Queen of Song and Souls

by C. L. Wilson

  He scowled. “Not for you. If you think I’d ever let you put your hands on a Mage…”

  “Once our bond is complete, no Mage can soul-claim me,” she reminded him. “Let me stay, Rain. Let me watch…and learn.”

  He surrendered with ill grace, but insisted she remain securely at his side. On that, he would not budge.

  When the vol Oros sisters were ready to begin, they nodded to the warriors holding the twenty-five-fold weave around the Mage. Ellysetta expected the warriors to disperse their weave slowly, cautiously, but instead, one of the Fey cried, “Now!” and each Fey dissolved his thread in the weave.

  The instant the weave vanished, the two sisters leaned in and gripped the Mage’s head in their hands. Power exploded in a bright, golden-white light around them.

  Ellysetta’s belly coiled tight as she watched the shei’dalins spin their weaves. She’d seen Truthspeaking before…but never like this. The threads were sun-bright, blazing with such concentrated power she could taste the snap of it in her mouth, feel the shocking tingle race over her skin. It reminded her of the burst of power that billowed around Rain every time he summoned the Change.

  She kept her eyes on the shei’dalins, summoning Fey vision in an attempt to see the patterns of their weave. The threads were so bright, they would have blinded a lesser shei’dalin, but Ellysetta saw the pattern—or, rather, sensed it somehow—and her mind worked to commit it to memory. Spirit and shei’dalin’s love…not soft, not soothing, but hard and sharp as a knife. It stabbed deep into the mind of the unconscious Mage.

  His eyes flew open, filled with shock. His lips parted in a soundless gasp. No other part of his body so much as twitched, because the Fey had spun a paralysis weave on him as soon as the shield weave had dissolved.

  Ellysetta heard a voice—a wail. The Mage’s wail. His mind rejecting the invasion of his thoughts. On the heels of his cry came a powerful intonation, two female voices, each vibrating with compulsion so strong, a chill shuddered up Ellysetta’s spine.

  «Open your mind, son of Eld. Let us in. We can feel how it hurts you to keep secrets from us. Don’t torment yourself this way. The knowledge you hold is a knife in your belly, twisting deeper with every moment you delay. Let go of the pain, son of Eld. Open your mind, set free your burdens, and let us bring you peace.»

  Ellysetta’s nails dug into Rain’s wrist. The Mage was screaming now—a silent scream that ripped through his soul. The shei’dalins were not spinning pain upon him; he was doing it himself, thanks to the compulsion woven into their voices. Still, he fought to hold his barriers in place and resist the invasion of his mind. He wanted to whisper the death spell, the one that would free him from this torment and keep what he knew safe, but he couldn’t remember the word, and his tongue couldn’t move to form it.

  «Torvan… » The shei’dalins had pierced the outer layer of his mind and discovered the Mage’s name and a memory from his childhood—a memory of a time when he’d been young and still innocent, a powerful child already slated for greatness. He had a mother, a Primage’s favored concubine, a beauty with brown eyes and raven hair. She had loved him—at least as much as a woman of Eld dared to love her child.

  «Torvan.» Narena and Faerah had now tapped the memories of that mother, the feelings the boy Mage had reciprocated until he grew old enough to know that one day he would be her master. Using those memories, the shei’dalins spun a vivid illusion of the boy’s mother, the sound of her voice, the sweet smell of her skin, the soft warmth of her embrace in those too-brief moments when she was allowed to hold her child. «Torvan, dear one,» the boy’s mother pleaded. «Please tell us what we need to know. Please, my son. Trust us.»

  Ellysetta swayed. It was almost as if she were there in the weave with the shei’dalins and the Mage and the Mage’s memories. She knew the instant the crack into the Mage’s mind opened a little further, gasped as the shei’dalins plunged deeper.

  «Tell us what you know, Torvan. Tell us. You cannot hold back. You don’t want to hold back. The need to speak, to confess what you know, is too strong to resist.»

  The shei’dalins’ fingers tightened on the Mage’s face, and another wail was wrung from his soul as a surge of fresh power bolstered their weave.

  They had tapped other memories of his youth. Rain was wrong: Mages weren’t born evil. They weren’t born without a conscience. They were a product of their upbringing and the dark weaves of Azrahn that they were taught to spin when they were too young to know the danger. That sort of power was a heady drug for anyone, let alone a child.

