by Morgan Smith
He smiled at her, and then turned back to me, with a look of unholy amusement, as if we shared some special secret.
I wished he wouldn’t. The thought that I was in any way a part of this, of him, was as sickening a thought as I could ever have had.
The Lady was on her knees, now, drawing out the circle, and he turned back to her. He began watching her with the single-minded enthrallment of a child too long denied a promised treat. If I had run, just then, I don’t know that either of them would have noticed my absence.
How long this state of affairs would last, though, I couldn’t be sure. She had spoken of blood magic and I thought, maybe, I could see how this would play out. I would kill this poor soldier, and then they would kill me, and all that blood and power of it might free that thing back into the world.
I remembered that odd scene, so many years ago, in the little shrine beneath Penliath. It had been about the same time of year, I thought. I hadn’t known what my mother had meant to do, but I had known instinctively, even then, that it would have involved blood and death. My blood, and my death.
She hadn’t known enough, my mother. She hadn’t understood what this thing really wanted. Even if she had understood, she might well have misread it all anyway, through that lens of her own gaping neediness and greed, and simply gone ahead and done as she liked. She had never been a woman who could play a longer game.
And what a mistake it had been for my grandfather to intervene and save me. I could see that, now, that my end that day might have saved us all from a far worse fate.
Ilona finished the circle. She began to lay out the items they needed, the bits of old bone, the cups and the candles. Then she pulled out a flask of something viscous and dark, that she poured out into carefully placed pools at the five cardinal points inside the ring she’d drawn.
She lit the fluid and the little puddles smoldered, raising a stench of something honeyed and rotting, and it mingled above our heads with the smoke of the torches. She straightened back up, stepped away towards the Well at the centre of the circle she’d drawn, and waited.
The Incarnate produced an ancient, evil-looking, ritual knife, carved and dark, and handed it over to her. She held it reverently, with more than just a hint of fear, and after a moment, she began to whisper some odd, complex, unintelligible words in a sing-song chanting rhythm.
The knife began to take on a greyish glow, drinking in some of the ambient Power that still drifted from the Well. And it was drinking in hers, as well. Even I could see it, but the Lady of Gorsedd seemed strangely mesmerized and unaware.
The Incarnate sighed deeply, and looked back across the smooth stone flooring to me.
Ilona’s voice grew louder. Beads of sweat appeared on her brow, and she swayed a little with the effort of this one final, all-important task.
It was Penliath all over again. All my life had dragged me here.
I wasn’t a child anymore. It wasn’t the circle, or these crazy rites, or even Ilona that frightened me now. It was that figure beside her. If once he touched me, I thought, that would be it. I could sense the power in him.
And I sensed something else, as well.
Oh, it wasn’t that I had any gifts or talents. It was simply the training again, the training of a warrior, and it was something the holy and the wise always discount as too material, too obvious, too ordinary. It was just a function of observing and not trying to interpret past what was demonstrably present.
The Incarnate’s Power was mainly, if not entirely, connected to the vapours still rising from that circle of stones. In the moments after he had stepped away, those hazy strings had still been reaching for him, clinging to him and melting into him, even as some of that power filled the knife or began spreading itself out into the cavern.
But the tendrils were diffusing now, that was the real point. They were beginning to drift away, and pretty aimlessly, too. They had begun to mix with the other forces at play here, almost at random.
The pair inside the circle turned to me, and that thing, he smiled at me once more.
There was a sort of faint sound, from very far away.
The two inside the circle, though, were so keenly focused on their own aims that neither of them seemed to notice.
They might, of course, at any moment, become aware of things beyond their little world. It seemed obvious that I needed to keep their attention on me and me alone, for as long as I could.
“Come,” he said. “It’s time for you to do your part.”
I shook my head. I didn’t trust myself to speak. My heart was like lead. I could not win, I realized, not against this. I could delay this, I might even be able to hamper their ends, but winning? No.
I could feel a crushing despair, and the weight of too much magic and power in this place, like a millstone on my chest, pressing ever harder against me. It hurt even to breathe.
“Come into the circle,” he said. “Come to me, kill for me, and I swear, your fate will be mighty beyond dreams. You belong to me.”
And my body - it wanted to. It was straining to go. It took everything in me not to move, not to do as I was asked.
I took a deep, painful breath and said, “You lie.” I could feel it, the mockery and the triumph in them both. That circle encompassed my death, at least, if not something far worse.
The theft of a daughter cuts at the roots of the world.
Where had I heard that? Was it only a rhyme out of some old fireside story, or something more? It seemed an important truth, it seemed like the heart of the thing, but I couldn’t think why.
My head felt thick and clouded. Far away, from a place as muffled and distant as a dream, I heard voices, shouting, but I wasn’t able to tell anymore if it were echoes from some faraway imagining, or if there still were other people left in this world.
“Take her,” said Ilona, breathlessly. “Bend her to your will, my lord. Time is short.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was suddenly so quiet now, I couldn’t even hear my own breathing. It was as if the rest of the Mother’s creation had fallen away, leaving only the three of us alone and frozen at the end of the world.
