Mother of All

by Jenna Glass

  Against all odds, she must have dozed off for a little while, for she suddenly jerked awake when the carriage came to a stop. She blinked in confusion, glancing out the window and seeing a dark and nearly abandoned courtyard, bounded by an ornate iron fence. Opposite the fence was the towering façade of what could only be the royal palace. Leethan’s head felt thick and slow. She hadn’t known where she was being taken, but she certainly hadn’t expected it to be here.

  A royal palace was never entirely dark, for there were always people awake within, but it was still well before dawn. She doubted anyone with real authority was awake at this hour, but perhaps she was to be held here until someone was available to question her. Why she could not have been allowed to stay with Elwynne and sleep until then, she didn’t know.

  She stumbled with weariness when exiting the carriage and would have fallen flat on her face if the soldier hadn’t caught her.

  “Steady now,” he said as he set her on her feet. “We’re almost there. Follow me.”

  Stifling a yawn, she nodded and followed the soldier into the palace. They entered through what was obviously a servants’ entrance, then followed a long and twisting corridor until they came to something that looked more like an opening in the wall than an actual doorway. The opening was flanked by two liveried men, who nodded to her escort.

  Leethan followed him into the darkened hallway beyond, more puzzled now than ever. The servants’ corridors had screamed their utilitarian purpose while still displaying a certain understated elegance. No one would mistake even the servants’ wing as belonging to some ordinary manor house. But this darkened hallway was different, completely unadorned, and not fitted with luminants. Her escort lit the way with a handheld luminant that barely seemed to push back the darkness. She swallowed hard, wondering if this strange corridor led to hidden dungeons under the palace.

  They reached what appeared to be a dead end, but the soldier opened his Mindseye and activated some spell, which caused a doorway to appear in what had looked for all the world like a blank wall. Leethan raised her eyebrows at him, and he offered her the tiniest hint of a smile.

  Eventually, they reached a stairway and climbed until they entered yet another barren hallway, which led to a heavy door. The soldier knocked on that door and waited.

  There was a sound of rustling clothing, and then the firm metallic thunk of sliding bolts. The door opened, and Leethan found herself face-to-face with an elegant young woman, wearing a jewel-encrusted bodice over voluminous skirts of heavy silk. Her headdress featured a filigreed golden diadem that sparkled with diamonds.

  “You must be Lady Leethan,” the young woman said with a welcoming smile.

  Leethan, still feeling stupid with exhaustion, did not at first know what to make of the woman. Her mind was still dozing in the carriage, and it wasn’t until she saw Prince Zarsha standing just behind the woman that she comprehended what was happening.

  “Your Majesty!” she said with a gasp, then struggled to perform an elegant curtsy without allowing her weakened knees to collapse beneath her.

  Leethan was mildly shocked when Queen Ellinsoltah reached out and put a hand on her arm as if to support her.

  “Please come in and sit,” the queen invited, drawing Leethan into the room. “I must apologize for dragging you here when I’m sure you are badly in need of sleep, but both Prince Zarsha and I felt it was imperative we speak with you as soon as you arrived in Zinolm Well. I have had tea and biscuits sent up, in case you are hungry, and I promise we will not keep you any longer than necessary.”

  Leethan, numb and wondering if she might not still be fast asleep in the carriage and dreaming, entered what appeared to be a bedroom. Swallowing hard, she looked around and blinked, but the magnificent canopied bed that dominated the room did not go away. It wasn’t just a bedroom, it was the queen’s bedroom. The queen and her prince consort led her through the bedroom into an adjoining sitting room. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the door through which she had entered was now concealed by a tapestry.

  The scent of tea teased her nostrils, and though her stomach was tight with tension, she happily helped herself to a cup when invited.

  “Forgive the rather scandalous entrance into the queen’s bedroom,” Zarsha said as he settled himself on the arm of Ellinsoltah’s chair, drawing a not-very-convincing stern look from his wife. “But until we’ve heard what you have to say, we thought it best to keep your arrival in Rhozinolm in general—and Zinolm Well in particular—a secret.”

