Lit by a few candles that burned low, her mother sat in a chair by a window that looked out on the city wall a short distance across the chasm. The way the palace ranged over the steep hillside, the ground floor of Oria’s tower stood stories high over the sheer drop to the wall’s base on this side. The parapet of the wall stood nearly level with the window’s view, though a significant distance separated them.
“Mother!” Oria cried, rushing to her and taking her hands. Cold and limp. Such a deep trance. “Should I remove her mask?” she asked Chuffta, who perched on the window ledge. Temple law and custom of privacy strictly forbade removing anyone else’s mask, except in dire emergencies. Surely this counted? Still, Oria hesitated, looking to Chuffta for his advice, since he hadn’t yet answered. His sinuous neck curved so his head reversed from his body, he sat motionless, staring with reptilian interest at the view out the window.
At a man running along the parapet, illuminated by the blazing torches.
Destrye. Wearing a dark fur cloak that swirled heavily around him, he loped in a half-crouch, a dully gleaming knife in one hand, an enormous axe strapped to his back. Furred boots rose to his knees, crossed with leather, his muscular thighs bare except for black curls that matched the thick locks of his wildly tangled hair and beard. He melded from one shadow to the next, and Oria might not have seen him if Chuffta hadn’t spotted him.
As if feeling their attention, however, he froze mid-step at the rim of a pool of light. Still but for the swivel of his wolfish head, he scanned his surroundings, thorough and unhurried.
Then locked gazes with Oria.
~ 6 ~
Lonen had seen many strange things in the past weeks. Impossible magic and horrific deaths that would take him years to purge from his nightmares, if he ever could.
If he lived that long.
The sight of the woman in the window hit him with enough force to unbalance him. Through the blood-drenched night, he’d kept focus on one kill after the next and only on that, much the way he’d climbed the wall, except that he slit the throats of defenseless women, one after another, instead of reaching for holds. They died so easily, seeming oblivious to his approach, focusing their placid attention outward to the battle where the booming assault of the sorcerers diminished and ceased as their sisters succumbed to the blades of Lonen and his men.
The fact that they didn’t fight back, that they remained so vulnerable, sickened him, each death layering on unclean guilt that he’d ignored until the vision of the woman in the window knifed into him like an unseen blade. Maybe it was because her fair coloring was so much like the first woman he’d killed. After that one, he hadn’t looked at their faces, taking the dispensation offered by their featureless masks.
For whatever reason, the sight of her gripped him, standing in the open window, illuminated by candlelight in an otherwise dark tower that rose from a deep abyss. Her hair shone a copper color he’d never seen on a living being, like a hammered metal cloak that shifted with her startled movements. She put a hand to her throat, eyes dark in her fine-boned face. A creature from children’s tales perched beside her, staring at him intently. He would have thought it a statue carved from alabaster, but it swiveled its head on its neck to look at the woman, then back to him.
Lonen had seen illustrations of dragons in his boyhood books, but they’d been huge and…fictional. This thing looked very like those, only smaller—maybe as long as his forearm, not counting the tail. All white, it shimmered in the bright torchlight from the walls much as the woman’s hair did. It sat on its haunches, taloned feet clutching the stone windowsill, bat-winged forearms mantled. Large eyes with bright green shine dominated a wedge-shaped head with a narrow jaw and large ears. It lashed its long, sinuous tail against the stone, as a cat watching birds would.
Beautiful, both of them, and as fantastical as if they’d stepped out of one of those storybooks. The wonder of the sight swept away all the bloody horror. She was the bright face of the terrible magics—something lovely, pure and otherworldly. Something in him lunged at the prospect of such beauty in the world, a part of him he hadn’t known existed. Or rather, a part he hadn’t thought survived from childhood. That sense of wonder he’d felt looking at those storybook illustrations, long since lost to the grind of the Golem Wars. He lifted a hand, not sure what he meant to do. A salute? A greeting?
“Prince Lonen!” Alby ran up, bow in hand. “Why do you—a sorceress!” He reached for an arrow and notched it, a smooth, practiced movement that Lonen barely stopped in time.