“Kill him.” The Incarnate’s tone was perfunctory, almost disinterested.
“No.” It hurt, that single syllable.
“Why not? What is he to you but a traitor? He needs to die.”
It was actually funny, in a way. Father and child, getting to know one another at last.
I shrugged. The weight against my chest pressed harder.
He said, still confident, “You will do it, you know.”
“Why should I?” I could barely draw breath, now, but it seemed important not to show that.
“Because I will it. Because you were born for this. Because you belong to me.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Why should you? You have killed for others before, and with much less to gain.” I considered this. He seemed very sure of me, even now.
“If you do not kill him,” the Incarnate said, “he will die anyway, they all will, and you with them.”
Well, that had the ring of truth, at any rate. I sucked in more air, no longer caring about the pain.
“Everyone dies.” I said, at length. “Rich women or poor farmers, babies and greyhaired grannies, they do it every day. Now or tomorrow or a hundred years on: there's no difference, not for him, not for me, not for anyone.”
He watched me through the mottled light, eyes now narrowed and suspicious, probing.
“Do your own damned dirty work,” I said.
He shifted so suddenly, in a single movement so swift, I had no time to even realize he had done so.
The Incarnate touched me and screamed, and his fingernails, suddenly as long and sharp as eagle’s talons, ripped along my arm, leaving a thread of intense and burning agony in their wake. He spun, and his hand connected brutally with Ilona’s cheek, sending her stumbling out of the circle. She collapsed in a heap, moaning.
; “Liar!” He was screaming still. “Liar! You swore she was mine!”
Ilona raised her head. “She is yours! Who else could have fathered her? I made sure that oaf the little fool was dallying with was as barren as a wethered ram - why else should I have let him come with us?”
He spat at her, and said something foul, and she shrieked in pain, her head falling back onto the smooth stones with a sickening thud.
He looked back to me.
He raised his hands.
The threads of vapour, still leaking from the Well, ran suddenly straight and true, right into him, and I braced myself. I couldn’t hope to withstand this, but I could try. I could hold on a little and not shed anyone’s blood, and maybe that would be enough.
And then suddenly, I was falling, my body hitting the hard stone floor, as someone careened into me like a boulder out of a catapult, smashing into my side and knocking what breath I still had right out of me. I rolled over and struggled to my feet, and this time my despair was not magically induced, but something real and all my own.
What in the name of every hell had Guerin been thinking? I could have hit him, I was so furious, except that he was out of my reach. His momentum had sent him sprawling across the cavern into that chalk-drawn circle, right past Ilona and not a hand’s span from the curving line of stones that marked the Well.
In an instant, Ilona was on him, grasping at his throat and trying to choke him. She was gasping for breath, they both were, I could see them locked into a fearsome struggle, and while I had thought her a powerful mage, one part of me noticed that all the force and strength in her was gone. That knife that the Incarnate had given her had sucked it all away. It lay abandoned on the floor, still glowing with that unholy grey heat.
Ilona looked desperate, and nearly spent by her efforts so far, and yet she still was latched on to Guerin’s throat with the ferocity of a mountain cat, and the pair of them rolled away, out to the edge of the circle.
I could do nothing for him, I knew that. And if I couldn’t find a way to change all this, it wouldn’t matter much, anyway.
I looked across the cavern. I couldn’t even see the walls at all anymore. They had disappeared into the swell of power surging around us.
The Incarnate looked, too, and just for a moment I would have sworn the barest uncertainty crossed his face.
I was wrong, I suppose.
Into that unearthly silence, he began to laugh.
“Did you think your little stratagems might save you?”
He lifted a hand and the sorcery that had grown out around us lifted high, compacting in on itself and like a snake, it twisted and writhed above our heads.
Now I could see that Guerin had not come alone, although he might as well have, for all the good it would do.
The people at the entrance of the cave were caught, entangled in some arcane trickery, frozen in that same despair he’d locked on me. I could see them clearly, though I couldn’t imagine how they’d known to come here. Cowell, and Birais and Lannach, and even some others I didn’t know, struggling furiously against a wall of terror and anger.
Useless: not a priestly talent or a gifted among them. I was on my own, which was more than ordinarily depressing.
I had a choice to make. I had told Arlais, once, that my death didn’t matter. That winning was defined by my opponent’s death only. I didn’t need to survive to be victorious.
The trouble was that this time, I was making that choice for everyone else, too.
Be a rock. Be a wall of stone. Be no living thing.
Or not.
I moved as fast as I could, scooping up the knife where Ilona had dropped it, and slashing wildly at the Incarnate.
It had the virtue of surprise, at least. The knife ripped across his chest, and then I felt the vibration and the pain, and I stumbled and rolled with it, past them all, past the Incarnate, Ilona and Guerin, past the still-unmoving body of that nameless soldier.
And then I dropped the damned thing into the Well.