  Thinking furiously, Leethan took a sip of tea. The need for secrecy might also explain why she’d been brought to the palace at this unholy hour. She’d thought it a coincidence that the ride from Falcon’s Ridge had delivered her to the capital at such a late hour, but now she saw that it was by design. And the fact that Queen Ellinsoltah was at least for the time being keeping this secret seemed likely to be a good omen. If she were planning to hand Leethan back to Waldmir, there’d be no need for secrecy.

  “I must thank you for your discretion,” she said carefully, taking another sip of tea and willing it to do its magic. Both Ellinsoltah and Zarsha were perfectly dressed and coiffed, and they looked as fresh as if the sun were high in the sky. Leethan felt grubby by comparison.

  Ellinsoltah smiled gently at her. “As you might well imagine, Prince Waldmir has demanded the return of Princess Elwynne and her ‘kidnappers’ should they make an appearance in Rhozinolm. We thought it best to dissemble, at least until we learned the reason for your precipitous—and perilous—flight.”

  “Yes,” said Zarsha, his blue eyes suddenly focused on her with an unsettling intensity and his voice taking on crisp edges. “It is fortuitous for all involved that the healers have declared my little cousin to be in good health, considering the reckless risk you took with her life.”

  Leethan shivered slightly in the chill of Zarsha’s gaze. He was well-known for being affable and full of good humor, but in that frosty stare she could clearly see the resemblance between him and his uncle. She formed the instant impression that he would make almost as bad an enemy as Prince Waldmir.

  “I assure you,” she said, “I would not have—”

  “The princess could as easily have died as arrived in Rhozinolm,” Zarsha interrupted. “You had best hope I find your explanation for dragging her through the mountains of Nandel during the winter satisfactory. And convincing.”

  Ellinsoltah put a gentle hand on her husband’s leg as if to calm him, but Leethan had the instant impression that there was something slightly rehearsed to both his words and her gesture. Even so, she quickly abandoned any idea of embellishing her story to make it more convincing. If anything she said struck a false note, she might find herself in the hands of the royal inquisitor.

  Instead, she settled for the truth, even if she feared it would not be believed. She told Zarsha and Ellinsoltah about her vision, but she also told them how disturbed she had been by Elwynne’s banishment to the Abbey and how that made her fear for the child’s welfare. She could not tell from their faces what Zarsha and Ellinsoltah thought of her reasoning.

  “And why do you think Prince Waldmir has treated Elwynne so poorly?” Ellinsoltah inquired. “Surely even in Nandel there are allowances made for childish misbehavior, especially in one so young.”

  Leethan nodded. “Of course. But there are rumors…” She let her voice trail off, suddenly frightened of putting the rumors into words under Zarsha’s knowing gaze.

  “What rumors?” he asked, a dangerous edge in his voice.

  Leethan cleared her throat and tried to look away, but found that she couldn’t. “I doubt these rumors exist outside the Abbey,” she hedged, “but within its walls…Well, there is some speculation that Elwynne may not be Waldmir’s child. After all, Waldmir divorced her mother, yet Princess Brontyn never did arrive in the Abbey. Some think Waldmir had her quietly
killed to punish her for her infidelity without having to admit it publicly.”

  “And are there any guesses as to whose child Elwynne might be if she is not Waldmir’s?” he asked, still in that same menacing tone.

  Perhaps, Leethan speculated, she might have handled this interview with more tact and foresight if she had not been so achingly tired. But it seemed it was too late to be careful and tactful now.

  “I don’t know what anyone else thinks,” she said. “But it seems fairly likely that if she is not Waldmir’s, she may well be…yours.”

  * * *

  —

  When Alys had first approached her grand magus, Rusha, about the contents of Xanvin’s letter to Tynthanal, she’d done so with a touch of reluctance. She would have preferred confiding only in Chanlix, but Chanlix had quickly persuaded her that she needed Rusha’s help.

