Of Truth and Beasts (Noble of Dead Saga Series 2 Book 3)

by Barb; J. C. Hendee

  He glowered at her from where he stood beyond the council’s table. Suddenly, his glower turned to an incensed glare, quite disturbing from any hulkish dwarf. He rounded the table and tall-back chairs, coming straight toward the opened doorway, his long red hair bouncing with each stride.

  “Does your impudence know no limits?” he rumbled, halting within arm’s reach.

  For an instant, Wynn had thought Chane was the domin’s target, but High-Tower’s anger was fixed on her.

  “This is a guild matter,” he growled. “It is no business of any outsider!”

  Wynn glanced up at Chane—who stared down at the broad domin.

  “You need to leave,” she said quietly. “Wait for me in my room.”

  “No,” Chane rasped.

  Wynn stiffened. Most times, she no longer noticed his maimed voice. But there was warning in that one word. Chane passively looked at everyone inside the chamber, and this only heightened Wynn’s tension.

  Chane’s resolve might have given her relief at first, but now it was making things worse.

  “You will leave,” someone else said flatly.

  Wynn followed the sharp shift of Chane’s eyes.

  Premin Frideswida Hawes of Metaology stepped straight toward them in a smooth gait that didn’t even sway her long, midnight blue robe. Within the shadow of her cowl, her hazel eyes watched them both. She stopped six paces off and focused fully on Chane. In place of High-Tower’s anger, she appeared mildly disdainful.

  Chane didn’t move—and Wynn began to panic. What could anyone here possibly do to force him?

  “High-Tower,” Hawes said.

  The dwarven domin lunged and grabbed Wynn’s arm, jerking her into the chamber.

  Chane took one step. “Release her!”

  A sharp utterance cracked the air between the wide chamber’s walls.

  Wynn twisted her head to see.

  Hawes’s eyes narrowed as she stamped the floor and lashed out with an open palm.

  The echo of High-Tower’s steps seemed to vibrate in the floor, and Chane wobbled, as if about to topple, his eyes widening.

  The floor beneath his feet suddenly lurched. Its stones rolled like a wave rising on a tidal beach. He fell backward through the open doors and toward the passage’s far wall. Hawes swept forward to stand before the opening, her back to Wynn.

  “Why are you doing this?” Wynn asked, and jerked forward, but she couldn’t break High-Tower’s grip.

  The two attendant sages grabbed the door handles, pulling the great oak doors closed. Hawes raised one hand before the narrowing gap.

  “Wynn!” Chane rasped, trying to scramble to his feet.

  “Wait for me in my room!” she called.

  The doors slammed shut, and he was gone from her sight.

  Hawes swept her hand down with another sharp utterance.

  Wynn went limp in High-Tower’s grip as the doors’ aged oak began flowing together along the passing of Hawes’s hand. The gap blended downward along the seam. In an instant, the twin doors became one solid barrier, the wood’s grain now looking as if it were cut from one piece.

  Premin Hawes laid her fingertips on the wood, cocking her head as if listening.

  Wynn stared numbly at the barrier as High-Tower released her. Even Chane would be hard-pressed to break his way through from the other side. More than once she’d heard Domin Ghassan il’Sänke’s innuendos about this branch’s metaologers compared to his own. During his visit from the Suman Empire’s guild branch, he’d made plain how little he thought of even Premin Hawes’s skill as a thaumaturge.

  Il’Sänke had been very wrong.

  Everyone within the room remained silent for the longest time.

  Premin Hawes finally turned and nodded to the others. She glided toward the long table’s right end, and the rest of the council turned to follow. But her gaze fell upon Wynn as she passed. There was no malice or anger there, merely a cold and calculating study.

  Council members began taking their seats, and Wynn turned to face what awaited her . . . alone.

  Hawes settled silently in one of the smoothly crafted, high-back chairs at the right end of a long, stout table that stretched across the room’s rear. All the chairs were now filled with the five robed members of the Premin Council.