Chapter Thirty-Five
There was a moment, between my fingers letting go and the sound of that obsidian blade clattering against something unseen down inside the Well, a moment where I actually thought I might get away with this.
And then all that sorcery, all that greenish vapour and wild, arcane force that had been pouring out into this place, held at bay and biding its time, it all rushed back in on itself, following the knife into the Well, and leaving a kind of airless, empty hush of death behind it.
Only for the briefest of moments.
Then something spat it all back up, and that was not at all a good thing.
It wasn’t sound, although that might be the only word you could put to it.
It wasn’t movement, although I felt it, shaking deep within me, a roaring pulsation from somewhere far inside the bowels of the earth.
It wasn’t even painful, so I didn’t quite understand why there was so much agony involved.
The shock of it had flung me back away from the Well, and I was not aware of very much else, except that the Incarnate, in that instant after he and Ilona both scrambled over and past me to the Well’s stone edges, the Incarnate was howling with an inhuman fury.
The torches had been snuffed out in an instant, but all that force, in its sudden return, it lit us up like ghostly green fire, and I saw that whatever had held it, it was loose now, and raging like a tempest, crackling against the rock walls and showering me in a murderous hail of cold, black sparks.
I looked back to the Well, the source of this infernal torment, and saw the two of them still scrabbling at the edge, blind to everything but their own greed, and I saw that poor, unnamed soldier rise, and heard him speak.
But not with his own voice.
“GetoutGetoutGetout!””
That was - Arlais? If I hadn’t been on the ground already, it might have felled me with the shock.
The soldier-Arlais shrieked her warning again, and I felt a strong hand pulling me up, dragging me by force back toward the entrance, and I heard soldier-Arlais screaming something odd and terrible that I didn’t understand.
And then I found my feet again and was running, too, following Guerin and Birais and the rest of them, all of us plunging blindly down the smooth-walled passageway and through the narrow, rocky gorge and away, out into the green, grassy place where the weathered stones of an ancient ruined temple still lay, rooted forever into the earth.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I asked her, a long time later, how she’d done that. How do you die, but not die?
“It’s a simple enough trick,” she said, airily. “It’s just a little of this and a little of that, really, things that make up every spell. Any student at Braide could tell you that. But then, Ilona was always so sure that ordinary magics were pointless, she never paid any attention to how they work.”
I asked her a lot of other things, too, like how she had been able to count on me to do the one thing that I had done, when she had been nearly a half-mile away, or how she had known any of it would work at all. And I got equally vague answers that really weren’t answers at all.
But that was later.
***
Out in the world, it was still deep night and there was fresh clean air and velvet darkness. I leaned wearily against a gnarled old ash tree and wondered how I had lived for so long and never noticed how good this world could feel.
Cowell came by, and I thought he might punch me in my arm again, but then he thought better of it, and just shook his head and said I was a Goddess-be-damned fool and he was glad of it.
Guerin was still beside me. He told me to sit, and I ignored him and just concentrated on how sweet the night air felt as it slid into my lungs.
Lannach came by, and shook my hand and said something about courage.
“That wasn’t courage,” I said. “That was just stupidity that didn’t go all arse backwards, for a change.”
And then I said, because it had become annoy
ing, “Don’t fuss, Guerin. It’s the merest scratch. Let it alone.”
Guerin stopped pawing at my arm.
“Was there something,” he inquired, “that you particularly wanted to bleed on? I’m willing to arrange it.”
I looked. He wasn’t joking, not utterly. The gashes on my arm were deep and the red blood had soaked down my sleeve right to my wrist. I would need a new shirt.
“It is a bit pig-like, isn’t it? Sorry.”
The King of Keraine was laughing at us, a little. But then, when Guerin had convinced me to sit, finally, and managed a makeshift bandage, Birais stopped laughing and said to me that he was greatly in my debt.
He was extremely serious.
“Lannach has the right of it, even so.” He said this with an emphasis that wouldn’t allow for any flip remarks. To be honest, I had no desire to make a joke of this. I was much too tired. “You never wavered.”
I had wavered plenty, as I recalled. But I couldn’t think of how to explain what I’d done, or why, and finally I just muttered that it was really Arlais who had saved us.
“You gave her time to work in.”
That had been sheer bloody-mindedness, really. It wasn’t as if I had known what she was doing. But I couldn’t say that, either. Not with him looking at me with so much admiration. Admiration and something else, something I had seen in other people’s eyes, but never, ever, not even once, directed at me.
Daughters are the roots of the world. I suppose he had learned this catchphrase, too.
“Any man would be proud -“
“Don’t,” I said. I closed my eyes against this onslaught.
I couldn’t take this, not now. I didn’t want this. I didn’t need this.
And he certainly didn’t need it either. He already had heirs. True, attested, blood-heirs. No one needed to muddy those waters now.
“Don’t. Please. It’s enough that - that you and I know what I am. And what I am not.”
To this day, I don’t know if it was relief or disappointment that he felt then. But he let it be, after that.
It was so peaceful, now. I wanted nothing more than for that peace to last.