The Wizard King

by Julie Dean Smith

  But the Sage was no longer listening; no longer in such awe of her. His reverence had changed to dark suspicion, and he leapt to his feet and jabbed an accusing finger at her, defiant to the last. “No! I shall not meet your challenge. It is a trick, do you hear? A trick! You tell me there is power in that crown, but you only wish me to lower my defenses and walk blindly to my death! You are jealous of me! Jealous! I am destined to sit at God’s right hand and you come to me with lies, bidding me to turn back at the brink of my greatest success—God’s greatest victory upon this earth!”

  Athaya drew back, mighty wings flinching inward in genuine astonishment. Truly, your Grace, you bring new meaning to pride and vanity. If God Himself denies you, will you still mewl like a spoiled child, demanding to see His superior?

  By now the crown was glowing like a harvest moon in the archbishop’s hands, and only then did Lukin’s muddled senses piece together what was happening—that his precious weapon, meant to kill, was somehow the cause of all this pageantry; the locus of Athaya’s power. As if it carried pestilence, he hastily dropped the crown into the strongbox and slammed the lid closed, locking it in impotent darkness.

  The psychic shock ripped through Athaya like a severed limb. The delirious intoxication of power surging in her veins was gone in an instant, leaving an empty husk of flesh. The swift descent from one extreme to the other rendered her mute and paralyzed, as if the rhythmic pulses of love had suddenly been twisted into agonizing convulsions of death. Without the crown, her creation shattered like stained glass in an explosion of sharp and blinding color—a little death that returned her to human form. Her wings dropped away like autumn leaves; her flesh lost its lustrous glow; her gown turned once again to simple wool; her hair was once more night instead of day.

  The spell was broken, but the Sage was beyond comprehension now, his mind irreversibly contaminated by both Athaya’s magic and the residue of the crown. “Are you afraid of me, then?” he shrieked, ignoring Athaya’s battered mortal presence and whirling around like a madman in the dark for signs of the now-vanished archangel. “Have you gone back to carry false tales of me to God?” He shook a fist at the sky, damning it and all that it contained. “You all conspire against me! I will speak to Him without your aid. I need no intercessors! He will see me!”

  Clutching the strongbox by a leather strap, Lukin bolted toward the arena’s edge and freedom, but the Sage snatched his arm with unholy strength and held him back. “Give me the crown! I will see Him… and this crown shall be my gift to Him. And if the crystals do have secrets, then He will tell me what they are!”

  Lukin’s face was waxen and his lips convulsed several times before any sound came out of them. “See Him? A gift? What are you—”

  “Give it to me!” The Sage clamped a fist over one of the leather straps and wrenched the strongbox from the archbishop’s arms.

  “No! The crown is priceless! It’s Caithe’s only hope against—”

  Heedless of Lukin’s protests, the Sage threw his head back and shouted at the heavens, a herald proudly announcing his own arrival. “HINC LIBERA ME!”

  But Lukin was unwilling to give up his prize so easily; he made one last leap at the strongbox—and his body touched the Sage’s own the instant the spell was cast. Their forms began to shimmer in unison, ebbing from the world like morning mist. Translocation, Athaya breathed in wonder. But this time the Sage intended not merely to pass through the between-place; what he had once called heaven. This time it was his destination—a destination from which his human form could never return.

  The Sage was badly weakened by his battle against the crown and the spell was poorly cast. Time and again, he and Archbishop Lukin drifted in and out of the world like the moon slipping out from behind one cloud only to be quickly obscured by another. Lukin’s face was frozen in a mindless scream of terror, while beside him, the Sage’s eyes gleamed with reckless expectation, certain of the reward and vindication that would surely be his.

  After several uncertain seconds, the Sage and his captive vanished completely, and from somewhere very close, Athaya heard Lukin’s wails of terror echo in her ears like a half-remembered nightmare. He gained no more respite from his pain than he had granted to any of the Tribunal’s prisoners; his wails transformed to tormented shrieks as his flesh was rent from him piece by piece, leaving nothing but the soul behind—if, Athaya mused, he had one. Would that soul be permitted to stay? she wondered. Or would it be cast down into a realm far less forgiving, reserved for those who had done great evil in the world?

