The Hidden Stars

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The Hidden Stars Page 27

by Madeline Howard


  “The world is in flux,” he went on, after another silence. “Silüren uilédani amffüriandem—isn’t that what the wizards say? All things under the moon are changing. It’s been true for more than a century, but it seems to be more true now, and even a half-blood Ni-Ferys like me senses this increasingly.”

  In his words, Sindérian caught an echo of her own worst fears. And she wondered what perceptions the Faey had to know these things, what knowledge and powers that even wizards lacked. Faolein might have known the answer to that, but she did not. One thing she remembered that her father had said, back at Tregna: “It is bad enough when our enemies take us by surprise, but when it is our friends who prove unpredictable and untrustworthy—”

  Sitting back on her heels, she said with a sigh: “If Prince Ruan dislikes and mistrusts you, he seems to like me even less. I’m afraid that I said things back at Brill that he will never forgive. I would set things right if I could, but I fear the breach is already past mending.”

  Much to her surprise, Gilrain began to shake with silent laughter. “To do the Prince no more than justice,” he said, his voice colored with amusement, “I think you are wrong. You are merely the victim of Prince Ruan’s peculiar idea of chivalry. He thinks it proper to keep you at a distance. Have you never considered the evils of your situation, now that your father is gone? A lone female, traveling with a party of men—

  “But I see that you have not,” he added, when her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “Your pardon, Lady Healer, if I’ve made you uncomfortable. Perhaps I should never have mentioned it.”

  She felt the hot blood rising in her face, and not because of the fire. “I’m well able to defend my own honor, should it come to that,” she replied stiffly. “In any case, there are far more important things I should be thinking about now. I can’t allow myself to be distracted by what you call ‘the evils of my situation.’”

  “Yet Prince Ruan seems to be able to think of little else,” said Gilrain, with an odd little smile. “I wonder why that is?”

  They rode out the next morning in a fine, misting rain, with a cold wind blowing in their faces. The worst of the storm had passed; but as Sindérian sniffed the air and tasted the wind, she was keenly aware of ripples in the world of matter, of currents and eddies—the aftereffects of Thaga’s spell. Power, restless and chaotic, shimmered on the air, and a whole series of tiny vibrations moved like ants across her skin. The horses seemed to feel it, too. Prince Ruan’s dun trembled and fought at the bit, and the chestnut gelding blew out a nervous breath and shied at nothing.

  That wretch Thaga’s unseasonable thunderstorm, Sindérian thought. It will be muddling up the weather in Hythe and Mere for the next half year. Not to mention what it might do to all the fertility spells and birthing charms of all the village midwives and wisewomen between the border and the mountains.

  And who would suffer if the crops rotted in the fields, if the flocks dwindled? Not the likes of Dreyde and his tame sorcerer, certainly. It was the ordinary people in tiny villages like Brill and Kemys, in towns like Dacre: they would suffer, they would do without, their children would go to bed hungry.

  It filled Sindérian with an impotent rage just to think of it, the more so because she felt partly responsible. She and her companions had come into the region like a wandering curse, and who knew how long afterward the suffering and the hardship they left behind them would last? How could people who already lived in such appalling poverty as they had seen in Kemys survive a bad season, when they could hardly scrape out a miserable living as it was?

  “Are we really so different from Ouriána and those who serve her?” she wondered out loud.

  “I would hope,” said the Prince, startled into answering, “that we are as different as night and day.”

  Sindérian bit her lip. If only it could be that obvious to her! “Don’t both sides use people like counters in some horrible game, gambling castles and cities and kingdoms, hazarding lives and futures on the very narrowest of chances, rationalizing it all in the name of some distant—and possibly unreachable—higher good? Who decides when the cost is too great? Who reckons up the value of a life lost now against lives spent later? Wizards? Princes? The Fates? Or that vast and incomprehensible power the Fates are supposed to serve, that Men call the Light?”

  To this Ruan had no answer; he could only shake his head.

