Of the Divine

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  “So . . . we don’t know what they want, ultimately,” Dahlia said, “but it killed Helio, and Verte, and Celadon. It nearly killed Henna and Ginger, and others are still being tended by physicians. It seems clear that whatever they want, it isn’t in our best interest.”

  “No doubt they think it is,” Maddy grumbled.

  “Is there a spell that might protect against them?” Dahlia asked.

  “No,” Henna snapped, frustrated. Maddy had already addressed that; Dahlia just hadn’t understood because she didn’t use sorcery herself. “The Others feed on power. Any spell we’re strong enough to weave will only assist them.”

  Silence, again.

  Ginger moved, painfully, to sweep up the crumbs.

  “You don’t have to do that, honey,” Maddy objected, watching the girl make small, careful movements.

  “I need to do something,” Ginger said. “Sitting drives me crazy.”

  An idea seeped into Henna’s mind. It was a horrible idea—but it was a horrible situation.

  “How do you get rid of mice?” she asked.

  Ginger looked at her like she was crazy, and then looked pointedly at the hand-broom she had picked up. “You don’t get rid of mice, not unless you’ve got a cat. You stop leaving food out and they stop coming.” She shook her head, and muttered a disdainful, “Sorcerers. Don’t know the simplest things.”

  “Henna?” Maddy asked.

  “What’s the best way to keep stray cats out of the garden?” she asked, wondering if the same memory she had just recalled would come to Maddy’s mind.

  Maddy stared blankly at her for a moment, frowning, then seemed to realize what Henna was talking about. A few years back, they’d had a terrible time with feral cats in the neighborhood. It had turned out that a nearby butcher had been deliberately leaving out scraps for them.

  Maddy sounded puzzled as she answered, “Get your neighbor to stop feeding them.”

  Henna stood and paced as she spoke, thinking aloud. “Naples said invoking the Numini made them stronger. So we stop doing that. We stop feeding them, and make it so there’s nothing here they want. Just like any other pest. Right?”

  “We can’t change the way people talk,” Ginger said.

  “That isn’t true,” Henna argued. “And I was thinking about more than that, anyway. For a little while, we starve the Others. We make the cupboard barren, so to speak.”

  Dahlia’s brow crinkled. “I don’t follow. What, exactly, are you proposing?”

  “I’m proposing . . .” Henna drew a deep breath, arranged her scattered thoughts, and started again. “I’ve lost too many people I love, and come close to losing others—not to mention almost dying myself. I’m willing to make a sacrifice, if doing so means I don’t lie awake listening in the night, wondering if the next time Clay screams it’s because his magic is ripping him apart. I’m proposing that I take the brand.”

  She had seen what the brand did to a magic user, but it was nothing compared to the devastation the wild power had wrought in the last days. “As well as everyone else in the Order who is of age and willing. Those who refuse, we ask to refrain from using their power until it seems the danger has passed—small-magics as well as high sorcery, since we don’t really know the effect of one over the other. I propose we shut down the temple. In short, I propose that we be very . . . very . . . careful to clean up all our crumbs.”

  “Not everyone will agree with you,” Maddy said softly.

  “Not everyone has had the blood of the dead splashed over them, not once but twice,” Henna said flatly. “We’ll convince them.”

  Dahlia rubbed her eyes as if they pained her. “I need to go back out there and answer the assembly’s questions. If I try to put them off by saying the Order of Napthol is ‘dealing with the problem,’ they will riot.”

  Henna’s heart was pounding so fiercely with the sweeping finality of her own suggestions that it dizzied her. She gripped the back of a chair to steady herself. “Tell them the truth,” she said. “Tell them everything. Tell them the royal house served them loyally, but reached too far and damaged the veils between this realm and the next. Tell them that monsters from the Abyss and the Numen have walked the mortal world in the last few weeks, that their battling probably caused the ice storm and has caused death and injury since then. Tell them the sorcerers of the Napthol Order are going to do whatever we must to seal the rift and protect this world again.”