  Then she heard the Sage’s voice as well, more distant than Lukin’s but no less anguished. But the voice was swiftly gone, spiraling into nothingness beyond human pain, and silence once more settled over the arena. Whatever they endured was over now. And where there had been two heartbeats sustaining the blood-wards, there now remained only one.

  With the Sage dead to this world, the blood-wards began to dissolve, melting like wax in summer heat and leaving pools of sticky whiteness on the ground. Through Athaya’s black-edged vision came a badly blurred image of hundreds of bodies lying prone upon the cobblestones, some still writhing in the last paroxysms of death. Couric’s form she recognized, now staring sightlessly up to God; and another—was it Nicolas?—stood near him, with someone just behind, watching in fearful expectation. And around them was a city in chaos, as fires and sickness and madness raged, the work of those struck down by the crown who had not yet been granted the mercy of death.

  Athaya dropped to one knee, no more than a bruised and bloodied woman in a tattered dress, her heart straining to keep its rhythm—pitiable, she thought, compared to what she had been only moments before.

  Though she knew the sun shone bright above her, twilight soon descended on her vision. Her body was ready to collapse from the strain it had suffered—the weariness of translocation multiplied a hundredfold—and ached for endless sleep. She felt no pain; only a mellow and hazy fading away, like death from cold, too far gone to be afraid of the shadows overtaking her. Tired… so tired. She felt plunged into a sea of lukewarm water fully garbed in wool, the fabric’s sodden weight slowly dragging her down into the cold and murky depths.

  I have done my duty, as I once pledged to do. Please, she implored, to whatever Power held sway over the fates of men. Please, let it be enough.

  Just one thing more remained to be said; one thing more, before she could rest. And with the arena now dissolved, those still able paused to hear the words of the victor.

  “I am the Sage of Sare,” she said aloud, though her awareness was drifting beyond the sound of her own splintered voice. “But none will follow after me. I renounce this office and dissolve it for all time, its purpose ended.” She drew a breath… oh God, so hard. “And I declare the rightful king of Caithe to be Mailen Trelane, first son of my late brother.”

  The wizard king, though none save Jaren knew it.

  Then the world spun crazily, and she hit the cobbles hard, collapsing over Durek’s still-warm body in motionless embrace. She heard the clatter of footsteps approaching and felt warm hands upon her face, but consciousness spilled out of her as quickly as had her magic to mingle with her brother’s blood upon the stones.

  Chapter 21

  “Has a date been set for the funeral yet?” Jaren asked, gingerly breaking the silence. With the quiet creak of hinges, Nicolas opened the shutters to admit a mellow beam of sunlight. “No,” he replied, his voice incongruously weary in the bright face of morning. “But we can’t wait much longer. Your preservation spell will keep the body intact well enough, of course, but…” The prince shuddered as if something small and furry had just skittered across his boots. “There’s something eerie about it—leaving him like that, I mean. And now that Cecile and the children are back, we don’t have much cause to delay. As for Athaya…” Nicolas surrendered to a sigh. “I know she’d want to be there, but who’s to say when she’ll be up to it?”

  The mention of her name, combin
ed with the hint of morning chill that snaked beneath her coverlet, gradually roused Athaya from the soft weight of sleep that pressed her down. She cracked opened her eyes, half expecting to find herself ringed by clouds and stars and winged things, but her surroundings were nothing so grand as that; it was only her bedchamber in Delfarham with its aging blue coverlets and pleasingly weathered furnishings. Her journal lay open on the bedstand beside her, the creamy pages filled with Jaren’s graceful script. The restless murmur of voices drifted in from the outer sitting chamber.

  She moved only slightly, but the rustle of bedsheets brought Jaren and Nicolas to her side as if drawn in by a fisherman’s line. She glanced past them for an instant, thinking to see Durek as well, and her throat tightened as she recalled that she had seen her eldest brother for the last time on the day of the Challenge. If Durek remained at Delfar at all, then it was in a grandly fitted casket, awaiting burial in the crypt at Saint Adriel’s.

