by Erin Hoffman
Debris from the ship continued to fall around them, splashing into the sea and crashing onto the deck. The Empress Quest was an alien thing, a burning demon from a nightmare, not the ship his great-grandfathers had sailed. Ruby gasped again, and Vidarian looped one arm beneath her shoulders and the other beneath her knees, then staggered to his feet and ran up the pier.
Ash burned his lungs as he cleared the radius of the burning ship and fell to his knees, taking as much of the jolt with his legs and body as he could. Ruby groaned and lost consciousness, her head lolling. He lowered her to the ground, supporting her neck with one hand.
“Healer!” he bellowed, scrubbing water from his eyes with an ash-stained sleeve. “Fetch a healer!”
The hospital at Val Harlon, adjacent to the three-partnered Collegia of Herbmastery, Mindcraft, and Healing, might be dwarfed by the great Healing Center and Imperial University far to the east in the Imperial City, but it was one of the oldest and largest institutions of its kind. Consequently there were few cities in the known world quite so recommendable for sustaining a serious injury in.
The Imperial healers had devised ways of prolonging the life of a man or woman into long centuries. Some-Vidarian's family among them, and the emperor himself-considered the practice unnatural, but so honed was the healers’ art in their time that the merchant princes of the Imperial City were known to surpass a thousand years in their lifespans. It was said that a merchant princess died when she chose, regardless of the desires of the goddesses.
But some things were beyond the long reach even of an imperial healer.
Vidarian and Ariadel, half asleep, leapt to their feet as the door to Ruby's chamber opened. Madwen, the senior surgeon, shook her head wearily as she emerged. She walked to them and clasped one of their hands in each of her own, then patted Vidarian on the shoulder.
She sank wearily into the faded velvet divan to the right of the chamber door. Ariadel gave Vidarian's hand a squeeze, then pressed him down into the opposite divan before moving to prepare tea for the three of them.
“I've seen my share of traumatic injuries,” the surgeon began, dabbing the faint sheen of sweat on her forehead with her sleeve, “but this is one of the strangest. It's severe, certainly-fatal within minutes had she sustained it at sea. But it should have been well within our arts to repair, here on land.”
Ariadel returned with the tea, a dark and bitter brew laced heavily with lemon and honey, and pressed a mug into Marwen's hands, then Vidarian's, before she took her seat beside him. The little shapeshifter, as was its wont lately, perched on her shoulder in its golden spider form. The healers either didn't notice it or were polite enough not to comment.
“But she will survive?” Vidarian passed the hot mug between his hands, soaking in its heat.
“I believe so.” Marwen sipped on her tea, then winced and blew across its surface. “I've applied a poultice that will heal her slowly over time, perhaps four months. The injury resists healing energy, and even if it didn't, to heal it all at once using her own energy or mine would cause her body such a shock as to be potentially fatal.” Her voice was calm, academic-but as she finished, it lilted slightly upward in an unasked question.
“What is it?” Ariadel asked, lacing her fingers around her mug.
Marwen blew across the tea again in an exasperated sigh. “This energy, what's resisting my efforts,” she said, then looked crosswise at Vidarian, “I think it comes from you.”
Vidarian coughed, sending searing liquid up his sinuses. It wasn't bad enough, then, that his lack of control had caused Ruby's injury in the first place?
All things and their antithesis, the increasingly present voice in his head whispered.
“I'd like to allow my colleague to examine you, if you'd permit,” Marwen said, a faint frown filling a much-traveled crease in her forehead.
“Of course,” Vidarian murmured, numb.
Marwen took a long pull on her tea, then dipped her head in an apologetic nod. “I sent word an hour ago, hoping you would agree,” she admitted.
They finished their tea in silence, and as Ariadel rose to clear the mugs, a knock on the anteroom door preceded the entrance of a mindcrafter. Marwen and Vidarian rose also now, to greet the visitor. Her face was lined, but faintly, and her black hair sparsely streaked with white, but her irises were the dense indigo of a newborn child's. Although she wore the deep blue robes of the Collegia, they were strategically disheveled, and warm rather than imposing.