  Once Torvan donned the green robes of a novice Mage, earning the approval of his teachers and masters became the goal of his daily existence. That desire soon grew into a personal need to excel…to be better, stronger, more capable than his fellow novices. But it was only at age ten, when he watched his master force an umagi to commit unspeakable acts, that the true hunger for power over others blossomed in his Azrahn-darkened heart.

  Cruelty came soon after, born from a mix of boredom and a driving urge to destroy every hint of weakness and emotion in his soul. Weak souls were slaves. Strong souls were masters. And it was much, much better to be a master than a slave.

  Soon he moved from novice green to apprentice yellow, then Sulimage red. His rapid rise in rank and exponentially increasing talents caught the eye of a daring young Primage who had just ascended to the blue. Together with a handful of like-thinking Mages, they spoke in hushed whispers and thoughts stored in the small, private area of their minds that every Mage learned to create—the area that, in fact, separated Mages from umagi, though only a truly powerful Mage could keep even a small portion of his mind secure against the master who had claimed his soul as a child.

  Torvan and his mentor talked about the rule of Demyan Raz, and the hidebound traditions of the Mage Council. They shared treasonous, revolutionary thoughts and plotted ways to increase their own powers by supplanting older but less talented Mages. They even conceived the idea of breeding stronger, more powerful umagi by crossing magical bloodlines.

  And then the Mage Wars began. Gaelen vel Serranis slaughtered Demyan Raz and every last member of his clan—erasing the most powerful Mage family in Eld and upsetting the balance of power. As the Wars raged, Primages fought like vicious dogs to ascend to the dark throne of Eld. Intrigue, betrayal, even murder became commonplace in the great Mage Halls scattered across the land.

  It was Torvan’s mentor who finally succeeded where all the others had failed. Torvan’s mentor whose revolutionary ideas and forethought had led him to build the first underground stronghold, into which his trusted inner circle and a few thousand Mages and umagi fled when Rain Tairen Soul scorched the world. It was Torvan’s mentor who assumed the mantle of power and claimed the purple robes of the High Mage of Eld.

  And soon, very soon, it would be that same mentor who would lead Eld back to greatness. Then all the world would tremble and fall prostrate before them. And all the world would venerate the name of Torvan’s mentor, the High Mage Vadim Maur.

  Vadim Maur. The mere mention of that hated name sent a bolt of fear shooting through Ellysetta’s veins.

  As if alerted by her fear, a familiar sentience suddenly turned its dagger-sharp attention in her direction. Ellysetta gave a choked scream and flung herself backward. She yanked her consciousness back into herself and raised her mental barriers in a flash. Her hands clutched Rain’s arm so tightly, her nails broke against the unyielding surface of his golden war steel.

  “Fey!” he cried.

  A six-fold weave sprang up around her the same instant twenty red Fey’cha daggers sank into Eld flesh. The Mage died. Ellysetta’s knees gave out and she collapsed in Rain’s arms.

  Still kneeling by the dead Mage, the vol Oros sisters continued to hold his head and spin their Truthspeaking weave. Several concerned warriors tried to pull them away, but they resisted until another group of Fey yanked the body of the Mage out of their grip.

  “What jus
t happened?” Rain demanded. “Ellysetta?”

  Still trembling, her throat too tight to speak, she shook her head and tried to swallow. “The High Mage…he was there. While they were Truthspeaking that Mage, he was there.”

  Rain’s head snapped up. His gaze pinned the vol Oros sisters. “Narena? Faerah? Did either of you sense anything?”

  “Aiyah, but it wasn’t our Truthspeaking that drew him.” The pair turned their piercing eyes on Ellysetta.

  “I wasn’t Truthspeaking. How could I be, when I’ve never done it before?” Ellysetta paced the confines of Lord Teleos’s private audience chamber. The Fey had Fired the body of the Mage and dispersed the ash into the winds, and Lord Teleos had offered his personal chambers for the use of Rain, Ellysetta, and the vol Oros sisters.

  Gaelen, who stood at the perimeter of the room along with the other members of the three shei’dalins’ respective quintets, gave a humorless laugh. “When has lack of experience ever stopped you from weaving great magic, kem’falla?”