  “Ask the Followers of the Quinacridone for help, in Celadon’s name,” Ginger suggested, “before they can decide the Napthol sorcerers deserve what they get.” She looked around before concluding with apologetic haughtiness. “You will need them. They know how to survive without magic.”

  Dahlia pulled her ever-present sheaf of paper from her pocket and made shorthand notes as she spoke.

  “I’ll address the assembly, tell them what has happened, and ask for volunteers to join a high-priority committee to draft a series of recommendations for how to eliminate all unnecessary magic from Kavet until such time as it seems the threat is passed.” She frowned as she considered how people would respond to suggestions that they police their language, and whatever else the committee came up with. “We may have trouble with members of the Order of A’hknet. They don’t like to be regulated.”

  Henna shook her head. “They don’t like to be dead, either. We’ll make it work.”

  Dahlia stood, straightened her back, and schooled her tired expression into one of determination. Henna’s heart went out to the young woman.

  You have no power in the traditional sense, the sense of magic, but you have a strong destiny.

  Destiny was unfolding before Henna’s eyes.

  Dahlia was following her suggestion, but even so, seeing her square her shoulders sent a shiver down Henna’s spine.

  A whisper in the back of her mind asked, What have I created?

  Epilogue

  Choking and coughing in a futile effort to clear blood and ash from his lungs, Naples lifted his head.

  He spat a gob of sooty crimson phlegm onto black sand that glistened like oil, reflecting every color in the world.

  The instant his blood touched the sand, a swarm of long-legged white creatures, like some horrid combination between rats and spiders, scuttled over. Naples slapped one off his hand and shoved himself up and back with a cry, kicking another away as it tried to bite his ankle. He tripped over a rock jutting up from the sand, and barely managed to avoid falling on a jagged edge of what looked like obsidian, standing up like a blade.

  He stood again, more carefully this time. The white swarm watched him with gray eyes bobbing on gently swaying stalks.

  Where . . .

  He lifted his gaze to the horizon.

  In one direction was a vast desert formed of black caves and rock formations. The darkness was broken by multicolored lights, and bleached-white bones. In the other direction, he saw jagged cliffs hosting what looked like the remains of ancient trees, fossilized eons ago. Where the cliffs met the beach there was a narrow rim of sand, which could be traversed if he watched his step. If he picked a direction.

  Some kind of tar-like substance dripped down the cliff and ran in sluggish rivulets over the sand nearby, forming a lazy, ominous stream. It didn’t look like a good thing to touch, and Naples didn’t fancy his chances of jumping over it and maintaining his footing on the other side, so he put it behind him. And he started to walk.

  And to walk.

  Night fell, and he shuddered in the cold. Finally, his exhausted, battered body succumbed to sleep. He woke to find a creature like a giant green tick latched on to his leg. Naples had to use a shard of bone to cut each leg off before he could pry the creature’s maw from his flesh. After, his entire leg ached. He wondered if he had been poisoned.

  Could poison kill him if he was already dead?

  He didn’t feel dead.

  Another night came. This time the darkness revealed a swarm of luminescent creatures. When he tou
ched one, it exploded into a scalding wash of mercurial sludge that raised burn-blisters on his arms, shoulder, and face. He didn’t sleep that night, just waited.

  The next morning, he moved on.

  Or, he tried.

  With thirst and hunger clawing at him, he didn’t get much farther before he fell. Maybe he could rest a little while . . .

  Could the damned die a second time in this place? Or would he just lie here eternally?

  A new kind of creature sniffed at him. Naples tried to lift his arm to shoo it away, but someone else did so first, kicking at it roughly.

  When the woman knelt in front of him, Naples was sure he was hallucinating. Her eyes shone the way an Abyssi’s did, but her wine-red skin was smooth, not furred. And she looked familiar.

  She touched his shoulder where an ungraceful stumble into the cliff walls had drawn blood. “Not many people cross the realms with flesh intact,” she said, before lapping his blood from her fingertips in short, catlike strokes of her tongue. “And you taste like power.”