“This is Anise, grandmaster mindcrafter,” Marwen said, and Anise smiled a gentle greeting. “Her work is known throughout the continent by mindcrafters and healers alike. Anise,” she turned between them, “the fire priestess Ariadel, and Captain Vidarian Rulorat-the Tesseract.”
Anise clasped their hands warmly, one after the other. “A great pleasure,” she said, lingering to look deeply into their eyes. Vidarian had never met a grandmaster of mindcraft before. He wasn't entirely sure what to make of her-what she was seeing, with each of those deep looks, and whether the reassurance that flushed through him when she did so was of his own making or hers.
“Ours also,” Vidarian said, to be polite. “We're extremely grateful for Marwen's assistance with Ruby.”
“Her injury is grave,” Anise said. She turned toward Ruby's room, regarding the door as if she could see through it. Could she? “She sleeps. Her heart aches for you.”
“You can read her thoughts from here?” Ariadel asked. Vidarian was somewhat gratified that she seemed to know no more about this level of mindcraft than he.
Anise turned back, smiling gently. “Not her innermost thoughts-only those she sends out to the world. No more than you would know simply by looking into her eyes.”
Vidarian wanted to know what she saw, then, looking into their eyes-but what he asked was: “And during your examination?”
Her features smoothed into a clinical calm confidence. “It will not take long, and for the purpose Marwen has described, I will not enter your mind itself so much as read the energies coming from it.” Ariadel and Vidarian exchanged a look of mutual incomprehension, and she continued, “We have found that wielders of elemental magic relay that energy from their minds, on an ambient level, even when they aren't actively using their ability. As your heart beats, as you breathe, so your elemental ability is pulsing and ‘breathing,’ and is as much a part of you as your heart or your lungs. I will read this energy only; you would know if I were to go further into your mind.”
Vidarian nodded his agreement, and she softly motioned for him to take a seat on the divan.
As Vidarian sat, Anise took a seat beside him, smiling reassurance. She lifted her hands, then paused, and raised her palms to either side of Vidarian's head only when he again nodded his agreement. With her hands spread close to each of his ears, she closed her eyes.
Vidarian felt nothing, but Anise's eyebrows lifted, then came together thoughtfully. She leaned forward ever so slightly, as if searching.
And if she finds what she seeks, what then? he heard, the soft voice insidious and close.
Anise's eyes snapped open immediately, and with a sharpness that left no doubt in Vidarian's mind what had recalled her. Her eyes-intense with the fullness of her skill and power behind them-bore into his, and as he stared back an emptiness quivered in his stomach, as though the force in her eyes were the tip of a glacier far deeper than he could possibly comprehend.
But then she blinked and lowered her hands, drawing back from him. She was quiet for a moment, closing her eyes with her palms on her knees, and neither Ariadel nor Vidarian exhaled until she reopened them and spoke.
“Your mind's energy is, of course, like none seen in my lifetime,” Anise said, and the slight hesitation in her tone said that she was reassuring herself of this as much as them. “There is a duality, and between the duality, a gulf great enough to transverse worlds.” At this thought her eyes unfocused slightly, but she remastered herself after a moment. “It is this gulf that
draws the energy from your friend.”
Ariadel gasped softly. “His nature-impedes her healing?” The thought of it closed viselike around his heart.
“Yes and no,” Anise said, her voice warm with sympathy. “In its moment, his energy held her. In fact, her life is at this moment bound to his presence, and likely will be until her healing is complete.” She let that sink in, and silence fell between them until she filled it again. “The emanations I feel from her match the rhythm of this dualistic balance. To disrupt it now would almost certainly be fatal.”
Vidarian breathed deeply. “So…she took a blow meant for me, and my mere presence has sealed her injury.”
“For good and ill,” Marwen said, and Anise nodded. “We have no idea what her fate would have been had she taken the blow alone.”
