Unbinding

by Eileen Wilks

  We . . . ? But—

  “Surely you knew that? You didn’t.” Winter shook her head. “Child, he was on our side in the Great War. He fought those who would have taken choice away from us. I don’t know if we could have won without him . . . but we did win, and he lost. He lost everything.” She fell silent, caught by memories Kai had no part in.

  Little part in, anyway. A few snatches of memory shared by a dying god didn’t give her the right to intrude on someone else’s memory of those events.

  Finally the Queen stirred and looked at her. “Why that for your token?”

  “Because it will remind me . . . you aren’t human, and it’s good to remember that, so I don’t expect human things from you. What you are, I can’t see clearly, but I know you were a true friend to Sandetti. Your promise to him cost you dearly, both in the giving of it and when the time came to honor it—but you honored it. And I want to carry a reminder of him, too. Of what he once was, before he was broken. And what I learned from him about myself.”

  Winter’s lips turned up ever so slightly. “Your name.”

  Kai stared.

  “Come, did you think you could discover your true name and I wouldn’t notice?” She smiled, suddenly impish. “I suppose I ought to tell you. You became a legal adult the moment you learned your true name, no matter how absurdly young you might be. You humans—always in a hurry.”

  “I don’t see how you . . . I didn’t realize it myself. I just kept remembering what—there at the last, the very last moment, he whispered it, but it was weeks before I could call it up clearly, and understand.” Though when she told Nathan, he’d known. Without her saying a word, he’d known. “Actually, I still don’t understand. I know, but I don’t understand.”

  “I will tell you a secret.” Winter leaned closer and whispered. “Understanding your name—that is the work of a lifetime.” She straightened, looking quite pleased with herself for no reason Kai could see. “Are you still minded to take service with me?’

  “I am. Yes.” The legal-adult part of the deal had never been what mattered most. And she didn’t distrust Winter anymore. She might not see the Queen clearly. There was so much of her, and she was not human. But something in Kai recognized something in this Queen. Something worthy of service.

  “Good. You belong in my domain, you know. You are as ruthless as I in its service.”

  “I am?”

  Winter’s eyes were now as pale and hard and bright as stars. “Of course. That is how I know you will never become a binder.” Winter was probably reading her mind again, for she nodded. “Yes. You serve truth, as I do. You killed a god with it. As did I.” She glanced down at the ring in her hand—and when had it moved from Kai’s hand to hers? “The answer to your question is, yes, I will use this as your token. You are right. It is a favor that runs both ways. Come,” she said, and held out her arm. “Let us amaze my court by entering together.”

  Kai grinned, thinking of how shocked some of those elves would be at the sight of a human shown such favor. And placed her hand on the Queen’s arm.

  GLOSSARY

  PLACES

  Aléri: city in the Queens’ realm (Iath); Winter’s court spends time there

  Adelsfrai: a region in one of the sidhe realms

  Angorai: a sidhe realm

  Annabaka: city in one of the sidhe realms where Kai was attacked by a mind-controlled assassin

  El Cahon: a small town near San Diego

  Fagioli: coffee shop in San Diego

  Iath: home realm of the two sidhe Queens, Winter and Summer

  Kakkar: an especially nasty region of one sidhe realm

  Kumeyaay Highway: one of the main highways in San Diego

  ELFIN/SIDHE WORDS AND TERMS

  Alath: a trio of nonmaterial beings (there are only three, or possibly one being in three parts) that Nathan mentions; they/it are called Alath by the sidhe but do not have a word-name for themselves

  adit: a handmade honor gift

  behi’yeli absore né: “the mad gods laughed”—a well-known saying or quotation among the sidhe

  birith: that spectrum or range of magic which includes healing magic, body magic, and transformational magic

  Dei’ri het Kai ahm insit?: “Will it make Kai sick?”

  dei is the uncertain form of “it,” used when the object isn’t known well enough to specify gender; used here with the suffix ri to indicate a question about the future. In the most common sidhe tongue, subjects, not verbs, are modified for tense.

  het = verb form of cause

  ahm = a linking verb similar to “to be”

  insit = physical malaise

  Devrai: a sidhe race

  Dirushi: a sidhe race

  eriahu: poison

  Jisen dá, oran-ahmni: “shut up, dot-eater”

  kish: an innate, unalterable ground that determines the form someone’s magic takes; a matrix

  liarda: rather like leather jockstraps. Worn by gladiatorial slaves in one region of a sidhe realm.

  Nathveta: no clear English translation, though “blessings” comes close; to call nathveta on someone means to actively desire good fortune for someone whose actions altered events in one’s favor, even if that favor was not intended. Elves consider this an obligation.

