Oath Bound (Book 3)

by M. A. Ray

  He took it as a good sign, and went to sleep.

  Divine Fire

  Aurelian cloisters, just outside Muscoda City; the novices’ dormitory

  Just after Matins, Stas lay on his back, staring at the ceiling in the soft light from the brazier between his shelf and Boris’s. Nodding off all through service, and now that he was back in bed: wide awake. He’d folded his thin blanket into a cushion for his head; sometimes even in winter the brazier warmed the cell enough for that.

  He settled into the most comfortable position a hard wooden shelf would allow a bony boy and bent his attention toward a beetle crawling up the wall at his side. How did it move so quickly on such little legs? Why didn’t it just open its shell, let out the delicate wings beneath, and fly to where it wanted to go? Stas reached out and coaxed it onto his finger. It trundled up his hand. He swallowed his giggles; its tiny feet tickled his skin.

  He didn’t think the bugs really cared about him—they didn’t have much concern for anything beyond staying alive—but they were good friends, from his point of view. They were never unkind to him. They just… were. He loved them nearly better than Boris, since they never asked silly questions, though of course he loved Boris a little better. He glanced over at the shelf across the way, the lumps hips and legs made curled under the blanket, and the skinny span of shoulders smashed against the wood on one side. The sight of Boris made him smile.

  All right. He loved Boris more than a little better. Boris was the one who watched with his big blue eyes wide to catch the slightest motion of Stas’s fingers, who listened when Stas didn’t make a sound. Just reminding himself that Boris was here relaxed him. He kept his face toward his friend and molded to his shelf as far as he could.

  His eyes were harder to open with every blink. He struggled with his lids, but at last he gave in and let them stay shut, drifting in the place between waking and sleeping where everything was fleecy and warm. Boris breathed evenly, and Stas imagined that was a lullaby.

  A terrible, long scream cut across his brain, and another, longer: jabbed in, twisted. Boris lay tight on his shelf, and Stas slid off his own and crossed to his friend. He laid a hand on Boris’s ankle, and Boris squeaked and jumped. “O—o—only—mmmmme,” Stas managed to get out, but before he’d made it past the second “o,” Boris twisted over to show him a white face.

  “Stas,” he said, while the screams frayed. “What is it?”

  I do not know. It will be all right, he signed. I am sure it will. I am going to see.

  Boris wrapped his hand into Stas’s smock, saying fiercely, “No, don’t!”

  I will just look out the curtain. Besides, you know that nobody ever sees me. He eased the fabric out of Boris’s grasp, smiling his best reassurances in spite of the shrieks rattling up the corridor, and skipped away when Boris grabbed for him again. It was only a few steps to the black curtain that covered the doorway, even for someone as little as Stas. He skirted the brazier and pulled the streaky, badly-dyed burlap aside.

  The moment he stepped out, a crowd of novices charged down the plain corridor, knocking him down and trampling him flat. Their bare feet crushed him. He bit back a cry when one smashed his hand. “Fire!” they all shouted, in a cacophonous mess of voices, and many fists hammered at the heavy door to the rest of the cloisters. “Fire! Let us out!”

  Stas could smell foul smoke now, and he struggled to rise with his bruises blooming, yellowing, fading in the blink of an eye. Boris pulled him to his feet and clung, magically there. “What do we do?” he whispered, and Stas squeezed his arm. There was a fire, no doubt of that; the stink was of no brazier in Stas’s experience, and down at the other end of the corridor, flames licked up one of the black curtains. Smoke blurred the torchlight. All they could do was wait for someone to come and open the barred door.

  “Fire!” the other novices screamed, over and over. Out of the curtain afire, into that dark smoke, reeled a figure in flames. One of the older novices, it must be; and he howled in agony as he ran up the corridor as though fleeing some awful beast, thumping into walls, brushing curtains and leaving them alight. His life guttered in his chest, visible to Stas even through the fire eating at his blistering, blackening skin.