“And when she wakes, your friend will surely tell you she would take the same action again, and wish for the past not to chain your thoughts,” Anise said, placing a light hand on Vidarian's shoulder. Her eyes were serious and inscrutable again. “The four goddesses know your mind to be weighed enough already.”
Four? the voice laughed.
As they left the hospital, navigating Val Harlon's narrow cobbled streets on the way to the inn that Endera had arranged for them-the priestess had fallen over herself to accommodate their physical needs in the wake of the Quest's destruction, providing for Ruby's surgery as well as their room and board-Ariadel grew quiet. The closer they came to the inn, the tighter her silence, until Vidarian feared to interrupt it. He searched his memory, wondering what he'd done.
When they reached their room, a sequestered corner chamber with a thick door that closed out any possible listeners, she suddenly dissolved into a baffling sequence of emotion: tears were the simplest part, colored here and there by a laugh (some of which were genuinely mirthful and some which were not), and finally anger that burned away into frustration, and more tears.
He had no idea what to do, and so as it started he took her hand, and was swallowed by confused relief when she turned to sob into his shoulder. Whatever he had done, apparently it wasn't completely unredeemable. The shapeshifter, unsettled by Ariadel's emotion, skittered across her shoulder and onto his. He tried very hard not to shake it off in a shiver of revulsion, but it transformed into its less unsettling kitten shape, hissed once, then leapt off his shoulder to run under the bed.
“Curse you,” Ariadel sniffed, just when he was beginning to think he was almost in the clear. She pulled away and moved to sit on the bed, gesturing him to follow. “I never cried so much in my life. I've been through elemental trials you couldn't imagine. I-well, never mind. With you it's every other day.”
He settled beside her gingerly, still searching for what brought this on.
Women, the voice whispered. They're crazy. Then another of its wild, unsettling giggles. He directed a stream of maliciousness in its direction, which seemed to amuse it, but it dwindled from his consciousness, returning back wherever it went.
“The Tesseract was prophesied to lose the jewel of his heart,” she said. “And I thought-”
A dozen things clicked into place. “You thought it meant Ruby,” he said softly.
“Well,” she sniffed, “before I met her, I thought it was me.” She laughed, but tears welled again to her eyes, and he wrapped an arm around her, sailing his own storm of emotion: dominant among it a kind of agony at what she had been putting herself through. “She told me she loved you only as a brother,” she said, blinking, “that she had loved a lander in the south for years, an artist, even though it was forbidden by her status.”
Vidarian laughed suddenly, bittersweet warmth loosening the pressure on his chest. Ariadel craned her neck to look up at him. “She never told me that,” he said. “Poor thing. She never wanted to be Sea Queen, you know.”
Ariadel blinked, tears beading on her eyelashes like tiny crystals. Vidarian bent to kiss her forehead.
“She was her mother's only daughter,” he said. “When we were children, she wanted to run away from the Viere to a farm in the south.”
The absurdity of the thought surprised a laugh out of Ariadel, and he smiled. “A farm?” she repeated, incredulous. “Ruby?”
“She had a fascination with growing vegetables and animals,” he said. “When you live a life on ship, they do seem rather magical.” Her childhood laughter flooded his mind in a memory, and his smile turned rueful. “I'm not sure she ever told anyone else about that. We are all called by our destinies.”
“That's all very well,” she said crossly. “But if Ruby isn't it, things don't look so good for me.” Bravery gave her words their sharp lightness, but Vidarian could hear the fear beneath, even while truth swept him like an ocean wind.
“It was the Quest,” he whispered, dread and grief and certainty seeping through him again at the thought of the ship, now a pile of ash and ruin in the harbor. “My fine lady.” The tide that swept him carried despair with it, a kind he had never known in his life. There was no doubt in his mind what the prophesy meant, nor that it was true-as disgusted as he was by the concept of prophesy in general.
Ariadel snorted wetly, but she wrapped her arms around him, holding him tightly for a long moment that said she understood. Vidarian leaned into her strength, just for that moment. “A ship,” she whispered back finally, then ran her fingers through his hair before bringing a hand down to gently trace his cheek. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
The next morning, Endera hosted them at a breakfast in the city. A sumptuous spread of delicacies prepared by one of the finest chefs in Val Harlon lay between them, but no one moved to touch the food.