  Premin Adlam, in the light brown of Naturology, sat at the table’s left end. Next, on High Premin Sykion’s left, sat portly Premin Renäld of Sentiology in cerulean. Sykion, as head of the council, sat at the table’s center, dressed in the gray of Cathology—Wynn’s own order. On her right, Premin Jacque of Conamology had his elbows on the table. His fingers were laced together, and he rested his high forehead against them, hiding his face.

  And Hawes at the far right end still studied Wynn, almost without blinking. Her hazel irises now seemed the color of the walls’ gray stones.

  Wynn stood straight, meeting that gaze, but then she couldn’t help glancing at the sixth person present.

  As with the last time she’d been called here, Domin High-Tower, her immediate superior in Cathology, returned to standing beyond the table. He wouldn’t even look at her and stared out one of the narrow rear windows. He’d once been a beloved teacher, but was now her fiercest, most open opponent, trying to hobble her efforts at nearly every turn.

  “Journeyor Hygeorht,” Premin Sykion began slowly, “I hardly know where to begin.”

  Wynn shifted her gaze.

  “Lady” Tärtgyth Sykion, once a minor noble of the nearby nation of Faunier, was an aged but tall and straight willow of a woman. A long silver braid snaked out of the side of her cowl and down the front of her gray robe. Beneath her usual motherly and temperate veneer, she was as untrustworthy as the rest. Tonight, there was no nurturing care in her expression.

  Strangely, that took away all of Wynn’s shame and fear.

  She wasn’t about to give them the slightest chance for a long recitation of her offenses. She wouldn’t subject herself to more subterfuge hidden beneath righteous indignation, no matter her guilt.

  “I request to go south,” she said immediately, “to the Lhoin’na, and our guild’s elven branch.”

  Sykion sat upright, like a willow suddenly revitalized in resistance to an autumn gale. Her eyes barely betrayed shock, but not so for Premin Jacque. He lifted his head from his laced fingers, his broad mouth gaping for an instant.

  “You are not here to request anything!” he said. “You are here to answer for your actions.”

  Wynn clenched her jaw.

  Sykion lightly cleared her throat and straightened a stack of papers. The topmost appeared to be a letter of some kind, but Wynn couldn’t make out its contents from where she stood. Then she spotted the sea green tie ribbon lying beside the stack. She grew sick inside, thinking of a royal wax seal that must have bound the ribbon enclosing that letter.

  “Journeyor Hygeorht,” Sykion began again, “it has come to our attention that a number of journals secured with the texts are missing.”

  Wynn was ready for this, the first and least of her “crimes.”

  Six moons past, she’d returned from abroad, bearing a treasure like none before it—a collection of ancient texts from the time of the Forgotten History, presumably penned by forgotten Noble Dead. These texts hinted at an ancient enemy who’d nearly destroyed the world a thousand years ago . . . in a war that many now believed was an overblown myth or had never even taken place.

  Wynn knew better.

  To her shock, upon returning home, she’d lost this treasure. Out of fear of the contents, her superiors had seized the texts—along with her own journals. They’d locked everything away, to be translated in secret. Wynn had uncovered hints that the original texts were hidden somewhere in the underworld of Dhredze Seatt. Against all orders, she’d found them again, but was only able to take back her journals.

  “The journals are not missing, but back where they belong,” Wynn answered. “I wrote them.”

  Perhaps they’d expected
her to be contrite. Why else would they make her stand alone before them like some miscreant schoolgirl about to be expelled?

  “You don’t deny that you took these journals?” Adlam asked, perhaps a little uncertain.

  “They’re mine,” Wynn answered.

  “You will return them immediately,” Sykion said.

  “No.”

  “Journeyor Hygeorht—”

  “By law, the texts are mine, as well,” Wynn interrupted. “I found them. I brought them back. If you make any attempt to regain my journals, I’ll engage the court’s High Advocate . . . with my own case to have all the texts returned to me.”

  She spoke without wavering, but her stomach knotted.

  Making threats gave her no pleasure, but she’d learned a thing or two about what was right and what was necessary. This place had been her home since the day someone found her abandoned in a box at its outer portcullis. She had no wish to be expelled from the only life she knew. On the other hand, the premins wanted her gone—and yet still under their control. They couldn’t have that without her continued connection to the guild.

