Lonen's War

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “Lonen.” Arnon put a hand over the map, covering the lines and forcing Lonen to look at him. “You can’t marry her.”

  Lonen blinked at him, dragging his eager thoughts from the logistics of building aqueducts. Had Arnon somehow read his thoughts? “Who—Natly?”

  Arnon gusted out an impatient breath. “Of course Natly! Who else would I be talking about?”

  Who indeed? “I’m not marrying Natly. Not anytime soon, anyway,” he amended.

  “That’s not what she thinks. Nor what she tells everyone.”

  “I don’t control what she thinks and does.”

  “Exactly the problem. Natly does as she pleases, always has and always will. She would have made a decent princess, but she won’t make a good queen. Don’t do it, brother of mine.”

  “She’s strong as a horse, can bear many children, understands and loves Dru and the Destrye—what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that being queen means not doing as she pleases. It’s more than wearing pretty dresses and sucking your cock, Lonen! These are dire times. Better for you to lead our people alone than be distracted by her.”

  The words prickled and Lonen burned to lob back a few of his own. But Arnon had that much right—being king meant not doing as he pleased, either. “I thought we were discussing aqueducts and building schedules.”

  Arnon held his gaze, then nodded, accepting the truce. “Good. I’ve made a timetable.”

  ~ 26 ~

  “You come before the temple as a supplicant,” High Priestess Febe intoned, “sponsored by our daughter, former priestess Rhianna. Do you, Princess Oria of Bára, plead to be granted the mask of priestess yourself?”

  “I do, High Priestess. You have tested my hwil and see that I am ready to wear the mask,” Oria replied, her face serenely composed.

  “Indeed, remarkable as it may seem, none can find fault with your hwil.” Febe sounded sour, a bitter complement to the irritated—and suspicious—energy she emanated.

  As well she should, as Oria no more had achieved hwil, whatever it truly felt like, than ever. But she faked it perfectly well. Nothing the priests and priestesses had attempted to shake her composure had rattled her. At least, not that she showed. It rankled deeply that, for all their pride in their personal magic, the masked ones could not truly see into her heart. As her mother had predicted, once Oria came out the other side of the harrowing test of scrutiny in the heart of magic, nothing less could frighten or upset her.

  After that, passing the simple tests of hwil proved quite simple. In fact, those challenges had been easy enough, after the horrors of the Destrye Wars, that she could have passed them before, had it ever occurred to her to lie about achieving hwil.

  How many priests and priestesses of Bára and her sister cities had hit upon that solution? In her most cynical moments, Oria suspected most of them, perhaps all. She hadn’t met anyone who didn’t leak emotional energy. Over the past weeks, practicing with her mother and Chuffta, she’d refined her ability to sort through what she sensed—and to release it again.

  Both sgath and grien flowed in her. Ponen. Not something for anyone else to know, however.

  “But the final test resides in the mask itself.” The High Priestess took up a golden mask, newly minted, from a stand on the altar. She anointed it with oils, holding it up to the assembled priests and priestesses, who took up a low chant. “Rhianna.”

  Her mother moved behind Oria where she knelt on the hard stone before the altar. She kept calm and unmoving as Febe pressed the metal mask to her face. It burned her skin, hot from the candle flames and warmed oils it had rested in, but Oria didn’t allow herself to flinch. Her mother took up the first of the three sets of ribbons, weaving them through Oria’s elaborate braids and tying them tightly.

  “Show us you possess the second sight,” Febe demanded, her hope that Oria would fail coming through quite clearly. The chanting rose in volume, climbing to deafening levels, to prevent an aspirant from using sound to navigate. Oria stood, walked around the altar, opened the door behind it and stepped inside.

  The others followed her, their chanting a drumbeat that accelerated her heart rate. To unsettle her also, then. It would take more than that to distract her.

  “Because you are more powerful than all of them,” Chuffta said, sounding both smug and proud.

  “Shh. You’ll make me fall.” She enjoyed focusing the thought at him, though—something else that had become easier with the thick walls of resistance removed.

  Men and women saw the obstacle course differently, her mother had explained, though she only knew how she perceived it. Using sgath, the narrow beams stood out to a magic user from the background. Apparently her father had confided to Rhianna that the men used grien much the way bats did, bouncing the magic off surfaces to detect the edges and pitfalls. It went against temple law for him to have told her that, or for her mother to have told her any of it, but it seemed any number of rules had fallen by the wayside in her mother’s—and other allies’—determination to see Oria on the throne of Bára.