  “Among the spell crafters at the Academy,” Chanlix argued, “Rusha is the most knowledgeable about Kai, both in its feminine and masculine forms.”

  Alys had to concede that such was the truth, for it was Rusha who’d gained illicit knowledge about Kai when she was an abigail of Aaltah, and it was Rusha who had used that knowledge to invent the spell known as Vengeance. If Alys wanted to understand the impossible power that Delnamal seemed to have gained—and learn how to counter it—Rusha was the best person to consult. Even if Alys still harbored some doubts about the woman’s character.

  For a full week after she’d given Rusha a copy of the letter Xanvin had sent, she had heard nothing, but she’d woken up this morning to find Rusha had requested an audience. She tried not to get her hopes up—logic told her there could be no easy fix to the situation—but she had to admit that she did not fully succeed. She granted Rusha the audience first thing, postponing the morning council meeting. Someday soon, she would have to discuss the situation with her full council, but for the moment, only she and Rusha and Chanlix were aware of the details of Delnamal’s condition.

  Rusha arrived bearing an ancient-looking battered scroll tucked under her arm along with a much fresher one that looked brand new.

  “What have you found?” Alys asked, sitting on the edge of her chair as Rusha took a seat in front of her desk.

  Rusha held up the battered scroll, then put it on the desk. “I obtained this from an old…acquaintance in Aaltah,” she said.

  Alys reached for the scroll, which seemed liable to fall apart at her touch. The parchment was yellow in places, brown in others, and there were tears and water stains obscuring some of the small, cramped handwriting.

  “I took the liberty of copying it in a more legible form,” Rusha said, laying the second scroll on Alys’s desk. “You can read it at your leisure, but I can summarize it for you much more quickly.”

  “Please do,” Alys said eagerly, for the scroll was quite long, and she could see from the first couple of paragraphs that it had been written in a florid, ponderous manner that would make it slow reading indeed.

  “It’s thought to be at least three hundred years old, and was written by an Adept spell crafter who was burned as a heretic,” Rusha said. “As far as my contact knows, this is the only copy that survived its author’s death. It was the scroll itself—which he distributed widely at the time—that was the cause of his execution.

  “His heretical premise is that Kai and Rho are two equal parts of the same element. He calls this element the ‘Seed of Life,’ but by his description, it sounds very much like Delnamal’s Rhokai. He claims he began seeing the Seed as soon as his Mindseye developed, but that he was urged by his family to keep quiet—for in Aaltah at that time, heresy was often punished by torture and death, just as it is in Khalpar these days.

  “For years, he kept his knowledge to himself while surreptitiously studying the Seed—Rhokai. He saw it in every living creature, and he also saw flashes of it deep within the Well. He came to the conclusion that it was Rhokai that gave us life, and that the Wells supplied that Rhokai. In his opinion, the Wasteland isn’t devoid of life because the Father imprisoned the Destroyer there—it’s because it’s too far away from the influence of any Well for Rhokai to reach it and spawn life.”

  Alys grimaced. “Hence being declared a heretic when he made the claim publicly.”

  “Exactly.”

  Alys absorbed all that, comparing it with Xanvin’s account of Delnamal’s power. “So it really does exist,” she said. “It’s not just a figment of Delnamal’s imagination, or some wild story meant to camouflage the truth.”

  Rusha shrugged. “I can’t say for sure, but it seems unlikely Delnamal and this Adept would come up with the same story three hundred years apart.”

  “Is it possible that Delnamal somehow got hold of another copy of this scroll?” Alys asked. “I don’t want to put too much of our faith in it if there’s a chance that Delnamal is making it all up and there’s some other explanation for what he can do.”