  “Kas!” Another of the older novices ran through the remnants of that first curtain and up the corridor after his fellow. “Kasper!” And if Kasper was in agony, so was Jan—it was Jan talking, Kasper’s brother-novice. His smock dropped away in smoldering clumps, and his head was covered in the fine ash that had been his hair, but no blisters rose on his skin. Blue life-light crowned his brow. Most people glowed in the chest, and Jan had that, too, but it blazed around his temples.

  Kasper’s legs gave, and he staggered, falling on his face right in front of Stas and Boris. Boris let a mind-melting scream into Stas’s ear and tried to wrench him back from Kasper, back into their cell. Stas resisted, wriggled away, and squatted close by, stretching out a hand. He thought to touch, to give his life like he’d given to Boris—some things were more important than keeping his secret—but he couldn’t keep his fingers on the older boy long enough to wake his power, though when he pulled them back the blisters disappeared from his fingertips as quickly as he could look at them. Kasper twitched, burning, still burning.

  Jan let out a wordless, animal sound of grief. Tears tracked through the ash on his face, glinting in the flames that still rippled over Kasper, and when he lifted his Brother, the fire touched him, but he wasn’t burned. “I’m sorry!” he wailed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, please don’t! Kas, please…”

  Stas hugged himself, trembling, not two feet from the scene. Kasper’s life dimmed, a candle reaching the end of its wick. While all the other novices stared, shocked into silence, Jan bent his head over Kasper. Charred skin flaked away from the near-corpse and drifted to the floor.

  The door clunked. “All right, move aside! Move aside now!” It was one of the novice masters—Brother Bratislaw, a Militant. “You’ve pissed yourselves! Move, I say!” Monks piled into the corridor, bearing buckets of water. Stas stayed where he was, hunching when one of them stepped over him, and he heard what Brother Bratislaw said to Jan, crouching there among gouts of steam as the monks worked to put out the fire.

  “The Queen of Heaven has given you a wonderful gift,” he said, though Jan wept on and on, rocking Kasper, as if his tears could quench the fire. “She’s blessed you above all these others, so that you may serve your Fatherland. Do you understand?”

  Jan didn’t look up, and Stas saw the pain in all the broken lines of his body, felt it almost as if Boris had been the one to burn. A dreadful ache sank down through Stas’s bones and into his heart. His ribs constricted—or maybe that was Boris, suddenly behind him, hugging hard. “Kas,” Jan choked.

  “I know, lad,” said Brother Bratislaw, unexpectedly gentle. “To lose a Brother is grief beyond telling.”

  “My Kas, I killed him,” Jan sobbed. “I don’t know how I did it—I burned—I killed my Kas…” He lifted his face, and Stas trembled again to see, even from the side, that despair. His eyebrows had burned to smudges of ash, and his face looked paper-white under the soot.

  “Yes,” the Militant Brother said. “But the Queen of Heaven will not mark it against your soul. Now you must come. I myself shall take you to a place where there is help, and hope.”

  “No hope. No help.”

  No, there wasn’t any. Kasper’s life guttered once more, and went out of him. Stas bit down on a cry of his own. He didn’t think Brother Bratislaw had noticed him or Boris, not until the Militant turned a hard gaze on them and jerked his head toward the door, where all the other novices had lined up. Stas and Boris scuttled to obey, and they trooped through the maze of intersecting corridors at the end of the file.

  They ended in another novice dormitory, already full, and there was a scuffle and shuffle of boys arranging themselves. Stas was so glad to be expected to share a shelf with Boris, so glad to curl under the scratchy blanket
into his friend’s warmth, so glad to listen to the quick, tripping heartbeat. He couldn’t help thinking of Jan, all alone without his Kas, and being a thousand times grateful for his own Boris. He put his skinny arms around Boris and squeezed, and Boris did the same.

  “Stas, what happened? I don’t understand.”

  “You shut up over there!” snapped one of the other boys in the cell, who’d been displaced from his shelf and blanket so Stas and Boris would have somewhere to sleep. Stas pressed his face deeper into Boris’s warm smock.

  “…happened before, you know,” drifted down the hall from another cell, in a novice’s hoarse, deepening voice. “Not exactly that, but my first year there was a boy who shot his Brother with lightning. The monks took him away, and we never saw him anymore.”

  “So what happened to him?” asked another. “You think they purified him?”