  Careful to use no grien those present might detect, Oria let the sgath flow and walked confidently along the narrow path, careful not to shuffle or appear to feel her way. Though the room was brightly lit enough for the shine to leak around the edges of her mask, the way the metal curved close to her skull kept her from seeing the beams she walked along. The route—which changed for each supplicant—twisted and turned, changing angles, but still fell short of the ones her mother and Juli, the junior priestess assigned to Oria, had designed with diabolical mischief for her to practice on.

  She still had bruises from falling. But they’d been worth it, for this moment.

  At last, she stepped off the end that narrowed to a needle-thin point, showing her mastery by not breaking it. And that was all. To advance to higher levels in the temple, she’d need to demonstrate sgath, but that would be for the future.

  The priests and priestesses surrounded her, kissing their masks to hers in ritual congratulation, the clinks like the chiming of wineglasses. Chuffta landed on her shoulder. His physical presence still worked to bolster and balance her, though she managed more of that on her own, through understanding the interplay of sgath and grien through her being. He tapped her mask with his nose.

  “I bet I could melt it if I tried,” he remarked.

  She tweaked his tail. “You’d be sad when I blasted you with my amazing magical abilities.”

  He snorted mentally, with which she ruefully had to agree. So far she hadn’t been able to do much with the grien besides use it as a release valve. No thunder, no fireballs, no earth-moving. Of course, as her mother wryly noted, most men learned their affinities from other wielders of grien. Oria wouldn’t be asking for lessons in that, so she’d have to figure it out on her own.

  The story of her life, it seemed.

  She felt her mother’s aura before Rhianna’s soothing embrace surrounded her. With a sigh, she leaned her masked face against her mother’s shoulder. “It seems odd for me to have the mask and you to be barefaced,” she said.

  “I don’t mind,” her mother murmured. “Those things get cursed hot.”

  Oria huffed a laugh at that, though she already believed it. She’d look forward to those cool, herbed face cloths now.

  “Now,” her mother said, releasing her, “to deal with the council. And Yar.”

  “I don’t like that we have no idea what he—and the rest of them—have been up to these last weeks. If only I could have gotten my mask sooner.”

  Yar had walled her out of all discussions. Neither she nor her mother had been able to find out many details about the city’s water reserves or communications with their sister cities—and without masks to allow them entrance as representatives of the temple, they were banned from the council meetings. Folcwita Lapo had turned Oria down with ill-concealed glee when she’d asked to be admitted as a citizen. She hadn’t sensed the Trom, but the giant derkesthai glided in la
zy circles in the thermals high above Bára, from time to time.

  “At least we’ll know soon.” Her mother patted her arm. “You’ve done all you could.”

  Perhaps so. But that still might not be enough.

  ~ 27 ~

  “How long until we have the final sections in place?” Lonen shaded his eyes against the angled autumn sun, to better see the lay of the aqueducts through the distance.

  “We’ll do the stretch to connect to Dru itself last.” Arnon pointed at the direction it would take. “It might mean hauling water all winter, but you wanted to prioritize crop irrigation, and the sections to the farthest fields will be done in the next few days. Even manually carrying water from the finished aqueducts to those, the time savings has allowed us to grow a respectable harvest, enough to last through the winter. You’ve done it, King Lonen.”

  “We did it. All the Destrye. And thank Arill for the unseasonably warm weather.”

  Arnon cast a judicious eye at the landscape. “Except for the danger of fire. Everything we haven’t watered is tinder dry.”

  “Perhaps we should be watering more things then,” Natly spoke up. “There’s plenty of it now, after all.” She pointed at the staged aqueduct platforms, painstakingly built into the foothills, funneling water in a series of manmade waterfalls to the ripening crops of fast-growing alfalfa.

  Arnon didn’t glance at Natly but his shoulder muscles bunched. Lonen suppressed the absurd urge to apologize for her, especially knowing how much Arnon disapproved of their engagement. He also—more ruthlessly—cut off the disloyal thought that Oria wouldn’t have said something so foolish. Not only unfair to Natly but probably untrue. He’d known Natly for years and Oria for two conversations. If Natly could still surprise him, Oria would likely obliterate his idealism.

  “It looks good,” he told Arnon, putting a hand on his brother’s shoulder, belatedly aware it was his father’s gesture.

  Arnon, however, didn’t seem to notice. He folded his arms, surveying the construction with a faint smile of pride. “It should work.”

