his tone incredulous. “The same energy that all try to reach. It is that of creation.”
“Only creation? Is that what these rune traps represent? Nothing of destruction?” It seemed to him that the summoning of power for creation could be countered by the opposite, by the desire for destruction.
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