Mother of All

by Jenna Glass

  “She must have one, too, mustn’t she?” Kailee asked anxiously.

  Alys arched an eyebrow in surprise. “You mean you haven’t managed to catch a glimpse of her yet?” she teased, for ordinarily she could count on Kailee to keep herself extremely well informed, and Leethan’s carriage had arrived in Women’s Well hours ago.

  In the old days, Kailee would have flashed her an impish grin, but this more somber version of her merely shook her head. “By the time I knew her carriage had arrived, she had already contrived to be indoors. I almost decided to pay her a call, but then I realized it would be presumptuous of me.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Alys protested.

  “Of course it would,” she answered with some asperity. “If we are to talk about the Kai, then it is only fitting that we three should do it together. If our assumption is correct, that is.”

  Alys saw little doubt that it was, especially when Leethan had sent a flier ahead and asked for an audience with Alys at her earliest convenience. Leethan’s request had not specifically mentioned Kailee, but Alys had included her because of course she agreed that the three of them must discuss the issue together.

  There was stirring in the antechamber, and soon a royal guard admitted Lady Leethan to the room, announcing her and then bowing as he exited and closed the door behind him.

  Alys looked at Lady Leethan and was immediately shocked that this old woman had fled the Abbey of Nandel on foot in the snow and made it through the mountains alive. She had to be at least seventy, her face heavily lined and her curtsy stiff as though her knees did not wish to bend. Then again, she’d had a long journey and was likely still feeling it in her joints.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Alys saw Kailee nod, and knew exactly what it meant. As they’d both suspected, there was a mote of sacrificial Kai in Leethan’s aura. Alys did not know exactly what role Leethan had played in the defeat of the Nandel army—Ellinsoltah had declined to share any details of the operation, nor had she been willing to confirm or deny any of the rumors about the deadly Kai spell that had killed Prince Waldmir and most of his heirs. But even before Kailee had confirmed the mote of Kai existed, Alys had felt deep down in her bones that Leethan had been involved. Her dream had foretold it, after all.

  “It’s good to finally meet you,” Alys said, gesturing Leethan to the cozy seating area before the fire. “I hope you do not mind, but I asked my sister-in-law, Kailee, to join us, as I believe the purpose of your visit necessitates her presence.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Kailee said, expertly navigating around the chairs and the coffee table to take a seat on one of the sofas. She had been spending so much time in Alys’s apartments lately that Alys had ordered several Aalwood pieces from Aaltah. Women’s Well was now growing Aalwood on its own, but they did not yet have enough mature trees with which to make furniture.

  Leethan smiled and nodded as she chose a plump armchair. “Yes, it’s best that we three put our heads together at once,” she agreed.

  Alys sat beside Kailee. She could not deny she felt a fair amount of anxiety over the conversation that was to come, so that sitting still was the last thing she wanted to do. She fidgeted with the folds of her layered blue skirts, feeling a brief pang of longing for the simplicity of her mourning attire, which she had set aside as soon as she arrived home in Women’s Well. When Honor had dressed her in color for the first time, Alys had broken down in sobs, and she suspected it would be a while yet before she could wholly let go of that distress.

  “I will venture a guess,” Leethan said, “that you are both aware of the existence of a very special variety of Kai.”

  “Yes, of course,” Kailee answered. “Just as we are aware that all three of us possess one of those special motes.” She frowned. “Even though none of us died to earn them.”

  Leethan shrugged. “I sort of did.” After swearing them to secrecy, she told Alys and Kailee what had really happened when Prince Waldmir had died.

  “He set off that Kai spell himself?” Alys exclaimed. “I don’t understand! Why?”

  Leethan closed her eyes in what looked like pain. “Because I told him that triggering the Kai spell would prevent a war over the succession after his death—and he believed me.” Her voice sounded rough and choked, as if she was about to cry.

  Clearly, Leethan considered her claim to have been a lie, which made Alys cock her head. “It seems to me you were right,” she said. “There was no resistance to Granzin’s succession, from what I have heard.”

  Leethan shrugged. “Maybe it turned out to be true, but I lied to him all the same. But never mind that. My conscience is my own to wrestle with. What matters is that in his final sacrifice, Waldmir saved me, secured his principality, and put an end to his own sorrow and pain.”

  Alys’s throat tightened with something almost like envy. She knew all too well the lure of a heroic death to someone whose life included too much suffering. Most of the time, she was grateful to have lived through her confrontation with Delnamal—especially when she thought of how abandoned Corlin would have felt if she’d died. Learning that he’d survived his own battle had certainly made her life feel more bearable, but she still suffered the occasional dark thought that living was almost impossibly hard.

  “In the end,” Kailee said, “we each made a sacrifice, even if it was not the literal sacrifice you saw in your dream.”

  Leethan turned toward her, and the look of curiosity on her face warned Alys that she was about to ask Kailee about her sacrifice, for unlike Leethan, she had not slit her wrists. Knowing that her sister-in-law was still haunted—and probably always would be—by the memory of killing Draios, Alys hurried to interrupt before Leethan could indulge her curiosity.