  “I don’t know,” said the first boy. “Next day, they told us he was blessed and he’d gone somewhere else. They might have done. They might do anything, you don’t know what they’ll do sometimes.”

  Boris’s chest shook with a suppressed moan. His arms tightened around Stas.

  When his power had come he’d helped Boris, but what if it became, somehow, different? What if he hurt or killed Boris before he could stop himself? What if the Brothers found out and “blessed” him too? He tightened his grasp on his Boris. His thoughts of Kasper’s burning body and Jan’s crown of life-light, of the light that stood out from his own skin and the warm glow in Boris’s heart, and of grasping the wire, so long ago now, meant sleep took a long time coming.

  Burden of Power

  Dreamport

  Since he’d come back from the Lucky Strike, Vandis hadn’t been alone for a moment. It’d been an endless fortnight. Damn Adeon, anyway, for having stepped into the mess hall from the hospital at the moment Vandis’s foot had touched the bottom step. Trying to sneak past the tulon hadn’t been one of his brighter ideas. Now he’d had an escort every time he wanted to use the privy, and a Knight standing outside the door every time he walked into a room.

  They’d ganged up on him even today. He stood under threatening clouds outside a fancy cookshop with a vague representation of a flying fish—he thought it was a flying fish—on the signpost, kissing his eighty-ninth baby of the day. “Lady’s blessings on her head forever,” he said, forcing a smile onto his face, and the baby’s mother beamed.

  “Thank you, Sir Vandis,” she said. “I know your blessing will shield her. She’s been so sickly.”

  “The Lady shields everyone who comes to Her earnestly. There’s nobody more earnest than a baby,” Vandis told her, but his stomach churned saying it. He’d felt the fever on the baby’s skin. “Bring her to the Knights’ Headquarters. The hospital there is always free, and Doctor Westinghouse is one of the best in Rothganar.”

  “Thank you, Sir Vandis.” There were tears in her eyes when she said that. Vandis managed another smile, somehow, but he cracked a little on the inside. Help her, would You?

  Do have a little faith, She snapped.

  Well, I’m sorry. It’s just fucking depressing. I can’t actually make anything better for any of these people, and they keep coming to me like I can. His mouth strained to smile again at the next petitioner, an old man supporting his right side with a crutch. “What can I do for you, uncle?” he asked, keeping his voice even.

  “Oh, Sir Vandis, it’s my leg…”

  And on and on and on. Vandis hardly wanted to eat anymore. He didn’t even know what was good to eat at this jumped-up place. He hadn’t chosen it; when he’d said he wanted a meeting, his Knights and Hendrick’s priests had gotten together and presented the two of them with dinner reservations, for which Vandis was now half an hour late—and the crowd only grew.

  He blessed people for what had to be at least another twenty minutes, under Hui’s intent scrutiny, until at last the door to the cookshop swung open to reveal, not another departing patron who would of course want Sir Vandis’s blessing, but Adeon.

  “Clear,” the tulon pronounced.

  How fucking long does it take? But he raised his hands to include everyone in the still-growing throng and gave a rote benediction so bland that he would have, before what happened on the lift, slapped himself for it. He left Hui to deal with the protests and ducked inside.

  It wasn’t as terrible as he’d expected. The décor was fairly simple, tending toward quality rather than ridiculous ostentation, and had a distinct nautical feel: shiny brass trimming the bar and accenting the dark wooden stools and chairs. “Good choice,” he muttered to Adeon, who twinkled.

  “I think you’ll like Hendrick,” was all he said. He ushered Vandis to a table at the back of the cookshop, where a youngish man sat on one side, an open bottle in front of him. He stood and leaned over to clasp wrists with Vandis. His clothes were plain, and he had dirt under his nails, and hair cut practically short, if slightly neater than Vandis wore his.

  “It’s good to meet you at last, Sir Vandis,” he said. He sounded younger than his weathered face looked, a pleasant tenor voice, and his grip was firm, but he didn’t press like the greeting was an arm-wrestling match. He was taller than Vandis, but who wasn’t? “I’m glad the doom-crows didn’t rob me of the chance.”