  “Good morning,” she breathed to Jaren, her voice stubbornly refusing to rouse itself as quickly as the rest of her. Though too drowsy yet to lift her arms, she accepted his embrace with a contented sigh. Then she turned to Nicolas and smiled; for the first time in months she gazed into eyes unclouded by magic. He was whole and healthy, the Sage’s poisons cleansed forever from his blood.

  “Nicolas… you’re back.”

  He squeezed her hand. “So are you.” His tone revealed that until now, the latter occurrence had by far been the more uncertain of the two. He studied her eyes like a worried physician. “Are you going to stay with us this time?”

  “What? Where would I be going?”

  Nicolas continued to inspect her for a moment, then glanced hopefully to Jaren. “I think she’s finally shaken it off. Her eyes are clearer than they were yesterday.”

  “I think you’re right. And she’s not slurring her words as badly—”

  “Would the two of you kindly stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here?” Athaya scolded, rolling her eyes toward the brocade canopy. “Next you’ll start spelling things out to one another as if I were a child.”

  Nicolas arched a chestnut-colored brow. “Yes, I’d say she’s back to normal.”

  With Jaren’s help, Athaya propped herself up against the pillows and took in a glorious taste of tangy salt air, relishing the luxury not only of being alive—miracle enough in itself, she realized—but of waking to the splendor of such a morning. Sunlight turned the rushes on the floor to polished brass and the sea was calm, its waves gently murmuring their promises that all was once more set aright, Caithe’s long-awaited peace duly paid for by both her magics and Durek’s blood.

  Jaren laid a palm on her forehead to check for vestiges of fever. “You’ve been coming and going for a few days now,” he told her, “once you were strong enough to wake up at all, that is. You haven’t been ill, exactly—not like the time Tonia and I released you from the sealing spell—but in a sense, this was worse. The seal made you delirious and feverish—something we could understand and help to soothe. This time…” He ran his fingers through a tousled shock of blond hair. “You slept constantly—you didn’t move at all except to breathe—and the few times you did wake… it wasn’t you. You were somewhere else, far away.”

  Nicolas’ face temporarily lost its usual merriment. “You had us scared to death, Athaya. Ranulf, Mason, and Jaren have been taking turns sitting with you; I left instructions that you were never to be left alone. We almost lost you once,” he added quietly, his face paling to match his ivory-colored tunic. “You stopped breathing one night about a week after it happened, but Ranulf was there to help you through it—apparently he learned some healing spells in his mercenary days. Damned good thing, too.” He shivered at the unpleasant memory.

  Athaya suddenly felt cold, mirroring her brother’s shudders. “Wait—a week after I… how long have I—?” She scooped up the journal from the bedstand with a shallow gasp. After a lengthy entry consisting of Jaren’s detailed report of what he had witnessed at the Challenge—something she would read with rapt attention later, as the events of that day seemed little more than a fading nightmare to her now—there were a series of brief notes about her condition, the last written—

  “This can’t be right,” she protested. “The Challenge was in the middle of August. This entry is dated a full month after that.”

  Jaren’s eyes skimmed over the page. “I wrote that four days ago. You’ve been away a long time.”

  “A month!”

  “Considering how quickly that crown was pulling the life out of you, Athaya,” he said soberly, returning the journal to the bedstand, “you’re lucky you came back at all.”

  Lapsing into boyhood habits, Nicolas settled cross-legged on the linen trunk at the foot of his sister’s bed, looking in spite of princely garb as if the years between had never passed. “I know it’s unsettling, but if it makes you feel any better, the Sage’s compulsion spell made me lose eight months. I can remember bits and pieces of it, but in feelings, mostly—not actual events. The first week was a little rough, but I eventually came back to my senses.”

  Though the tale was a serious one, his final words brought a grin to Athaya’s face. “There are those who would claim that has yet to happen.”

