by Jenna Rhodes
When the first purple shades of true night began to creep over his form, devouring him bit by bit, the whispering began.
Bregan dropped his face into his hands, hunched over in despair. Yet these were not the voices which normally excoriated him, reviling him for being unable to follow their needs and desires. No. These voices spoke more kindly to him, offering hope and even praise, as a moment which might change all drew near, and gave him a role to play in it. Redemption hung within his grasp, redemption and mastery of his powers, along with retribution for those who had affronted the Gods. All that had bedeviled him these past years, now boiled in a stew. Yet around all the pleased, encouraging voices surrounding him, the other voice slid in, stealthy and beslimed, hissing its disagreeable suggestions that made it all the more unpalatable.
Bregan whipped a hand out in a snap of power and caught it by the neck, this thing that reviled him. He could not see it, but it writhed and snarled at him, the air about it disrupted as if something yet unseen existed there and flailed about in a great but useless struggle.
Bregan blinked. He stared at his left hand, grasping something unknown but definitely filling his hold, as his hand and even his own arm bounced up and down in the struggle to keep it bound. His ears filled with the vile cursing of the thing, the voice no longer promising rewards but vowing a thousand terrible deaths to both him and his soul. Bregan swallowed tightly.
Then his other voices rose in quiet and confident praise for his capture, strong words that overrode the blight of the other’s intonations, that drove it down even as his grip did, until it hung, quiescent, in his hand. It had not surrendered to him, but to the overbearing strains of the Gods and for the briefest of moments, Bregan shared a sympathy with whatever it was he’d caught, just as cowed and browbeaten as he was although he sensed the condition would not last.
He found himself spiraling inward into the crazed reality he could not avoid, but he retained enough of his former presence of mind to keep that thing in a firm hold. He staggered to his feet, with a single goal in mind, in this mind that the Gods controlled and pestered and corrupted to within a pinch of his life. He crossed the broken ground, heading toward the faint light of campfires and tent lanterns, in a single-minded journey.
• • •
Ceyla closed the tent canopy, before turning and looking at Diort who half-sat, half-lay in his familiar chair, his leather throne as it were, for he seldom returned to the city he had named his capital and where his true throne stood. She wondered if the nomad in him kept him camping in lands far from the center of his rule, shying away from city walls and paved streets. She sat on the tent floor next to him, crossing her legs and tucking her feet a bit under her, enjoying the smile she awakened. “Dinner and a reading?”
“Dinner, of a certainty, and no, not a reading. Just company tonight, unless you mind.”
A flush of happiness stained her cheeks. How could he think she would mind being asked to stay with him? He forced her into nothing, not conversation, not prophesying, and never love. But it remained wondrous to her that if she were to offer any of those, he eagerly accepted, and returned it equally. She had grown to love him, and he’d revealed that he, in turn, loved her. What more could she ask? There were few things she could even call to mind.
He put his hand on her shoulder. “I take your silence as interest?”
“Interest and wonder.”
“Wonder?”
“Yes. Always. That one such as I—” Her thought caught in her throat, and words failed her.
“If I could take anything from you, it would be that.”
“What?”
“Your need to count yourself as less. You’re not less to me, you are more. You bring intelligence, soul, and beauty to my life.” He put his hand out to her, to catch her up and draw her close.
Ceyla thought to feint away, to play, but something in the air pierced her, driving away her humor and leaving only the darkest of fears. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, prickling and stiff in warning. Trouble, running at them, like a wild animal in a charge, and her voice stuck, unable to utter a warning. She scrambled ungracefully to her feet, mouth working to say what she could not, hands waving about. Alarmed, Diort came to his feet, too. The bent and shambling figure of Bregan burst into the tent, and Abayan straightened to meet him but not in time. Bregan grabbed up the war hammer, pivoted and swung before his target realized he was attacking. It slammed into the side of Diort’s face. Flesh and bone were assaulted as Diort staggered back, too stunned to cry out. He put an arm out, across Ceyla, trying in vain to protect her.
The war hammer drew back for another blow. “You’ll not stop me!” shouted Bregan.
Ceyla fell as Abayan did, throwing her body over his, before Bregan could strike him again, and trembled, waiting for the bone-crashing blow. But it did not strike. She turned her head and saw him thrust his left hand onto the hammer, doing a stiff-legged dance of force that she could not comprehend, but then he lifted the war hammer and pointed at the tent ceiling in triumph.
“Rakka!” he shouted, and she swore she saw the hammer twist and thrust upward as if in answer.
Diort groaned, shifting under her. Bregan spun about as Ceyla watched him, crooning soft words to her wounded lord, trying to keep him still as the agitated Mageborn eyed them both with wild eyes. She put her left hand out toward Bregan.
“What are you doing?”
His hair fairly crackled about his head with the energy sparking about him and pulling his limbs this way and that into a palsied effigy of dance. “Rakka is reborn!” He pumped it up and down, the sinews standing out on his wiry frame as he did. “Earth-shaker will shout again, in my hands.”
Diort moaned again, half-sitting up despite her efforts to keep him down and quiet lest Bregan attack him again. Blood flowed freely down his face.