  One-off: English translation of a sidhe term for someone—almost always of mixed blood—with a rare or unique Gift that is unlikely to be inheritable

  Osiga: one of the Hundred Names (sidhe families or clans)

  p’tuth: revenge as performance art

  tétel an bo: eye-of-the-sky, a beautiful turquoise-colored gem with a white, star-shaped incursion

  NAVAJO WORDS

  Azhé’é: Father

  Hataali: medicine maker

  Doko’oosliid: Abalone Shell Mountain, one of the holy mountains

  Diné: the People

  Diné Bizaad: the Navajo language

  Bilagáana: white person

  Yázhi Atsa: Little Eagle

  OTHER UNUSUAL WORDS

  Sukhasan: a yoga term

  Ent: a tree-being (from Tolkien)

  marbligpot’th: (unknown derivation) a magical configuration

  Nokolai: a lupi clan

  Rho: the leader of a lupi clan

  Rhej: the memory of a clan; Lady-touched

  Keep reading for a sneak peek of the next Lupi novel by Eileen Wilks

  MIND MAGIC

  Coming soon from Berkley Sensation!

  THE guards came as a shock.

  She knew about the alarm system and exterior lights. Those had been in use when she lived in the big farmhouse. She knew about the perimeter alarm they’d added, too, having checked the updated schematics through her back door. No problem. There wasn’t a tech system yet invented that she couldn’t subvert, given enough time. She’d crossed the perimeter with no problems.

  Maybe she’d been cocky. No, definitely she’d been cocky. Tech wasn’t the only way to keep people out.

  Or to keep them in.

  Demi pressed her back against the big oak as if she could get it to soak her up if she pushed hard enough. Her heart pounded. Her mouth was dry. Nausea stirred in her gut. She didn’t deal well with surprises, even the happy sort. This one was not happy. Her mind was a mess, thoughts shooting off in all directions like accidental fireworks. Her fingers began moving in an automatic pattern, fingering an imaginary flute.

  Sensei said once that her mind was her biggest friend and her most terrible enemy. Sensei could say stuff like that and no one laughed at him. It wasn’t because he was right, either. He was, but you could be right and people would still laugh at you or get mad. She understood the getting mad. It’s like Mama said: people don’t like to feel stupid, and sometimes if you’re right it means they’re wrong, or else just you being right make
s them feel dumb, and that makes them mad. She knew how that felt. She didn’t understand the laughing, but it always made her feel stupid.

  She missed Mama so much.

  The tree refused to absorb her. Her fingers kept moving repetitively. Gradually her mind calmed down enough to be useful again. The situation wasn’t what she’d expected. She needed to evaluate it before deciding what to do.

  Demi was in a small copse of trees about a hundred yards from the big farmhouse. There was some cover between her and her goal—a dip in the grassy meadow that she knew from experience would conceal her as long as she crouched low. That would take her to the barn, which would block her from view of the house as the dip petered out. She’d planned to slip inside the barn, climb to the hay loft, then out the window at the back and into the big elm. From the elm she’d go to the roof of the detached garage; from there to the patio. The motion sensor aimed at the patio was tied into the security system, so that wasn’t a problem. She was already hacked into it.

  She couldn’t hack into eyeballs or the brains and bodies that went with them. The guards had been wearing camo, as if they were soldiers. Maybe they were. Mr. Smith could probably get soldiers if he wanted some.

  Why would he want soldiers? What was going on?

  She drew a shaky breath. That’s what she was here to find out, wasn’t it?

  The knot of determination in her chest tightened. She wasn’t giving up. Nicky was in there. She was ninety percent sure he was. If she was right, all kinds of things she’d thought true were fake and false, lies created to get her to help them do . . . whatever dreadful thing they were doing. Because you didn’t lie in order to get people to do wonderful things, did you?

  First things first. If Nicky was here, she had to rescue him. Which meant she had to figure out not just how to get in without being seen, but how to get both of them out again. Slowly she sank to the ground, sitting with her knees drawn up. She needed to think. To get her mind pointed in the right direction. If she didn’t get all hurried and frantic, she could do this.

  First question: should she abort the mission? Not give up, but gather more data, come up with another plan?

  She tried to weigh the risk of continuing against the risk of postponing, but she didn’t have enough data to make reasonable estimates. What she needed, then, was more data. How many guards were there? Were they armed? Were they really soldiers? Did they stay put or move around?

  She didn’t know any of that. She’d seen two guards and panicked and kept backing up until she bumped into this tree. She must have been quiet because they hadn’t come after her, but all she really remembered was being scared. She still was, but she was thinking again.

  It was three o’clock on a sunny September afternoon. The sun would be up for hours. She had time and a tall tree at her back. She stood, crouched, and launched herself at the lowest limb, grabbed it, and scrambled up.

  Climbing was Demi’s one athletic skill. She went up that tree like an oversize squirrel, stopping when she reached a convenient fork that gave her a good view of the house and grounds. She straddled it with her back to the trunk and looked out.