“I wish for peace between us,” Endera began, when it became clear that no pretense would be tolerated. “And you cannot deny your need for assistance, even now. Would you turn away an ally?”
Vidarian stiffened at the echo of his own words to An'du, wondering, for a scant moment, how far Endera's reach truly was. But there was no knowing sharpness in her eyes; it was coincidence only. “I have allies.”
“Incomplete ones, as you well know,” Endera replied relentlessly. “I am no weak meddler, Vidarian, to pull your strings, but you must understand your importance. And you must understand what I will do to protect the world that I know.”
“Do you truly think you know this world, Endera?”
“Never in its totality. But more than most.” At this she reached for an arrangement of artfully sliced fruit, but she only moved it to a plate. She leaned forward slightly. “You have no quarrel with me. I set you on this path, but it unlocked a potential that was not only latent but inevitable in you.”
“You destroyed my ship.” He kept a tight rein on his temper, but the words threatened to pull fire from his veins.
“You know my sorrow for that is great,” Endera said, and Vidarian was surprised by the genuine weariness in her voice. “As well as for Ruby's injury. I know that neither of these are reconcilable. Yet you also know that they were unintended.”
“How is it not intent, when you lure me repeatedly into the hands of madwomen?”
“They are what you have always been told,” she said, and his blood boiled anew. “Wielders of a new and dangerous form of magic, a hybrid of energies not seen for thousands of years.”
“And you thought you could control them.”
“Not control,” she corrected. “Open channels to. Understand, perhaps. But all this is now quite thoroughly moot. I knew them, once. But the women you killed were none that I knew.”
Vidarian could not quite suppress a shiver as his memory of the blonde priestess's death shadowed his mind.
“And speaking of moot,” she continued, a sharpness creeping back into her voice. “So too is your pretense for rejecting my offer. I have something you need.” She reached into the pouch at her side, and released onto the table two stones identical to the sun emeralds save for their vivid red hue. They glowed even more than the emeralds had, shining like tiny suns be
side the silver platters of pastry and fruit.
“Horses,” Ariadel said, and Vidarian looked up in surprise. “The priestesshood has them, and it's the least you can do to ease our journey.”
Endera bridled at Ariadel's tone, but she only stared at her younger colleague for a long moment; sensing, Vidarian knew, as he did, the completeness of the bridge burned between them, and Ariadel's still raw sense of betrayal. “Horses,” she agreed. “Two.”
“Three,” Ariadel corrected. “Mountain breeds. And three verali. All awaiting us at the Invesh Pass.”
“For peace,” Endera said, extending her hand across the table. “And what advice-I will not say guidance-the fire priestesshood may provide you.”
Vidarian watched her for a long moment, then turned to Ariadel, who inclined her head. He took Endera's hand, and she exhaled as they touched, a vulnerable relief in her eyes. In that moment she seemed aged far beyond her already long years. When she released her grip, she set his hand down atop the sun rubies, which flared with warmth to his touch.
The thrum in the pouch at his side was the response of the storm sapphires, and his mental grip tightened around them. They subsided only after several moments of resistance.
“Do you know, Vidarian, which path you will take, at the gate?” Endera asked. The look Ariadel gave her at these words was another blend of anger and surprise.
“With respect, and peace,” Vidarian said carefully, looking up from the stones only when he was sure of his control over them, “I can't take your advice on that any longer. My counsel is my own.”
O n their fifth day in Val Harlon, Vidarian and Ariadel woke in good spirits. Ruby was at last showing signs of mending, and of a return to her old self. Being in one place for more than two days straight had settled Vidarian's mind, which over the last several weeks had grown nervous and brittle. Anise, whether summoned by Marwen or her own intuition, visited him often at Ruby's bedside. The mind, she said, could not be healed as could the flesh, but it could be shaped in one direction or another.