Mother of All

by Jenna Glass

  Oona bit her lip. “Xanvin sent him away. Me, she trusted to stay silent. Him, not so much.”

  “And Xanvin did not wait for Delnamal to wake up before traveling to Khalpar?” Tynthanal asked, struggling against frustration.

  Oona shrugged. “She waited as long as she dared. She wrote to me once when they reached Khalpar and assured me that he was recovering. But I have not heard from her since.”

  It was not hard to see the hurt in Oona’s expression, but it wasn’t Xanvin’s silence that hurt her. Tynthanal bit his tongue to keep in an acid comment about Delnamal’s treatment of a woman who clearly—and against all reason—loved him. Perhaps with his maimed hands, he had not the dexterity to pen a letter himself, but he surely could have dictated one.

  “Do you know how to reach him?” he asked gently. “If there’s any way you can find out from him exactly what happened at the Well…”

  Once upon a time, Delnamal had had a sense of duty, even if he had often resented that duty. Perhaps if he knew what was happening to his kingdom in his absence…

  “I can try writing to King Khalvin,” Oona said doubtfully. “I’m sure he knows where Delnamal is, though I don’t suppose he thinks particularly highly of Aaltah right now.”

  Tynthanal could not help but agree. Thanks to Delnamal’s erratic behavior, diplomatic ties between the two kingdoms had been strained even before the disaster. And now that Tynthanal had been chosen as prince regent, Khalvin had let his displeasure be known by recalling his own ambassador and expelling Aaltah’s from Khalpar.

  “You must reach out to him as a concerned wife, rather than as a representative of Aaltah,” Tynthanal said. “Tell him nothing about our troubles, but ask only for him to tell you how you might go about reaching Delnamal.” The magic of fliers—even those spelled to deliver messages specifically to a person rather than to a place—required the sender to have at least some idea of the recipient’s location.

  “I know you still aren’t sure whether to trust me,” he continued. “But I will not ask you to share anything with me about your husband’s location. I only ask you to find him and ask him what happened at the Well.”

  Oona nodded. “I will try,” she said, and Tynthanal let out a long sigh of relief.

  * * *

  —

  Xanvin gave a cry of gladness when she stepped into the parlor and saw the caged bird that Delnamal had purchased. Well, that he’d had one of the servants purchase on his behalf. She hurried over to the cage and began to make small cooing noises, tapping at the bars ever so lightly. The bird—uncommonly bold—sat still on its perch and cocked its head first to one side, then the other, then fluttered its clipped wings restlessly.

  Delnamal realized with a touch of chagrin that he had made a mistake. He had not told his mother that he was the cause of her last pet’s demise, and she naturally thought he had bought this bird as a gift for her.

  As far as he could tell, no one had any inkling that he was responsible for the death of the songbird, the handful of chickens, or the hapless serving woman who had “passed peacefully in her sleep.” Everyone thought the decreasing number of “fits” he suffered—and his increasing strength in between them—was a sign that he was healing naturally. Which was convenient, to a point. But rusticating here in the wilderness, he’d had more than enough time to himself to think, and he’d quickly come to realize that his current circumstances were not sustainable. The secret could not last forever unless he never indulged again, and he had no intention of suffering a life of self-denial. So he had embarked on a plan to make of his secret a strength that might well gain him everything he wanted and more.

  He wished now that he’d not been so impatient, that he’d put just a little more thought into his plan before implementing it. His mother would likely have been more open to his proposal if he’d chosen a chicken meant for tonight’s dinner for this demonstration.

  Ah, well. He could buy her another songbird easily enough. Though truth be told, he’d enjoyed the silence the death of the last bird had brought to the manor house.

  “Don’t get too attached, Mama,” he said, closing the parlor door and snicking its lock shut. For the time being at least, this demonstration was to be just between himself and his mother.

  Xanvin’s smile dimmed, and she clutched the cage possessively as she turned to look at him. She could not help but notice that he’d locked the door, nor could she fail to hear the bird’s death in his words.