  “Help me.” His throat was dry as the sea beyond him, but he forced out the words.

  “Why?” she asked, tilting her head. Again, she seemed so familiar.

  “Please.”

  She smiled, and it was that smile at last that allowed Naples to recognize her—or, more accurately, her lineage. He was sure this was the Terra’s child, most likely with the Abyssi Antioch. Given her apparent age, he suspected she had been conceived not long after Terre Verte was born.

  “I always wanted a pet,” she said, reaching out one slender hand. “Well, come along.”

  Verte opened his eyes. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Where was the crystal sea, with the sand like diamonds? Where was the gate, which should have opened for him?

  I did what they told me to do.

  Why had they forsaken him?

  “Terre Verte.” The low, rumbling voice was Modigliani’s. The prince of the lowest level of the Abyss stalked around his prize. “You lost the Numini’s grace when you slew another mortal, or else I wouldn’t have been able to touch you.”

  Verte tried to stand, and only then realized his body was wrapped in chains.

  “You have power,” the Abyssi said, “and have done us a service by slaying the Numenmancer and driving his Numini out of the mortal realm. My sire wishes to make you a deal, if you will hear it.”

  The king of the Abyss was a sight no mortal could see and survive. Only the dead and damned could look upon the darkest demons.

  Verte stared long at a creature made of pure acid smoke, of claws and fangs but mostly just of sharp and hot and pain.

  “I don’t want to make a deal,” he said.

  He had that much pride left.

  Too much pride, maybe.

  Henna clenched her teeth firmly on the leather strip.

  They called it hot power for a reason: it burned. As Maddy set the sigil against Henna’s flesh, the magic screamed, and seared, and tried to tear its way into friendlier territory. Henna bit down harder to keep from shrieking, and more so, to keep from crying out, “I’ve changed my mind!”

  Or worse, “Dear Numen, make it stop.”

  She was more powerful than Ginger had been, more powerful than any hot magic user still surviving within their Order. The brand had never been meant for someone like her. The human body wasn’t made to take this kind of severing.

  In the aftermath, her flesh felt cold and numb. There was no heat left in the world.

  As soon as she was steady, she lifted herself from the chair. The brand, though barely the size of a coin, seemed to pull worse than any of the scarred burns and claw marks had.

  “Ready?” she asked Maddy, as she prepared a different sigil with trembling hands.

  Maddy did scream, the leather strip falling from her mouth to the ground. But it was a wordless scream, without a prayer.

  Dahlia stood at the podium in front of the assembly . . . her podium, and her assembly. They had elected her President, but the Constitution they had intended to draft had fallen by the wayside, to be completed once other more important tasks were done.

  At the council’s suggestion, the memorial services for the royal family—Terre Jaune, Terra Sarcelle, and Terre Verte—had been brief and in the Quin style, with no mention of the realms beyond and none of the magical pageantry that would normally accompany such a lofty event. The funeral was scarcely attended, as many of the Order of Napthol sorcerers who would have been there were still recovering from the brand. Adding to the strangeness was the end, when there was only one body to inter.

  Even Henna had opted to avoid that service, instead choosing to light dozens of candles and send them out to sea on a wooden raft. Mikva had helped her with the Tamari ritual, which Henna assured Dahlia invoked no divine or infernal powers, but only the sea and sky.

  Around the same time, the final agreement with the Osei was sealed with what felt like anticlimactic fanfare, Terre Verte’s sudden and violent death having removed the last obstacle to a disgustingly amicable arrangement. Like the rest of Kavet, the Osei recognized Dahlia as the leader of the land, though they called her queen instead of president. She had the impression they believed she had forcibly overthrown the monarchy in retribution for their crimes against the Osei, and wanted to reward her for that “service”; regardless of the reason, she was able to negotiate for safe passage and significantly lowered tariffs for Kavetan ships, favorable trading rights on several key goods, a right to purchase the freedom of any Kavetan claimed in payment for a defaulted debt, and a continued ban on any Osei flight over Kavetan land. After so much anxiety and time and power and blood had been sacrificed to that cause, Dahlia couldn’t help but note how odd it felt that she signed the final treaty with a frustrated sigh, irritated that it was taking her from more important tasks.