Bregan leaped toward them, landing within a hand’s width, and bending over, laughing in his broken voice, the gaze in his eyes piercing. He held the war hammer high as it rumbled with a voice of its own, one of a terrible thunder that threatened to shred their ears. “The Gods call me! I am going to break the world!” With that, he bounded away, out of the tent and into the night where a terrible wind arose and the canvas about them rippled as if asail on a high and troubled sea before all fell into a deep quiet.
“Gods help us.” Diort tried to stand and failed as she caught him up again and held him tightly, the wound from his temple and scalp bleeding what seemed to her to be buckets, cascading over both of them.
“We have to stop him.”
Diort pressed his hand wide-fingered over his head, blood leaking through abundantly, streaming down the back of his wrist. “And how might we do that?”
“Rakka is yours. Surely it will still answer to you.”
“Did you not see him shove another demon into its being?”
“Saw and felt.”
Diort rocked back on one heel, almost leaning back more than he could balance, and his other hand closed tightly on her shoulder as he fought to save himself. “If you’re counting on my being able to stop Bregan, don’t. The Gods have set him loose. These are my Gods, not yours, and they are awake and angry.”
“Someone has to be able to stop him.”
Leaning heavily on her, Diort threw back the tent flap as men came scurrying to her call for aid. “If the Gods have called for him to break the world, it’s likely none of us can stop him. I fear all we can do is hope to survive.”
Chapter
Forty-Eight
DAYS PASSED WITHOUT WORD, except a tiny patch of letter that Nutmeg got from the Barrels, dispatched by the local tinker-trader who wound her way down to Calcort eventually. They reminisced about their acquaintances and rued that the legendary Robin Greathouse no longer traveled the roads, and finally the tinker passed over the missive, sent by one Joniah Barrel whom she remembe
red as being shorter than knee-high last time she’d seen the Barrel family. He wrote word that he’d come across Dayne and traded a horse to him. That had been, by the time the crumpled and wax-sealed page reached her, an age past. She carried the letter in her apron, for all the comfort it gave her, and watched the vineyards, knowing that she would have to hire whoever she could for the harvest which should be handled any day now. Wait too long and the rains could blight the grapes. Wait too long and anything horrible could happen. Had already happened, and more might befall her. Tolby had sent Lily a briefer letter saying only that Corrie had been found dead, killed by those she’d been in league with. Not a letter anyone would cherish.
She stood outside the cider barn and stretched her back, achy and tight from having leaned over the curing table since early morning, checking the progress of the restoration. The fine dust of the aryn added to the current batch of tincture seemed to be the final ingredient necessary for success. Dayne and Tolby had been remarking on it, just the day before—was it?—the twins had been taken. She kicked the barn doors closed behind her.
She did not expect word but thought that somehow, some way, they would find her children and get a message sent home. Summer edged to autumn, denying her that hope. Nutmeg folded her arms. Lara had not sent any further word other than that she had troops searching as well, having given up the search herself because of other responsibilities. No hint of ransom for them. No message of self-satisfied arrogance from Tressandre. Nothing but silence.
Nutmeg snatched off the lenses which not only protected her face from the curative spray but also magnified the pages on each book so that she could see definitively the work needed. Each inked letter could be delineated so clear and crisp that she could see if the black mold had indeed retreated—no—been wiped entirely from the volume.
If only Tressandre ild Fallyn were a black mold. She would wilt and collapse into a slimy heap as Nutmeg sprayed her from head to toe and watched her disintegrate—
Nutmeg pursed her lips and blew out a disgusted sigh. She took off her bonnet to fan her face, attacked by her anger as much as by the heat. She did not like standing by and waiting for word on the fate of her children.
Hers. Not Jeredon’s, for he’d never lived long enough to put his hand on her burgeoning stomach. Not Lara, for all her care of Nutmeg was that she held the two heirs to her kingdom. Not her father, bless his heart, or her mother, or her brothers. No. They were hers, and here she stood in the dirt road and whined because she knew nothing of their whereabouts.
A silverwing arced by overhead, its wings catching the light with its metallic glow, and she traced its flight. Where did it go and why? It seemingly paid no attention to the cityscape stretched beneath it, and why would it? It had no training or reason to bind it to Calcort. That jogged a notion in her mind abruptly.
Nutmeg whirled around and tied her bonnet to the cider barn handle. No more. She would stand and wait no more. She’d be patient waiting for the harvest of grapes, but not this harvest. Not this one. She took to her heels and her guards, who had been lazing in the heavy sun, hurried to follow after.
Across town, where the edges of Calcort became ragged and seedy and lesser establishments filled the quarter, she found the man she wanted. As soon as she entered, he looked up, his face as sharp-edged as some of the birds he trained. “What word?”
He shook his head. “None, Mistress Farbranch. I’d have sent it if there’d been anyway.”
“Unless Vaelinar coin is worth more than my own.”
“No, no. I work for the mayor and people of Calcort. How can you say that?”
“You sent birds out for the auntie of my children, did you not?”
“Well, I—I—suppose I might have. A customer. She wrote to family, I thought.”
