The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  And found herself in Ian Draclas’s bed.

  Disappointment seared her, stung her, cut her until she bled. She bore its sulfur-bitter taste without letting her emotions show.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  I slept with my enemy. She kissed Ian lightly, playfully, and did not answer his question. “Time for me to go, while it’s still dark.”

  “You don’t have to leave. Stay with me.”

  She nibbled along the nape of his neck, trailed her fingers down his spine. “I have to go. For now, I have to. But if you want, I’ll be back tonight.”

  By the return of night, she would have banished Ry Sabir from her thoughts. She would have convinced herself that she hated him, that she wanted to see him dead. She would have made herself believe that she could feel genuine passion for Ian Draclas, and in Ian’s bed she would prove to herself that her dreams didn’t matter.

  Until she slept.

  In her sleep, she could not lie.

  Chapter 25

  Kait made it back to her cabin just before Hasmal arrived. So far, she’d managed to keep him from knowing about her relationship with the captain, just as she’d managed to keep Ian from finding out about the time Hasmal spent with her. Another week had passed, and she’d finished her solitary study of the Secret Texts, and begun learning basic magic.

  He knocked on her door, and she let him in, acting as if she’d just woken.

  He glanced at her bed, where she’d rumpled the covers and made it look like she’d just climbed out of it. He gave her a cold look and said, “You didn’t have to mess them on my account.”

  Kait felt heat flushing her cheeks. “I . . .”

  “You need to learn not to lie. Not to your colleagues, anyway. I already knew about you and the captain. It isn’t as if it were any great secret.”

  That was news to her. “When did you hear?”

  “Two weeks ago. I probably knew not long after you did.” His tight smile told her she’d been foolish to hope to keep the relationship secret. “How are you doing on your shielding?”

  “The dreams aren’t bothering me as much. Most times I can wake up from them when the dance starts now. And I don’t have the feeling that he’s looking over my shoulder during the day—not like I did at first.”

  “You still think he’s following us?”

  “Yes.”

  Hasmal sighed. “I think you’re right. I wish we could get rid of him. I’ve thrown zanda half a dozen times in the last few days, and I get nothing at all.”

  Kait tugged the blankets on her bunk straight, then sat on top of it. “That seems like a good sign.”

  “No. ‘You’ve lost him’ would be a good sign. ‘He’s still back there’ would be a neutral sign. ‘Sorry, I have no information regarding your question’ is a very bad sign.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it means he has access to magic powerful enough to make himself and his whole ship disappear to the zanda. I couldn’t do that. I and my father together couldn’t.”

  “Oh.” Kait knew that only she could feel Ry behind them, and the feeling connected to her through her Karnee senses. Hasmal had said that as far as he could tell, no one was following them physically, though he insisted the Galweighs from Goft still tracked them magically.

  “We’ll deal with the problem when it arrives,” Hasmal said. “Now, what has your spirit said about our destination?”

  Finally Kait felt that she had good news to give him. “She told me that we’ll find a chain of islands tomorrow. From that point, we only have another two days or so to reach the continent, depending on the weather.”

  “The weather has been good so far.” Hasmal didn’t look happy, though.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Once we reach the continent and find the city, we’ll also find the Mirror of Souls.”

  “Exactly. That’s why we’ve come all this way.”

  “As soon as we have the Mirror of Souls, we become a target both for the Sabirs who are following us and for the Galweighs who are waiting for us to come back to them.”

  “Amalee assures me that we’re going to survive this, Hasmal. You’ll see.”

  He nodded. “So she says. But I did a divination last night. The Speakers say the Reborn has already been conceived. If that’s true, your ancestor may be guilty of wishful thinking. Once the Reborn is conceived, disaster is imminent. So tonight you’re going to help me with a ritual to see if what they say is true.”

  “I can’t help you with a ritual,” Kait said softly. She glanced around the tiny cabin as if expecting the ship’s parnissa to rush in with a lynching crew. “I barely know enough about magic to maintain a shield.”