  “What do you mean, my son?” she asked, carefully placing herself between him and the cage.

  “I brought you here to show you something. Something that I believe will change how King Khalvin thinks of me.”

  At the moment, Delnamal’s uncle clearly thought of him as some kind of failure and embarrassment. A secret to be kept tucked in a hidden manor house in the middle of nowhere. Someone he helped even that much only out of a sense of family obligation. But once he understood how Delnamal had been changed, the king would come to realize that his scorned nephew wasn’t so useless, after all.

  “Delnamal…” his mother said, her voice filled with compassion, and lacking in anything resembling respect.

  Once upon a time, that tone would have set his nerves on edge and sparked his temper. He was aware of the spark even now, just as he was aware of a spark of guilt. Not for hurting the bird—the death of a single songbird was of no consequence—but for the pain that death would cause his mother. A good son, a decent human being, would have seen the look on her face when she beheld that bird and instantly changed his plans. But as with all inconvenient emotions these days, he shunted this aside.

  He smiled faintly at the singular sensation of being able to choose whether to snap at his mother or not. Her body language said she was waiting to absorb whatever verbal blow he was about to deliver, though his smile seemed to knock her off her stride.

  “Please step aside, Mama,” he said in a completely neutral tone of voice. “I promise I will buy you another bird.” His smile broadened. “I will buy you an entire flock, if you’d like.” And a new house in which those damned birds could sing to their hearts’ content without his having to listen to the cacophony.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, and this time there was a faint quaver in her voice.

  “Step aside, and you’ll see.”

  Delnamal strode forward as if there was no question his mother would do as he asked. For all that she’d been raised to observe the Khalpari imperative that a woman be subservient to men at all times, she ordinarily had a fair amount of steel in her backbone. Certainly she had often stood up to him, even when he was in a rage, though he was aware she chose very carefully when to make a stand and when to step aside. He more than half-expected her to hold her ground, but when she met his eyes, something very like fear spread over her face, and she stepped out of his way.

  Another stab of guilt, set aside effortlessly.

  Xanvin wasn’t the only one who was frightened. The caged bird’s primal instincts warned it that danger approached, and it hopped to the far side of the cage, as far away from the door as possible. Its useless wings battered at the cage’s bars, and it called out loudly and repeatedly as Delnamal opened his Mindseye.

  With his Mindseye open, he couldn’t make out the door’s mechanism, so he had to open it by feel—tricky with his mangled fingers—his gaze fixed on the tantalizing mote that was trying so desperately to escape him.

  After he’d killed the housemaid and her mote of Kai had come to join the rest of the Kai that surrounded him, he’d put a great deal of thought into exactly the nature of that faceted globe he saw inside of every living creature, and what it meant that the housemaid’s mote had been chipped, with a shard of it hovering in her aura.

  Conventional wisdom said that masculine Kai was formed by a man’s violent death, and that women’s Kai formed when a woman
was raped. But it was his belief now that the Kai wasn’t formed at all. Both the element known as masculine Kai and the one known as women’s Kai were but fragments of a larger element—whole Kai, which in many ways resembled an egg. A black outer shell surrounding the white Rho and the precious yolk of Kai at the center. He had decided to call the egglike element that only he could see “Rhokai,” for it contained both the element of life and the element of death.

  Turning his attention back to the frantically shrieking bird, he reached his hand into the cage. Moments later, the room went quiet as the bird’s wings stilled and its cries of distress ceased.

  Delnamal shivered in blissful delight as his body absorbed the bird’s life force.

  Behind him, he heard Xanvin’s harsh gasps of breath and knew his gentle mother mourned the stupid bird. Yes, a chicken already destined for the dinner table would have been the wiser choice, but he hadn’t given the issue a moment’s thought. Careless of him, for distraught people could be highly annoying.