  Still two guards, one at the east end of the house, one on the west side. Those sure looked like Army fatigues, with their billed caps and the pants tucked into combat boots. There was some kind of insignia on the sleeve of the closest guard. That made her stomach unhappy. So did the holstered gun.

  Grimly she pulled out her phone and tapped in the data: 3:05 Guard 1 by fountain; Guard 2 25 ft. fr. west wall (dining rm). Then she took pictures of the guards using the phone’s zoom feature and got a fairly good shot of the insignia so she could check it out later. She couldn’t do that now. The phone was in airplane mode so it wouldn’t ping any nearby cell towers. That was probably excessive caution on her part, but why take a chance if she didn’t have to?

  Right now the guards were staying put. She set herself to watch. While she watched, she thought about minimum force.

  When she first began taking lessons from Sensei, he’d talked about how minimum force was the idea behind every martial art. You learned how to spend the least possible force, often using your opponent’s own force to defeat him. This, Sensei said, was what everyone tried to do in every aspect of life: use the least effort possible in order to achieve a goal. No one used one bit more effort than he or she thought was necessary. The trick was in figuring out what that minimum was and how to apply it. That’s what people got wrong. That’s what they would learn to do in his class.

  Demi had been fascinated by the concept. For the next few months, she’d tried to find examples of people intentionally using more effort than was needed. The first one that occurred to her was studying for a test. Some people crammed like crazy, going way overboard. But that, Sensei had said, was because their goal wasn’t to ace the test, but to reduce their anxiety about the test. Because they couldn’t control what was on the test, they could never eliminate that anxiety entirely, so they kept trying to memorize more and more facts.

  Another time she’d suggested that suicide bombers broke the rule. Sensei agreed that they appeared to do so, because giving one’s life to achieve a goal could be considered spending the maximum possible to any person. But if your goal is to be a martyr, death is the minimum requirement. And those who sent a suicide bomber out to kill strangers were obviously expending the minimum force. They exchanged one life for several of those they considered enemies and caused fear in hundreds or thousands more.

  She’d come up with lots more examples, but after a while she could shoot them down herself with a little thought. People mostly weren’t very good at estimating the amount of effort needed. Mostly they underestimated it, which was why diets failed so often. People tried to make sweeping changes without allowing for how difficult, how against their nature, this was. Incremental change worked better because each step felt like the minimum necessary. On the other hand, when people were scared they often overestimated the amount of force needed. That’s why police departments had rules and training for when it was okay to use deadly force. You couldn’t rely on instinct when you were scared. Your instinct might be to shoot whatever was scaring you, and that could be a terrible mistake.

  Demi had also come to realize that when people seemed to use disproportionate force, she’d probably misidentified their goal. As she sat high in the tree watching the guards and brooding, she fought valiantly to persuade herself she could fix this, could find some way to avoid being seen by those soldiers. Nicky had been missing for a week now. She didn’t think they would actually torture him, but he must be miserable and frightened. Who knew what kind of pressure they were putting on him to do—well, whatever it was they wanted him to do? Given the nature of his Gift, it must be something awful. She had to get him out.

  Only she couldn’t. Not yet. Her chest ached with the knowledge. She hung her head. Nicky, I’m sorry. I’ll be back.

  The dreadful truth was that she’d overlooked the obvious.

  The amount of force people use is always in proportion to their goal. She’d been ninety percent sure that Mr. Smith had lied about his goal for the enclave, yet she hadn’t reevaluated the amount of effort he might employ to secure it. She’d acted as if nothing had changed, trying to sneak into the enclave the same way she used to sneak out of it.

  She had been downright woolly-headed. That stung.

  Demi’s eyes watered. Angrily she rubbed them. Much as she hated it, today’s plan was a bust. She was going to have to go back to campus and come up with another one. She began making her way down the tree, going a lot more slowly than she’d climbed up.

  A stick cracked. She froze in an awkward crouch, one foot firmly placed on a thick branch, the other foot reaching below it for the next one. Her heart pounded. That might have been anything—

  Faint but clear, she heard the rustle of feet. Coming this way? She thought so. Oh, God, oh
God, now what? She was going to be sick. No, she wasn’t. She refused to throw up and give herself away. She’d get herself firmly planted on this branch and hold extremely still. She was still fairly high up, with branches and leaves and all between her and the ground. Maybe whoever it was wouldn’t see her.

  Slowly, careful not to make noise, Demi made herself secure and held very, very still. Even when the pair of soldiers moved into view, heading right for her tree, she didn’t move. She may have stopped breathing.

  The soldiers carried rifles slung over their shoulders. The man with them did not.

  He was a round little man. Not fat, but with a bureaucrat’s round little tummy and gray slacks. His cheeks were plump and pink, his head round as a bowling ball and almost as bald. Even his glasses were round. He stopped at the base of her tree and looked up. Those glasses winked at her as light glinted off them.

  “Demi.” Mr. Smith shook his head sadly. “You might as well come down.”