  “Even that will help. With you adding your strength to the shield, I’ll be able to use more of my energy to seek the Reborn. The ritual is dangerous and difficult, but we have to know.”

  Kait didn’t think they needed to know at all.

  I promise you the Reborn isn’t going to figure into your future, Kait, Amalee said.

  Kait had learned to answer her without speaking. Perhaps not. But I’ll never convince him of that. The least I can do is help him with his ritual so that he can see for himself that he’s exaggerating the dangers we face.

  “Your ancestor doesn’t like my idea, does she?”

  “You can hear her?”

  “No. But I’ve gotten better at reading your expressions. I can always tell now when you’re discussing something with her. You get a faraway look in your eyes, and your mouth tightens. Tell her I want your help whether she thinks I need it or not.”

  Kait didn’t need to tell her. Amalee heard perfectly well. And responded scathingly. Kait didn’t pass on her comments word for word. She just said, “She still doesn’t like the idea, but I don’t care. If you need me, I’ll help you.”

  “Then meet me in the aft food storeroom tonight when Telt rings.”

  * * *

  Kait knelt on the hard storeroom floor, behind the bags of yams and flour and the casks of beer, and beneath the dried meat that hung, swinging with every movement of the ship, from hooks overhead. In the darkness, the silhouettes of those homely things loomed like monsters rising from the sea; she could almost feel their hot breath against the back of her neck. With every creak she was certain that she was about to be discovered. The sounds of rats scrittering along the enclosed shelves suddenly unnerved her, and every stray step that echoed across the deck above her head set her heart pounding like a war drum.

  The darkness had never bothered her. But she discovered that she feared her pending introduction to real magic, and as much as that, she feared being discovered.

  Across from her, Hasmal cupped a blood-bowl to his chest and closed his eyes and offered up a quick, whispered prayer to Vodor Imrish, that they might not be interrupted as they sought across the leagues for the Reborn. That done, he lit a tiny candle and crouched over it, and by its light drew his own blood and poured it into the blood-bowl. Kait watched his facility with the tiny knife and the tourniquet and thought she would be practicing very little magic. She hated the idea of piercing her flesh or drawing her own blood. Though Hasmal insisted very little of the farhullen magic involved bloodletting, Kait felt any amount was too much.

  As soon as Hasmal had a little puddle of blood in the bottom of his bowl, he pinched out the tiny flame. He leaned, shivering, against a bag of yams beside him, breathing hard. “Now we begin the actual spell,” he said. “Keep your shields around both of us until I tell you to let them drop.”

  “You’re sure I have to drop them? The Galweighs and the Sabirs will be able to see what we’re doing . . . and where we are.”

  “The shield that keeps others out would trap us in.” He shrugged. “You cannot send out a spell while shielded. Nor can you send a spell through a shield someone else has placed over you. That fact is part of what makes magical battles so deadly. But back to what we were doing. Just be ready when I tell you.”

 
Kait already felt queasy, and the idea that she would be exposing herself to those who followed her only increased the sick feeling. But she nodded, and focused herself the way Hasmal had taught her.

  Meanwhile, he shook several packets of powders into the blood-bowl and murmured an incantation that she recalled reading in one of the later parts of the Secret Texts.

  “He’ie abojan treashan skarere

  Pephoran nonie tokal im hwerat . . .”

  [I who wait in the long darkness

  For the coming of the light,

  Seek now the quickening spirit

  Of the Reborn; you who were once

  Master of the Falcons,

  Our teacher, and our guide;

  You who were stolen from us before your time

  And who promised to return to lead again;

  You who taught love and compassion,

  Humility and responsibility,

  Integrity and honor above all virtues.

  I call out to you.

  The world needs you, and

  Your Falcons have not forgotten.

  Kind Solander,

  Shall I be blessed to hear your voice?

  I offer myself as your protector

  While you are weak,

  Your teacher while you are young,

  Your servant always,

  That you may return

  To heal the pain of the people

  And bring love and the fulfillment of hope

  To the hollow shell of the world

  You left behind.]