  “Not so many who would say it aloud now that I’m running things around here.” Nicolas cast a sardonic glance at Jaren. “See? I told you she was fine; well enough to go about insulting me again. In any event,” he went on, “I was more than a little confused the day the Sage… well, ‘died’ I suppose you’d call it—like I’d been jolted awake from sleepwalking. There I was, standing in the middle of a riot, totally ignorant of how I’d gotten there or why you and Durek were lying on the ground in what looked like puddles of melted wax. Somehow, Jaren found me in the commotion and kept me from getting killed by demented wizards while we got you out of the square.”

  Nicolas averted his eyes, suddenly pensive. “I never thought Durek…” He abandoned the thought and slumped forward, forearms resting on his knees as he grappled with the knowledge that the brother he had lost was not the same man he remembered. “I guess neither one of us knew him very well.”

  “Has there been any trouble from the Sage’s men?” Athaya asked, eager to set aside the melancholy subject for a later time.

  “Not really,” Jaren answered dryly, “since most of them are dead. And the few that aren’t probably will be shortly. When I saw that strongbox in Lukin’s hands, I realized what he was doing and tried to keep him from entering the arena, but our friend Couric thought it was a trick and had the Sage’s guardsmen hold me back—he assumed Lukin would walk to his death the same way Durek did and save the Sage the trouble of killing him later. I screamed at them to run for their lives, but they just laughed at me. They didn’t even bother to use sealing spells.”

  “Is that how you—”

  “I had no choice. I wasn’t going to leave without knowing what happened to you. I thought I’d have to make a quick trip back to Kaiburn so Tonia could release me, but she arrived at the castle a few days later. As for the city itself,” he continued, shaking his head, “you were lucky you couldn’t see anything from within the wards. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I couldn’t have imagined hundreds of wizards all stricken mad at the same time. The area around the cathedral is almost entirely gutted by fire—it’s a miracle the church itself is still standing. Most of the wizards simply killed themselves to escape the crown’s pain, but the ones that didn’t… well, if they weren’t torn apart by the mob in retribution for the Sage’s invasion, then they’re hopelessly insane and locked away so that their spells won’t harm anyone. Fortunately, Ranulf and Mason and the other wizards in the castle dungeons were far enough from the cathedral to get nothing worse than a mild headache.”

  Athaya twirled a lock of hair thoughtfully around one finger. “If Lukin hadn’t put that crown back into the box when he did, I’d be dead, too. Funny, but it seems that I have Archbishop Lukin to thank
for saving my life.” Laughter bubbled up from deep within. “If he wasn’t dead already, that fact alone would kill him.”

  “Nice of him to take that blasted crown with him, too—wherever he’s gone to,” Nicolas remarked with a snort. “Neither he or it will trouble anyone again.”

  “No. But Lukin did have allies.”

  “Oh, I’ll grant you that our problems are far from over,” Nicolas conceded, “but whether we agree with his tactics or not, the Sage didn’t leave too many Adrielite Justices alive to make trouble for us—not that they have a legal commission anymore, since I’ve disbanded the Tribunal permanently. And the Curia is remarkably less antagonistic these days. They’re still reeling from the Sage’s ability to seize most of Caithe in the span of three months, and like it or not they have you to thank for saving her. Just don’t be surprised if some people walk in wide circles around you for a while,” he added. “Not everyone is convinced that what they saw that afternoon was only an illusion.”

  Athaya’s brows curled inward. “How absurd. What else could it have been?”

  “Divine intervention, maybe?” Nicolas flipped his hands over, palms up. “A little outside help to make sure you won the Challenge? After all, you were able to turn aside the power of that crown. And the way I hear it, you made a fairly convincing archangel.”

  Athaya stiffened skeptically at the compliment. “Better than being called a Devil’s Child, I suppose. At the very least, maybe my enemies will assume I have friends in both places from now on.”

  She asked for a glass of watered wine—speaking so much after four weeks of silence was making her throat raw—and sipped at it leisurely while she listened to Jaren and Nicolas recount all that she had missed during the past month.

  “Cecile and the children are back from Reyka,” Nicolas told her. “Mosel’s with them—and Prince Felgin, too.” He tossed a knowing look to Jaren; the news clearly had more significance than she knew.