  Closing his Mindseye with a contented sigh, Delnamal turned to face his mother. Her eyes were wet and shiny with tears, and she held both her hands clasped in front of her mouth as if to try to contain her horror. A ring of white surrounded her pupils as she stared at her son. He had made a tactical error when he’d chosen the songbird for his demonstration, but at least he had realized in advance that he should not tell her about the aura of Kai that floated around his body. One terrifying fact at a time was enough for a woman with as gentle a soul as his dear mother.

  “What have you done?” she whispered, shaking her head.

  “It turns out not everything that happened to me at Aaltah’s Well was bad,” he said, disappointed to find that the hum of euphoria he’d experienced from absorbing the bird’s Rhokai was fading already. He’d been spoiled by the long-lasting effects of the maid’s death, and wished he could engineer another such opportunity.

  He explained his theories about the nature of Kai, and of the new element he had dubbed Rhokai. He gestured at the pathetic bundle of feathers that lay still at the bottom of the cage.

  “It also seems that removing that mote of Rhokai is fatal, at least to birds.” Even when he admitted what he had learned about the nature of masculine Kai, he had no intention of allowing his mother to know just how he had learned it.

  Xanvin was still shaking her head and staring at him, aghast. He had expected her to be unsettled by his demonstration, but he had underestimated the strength of her reaction.

  She put her hand to her chest, rubbing fretfully. “It’s in me, too?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mama. It’s in everyone.” He smiled faintly. “It seems that the only true difference between magically gifted men, ordinary men, and women, is whether they can see the Kai. I shall be most curious to observe a natural death someday to see why no one has reported seeing Kai in those cases. My conjecture is that it is only violent death that breaks open the Rhokai to reveal what is beneath, but of course I am not certain.”

  The horror on his mother’s face only strengthened, and he realized how callous he’d sounded in his curiosity—nay, fascination.

  “Forgive me for upsetting you, Mama,” he said. He tried to remember how to make his voice sound sympathetic—not that he’d ever been especially good at it—but his mother showed no sign of being soothed. “But I knew if I wrote to King Khalvin and claimed to have this power without confirmation from someone he knows and trusts, he would likely call me a liar.”

  “W-what?” Xanvin stammered, made stupid by fear.

  “When Khalvin realizes the power I possess,” he explained patiently, “he will understand that I must not be kept hidden away in some remote estate where I can contribute nothing to society. I am a weapon the likes of which the world has never seen.” He gestured again at the dead bird. “I believe I was given this power by the Creator, and that He means for me to set the world back to rights for Him.”

  The line was delivered smoothly enough, although Delnamal believed no such thing. All his life, he had tried to believe in the Creator, to believe the teachings of the Devotional that meant so very much to his mother. But the truth was, he never truly had. What he did believe was that Khalvin was even more fanatically religious than his mother, and that convincing his uncle that this power was a gift from the Creator was the surest way to free himself from his exile.

  “I have written a letter to the king,” he continued, drawing a rolled sheet of parchment from his doublet. His hands were not capable of manipulating a quill, but he had purchased a scribes’ spell that had made the task possible. He had had to sell some of his mother’s jewelry in order to afford the expensive spell, and he could tell by the frown line between her brows that she’d thought he intended to use it so that he might write to his wife. She might have balked at selling her jewels if she’d known he intended to contact her brother instead.

  He pointed at a small writing desk tucked in the corner of the parlor near the window. He had already laid out a fresh sheet of parchment, a quill, and a pot of ink. “In it, I explain what I can do and how the two of us together can become holy warriors to further the Creator’s glory. With my power and the might of Khalpar’s navy, we can take back Aaltah and march on the abomination that is Women’s Well. I believe I can use my power to destroy that unholy Well, and that once I do, it will be as if the Curse never happened.

  “All I need you to do is write to your brother and confirm that you have witnessed this power and that it is not some delusion born of desperation.”