  The powders within the mix of blood began to glow. Kait shuddered. She could be brave in the face of the most terrifying physical dangers, but in the face of magic, she wanted to cower and flee. She could feel the spell beginning to work; she could feel it in her bones and in her blood, and though she didn’t experience Hasmal’s magic as being painful or “greasy” the way she had the magic Dùghall had identified in the airible, she still became increasingly uncomfortable. As if she were standing near a fire and the fire were growing bigger and hotter. She knew she wasn’t in danger. But she could sense the potential for danger.

  “Drop the shields now. If the Reborn has truly returned, the blood itself will begin to glow,” Hasmal had told her before they started. Now, in the silence and the darkness, Hasmal’s blood proved the truth of the message the spirits had given him. It began to glow softly, its white light a radiant nimbus that started as a thin skin around the bowl, then spread to envelop his hands, his arms and shoulders, and finally all of him.

  Then it spread farther, covering Kait in its warm, comforting cocoon.

  Once within the sphere of the light, she felt the tenuous awakening of the Reborn. Far away, the infant stirred in his mother’s womb and reached out to embrace the feather touch of magic. He was full of love; he was love. Hot tears welled in Kait’s eyes and slid down her cheeks, and she embraced the fragile connection. While his spirit touched hers, her fear of magic dissolved, and she felt whole. More, she felt accepted in a way she had never been in her life. Even with her parents, she had always known that they loved her in spite of what was wrong with her. But the Reborn loved her just as she was, and accepted her because in his eyes, she was as perfect as he was.

  In the instant that their souls touched, she felt that a pain that had always been inside her had healed. And when she looked at Hasmal, and saw the tears running down his cheeks, she knew that she was not alone. Kait could not believe that she had been so blessed—that she had been chosen to assist the Reborn when other, worthier people had lived and died waiting for his arrival, and had never seen their hope fulfilled.

  Peripherally, she sensed that other Falcons like Hasmal had come to offer their services and fulfill their oaths, and had come, as well, to witness the private beginning of the wonder and the joy that was promised to all people. So many minds, all strange to her and yet all unified in purpose and in love, brushed against hers and did not pull back in revulsion. She was what she was; they were what they were; gathered around the soul of the Reborn like men who had been lost in the desert and who had found a spring at last, all they could do was love each other and rejoice together.

  Kait stretched herself farther, and touched the Reborn’s mother—and got a shock. All she could feel from her was rage and pain and hatred. She sensed that the woman had suffered horribly at the hands of her enemies. The mother seemed blocked off from the love her unborn child offered; her pain and anger locked her into her own mind and prevented her from being healed in the way that Kait had been healed. Then Kait received a second shock. Flashes of the other woman’s thoughts and memories reached Kait, and she discovered that the Reborn’s mother was her cousin Danya.

  She wanted to shout, You’re still alive! Someone she loved had survived the Sabirs’ treachery. But she couldn’t make Danya hear her. She wanted to say, You aren’t alone. I’m here, and I’ll come help you. But Danya was deaf to her offered comfort, too.

  Kait lacked the magical skills to make herself heard. But that would change. She would learn whatever she needed to learn, because in the moment that Hasmal brought her into his circle, her world had changed for the good. She had so much to live for, and so much to do. The Reborn was real, and would be the son of her beloved cousin, who had not died at the hands of the Sabirs. Kait would do whatever she had to do to keep them safe, and to help the Reborn’s love restore the world.

  * * *

  Rrru-eeth’s diffident tap at the cabin door woke Kait, who had spent the night alone.

  “Come in.” She yawned and stretched. In spite of the increasing tension caused by her need for Shift, she felt good. Lighthearted, full of hope, certain for the first time that the future would be better than the past. Danya, mother of the Reborn. She grinned at Rrru-eeth when she peeked her head in the door.

  “What shall I do for you today? Do you have any laundry, or does anything in your cabin not meet with your satisfaction?”

  Kait grinned at her. “Do you have something else you’d rather do today? Spend time with Jayti, maybe?”