  “But wouldn’t I have known? Wouldn’t you”—she glanced at Rain and her quintet—“have known? That weave they spun took no small amount of magic.”

  “When several shei’dalins spin, Feyreisa, even strong threads can hide among the others.” Narena, the elder of the two sisters, offered the possibility. “You must have analyzed our pattern and added your own threads to our weave shortly after we began. It is a common way to learn a new weave.”

  If she had, she’d done it purely without conscious thought. “May I ask what made you search the Mage’s mind for memories of his mother?” she asked the vol Oros sisters. “Is that something you usually do when you Truthspeak a Mage—tap into the emotions he felt as a child in order to enter his mind?”

  Surprise flickered in dark eyes. The sisters exchanged a look. “We made no such search, Feyreisa,” Narena said slowly.

  Ellysetta frowned. “But you did. You discovered his name, and his memories of his mother, and used those to probe deeper into his thoughts.”

  The sisters continued to look at her as if she were some unexpected—and disconcerting—surprise discovered beneath a scientist’s close-viewing glass. Ellysetta’s hand rose to her throat. “But surely you heard him? Surely I wasn’t the only one to see the memories of his childhood? How he became a Mage…how he rose in rank and came to know the High Mage”—she swallowed and forced herself to say the name—“Vadim Maur?”

  Faerah moistened her lips. “Did he…tell you all that, Feyreisa?” Horror and curiosity mingled in equal parts on her lovely face.

  “I…” Ellysetta’s cheeks began to burn and her hands went clammy. She hated when she did things like this. Hated when her gift—or curse, as often seemed more the case—made her seem such a strange, odd misfit of a person. She hated the way it made people look at her—as if they couldn’t decide whether she was Fey or foe, magic or monster.

  Most of all, she hated how it made her wonder the same thing.

  Rain’s hand closed around hers, the broad strength of his fingers squeezing gently, and with that simple handclasp came the rush of emotion she needed most: love. Utter devotion and unswerving acceptance. He was the unyielding haven in the center of her storm. «Breathe, shei’tani. It’s all right. Everything will be all right.»

  She took a shuddering breath and nodded as she fought to control her racing heart. So long as Rain was at her side, she could get through all of the oddities of her existence, even the parts that shot terror through her soul.

  “What did the Mage tell you, Feyreisa?” Narena echoed her younger sister’s query.

  “He told me about his life…well, ‘told’ isn’t exactly the right word. It was more like he let me live his memories with him….” She glanced at Rain. “Almost the way tairen do when they sing.”

  “You mean you heard his song?”

  “Yes.” His horrified expression made her flush and begin to stammer. “No. Oh, I don’t know, Rain. I don’t know what I did, or how he shared what he shared. I only know it was the truth.” She squeezed his hands. “I know it was the truth. His name was Torvan Zon. His father was a Primage, and his mother was an umagi concubine.”

  She also knew that Torvan Zon had loved his mother. Even after he’d woven so much dark magic that he was no longer capable of love, he couldn’t erase the part of him that belonged to her before it belonged to the Mages. By then, however, he had learned to consider love—or any form of emotional attachment—a weakness, and so he had hidden it away deep inside his mind, a shameful secret never to be revealed.

  “Rain, Zon knew Vadim Maur—before he was the High Mage. He was Vadim’s…” She hesitated. “Friend” wasn’t the right word. Mages didn’t have friends. They reviled all emotional attachments. She finally settled on: “He was one of Vadim Maur’s inner circle.”

  She pressed her hands to her temples as she paced the room. She could still remember everything so vividly…as if some part of the Mage had become part of her…or rather as if his memories had become her own. She remembered the slow decline, from the child warm in his mother’s arms to the Mage who had, without a twinge of conscience, enslaved another person’s soul for his own use. She knew exactly how triumphant—almost godlike—he’d felt when he’d completed the claiming of his first umagi and then forced that umagi to do his bidding. She knew the euphoric rush of exultant power that had flooded the Mage’s body. That rush—that feeling of greatness and invincible power—was the drug, the addiction, that kept Mages pursuing ever-greater, ever-darker magic. She could still sense it, even now.

  And some part of her liked the taste of it.