  Xanvin continued to gape at him. For the first time ever, he saw not the faintest trace of a mother’s love in her eyes, for there was nothing but horror and bone-deep fear. Perhaps Delnamal would have felt the same in the days before he’d been so indelibly changed. He wondered if a good, hard slap would break her out of that shock, but worried it might only make things worse. So instead, he merely waited patiently while she gathered herself.

  Slowly, intelligence crept back into his mother’s gaze, although the horror was still clearly visible. She dropped her hands away from her mouth, immediately grabbing for her Devotional and holding it clutched between both hands against her belly. He was doubly glad he had not chosen to tell her the full truth. As unsettling as this power was, his greatest strength lay in the aura of Kai that surrounded him. He hoped that King Khalvin would see Delnamal’s power and his aura as an asset, rather than an abomination, but so far his mother’s reaction was not promising.

  Xanvin’s color did not look good, and she was still breathing hard, but at least she was no longer frozen in terror. She swallowed, then licked her lips before she spoke, ever so tentatively.

  “I’m not sure my brother would interpret your…power in quite the way you imagine,” she said.

  “Oh?” he asked with a raise of his eyebrows. “How else might he interpret it? Surely he will know that I would not have been changed like this unless it was by the express will of the Creator.”

  “Th-this power of yours…” She cleared her throat, then swallowed again in a way that suggested she was struggling to keep her gorge down. “It is very…dark.”

  “Ah!” Delnamal said, understanding immediately where she was going with this, thanks to her endless sermons and enforced readings of the Devotional. “You fear your brother will believe my powers have more to do with the Destroyer than the Creator. Is that it?”

  According to the Devotional, the Destroyer had been the son of the Creator and the Mother. Aside from being death incarnate, the Destroyer had further desecrated His father’s creations by seducing and sleeping with the Mother. In punishment, the Creator had cast His son from the heavens and imprisoned Him deep beneath the earth. It was said the Wasteland marked the place where the Destroyer fell to earth, His evil stripping all hints of life from the place. Delnamal did not believe a word of it. What had happened to him at the Well was a freak acciden
t, brought about by the twin indignities of Melcor’s unexpected death and Mairahsol’s deadly scheming.

  Eyes widening with fear again, Xanvin nodded silently. Delnamal most likely should have anticipated the direction of her thoughts, but he had failed to do so. His temper—and the self-loathing that he had never quite been consciously aware of when he was its helpless victim—attempted to derail his powers of reasoning, but it flickered and died away before it could cause him much grief.

  He had never been a quick thinker or skilled liar, but it was clear to him now that it was his own feelings of guilt and anger and inadequacy that had held him back, for he easily embellished his explanation to assuage Xanvin’s fears.

  “Tell him that if my powers were granted by the Destroyer, then it could only have happened if the Creator had decided to temporarily release His son from His imprisonment. Perhaps it is only the power of the Destroyer that can counter the Curse. We must have faith that when the Curse is undone, the Destroyer will be returned to His prison and all will be well once more.”

  It did not take a keen observer of the human condition to see that his mother was far from convinced by his logic. But then, it was not his mother he needed to convince. She was nothing but a messenger, and she did not have to believe the message to write it.

  “You will write to your brother on my behalf, will you not, Mama?” he inquired. His voice was calm and level, and he made not the slightest hint of a threat. And yet he knew full well that in her current state of mind, his mother would hear the threat all the same.

  Xanvin was a proud, brave woman. But she was not a stupid one.

  She bowed her head—whether as a token of respect or to avoid looking at him, he neither knew nor cared. “Of course, my son.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In an act that she suspected held just a whiff of desperation, Kailee scheduled a quartet of musicians who were all the rage among the noble houses to play for her one afternoon, inviting nearly every noblewoman who resided in Aalwell to join her. Most quickly sent terribly polite responses declining the invitation for reasons real and fictional. A handful were rude enough not to reply at all, but to her surprise, Kailee did receive two acceptances. One was from an elderly matron—a woman old enough to feel herself beyond the reach of the court gossips—and one was from the dowager queen.