  Yet she knew what Faolein would say, if he were there. Our lives are the clay the Fates use to shape a better world. Only Faolein was not there, nor would ever be again, and so far as Sindérian could see—for all that she had done and experienced so far, for all the myriad questions that swarmed in her brain—the world became more and more a perilous place to live in, and one harder and harder for her to understand.

  But then, all at once, she was furiously, breathtakingly angry with herself.

  Sitting up straighter in the saddle she took the reins more firmly in her hands. What gives you the right to self-pity? You ought to be ashamed! You may be orphaned, but you’re young and strong and whole, which is a good deal more than many can say. And you have a home to return to, when there are thousands left homeless by the war.

  How dare you even begin to feel sorry for yourself.

  18

  As if in sympathy with Thaga’s distant spellcasting, it was raining on Phaôrax, too.

  For three days and two nights there had been a thick, slow, persistent rainfall over the capital. It drummed on slate roofs, leaked under wooden shutters, filled all the gutters and cisterns to overflowing. It turned narrow, dirty streets into sluggish brown rivers, polluted with garbage and drowned cats.

  Lightning flared and thunder rumbled; the slate-grey waters of the bay turned a burning sulfurous yellow. Sometimes a bolt struck one of the dagger-pointed obelisks, or a belfry at the New Temple—then there would be smoke and a sizzle, followed by a rain of dead bats in the courtyards below.

  At Ouriána’s nine-towered palace on its rocky promontory, the gargoyles and serpentine drainpipes were spouting like fountains; the hideous lead statues on all the lower terraces stood knee deep in water. Inside the looming black stone structures, gusts of wet air blew open the heavy, iron-banded doors, then slammed them shut again; rain came tumbling down the chimneys, putting fires out; and the Empress was in a perilous temper.

  When messages had arrived earlier that day by way of a draggled rain-drenched crow, she had closeted herself in an upper room with two of her priests and her Lord Chancellor. And there she remained, pacing the floor with a restless, uneasy step, brooding over the news from Mere.

  “This Sindérian, the daughter of Faolein—who and what is she, to have made such a fool of Thaga?” Her voice vibrating with passion, Ouriána turned a fierce, green-eyed glance on the two priests, Vitré and Scioleann.

  Standing together by the door, gaunt and wraithlike in their damp crimson robes, they could only look bewildered and shake their heads. She had called them away in the midst of their fortnightly sacrifices, and they still smelled faintly of blood and smoke. While they understood her anger, her impatience (anything in the way of incompetence always incited her wrath), they could by no means comprehend the scope of her dismay.

  “I’ve never thought much of that scheming mountebank, Thaga,” Vitré declared, with a slight grimace. “A second-rate magician from a discredited tradition! Are we really to be surprised if, after first disposing of the Master Wizard, he has allowed himself to be bested by the daughter—a mere journeyman wizard of no name or reputation?”

  He made a dismissive gesture with one lean, spidery, six-fingered hand. “And even if she did make a mockery of the magus and his spells at Saer, can we doubt there will be a very different outcome, should she manage to overtake Camhóinhann and the others, which is unlikely in itself, and attempt to hinder them in any way?”

  Scioleann murmured his agreement, but Ouriána was less than satisfied. Her fingers closed, reflexively and unthinkingly, around a small object she carr
ied in one hand. Somehow—she could not say how or why, yet the feeling was unmistakable—she had a strong presentiment that something had gone seriously wrong, something far more important than the escape of an inexperienced young wizard and her equally insignificant companions from a fortress in Mere.

  Abruptly, she shifted her gaze to the fourth person in the room: a little old man, so bent and crabbed with age that the braids of his long, white hair and beard swept the floor when he hobbled across to stand at her feet.

  This was Noz, the onetime court jester, the onetime spy—Noz, the grotesque one-eyed hunchback with the bandy legs and the battered face, who had tumbled and leapfrogged over so many other ambitious and determined men, rising first to the office of Chamberlain, and at last to Lord Chancellor, the most envied—and therefore the most hated—man on Phaôrax. The Furiádhin, in particular, loathed and despised him, which she knew very well, but they had better sense than to protest his presence.