  Her stomach lurched. She stopped pacing and put her head down in an attempt to quell the nausea. Oh, gods. What had she done? Had she opened her soul to Torvan? Had she inadvertently admitted some part of his evil Eld darkness into her own soul—or, worse still, released the darkness that had existed in her own nature all along?

  “Shei’tani?” Rain was there in an instant, searching her face in concern as he pulled her into his arms. “What is it?”

  She leaned against him for a moment, closing her eyes and letting herself shelter in his strength. When he held her like this, when his soul reached for hers as it was doing now, he almost made her fears melt away, almost made her believe that she truly was as bright and shining as he claimed.

  If he knew the truth, he would recoil from you in horror.

  Ellysetta flinched at the cold whisper that snaked through her mind, taunting her, filling her with doubts. That voice—a voice that sounded more like her own than the High Mage’s—was the same that had urged her to weave Azrahn in the Well. Alarmed, she pulled out of Rain’s arms.

  “Ellysetta?”

  “I’m all right,” she reassured him, taking a quick step to evade his hands. “It’s just that the Mage’s memories were so vivid.” Not a lie. Not the whole truth either, but she wasn’t about to admit the ugliness of her dark thoughts in front of these two shei’dalins. “It’s unsettling to be that closely connected to evil…to know what plea sure the Mage felt when he enslaved a person’s soul…” Ellysetta’s shudder was entirely genuine. That gloating triumph, that thrill of dark joy as a weaker soul succumbed to the Mage’s domination, was disturbing in every way…but not half so disturbing as her own echo of that thrill.

  Gods save her.

  She forced her features into a mask of calm and tried to deflect everyone’s attention from her. “Teska, let’s not dwell on this. It doesn’t matter, in any case. None of what the Mage showed me shed any light on the High Mage’s plans.” She infused her voice with a gossamer weave of Spirit to encourage the Fey to turn their attention elsewhere. Spirit was her strongest branch of magic, strong enough that even Rain and Bel admitted she spun a finer weave than they—and they were two of the Fading Lands’ most gifted Spirit masters.

  Without so much as a blink of suspicion, Rain turned to the vol Oros sisters. “Were you able to learn anything? What were the Mages and d
ahl’reisen doing here in Orest?”

  Narena frowned slightly, but if she sensed a compulsion weave, she gave no other sign of it. “As you already suspect, Feyreisen, they came for your mate. The High Mage has not given up his pursuit of her.”

  A chill raised the hairs on Ellysetta’s arms. Though the shields spun around her each night as she slept kept her dreams free of disturbing nightmares, she never deluded herself that the Mage had decided to leave her in peace. He was not the sort to admit defeat.

  “Do not fear, shei’tani,” Rain murmured. “He will never see that aim fulfilled.”

  “Nei, he will not,” Bel echoed, his cobalt eyes calm and filled with unwavering certainty.

  She turned to the leader of her quintet, who had become her dearest friend over the last months, and for his sake, she forced a smile and pretended a confidence she did not share. Bel meant what he said. He would die to protect her, as would every other lu’tan who had bloodsworn himself to her. But that would not stop the Mage from coming after her.

  Rain brushed a caress of warm Spirit against her senses, but kept his gaze fixed on Narena. “What of Koderas?” he asked.

  The shei’dalin nodded and folded her hands in her lap, long fingers twining gracefully. She seemed so calm, so perfectly composed. Serene and queenly. Much more so than Ellysetta, the uncrowned and exiled queen of the Fading Lands.

  “The fires are lit, as you surmised,” Narena confirmed. “The Eld are preparing their invasion force.”

  “Where does the High Mage intend to strike?”

  “An armada will reach the mouth of Great Bay in five weeks’ time and move on to Celieria City once King’s Point and Queen’s Point are destroyed, but that is not the Eld’s primary target. The bulk of the forces from Koderas will attack Kreppes.” Kreppes was Great Lord Cannevar Barrial’s fortress, located where the Azar River flowed into the Heras. “Once they establish a stronghold there—”

  “They can bring the full might of his invasion forces across the Heras to conquer the North.” Rain’s boots clapped on the hard stone floor as he began to pace. “I thought it would be Moreland, Great Lord Sebourne’s keep. It’s a straight shot down the Selas River from Koderas. Kreppes is less obvious, but still damaging enough if they capture it.”