  “As I said, this is thought to be the only surviving copy of the scroll, smuggled out of his home by his son just before the father was arrested. It doesn’t mean there can’t be another copy, but…” She shrugged again. “Perhaps it’s superstitious, but to me, the scroll has the feel of truth about it. We see Rho around living beings, but we also see it floating around in the air and flowing freely from the Well. It is not unique to the living. Surely it makes sense that there is something inside us that gives us life—and that that something comes from the Well.”

  “Even if that gives us reason to believe Rhokai really does exist, it doesn’t explain how Delnamal, of all people, sees it when no one else does. Or what happened at the Well to change him, for he certainly didn’t see it before the accident.” She shuddered, for thinking of Delnamal with magical powers and a whole kingdom at his back was enough to give her nightmares.

  “I can only venture a theory,” Rusha said, and Alys made a hand gesture to keep her talking.

  “From Mairahsol’s writings, we know that she believed masculine Kai was poisonous to the Well, and we have guessed that she performed her own sacrifice in an attempt to purge the Kai before it did too much damage.”

  Alys nodded.

  “Based on the Adept’s writings, I believe that the Rhokai mote inside us shatters when we die by violence.”

  Alys cocked her head. “Us? You mean all of us, not just powerful men?”

  “Yes. The Adept said he saw it in every living being, and Delnamal said something similar. I think only powerful men are able to see their Kai when their Rhokai breaks, but I think it’s present in all of us. I think that Mairahsol’s attempt to purge it worked too well. She purged not only the Kai, but also the Rhokai—that’s why Aaltah’s fertility rate has gone down.”

  Once again, Alys shuddered, remembering Shabrynel’s vision. “And somehow Delnamal absorbed it.”

  Rusha nodded. “It seems that way. The Adept said he never saw a Seed that was not contained either in a living being or in a Well. Maybe it can’t exist without a vessel, so when it was purged from the Well, it went into the closest living being it could find.”

  Alys groaned softly. “And it’s somehow keeping him alive.”

  “And because the Rhokai is part of him, the Kai motes released when it shatters belong to him and stay with him. Again, this is all just theory…”

  “But it makes more sense than anything else I’ve been able to come up with. Even if it doesn’t explain how he can steal other people’s Rhokai.”

  “Like calling to like, maybe?”

  Alys fingered the two scrolls absently and tried to stave off her sense of dread long enough to apply herself to the problem at hand. “So in order to kill him, we have to get that Rhokai out of him.”

  “That’s what I believe as well,” Rusha confirmed. “And if we can purge it from him while he’s near Aaltah’s Well, perhaps it will return to where it belongs.”

&nbs
p; Alys did not care to consider the other obvious likelihood—that the Rhokai would just move on to the next closest living being and the nightmare would begin all over again.

  “I suppose we’d better begin researching purgatives, then,” she said, and imagined she and Rusha—and probably Chanlix as well, for her wealth of experience—would have many a long night at the Academy ahead of them.

  * * *

  —

  In the weeks that Draios had been serving as regent in his brother’s stead, certain members of the royal council had been…half-hearted (to put it kindly) in their support of his rule. Thanks to the efforts of the lord high priest and the rest of the clergy, Draios had yet to encounter any true resistance to the war plans he was putting into effect, but he was well aware that certain members of his council were merely humoring him while they secretly longed for Parlommir to return to his abandoned throne.

  The lord high commander had been seduced as much by the promise of a glorious war as by the desire to do the Creator’s bidding, and the lord high treasurer was too weak-willed to offer any substantive resistance, though an occasional disapproving frown marked his discomfort with the situation. As long as he released the requested funds, Draios did not much concern himself with the little weasel’s disapproval.

  The lord chancellor and the lord chamberlain—the two highest-ranking members of the council—were a different story, and Draios could almost feel the resistance building within them. The lord chamberlain especially was a problem, for he had loved King Khalvin—his great-nephew—with something akin to a lover’s passion, and it was not possible to look in his eyes and not sense the fulminating hatred he felt for the king’s “murderer.”