  “What can you tell me about this young woman?” she asked, going back to her brooding and pacing. “Surely our spies have mentioned her at one time or the other, surely there is something written about her in that great book of yours?”

  The old man cleared his throat. He wore a red leather patch over the empty eye socket, but his remaining eye was a bright hazel, curiously young and alive in his damaged face. He had a remarkable memory, was known to carry around a vast and comprehensive library of information inside his head, and though he kept careful records of everything, every last scrap that her spies brought in—maintaining, for instance, a thick ledger full of detailed notations on the Scholia and the wizards on Leal, including family trees and much else besides—he was seldom obliged to consult his written archives.

  Nor did he find it necessary to do so on the present occasion. “She has, in truth, a formidable pedigree. Sindérian Faellanëos, sin Faolein Faellanëos ei Shionneth Eäldridhin—descended, according to my best recollection, from at least seven generations of wizards in both the paternal and maternal lines. Despite which,” he added, “she seems to be nothing more than a particularly gifted but innocuous young healer. Perhaps we should not make too much of the fact that Thaga’s bindings could not hold her. With such a father, it is no wonder if the young woman is armed with any number of counterspells for her protection. But more than that—?”

  Noz scratched at his beard with a long, yellow fingernail, hooked like a claw. “Yet I do recall one thing. It may mean much, it may mean nothing at all.”

  Again Ouriána experienced that little chill in the blood, that inexplicable intimation of trouble. “What have you remembered?”

  “Only that she spent two or three years in the household of the Princess Nimenoë. But at such a tender age, it’s unlikely she acquired much of your sister’s craft. However, she would have been there, along with her father, when the Princess gave birth.”

  Self-proclaimed goddess though she was, the Empress felt a purely mortal dew start out on her skin.

  It ought to mean nothing—a child healer present at a difficult and ultimately fatal birth; a little girl rendered helpless by reason of her youth and inexperience, as much as by the effects of Ouriána’s own curse; and forced thereby to watch and do nothing while a foster sister came into the world, a foster mother left it. And if Nimenoë (who must have known that she was dying) had tried to protect her babe by linking the infant’s destiny to that of another, then surely, surely she would have chosen one of the older, more powerful wizards who were there at the time.

  Ouriána’s restless movements took her over to one of the tall, arched windows, where she paused, watching the rain sheet down the diamond-shaped glass panes, listening to the roar of surf on the jagged rocks below. Lightning flashed out over the water, and the concussion that followed rattled the windows.

  Suddenly remembering that her hands were not empty, she glanced down at the slightly sweaty object she held in her left palm.

  It had arrived with the letters from Dreyde and the magus: a little packet wrapped up in silvery fish skin to protect it from the weather, then bound to the crow’s leg. The contents—a slender coil of weather-roughened dark hair, and five short woolen threads—she had originally mistaken for some rustic charm or fetish, for there was still much of the village warlock about Thaga.

  But the hair was Sindérian’s, obtained (according to the magus) by one of the maidens who had helped her to dress before dinner, and the threads, which were stiff with blood and sweat, had come from the gown she was wearing when she first arrived at Saer. “These I send you,” Thaga had written in his bold, uneven hand, “in case you should find use for them.”

  Ouriána permitted herself a brief, grim smile. Whatever else you could say about Thaga, the wretch was at least resourceful. She could not imagine, for instance, any of the Furiádhin condescending to bribe or bully a lady’s handmaids in order to get at her blood or hair. And yet some of the old Earth Magics—the magic of bone dust, spittle, nail clippings, and the like—could be surprisingly potent. Particularly when one wished to harry or curse a person one had never seen or touched, who just at the moment was many hundreds of miles away.

  “I think,” she said at last, “that we should not dismiss this Sindérian too easily, just because we know so little about her.

  “The girl is probably nothing in herself, but she may be a part of something greater.”