  “Just Vandis. So am I.”

  “Then you’d better call me Hendrick.” Naheel’s new High Priest sat again, steadying himself on the edge of the gleaming table. His nose stood out pink, and the wine bottle was half empty. There was no glass. “Hope you’ll forgive me,” Hendrick added, when Vandis took a seat across from him, probably catching the direction of Vandis’s eyes.

  “What for? I’m the one late.”

  “Understandably,” Hendrick said.

  “Sure.” Vandis raised a hand for a drink of his own. He recognized the wine Hendrick had been tippling: a dry red out of Brightwater, not at all to his taste. He wanted whiskey. Adeon intercepted the waitress. “The fact remains that I’m late.”

  “I’m forgiving you for it.”

  He had to give Adeon his drink order, and the tulon passed it along as if he treated Vandis like a baby every day—which he had been. Vandis suppressed a tired sigh. It’s only because they care, he told himself, like he’d been telling himself since the incident a week and a half previous, when he’d snarled at Evan’s young Henry that he was perfectly capable of bathing unescorted, thank you very fucking much, and gotten a jab in the temple from his Lady for it.

  “You’re taller than I thought you’d be,” Hendrick said.

  Vandis wiped the scowl off his face. “Taller?”

  “Oh, yeah. Everyone’s always saying ‘Vandis is so short, Vandis is shorter than a little kid.’ But you’re not that short.”

  “That’s your second bottle, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Hendrick laughed and blew a note across the top. “Third.”

  Right. Not even going to try to catch up with you. Vandis’s whiskey arrived in a glass, and he took a judicious, deliberate sip.

  Hendrick laughed again and swigged from his wine bottle. “Bright Lady!” he said, wiping his mouth on a sleeve. “I’ve been nervous, that’s part of it. I’m nervous now, if you want the truth.”

  Vandis raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve been High Priest for less than three months. ‘Hey!’ they tell me. ‘Vandis Vail is in town! He wants to meet with you!’ Your reputation precedes you with a battleaxe.”

  He raised both eyebrows.

  Hendrick picked at the label on his bottle, hunching slightly. “So—ah—what did you want to talk about?”

  “Lech Valitchka.” Vandis took another sip of whiskey to burn the name out of his mouth.

  “Rat fucker,” Hendrick said, surprising a laugh out of Vandis.

  “Oh yeah.” Vandis rotated his glass. “So I guess that means you’re not going to freak out if I say something needs to be done about him.”

  “We’re going to Conclave. Didn’t you know?”

/>   Vandis sat back in his chair as Adeon and one of the House of the Sun’s under-priests brought food across the dining room. I don’t even get to choose my own dinner? Aloud, he said, “I know. Conclave doesn’t have any real authority.”

  “So what are you saying?” Hendrick’s brow wrinkled.

  Adeon set Vandis’s plate in front of him with a flourish. A fish cutlet, breaded, and some kind of bacon-rice-cabbage thing. It looked tasty, so he didn’t complain.

  Hendrick got the same thing. “I didn’t get to order,” he said sadly.

  “Safety first,” said the middle-aged priest who’d brought it, and Hendrick sagged.

  “What’s the good of being High Priest if they don’t listen to you?”

  “Search me,” Vandis said. He got out his cutlery and cut off a piece of fish: cooked just so, flaky and tender at once, but damned if he wouldn’t sooner have a whole fish caught not an hour before, roasted on a spit over a crackling campfire, with two wide-eyed kids for company. He imagined telling them the story of what had happened on the lift. Kessa would gasp in the most gratifying way, he was sure, and Dingus—well, Dingus would pitch a fit, but that would be satisfying, too. Then, chewing his bite, he remembered menyoral and the food soured on his tongue.

  Another thing to conceal from his boy. Another way to lie into a trusting face. Maybe he’d just have done with all that. Dingus was an adult, technically, however hard Vandis tried to see anything other than a wounded little boy in his hazel hitul eyes. Maybe when the time came, when they’d had a couple of days together, he’d just… sit Dingus down and tell him all of it, from the very beginning. But a couple of days, first, before he had to wipe the trust out of Dingus’s eyes forever.