  Rrru-eeth shook her head. “Perry the Crow sighted the islands you described, and until they’ve made sure we won’t ground on a reef, Jayti will be on deck working.”

  Perry the Crow was a sociable crewman named Perimus Ahern, who had a liking for heights and whose eyesight was as sharp as Kait’s. During meals, he told amusing tales of his life before he’d joined the Peregrine, when he’d been a Calimekkan barrister prosecuting cases of patent theft among the city’s inventors. In his last case he’d made the mistake of winning the case for the actual inventor who had accused a minor member of a major Family (though he refused to say which one) of the theft of his idea. Perry discovered to his chagrin that he needed to make both a career and location change the very next day. He said, though, that he had come to love the sea, and his trial against the Family “inventor” had turned out to be his luckiest one.

  “I’ll be glad to reach land again,” Kait said. “I’m tired of the sea.”

  Rrru-eeth’s smile had an edge to it. “The ship can be confining for even a short time. Imagine spending your entire life on it.”

  Kait thought of living in a tiny world built of wood and bounded by nothing but water and sky. She shook her head. “I can’t imagine that. But surely you only spend some of your time on the ship.”

  Rrru-eeth’s dark eyes narrowed, and she said softly, “I wouldn’t think of leaving the decks of the Peregrine. As long as I’m on board, I answer only to Captain Draclas. If I were to leave, well . . . there are those in Ibera and the Territories who have reasons to want my neck in a rope.”

  Kait sensed the other woman’s pain as a change in her scent, a tensing of her body, a shift in the pattern of her breathing. All those things came to her clearly—the Karnee senses were growing more acute as she neared her next Shift. She leaned forward and said, “I can’t believe you earned that fate.” She shook her head. “You’re a good person.”

  Rrru-eeth c
lasped her hands together and said, “Yet by Iberan law, I’ve earned death in any Iberan land.”

  “How?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “If it’s your life, how can it not be important?”

  Rrru-eeth laughed—a sharp, angry bark. “My life is important to me. To Jayti, I suppose. Certainly not to you—you’re Family.”

  Kait shook her head. “Not anymore. My neck is, I’m sure, marked for the rope, too.”

  Rrru-eeth sighed, and Kait pointed to the chair across from her bunk. “Sit. Talk. We have some time, surely.”

  With obvious reluctance, Rrru-eeth took the offered chair and said, “My people were from the mountains to the southeast of Tarrajanta-Kevalta, what you would maybe know as Lake Jirin in Manarkas.”

  Kait nodded. The Galweigh Family had holdings in the New Territories south of Lake Jirin, which was one of the lakes the Wizards’ War had created.

  “I lived there until I was about six, I suppose. Maybe a little younger. Then diaga came to our town, and claimed all the people in it as their slaves.”

  Kait said, “The diaga? That’s humans like . . .” she was going to say me, but at the last instant, she changed that to “the captain? And Jayti?”

  “Yes. Our people were good fighters, and they stood against the diaga, but your people’s weapons were better. Most of our fighters died. This left the injured, and the old, and the young, and a few of the women who were pregnant at the time and not able to fight. The diaga gathered all of us and took us to the New Territories. We went first to Old Jirin, then to Badaella, then to Vanimar, and finally—for me, at least—to Glasmar. At each stop, the diaga sold such of us as they could. No one had much interest in a child as small as I was until we reached Glasmar, and there, at last, a buyer found me.”

  Her voice had grown harsh at those last few words; Kait had the idea that the buyer had not been some kind family who needed a companion for their young daughter. She was right.

  “A man named Tiroth Andrata bought me. He also bought my younger sister, who was the only other member of my family to survive, and two other little girls from our village. We’d been acquired to be trained as concubines for those among the upper classes of Glasmar who had . . . exotic tastes. Tiroth Andrata apparently had a thriving business in exotic concubines; he became wealthy from his trade, and met his own needs at the same time. He trained us all himself, you see. He was very fond of small children, and perhaps fondest of all of little Jerrpu girls.”