  “We did, in our own strange ways,” she said. “Ways that neither one of us is anxious to discuss.”

  “Of course,” Leethan said smoothly with a bow of her head. “And now we all three are in possession of motes of sacrificial Kai.”

  “Yes,” Kailee said. “And I can plainly see that the edges of our three crystals are such that they could fit together to form one larger crystal.”

  The words themselves felt portentous, and Alys suppressed a shiver of combined excitement, anticipation, and no small amount of dread. She and Kailee had already seen that their two Kai crystals would fit smoothly with each other, the protrusions on one crystal shaped exactly like the spaces in the other.

  “From the description I heard of your dream,” Alys said to Leethan, “it ended with the three Kai motes joining together.”

  “Yes,” Leethan confirmed. “Very little of that dream turned out to be literal, although I’m sure we can all see how the events in the dream correspond to what happened in reality.”

  “But you think that the joining together of the three motes was meant to be literal,” Alys said, and she felt the rightness of the idea as deeply as she’d felt the conviction that she had to be waiting for Delnamal at the Well of Aaltah. Even after everything that had happened, there was a part of her that remained skeptical that a divine hand was at work, but skepticism was not outright denial.

  “I do,” Leethan said. “At least I do now that I see we three can make one another’s acquaintance without immediately triggering anything. I thought perhaps all we needed to do was meet, but now that Kailee has seen that the motes are meant to fit together…”

  “Do you have any idea what would happen if we were to join those motes?” Alys asked.

  Leethan shook her head. “Before Jaizal and I left Rhozinolm, I triggered a vision in hopes of receiving more guidance.” She wrinkled her nose. “For naught. I have no choice but to conclude that whatever happens next is up to us.”

  Silence descended on the room as they each lost themselves in thought. It was Kailee who eventually broke the silence.

  “According to Mairah’s notes—at least what we w
ere able to make out from them—the Blessing was cast when a combination of three sacrificial Kai motes was used to trigger a spell. It was clear from Mairah’s notes that she had no information on what that spell was, how it was created, what exactly it was designed to do.”

  “Well, I suppose we know the answer to that now,” Alys said.

  “Yes. But my point is that the information we’ve been given suggests the combined Kai should be used to trigger a spell.”

  “But what spell?” Alys asked with a touch of exasperation, still struggling to accept the possibility of divine intervention.

  “Maybe…” Leethan put in hesitantly, then bit her lip. For a moment, it looked like she had thought better of what she’d been about to suggest. Then her shoulders squared, and she nodded ever so slightly. “Maybe that is for us to decide.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  “That’s it, then,” Alys said as she examined the spell that she, Leethan, and Kailee had been working on for the last three months.

  “Looks right to me,” Kailee confirmed, and Leethan also agreed.

  Alys closed her Mindseye, as did Leethan. They were sitting in Alys’s private parlor in the residential wing of the palace. As she had for each of these sessions, Alys had dismissed all the servants and guards so that she and the others might have absolute privacy.

  “I guess we can no longer put off making a final decision,” Alys said, shaking her head at the golden chalice in which their spell was contained.

  Kailee sighed softly, her nose wrinkled with what Alys read as impatience. “I thought we had made a final decision. Several times, in fact.”

  Alys plucked at the folds of her skirt. “Well, sort of. We didn’t have the spell ready yet, so it wasn’t possible to make a final final decision.” There were butterflies flittering around in her stomach, and she did not think that the sweat moistening the nape of her neck had anything to do with the desert heat.

  “I believe this is what we are destined to do,” Leethan said, her face showing no hint of Alys’s turmoil or Kailee’s impatience.

  “Even though your Mother of All refuses to give us any additional guidance?” Alys challenged.

  Leethan had tried two more times to gain additional insight into the Mother of All’s wishes before she’d given up. Although Alys couldn’t claim to be a woman of great faith, she would have felt easier making this momentous decision if Leethan had had a vision of how their spell would affect the world.

  Leethan did not rise to Alys’s challenge, smiling serenely. Of the three of them, only Leethan had never questioned the wisdom of what they were planning, and Alys envied her the certainty.

  “If we were going in the wrong direction,” Leethan said, “then I’m certain one of my visions would have warned me of it. The Mother of All knows Her daughters well. She brought us to this moment and has always known exactly what we would do with our Kai.”

  Alys snorted. “She could have saved us some time by just telling us what to do.” At least then if the casting of the spell went horribly wrong, Alys could have blamed someone else for the catastrophe. Of all the terrible decisions that had been placed on her shoulders since she had come to Women’s Well, this was the most momentous and onerous.

  Leethan shrugged. “It is not the Mother’s way to demand obedience. She gives us guidance, rather than orders.” She held up her hand to forestall Alys’s reflexive protest. “And we had enough guidance to bring us to this point, or we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Personally,” Kailee interjected, “I’m growing weary of the debate. We didn’t spend the last three months working on this spell—and having this argument so many times I feel we could write a script for it—only to decline to cast it when it was ready.”