“She wrote to the ild Fallyn, and you knew that as well, for the birds only go where they’re trained to fly! A traitor camped in my home, and you never said a word! So how am I to know what coin rules you now?”
The bird master shrank back against the corner post of his open-air shed as she took a deep breath.
Nutmeg yelled at the bird master. She called him for his treachery and his love of monetary gain, his lack of loyalty, and threatened to set her brother Hosmer on him and his humble rookery. No one had come winging back with a message in the last few weeks. Not a single bird. Not a single letter. So he said, but how was she to believe him? How could anyone trust him again?
The guards outside the building hunched their shoulders against her shrill voice; she saw them straighten up as she darted outside the bird master’s quarters, her face hot and her throat aching. She paused long enough to toss over her shoulder, “Inform the city guard that this man was sending birds to ild Fallyn fortress in secret. He should be watched.”
Her breathing didn’t slow down until she reached her mother’s shop, with home full of empty rooms waiting for her just down the street. As she stood at the doorway, two women brushed past her, both Vaelinars but from the East coast where the wearing of veils and gauzy tunics trimmed with small tinkling bells were all the fashion. She saw the flash of their jewel-colored eyes as they looked, assessed, and moved past, veils hiding the shapes of their mouths. Approval or disapproval? No way to tell, but she could guess. The news of her diatribe had become the topic of gossip as soon as her words hit the air, racing like wildfire over dried-out summer hills. She took a steadying breath as she entered, and her mother looked up from the big cutting and measuring table that took up much of the room in the entryway.
“Meg,” she said softly.
“I know, I know.” She lifted her hands, still knotted in fists, and uncurled reluctant fingers before dropping her hands back to her sides. She plopped down on a nearby stool. “I know.”
“What can we do?”
She shook her head. “Short of trapping Tressandre and wrapping my fingers tightly about her neck, I can’t think of anything.”
“You know your father and Verdayne haven’t given up searching.”
“There’s nothing to find! She has to have them bundled away at her fort.”
“We—Lariel—has spies there, we know that, and there’s been no word. If she took them—”
“Who else would have?”
Lily stopped speaking a moment, lines at the corners of her mouth deepening. “It seems likely, but little evidence has been found. With Corrie dead, there’s no direct connection, even if the bird master corroborates your accusation.”
Nutmeg had been looking at the cutting table, littered with tiny scraps of fabric and loose threads, as scattered and difficult to read as the taking of her children. She lifted her gaze. “We know it has to be Tressandre.”
“I agree, but again, we don’t know that Corrie gave them over. It looks so, but we haven’t proof. So, I ask, what more can we do but wait for the searchers to return, and wait for Lariel to take more direct action.”
“But will she?”
“I think she loves them almost as much as you and I do.”
Nutmeg let out a scoffing sound.
“Truly,” Lily told her. “She sees Jeredon in Evar, I know she does.”
“And Merri?”
“On the outside, Merri is a mirror to you, but inside, she carries her own Vaelinar traits. She may be the more formidable of the two. Evar can be read. Merri is cheer and laughter, but her eyes hold a much older wisdom.” Lily crossed to her and took her hands up. Neither mother nor daughter had soft, unmarked hands. They were farmers and weavers, with the calluses and small scars—marks of years of hard work—to show for it. It struck Nutmeg for the first time how alike their hands were. She held her mother tightly for a moment before letting go and standing.
“I can’t wait any longer.”
Lily stepped back, with a tilt of her head, to watch her. “You need to be here when they’re found.”
Me
g shook her head. “No. There has to be something else to be done. They’re Vaelinars, and I’ve learned how to deal with them. I just have to think how to deal with this one.” She brushed past her mother then, each stride quicker than the last one, until she burst into a run, heading for the farmhouse.
Inside, she sat at the old table. If she took the time, she could find the various initials of her brothers etched into the wood edge. She’d been dared to do the same but hadn’t, determined then to be better mannered, a resolve that lasted until the day that she found an elven child dying on a battered and tiny raft as it carried her on the Silverwing River past their orchards. Finding Rivergrace had brought out two things in her: determination to be a leader, and a rebellion against things she felt were wrong. Perhaps it had been the wrist shackles that slipped easily off Grace’s emaciated arms, leaving terrible scars behind from when they had fit too closely. Perhaps it had been the notion that she had to banish Grace’s timidness and thrust her back into hearty living. Perhaps it had only been the realization that, with the addition of a sister, she was finally no longer grossly outnumbered in the family.
Nutmeg drummed her fingertips on the table. Over the years, she and Grace had learned much about the serpentine thinking of the Vaelinars, the elaborate back and forth and around. Tressandre had Lariel’s heirs. What did she now plan to do with them, and how could Nutmeg circumvent that? The children had no other value than their bloodline, and without that, they possibly still would not live in ild Fallyn hands. Tressandre would dare much, but she wouldn’t dare kill them now or they’d have been left for dead in their rooms by Auntie Corrie.
To kill those children now, outright, would set off a civil war among the Vaelinars, just as much as clearing out the Returnists squatting on the Andredia. Lariel had her hands tied.
But she did not. She, their mother.
A frisson crept across the back of her neck.