  But as Wynn’s last words escaped, any pretense of formality vanished from the chamber.

  High-Tower turned her way. He was not a premin, and so not part of the council. He didn’t speak, but his breath came strong and hard.

  Premin Renäld glared at Wynn and whispered, “And what of the loss of Prince Freädherich?”

  He may as well have shouted.

  This was the worst of it—her true crime. This was the reason she’d been commanded before the council. Next to the loss of Prince Freädherich, stealing back her journals was a child’s prank.

  Wynn slid one foot back a half step before catching herself. She’d known this was coming, but the quick shift in their assault had caught her off guard just the same.

  A gleam of righteous ire—but also horror over the consequences—sparked in Renäld’s eyes.

  “If the worst comes . . . you have cut our hopes in half!” he spat at her.

  Wynn knew it all more than he did. During her ordeal in the Stonewalkers’ underworld, she’d uncovered a dark secret unrelated to her purpose.

  A prince of Malourné, thought drowned years ago, was alive and locked away in the Stonewalkers’ underworld—to protect him from himself. His wife, Duchess Reine Faunier-reskynna, princess of Malourné by marriage, had been caring for him in secret. The family line of the reskynna had an ancient blood connection to the Dunidæ—Dwarvish for the “Deep Ones.” A fabled people of the sea, only the Stonewalkers and the royal family knew of them.

  Freädherich had been slowly succumbing to sea-lorn sickness, carried in his blood from a forgotten ancestor married in an alliance to one of the Dunidæ. Wynn had unwittingly drawn a black wraith named Sau’ilahk into the underworld, and the threat of the wraith’s presence had accelerated the prince’s illness and its transformation.

  Prince Freädherich had fled, escaping to the open ocean with the Dunidæ, who always sought him out at the highest tides. Because of Wynn’s actions, Malourné had lost not only a prince, but the prime emissary to the Deep Ones, and an ancient alliance along with him.

  Duchess Reine had lost her husband for the second and final time.

  Wynn’s certainty of her choices wasn’t enough to hold down her guilt. She tried not to let it show but smoothed her robe a bit too obviously. The council was watching for weakness, anything to use against her, and they had more than enough.

  “If this hadn’t been kept secret for so long,” Premin Renäld went on, “you wouldn’t be standing before us. You would be facing the High Advocate yourself, on trial for—”

  “As far as the public is concerned,” Wynn cut in, “the prince died years ago.”

  It was a shabby, cruel response, but there was nothing else she could say. What happened couldn’t be undone. She had no intention of justifying herself to those whose fears overrode necessary action, who denied obvious conclusions for all of these events.

  The Ancient Enemy was returning. Another war was coming. There was no if; only when. And Wynn had to continue in her determination to stop it.

  “So, you deny any part in the prince’s loss?” Premin Jacque demanded.

  “I deny its relevance . . . in the present,” Wynn answered. “It has no bearing on my request to travel south to the Lhoin’na’s guild branch.”

  This was her goal. In the brief time she’d regained access to the ancient texts, searching for clues of the Ancient Enemy’s return, Wynn had found hints of where to look for the mystery’s next piece.

  Bäalâle Seatt: a great dwarven settlement, lost in the mythical war at the end of the Forgotten History.

  Her best guess placed it somewhere south, nearer the great desert and mountains separating the north from the southern Suman Empire. The Lhoin’na—elven—branch of the guild was not far from that range of mountains. Each guild branch had gathered lost fragments of the far past in their own regions. The archived library of the Lhoin’na sages might be the better place to find clues to the location of that lost seatt. She now staked everything on the hope that her own guild branch wanted to rid itself of her presence.

  Wynn stood in a long silence, watching her superiors. During some moment she hadn’t noticed, Hawes had pulled down her cowl. The premin of metaologers was the only one who hadn’t spoken as of yet.