“No,” he commanded. “Stand down. She wears no mask. She isn’t one of them.”
“They’re all the enemy,” Alby insisted through gritted teeth, resisting Lonen’s grip. “She’s seen us.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Abruptly weariness swamped Lonen. Far too soon for him to wear out, as much remained to be done. That bright bubble of the fantastic had distracted him, the shattering of that brief moment of childlike wonder more painful for the sudden loss of it. He’d have been better off not feeling it at all. “Her people are largely dead, their defenses falling around them. Look out at the plain.”
Alby followed his nod. Grienon, enormous and low in the sky, waxed toward full, shedding silvery light on the quiet field. None of the magical fireballs or earthquakes thundered through the night. The golems had dropped like corn stalks after harvest. The Destrye forces moved in a familiar cleanup pattern, groups of warriors methodically searching the field for the dying, to either save or dispatch, depending on which side they’d fought for—and if they could be saved. Other groups remained in pitched battle, but the Destrye had the upper hand. Without their magic, the Bárans would eventually fall.
For as many years as they’d worked towards this day, Lonen had expected to feel jubilation, triumph, the roar of victory. Not the drag of exhaustion and regret. Their plan had worked far better than any of them had dared to hope—and yet only bleakness filled his heart.
The copper-haired woman’s fault, for showing him a glimpse of a dream of something more than monstrous death and destruction. He’d been better off hoping simply to live to the next moment, or not to die in vain.
Hope and the promise of wonder could destroy a man’s spirit more surely than a well-wielded blade.
With one last look at the woman in the window, he turned his back on her and her false promise. “Come, Alby. Let’s find a ladder or stairway down to the city inside the walls, so we can open the gates.” One that wouldn’t plunge him into that dark abyss. “There must be stairs or ladders that the sorceresses climbed. By sunrise, Bára will be ours.”
Soon he would be done with this evil place.
“Stupid to stand in the window like that. You made a perfect target.”
“Advice that might have been useful in the past and is irrelevant to the present is best not offered,” Oria replied with one of Chuffta’s favored adages, the oft-repeated words all her shattered mind could pull together. The impact of the Destrye’s energy and high emotional state had pushed her even closer to the edge of control. He had no mental discipline, not even a shred of control over his raging feelings. They’d doused her with a bewildering range—wonder, hate blended with an odd joyfulness, horror, despair, soaring hope, and surprising regret. Not at all how she had expected a barbarian warrior to feel, but then she’d never encountered one before.
Yet despite their scope and potency—especially at such a short distance—his emotions hadn’t overloaded her. Just left her a bit battered.
She sank to her knees, both because her weakened legs wouldn’t hold her and to better chafe her mother’s cold hands.
Blood pulsed weakly in her wrists, a faint flutter of butterfly wings. The two warriors had been speaking to each other, though she’d heard them as clearly as if they’d stood in the same room, the thin cool air transmitting their words. Had the Destyre been speaking the truth? Everyone dead, Bára fallen. The night had gone ominously silent, so it seemed so.
&n
bsp; “It doesn’t matter,” the Destrye warrior had said of her, of whether she lived or died. The other man had called him prince and he’d taken her measure and declared her not worth killing, a strange tinge of betrayal to the bitter emotion. She should be grateful for the reprieve from imminent death, though the old anger burned at her worthlessness. Something even a Destrye prince could recognize across the gap of a chasm.
Enough thinking about that rough man who’d so strangely grabbed all her attention.
“Mother!” She spoke sharply to penetrate the trance. Deeper than Oria had ever seen. If all the sorceresses on the walls had gone so far into sgath, no wonder they’d all died. Still no response from the queen. Enough of this, too. “Chuffta—use your talons to cut the mask ribbons.”
“The temple forbids—”
“I think all bets are off tonight. It’s not as if Priestess Febe will be looking for trespasses against holy law to punish in the next few hours.” If the high priestess of Bára’s temple had even survived. She might have been on the walls, too.