  The most critical work was drafting the document which held all the directives intended to lessen the grasp of the Abyssi and the Numini on the mortal realm. Creating it had taken weeks of debate, research, and preparation.

  “Using the knowledge and suggestions given to us by the Order of Napthol and the Followers of the Quinacridone, and taking into account all of the revisions, requests, amendments and provisos this assembly has brought up, we have created what I believe will be a tolerable document for all. It’s a little long, so we’ve printed several dozen copies of the final version so everyone can have a chance to read it. We’ll hold the vote in one week’s time.”

  Argent, the head of the farmers’ coalition, looked up with a frown from where he had been flipping through the pages. His testimony about what he had seen when Naples battled the Abyssi—winning once, and losing once—had gone a long way in the debates about how dire the threat to Kavet was.

  “‘A little long’ is an understatement,” he said. “How much of this applies to those of us who don’t use magic?”

  “Quite a lot of it,” Dahlia replied. She, too, had been surprised to learn how many little things even non-sorcerers could do to help. “I know it’s long,” she said again when she saw the restlessness in the crowd, “but I’m going to encourage everyone to read all parts. We need to be very careful.”

  Ginger flipped to the end, skimming the text there. “All one hundred . . . and . . .”

  “One hundred twenty-six.”

  “Why do they do these things?” the arbiter demanded. “I could have helped them, but everything became so twisted so quickly. Time does not pass the same there as it does here. It is all so . . . confusing.”

  Veronese wanted to comfort his companion. They had been together through the millennia. They had grown up together in the Age of Tears and had worked together through the Age of Mending, as they struggled to turn the mortal realm into something where their children could prosper and not know endless suffering. He could not find the words.

  Deep in the Abyss, his own chosen child, the heir of a bloodline he had nurtured for generations, screamed as Abyssi
savaged him in what they considered “play.” Veronese had meant only to chastise the mortal for his rash actions, with forgiveness surely to come after proper repentance, but Modigliani had acted swiftly and stolen him. Now Verte was nothing more than a bone torn between dogs as the Abyssal beasts battled for supremacy.

  On his knees in the deep drifts of snow that covered the highest level of the Numen, Veronese wept tears that turned to crystal upon impact with the frozen ground.

  “All is not lost,” Doné insisted. “I swear I will—”

  “You will do nothing. Our king has commanded us to leave the mortal realm alone. Swear to me only that you will obey.”

  “I swear,” she replied, “that I will make this right.”

  —END BOOK TWO—

  Acknowledgments

  For its first draft, Divine owes particular thanks to the Office of Letters and Light for hosting National Novel Writing Month, and Bri Maresh for leading my virtual writing group (and providing valuable insights into toddlers, years before I ever had my own).

  Revising Divine involved massive amounts of research, consults with sensitivity readers (thank you Ollie Lavelle in particular), feedback from long-time readers (Mason and Zim, looking at you), fresh eyes (thank you Chris Duryea), and a great deal of encouragement from my local writing group led by Remy Flagg. Even with all that support, I never could have managed without the many hours of babysitting provided by my sister Rachel, my parents, and my friend Karl so I could attend those writing group meetings.

  Finally, this book never would have reached you, my readers, without the support of my agent Beth Phelan and the team at HarperCollins, including my editor Priyanka Krishnan.

  About the Author

  AMELIA ATWATER-RHODES wrote her first novel, In the Forests of the Night, when she was 13 years old. Other books in the Den of Shadows series are Demon in My View, Shattered Mirror, Midnight Predator, all ALA Quick Picks for Young Adults. She has also published the five-volume series The Kiesha’ra: Hawksong, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and VOYA Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror List Selection; Snakecharm; Falcondance; Wolfcry; and Wyvernhail.