  Behind the building that housed the mews there was a narrow stair, seldom used, which wound up and up to a lonely turret and a barred door, overlooked by a particularly repellent screaming gargoyle.

  No one but the Empress ever took that stair. No one but Ouriána herself would have dared to do so. Even to stand on the lowest step and breathe the malign atmosphere seeping down from above would have tested the courage of even the hardiest. As Faolein had discovered at Saer, there are some things a healthy mind utterly rejects, from which the body instinctively recoils.

  To the alley behind the mews, and to that stair, the Empress went on that same day, after sending the priests Vitré and Scioleann back to their bloody duties at the New Temple and releasing the Lord Chancellor to the dusty pleasures of his musty archives. She left a shivering and unhappy mob of attendants waiting for her in the muddy, drizzling, twilit courtyard, and began her solitary climb.

  With her own white hands she removed the heavy bar and pushed open the massive door. A rank, nauseating odor flowed out to greet her, so that for a moment her head spun, and her stomach roiled.

  It would have been difficult to describe that smell. Reminiscent of graves, sickrooms, torture chambers, it was literally the odor of fear itself, and therefore suggestive of all that inspires it: the sour smell of rodent; the tiny electric tingle of spiders across the skin; plagues, tombs, winding sheets, fear of live burial.

  The low, round chamber, already close and breathless, became more oppressive still when she shut the door behind her. A faint light came in through a small window of cloudy green glass, but not enough to illuminate the room. The green glass shone like a jewel in what was otherwise total darkness.

  And she could hear queer, disquieting noises in that darkness: the piteous mewling of sickly infants; a consumptive rattle like air passing through a pair of diseased lungs; a wracking animal cry of terror and agony; an insane babbling that went on and on and on.

  With a Word, Ouriána ignited a branch of candles on a stand by the door. The noises rose to a feverish pitch—and then died down.

  Twenty-one iron cages dangled on chains from the great oak beams that held up the ceiling, twenty-one cages containing an equal number of tiny monstrosities.

  They were something like rats and a good deal like monkeys. They were no two exactly alike: They were horned, winged, taloned—several were armed with vicious stingers at the end of long reticulated tails. When they skinned back their wrinkled black lips, they showed double rows of sharp brass teeth. A few were covered in shaggy brown hair, but most were naked.

  Those who lived i
n the palace at Apharos grew accustomed to the ugly, the deformed, the grotesque, but even Ouriána’s household monsters (the Furiádhin, for instance, or the dwarfish Noz) would have flinched at the sight of these. They were nightmare incarnate: the malicious imps who carry bad dreams, who bring hallucinations to feverish minds, and horrors and delusions to drunkards and drug-fiends.

  As befitted a goddess, the Empress, of course, was quite immune. With a firm step, she crossed the room and opened one of the cages, allowing the grey-skinned nightmare inside to leap through the air and land on her shoulder.

  At once, all of the others set up a piteous plaint. There was a rattling of leathery wings, and a whirr like a thousand insects. Inside their iron cages, the imps flinched, jittered, and chattered their teeth, as if to show that even they were troubled by their own presence, or at least by the proximity of so many of their own kind.

  Ouriána ignored them, her mind on other things. “For you,” she said, reaching up to stroke the shivering and excited nightmare balancing on her shoulder, “I have a most important task. Seek out the one to whom these belong—” She held up three of Sindérian’s hairs, and the imp reached out and snatched them with its tiny shriveled hands. “You will find her traveling through Hythe or Mere.”

  The nightmare hissed in her ear, sidled down her arm, and settled on her wrist, where it sat fanning its double pair of wasplike wings and swinging its barbed prehensile tail, as if eager to be off. Perhaps its most disquieting feature was a pair of milky blue eyes, innocent and pure, particularly startling in that depraved little mad-monkey face.

  Ouriána held it on her wrist for several minutes longer, savoring the moment. Then she swept across the floor with a determined step, and threw open the door. While she had lingered in the room, the last light had faded from the sky. Torches flared down in the courtyard, and the wind brought in a strong whiff of smoke along with the rain.

 

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