“Lift me then.”
Oria held up her left forearm for Chuffta to land on, his feet gripping as he used his thumb talons to carefully slice the ribbons at Rhianna’s temple. Holding the mask with her right hand in a numb parody of the usual ritual, Oria kept it in place while her Familiar sliced the other two sets of ribbons at cheek and jaw.
When the mask loosened, she drew it gently away, then tossed it on the floor. Not proper treatment for the sacred relic, but the sight of her mother’s wide open eyes, dull and spiritless in her deathly pale face, sent a fresh rill of terror through her and Oria forgot all else.
“Oh, Mother,” she moaned, patting the queen’s cold cheeks. “Come back to me, please. I need you. Don’t leave me alone.”
“You’re not alone. I’m always with you.” Chuffta, on her shoulder again, stroked her cheek with his own, his tail looped around down around her arm to her wrist in reassuring affection. “Don’t cry, Oria.”
She brushed impatiently at her tears. “It’s not all mine.”
“Yes, you’re overloading. We should go back up the tower.”
“You heard the Destrye. There’s no one left in charge. I might not be a priestess, but I can’t be so fragile that I leave Bára without direction. My father and mother would expect that much.” Her mother, who still stared without moving or blinking. Perhaps dead inside a body that yet lived. “I’ll get through somehow.”
“And if you break?”
“Then I break.”
“You won’t do Bára any good if you’re broken.”
She wrenched her gaze from her mother’s blank eyes to Chuffta’s worried ones. “Look—either I do no good because I break doing my best to serve Bára in her hour of greatest need, or I do no good because I’m sitting in my tower preserving a potential, something that may never manifest. The choice seems clear. If I can just wake up the queen, she can take over.”
“Oria, she may be…”
“Don’t say it,” she replied fiercely, taking her mother’s face in her hands. Wishing for hwil more than ever before, she tried to calm her mind, then she deliberately reached for any glimmer of emotional energy. Strange and awkward to go in a totally different direction—to move outward, to attempt to receive instead of vigilantly defending herself. It opened her to the crashing terrors, angers, and sorrows around her, but she focused on her mother, letting Chuffta do his best to screen the rest of it.
And there. A thread of soul-killing grief, dark but potent. Oria fastened on it, pulling it up and out.
“Oria,” her mother breathed.
“Oh, thank all the stars!” Oria gripped her mother’s still-limp hands. “Are you all right?”
Rhianna’s eyes filled, then overflowed, a waterfall of tears flowing down her face. “He’s gone. Tav is dead. There’s a hole where he was. Oh no, no, no. Why did you bring me back?” She collapsed into sobs, not seeming to hear or feel Oria’s reassurances.
Oria’s heart bottomed out. Her father dead, her mother beyond reason. Likely her brothers dead, too. This wasn’t how it should be. Oria wasn’t the strong one. Of them all, she had the least ability to cope, much less to lead. She wanted more than anything to crawl into her mother’s lap and be comforted, but that wouldn’t happen. Maybe never again.
Not many made temple-blessed marriages, so the nature of such relationships were long on myth and romance, but short on facts. The ballads and tales always told of the sorcerer and sorceress dying together—either in sweet old age, in each other’s arms, or, tragically, battling some dire foe. Never did one survive the other.
Maybe her mother’s total and shocking loss of hwil hinted at why. The world quivered under Oria, spinning into a new pattern. One where her unshakeable parents were no longer the fixed points in her life, her mother no longer the single person who believed in Oria. Her father was gone forever and her mother this sobbing, hysterical wreck of a person.
Feeling sorry for herself accomplished nothing, however. Though it felt as if the world had ended, it no doubt continued hurtling headlong into disaster.
“Stay with her, Chuffta.”
“No, you need me more.”
Too tired to argue, she pulled herself to her feet, a monumental effort. Her legs leaden, she went to the door, opening it to find Renzo and her mother’s guard waiting with expectation so bright and dread so thick that she had to grip the door handle to keep from bowing beneath the onslaught.