  Premin Frideswida Hawes appeared to be late middle-aged, but her short, cropped hair was as fully grayed as dull silver. With smooth, narrow features above a pointed chin, her expression rarely betrayed mood or thought.

  Hawes’s silence, versus the others, seemed out of place.

  Wynn viewed metaologers as logical, willful, used to the subtleties and hazards of balancing belief and knowledge. She wondered if blunt honesty would now be a useful tactic.

  “I wish to go south. You wish me gone,” Wynn said, looking at Hawes, but then she turned to Sykion. “Simply give me approval. A quick word serves all our needs.”

  Shocked expressions rose on both Sykion’s and Adlam’s faces, but no one spoke for the span of three breaths.

  “The council will discuss your request . . . later, in private,” Sykion said. “For now, as you clearly won’t face your transgressions, you are dismissed.” Then she leaned forward. “You are confined to the guild grounds.”

  Wynn tried not to stiffen, but failed. “You cannot order me to—”

  “Journeyor Hygeorht, you will remain on grounds!” the high premin commanded. “Or I will have your status revoked. I may face the consequences of that, but it would be a price worth paying.”

  Wynn was too stunned for her growing anger to escape.

  “Understand this clearly,” Sykion went on. “No guild protection, no funding, no status whatsoever as a sage. Threaten us again with action to regain the texts, and I will have you charged with the theft of the journals, which were in the dwarves’ possession at the time. We shall see whose case the High Advocate takes . . . and whose word stands unblemished before the people’s court!”

  Her aged features were strained with a fury that Wynn had never seen there before. But open hostility was preferable to politely veiled aggression.

  They were in a deadlock. No matter Sykion’s warnings, she was desperate to keep a hold on Wynn. And no matter what Wynn threatened, she couldn’t afford to be cast out, or she would have no right to enter the archives of Lhoin’na sages.

  “Do you understand?” Sykion asked.

  Wynn nodded curtly.

  “Then you are dismissed . . . for now.”

  Wynn turned slowly and found herself staring at the impenetrable barrier of solid wood. By the time she glanced back, Hawes’s hand finished an upward sweep, thin fingers curling lazily inward at the last. When Wynn turned back, only normal, old oak doors stood before her.

  They began to open under the push of the outer attendants.

  Looking out hesitantly, Wynn was relieved not to see Chane outside. He must have
followed her request and gone back to her room. Trembling slightly, Wynn left the now silent council chamber, trying not to break into a jog until she was out of sight of the attendants.

  A short while later, Chane paced Wynn’s small dormitory room, listening to her recount what had happened with the Premin Council. Seething, and still startled by how easily he had been locked out of the proceedings, he listened carefully to all that had transpired.

  “They gave no answer to your request?” he asked.

  “Only that I’m confined to guild grounds.”

  She sat on the bed, one limp hand on Shade’s back. Chane studied them both.

  Wynn looked less troubled than he expected. Her wispy brown hair hung around her pretty, olive-toned face. He suppressed an urge to push a few strands behind her ear.

  Shade still appeared put out at having been left behind. Reading a canine face was not always easy, but she had almost taken on an air of petulance. Though she was an elven breed of dog called a majay-hì, anyone who did not know this saw only an oversized, long-legged, near-black wolf.

  Wynn ran her hand down Shade’s neck.

  “I think they’ll let me go in the end,” Wynn said. “Once they believe they have the means to get me out of their way and keep me on a leash.”

  Chane stopped pacing. “How soon do you think we can leave?”

  “I can’t even guess, but we’ll make use of our time while we wait.”

  He stood there a little longer, debating his next words. An uncomfortable concern had nagged him since returning from Dhredze Seatt. Wynn had more than enough burdens, but with another journey ahead, he could no longer put this off.

  “Then we should discuss safeguards,” he said carefully. “Once we leave civilization—”

  “I know,” she broke in tiredly. “I’ll be away from so many other mortals, and we’ll be traveling through isolated places where the Fay might try to seek me out.”

  At that, Shade raised her head, rumbling softly into Wynn’s face.

  This was going to be harder than Chane thought. Before Wynn or Shade could start in about the Fay, Chane cut them off.