  Although Kailee was no more religiously inclined than Alys, she had never seemed to suffer much in the way of doubt, as Alys did. Perhaps that was because of her youth, or perhaps it was a result of the new hardness that had grown inside her since she had killed Draios. She was no longer as haunted and melancholy as she had been in the days and weeks directly afterward, but she was also no longer as warm and cheerful as she had been before. Alys hoped that she would one day make a full recovery—Alys missed Kailee’s mischievous smile and easy laugh.

  “Do you even remember what it was like when my mother cast the Blessing?” Alys asked, her voice coming out rather more snappish than she would have liked. For all that she was grateful for the results of her mother’s spell, the immediate consequences of its casting had been terrible. Alys would never forget the floodwaters that had destroyed the Harbor District, never forget the screams of those who were washed away and the tears of those who were left behind.

  “I don’t believe this spell will cause the same kind of…disruption,” Leethan said. “Mother Brynna’s spell was far more profound than this one. She changed the very nature of life. We three haven’t the power to do anything so drastic as that.”

  Alys closed her eyes and searched for calm. It seemed to her an act of great hubris for the three of them to make this decision without consulting anyone else. However, unlike Alys’s mother, they all expected to survive the casting of this spell, and since there were certainly people out there—mostly men, naturally—who would object to the results, they’d agreed that keeping its origin secret was for the best. There would be some people who might guess they were behind it, but for the most part, the world would remain ignorant of their role.

  “I suspect much of the world will consider this very drastic indeed,” Alys said, opening her eyes and feeling no calmer.

  Kailee shrugged. “The effect will seem drastic,” she corrected. “But we aren’t changing any elements like your mother did. All we’re really doing is changing perceptions. Those elements are always there, even now.”

  Part of the reason it had taken them three months to craft this spell was that they had originally thought of it as making an actual change to the elements, which they didn’t understand how to do. Even consulting Mairahsol’s notes hadn’t given them any great insight into how Brynna had managed it, for Mairahsol had only learned about the use of sacrificial Kai as a trigger element. The nature of the Blessing itself was still very much a mystery.

  It was Kailee who’d realized the flaw in their thinking. As she said, the elements were there already anyway. All the three of them wanted was to make it so that men and women could see the same ones—an ability that already existed in both Alys and Tynthanal, although neither one of them understood how it had happened, except that it had something to do with the manipulation of bloodlines that Brynna and the abbesses before her had set into motion.

  “I can guarantee you that men—at least, many men—will see this as a neutering of the elements,” Alys said, “and that they will be very, very unhappy about it.”

  “But they will learn to live with it,” Kailee argued. “Just like they’ve learned to live with the Blessing, at least in much of the world. If we are all agreed that our Kai should be used to further improve the lives of women, then surely this is a positive step.”

  Alys nodded. It would not make women as large or as strong as men. It would not change the centuries-old power structure that had kept women subjugated, although the Blessing was already chipping away at that. What it would do was eliminate the division between women’s magic and men’s.

  “I hate the thought of causing more upheaval,” Alys said mournfully.

  “It will be worth it,” Kailee said, with no hint of uncertainty in her voice. “Now let’s stop talking and start doing.”

  Alys could not say she was as confident as Kailee and Leethan, but she also knew that, despite her doubts, she could not see herself leaving this room without triggering the spell the three of them had crafted. Leethan watched her expectantly, and with one more deep breath for courage, Alys opened her Mindseye.

  Hovering in the air before her
was the tricolored crystal that had appeared—according to Kailee—the moment she had reached out her hand to Delnamal. Kailee took hold of the shimmering crystal that hovered by her own shoulder, pushing the crystal toward the center of the table, where the chalice—and its spell—awaited.

  Alys’s hand shook as she took hold of her Kai and pushed it toward Kailee’s. She could clearly see the space where her Kai would fit to form a smooth edge, and when her mote was close enough, it seemed to be drawn into the space and snap into place.

  Lastly, Leethan fit her mote of Kai into the remaining space, forming a tricolored faceted round gem. Together, they guided the gem into the chalice, willing it to activate the spell they had built.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Alys couldn’t say for sure how the rest of the world was adapting to the new reality of nongendered magic. From her conversations with Tynthanal and Ellinsoltah, she gathered that there were a great many unhappy men in each of their academies—men who felt their status as spell crafters had now been diminished because there were women who could see and manipulate all the same elements as they. But the immediate impact seemed considerably less dramatic than the effects of the Blessing had been. It would take time—who knew how much—before women in the rest of Seven Wells could slough off the stigma of practicing magic enough to change the fabric of daily life. But with Women’s Well as an example of the benefits of cooperative magic, Alys was sure that more women would embrace their new talents.

  Women’s Well had absorbed the change with only a slight hint of anxiety. Some had worried that the unique magic of Women’s Well would be diminished once men could see feminine elements, but that worry had quickly been laid to rest. Even with men and women both able to see the unique elements produced by their Well, Alys’s tiny principality could still produce magic seen nowhere else in the world. And because the Women’s Well Academy had already embraced the concept of men and women working together to craft spells, they were ready to take advantage of the new accessibility of formerly gendered elements.