“Take the queen to her chambers and call a healer for her. Send word round the city for anyone still able to attend that there will be an emergency meeting in the council chambers—”
“At least have it in the tower, so you’ll reduce some of the input. And it’s more defensible if the Destrye enter the city.”
She nodded wearily, no longer spending the energy to protect the sensibilities of the guard. She wasn’t thinking clearly. “All right, that makes sense. Emergency meeting in the third-level salon in my tower. I’m going there now. All of you—get as much information as you can about what’s going on. Send messages as soon as you know anything. I believe the Destrye have plans and the means to open the gates and let their warriors into the city. There may be no one left to stop them.”
They made sounds of protest, but subsided when she shook her head. “Find out if I’m wrong. Make sure someone stays with the queen, should worse come to worst.”
“I’m staying with you, Princess,” Renzo said, face grim.
“No, I—”
“Begging your pardon, Princess, but if what you say is true, it’s possible you are the last surviving member of the royal family. Who is capable,” he added, carefully not looking toward Queen Rhianna. Hating that truth, Oria cast one searching glance at her shattered mother and queen as one of her guards gently picked her up and carried her from the room.
“We must protect your life at all costs,” Renzo urged quietly.
With no energy to argue and no thoughts to muster, Oria nodded. Then went to drag herself up the long climb to her tower, to find out whether any pieces remained to be put back together.
~ 7 ~
By the time Oria reached the third-level salon, the sky beyond the open windows had brightened with dawn. She went to the window; the view wasn’t quite as good as the one from her garden several floors above, but there was little to see of the conflict. Bára lay eerily quiet.
Most likely any citizens who hadn’t been summoned to the battle were barricaded in their houses, and any who had answered the call to defend Bára would still be trapped outside the walls. The main gates weren’t visible from her vantage point, which came as something of a relief, though that might be the wrong response to have. A good leader would want to see everything for herself. But it might be more than she could withstand, the sight of Bára’s gates hanging open like a wound, Destrye barbarians streaming through it to spill more blood, to finish the job of crushing her people.
And her. So far she hadn
’t broken, had withstood more input than ever before in her life, but it felt as if one more blow would do her in, leaving her shattered beyond repair.
“You’re doing very well. Besides, there is no ‘beyond repair.’ Where there is life, there is always the possibility of healing.”
“But where there’s death, there is no healing, only corruption of the flesh.” She sounded bitter even to herself and Chuffta did not reply. The image of her mother as a corpse in her chair still filled her head. She couldn’t quite grasp that her father might be dead. Perhaps her brothers, too. All that seemed far away, muffled behind a curtain she dared not draw back.
A scuffling sound at the door made Oria turn from her morbid thoughts, and High Priestess Febe entered, leaning heavily on her walking stick of carved bone, accompanied by her aged husband, Vico. Both wore their golden masks, both alive, if not necessarily well. Vico had earned his mask fairly, of course, but expressed the merest trickle of magical power. He served Priestess Febe well enough to siphon off her powerful energies when needed, but theirs was far from a perfect marriage and he couldn’t muster any of the greater defensive or offensive magics. No one had worried about it, because the high priestess used most of her sgath to sustain Bára, with the help of the junior priestesses. Vico mainly functioned to keep her balanced.
“I’ve sent word to the head priestesses of the temples in the other cities, Princess,” Priestess Febe said, sitting heavily. “I don’t know if they’ll be able to help—though they owe us—but they will at least know of Bára’s peril.”
“Thank you, High Priestess.” Oria hadn’t thought of that. So much she didn’t know, such as why or what they owed Bára. Except she did know that Bára was the capital of them all for a reason. None of the others sat atop such a potent and constant source of magic.
A few other priests and priestesses arrived, a dozen or so, all similar in magical power and physical strength—which was why they had survived the night. All were too elderly or not useful enough to have been called to battle the Destrye. The only others would be those too new to their masks to have ascended the walls or taken to the field, or those of the noble families who’d not yet qualified to take their masks at all. Who knew how many among them would find hwil and become useful?
Lonen's War Page 5