  With his gaze on the scaffolding of waterfalls, Lonen frowned at what he’d thought were clouds gathering over the peaks, as they did most afternoons in the heat of autumn, though they rarely produced rain as they had in years past.

  Not clouds, perhaps but…smoke? He traced the line of it behind low hills, where the harvested grains were stored. Fear crawled down his spine. As if called, a messenger came sprinting up.

  “King Lonen!” The messenger barely gasped the words on the last of his breath as he ran up, then dropped to his knees. The scent of char wafted from him and instant dread curdled Lonen’s gut.

  All these days and weeks of working, he’d anticipated this moment. Much as he’d tried to focus on the positive, to count the blessings rather than the curses, a vague foreboding had plagued him. Not unlike the nearly nightly dreams of Oria casting black magic spells, ripping him asunder—obvious metaphors for his fears of what the Bárans might yet do to the Destrye.

  Without hearing the words, Lonen knew.

  “Dragons…searing…eating the dead…” The messenger heaved out the news in toxic clumps. “The grain silos, everything, burning.”

  Beside him, Arnon cursed viciously. “It’s not possible!”

  But it was. Worse, it had been inevitable, if the nightmares were to be believed.

  Now none of that mattered. A greasy chill rolled over him, as if the mummified thing had already dissolved his bones.

  “How long ago and are they still there?” Lonen demanded, willing the man to breathe.

  “Just past noon. Sire, I—” The man broke off on a strangled scream as the shadow of a dragon passed across the platform where they stood, Natly’s cry of unmitigated horror as chill as the shadow. Without thinking, Lonen thrust her behind him. In the same movement, he drew the iron axe he’d never quite lost the habit of carrying. She’d teased him about that, too, that he kept the ugly thing ever with him, when he should be wearing his father’s shining sword of Destrye kingship. Call it superstition, but he’d felt better with his battle-axe at hand. Besides that, he couldn’t face the finality of his father’s passing by taking up the sword of office.

  The dragon swooped past again, low enough for the creature on its neck to look them over, raising a hand as it had in the council chambers at Bára. A strange greeting from a soulless creature. Arnon stood at his shoulder, iron sword in hand, and it comforted Lonen that his brother shared his preference for the ugly weapons.

  The dragon wheeled away again, followed by a phalanx of others, smoke drifting in their wake.

  Like locusts settling on a verdant farm, they set down and the Trom riders began filling those endlessly thirsty barrels of water from the freely flowing aqueducts.

  “You can’t go alone.” Arnon sounded very reasonable, but his face showed the strain of worry. “It’s suicide.”

  “If it is, taking more Destrye with me will only get more warriors killed. This way I risk only myself.”

  “I don’t want to be king,” Arnon ground out, jaw tight, as he paced. “Don’t make me have to be king.”

  Lonen waited until his brother made the circuit of the room and had to stop before him or dodge around. When Arnon seemed about to do just that, Lonen grasped him by the shoulders. “The treaty was between me and Princess Oria. If she violated the terms, then she owes me a follow up on her promises.”

  “If she violated the terms?” Arnon threw up his hands, breaking his brother’s grip. “Of course she did! The Bárans are without honor of any kind. How many times must she break her word to you before you see her for the evil, greedy sorceress she is?”

  “I don’t like it either,” Natly put in. She sat at the table, hands clasped around a hammered metal goblet of wine. If Lonen were a thoughtful lover, he would have brought her one of those delicate transparent vessels Oria used. A pretty gift for the faithful woman who’d waited for him at home. Natly had finally stopped crying, but her face showed the ravages of her hysterical tears. “Have I won you back from the Hall of Warriors only to lose you again? This Báran sorceress could take your love for me and twist it backwards.”

  Perhaps that had happened already, and that was why Lonen no longer felt as he once had for Natly. Why it was Oria who prowled through his dreams. Why he looked forward to seeing her again with an almost savage glee that gnawed at his heart—though that came from hatred. All through the counting of the dead, the damage to the precious crops, the senseless destruction, he’d fumed over Oria’s betrayal and relished the moment he’d confront her.

  In his saner moments, he told himself that he desired answers. Or revenge. That the fiery longing to wrap his hands around her throat came from the need to choke the pretty lies from her, not the burning need to feel her skin under his hands.

  In his less sane moments, he knew only that he had no choice.

  He would journey back to Bára alone and do what he could to save the Destrye.

  “You’ll be a good king,” he told Arnon, handing him their father’s sword, hilt first, aware of the relief of giving it up unworn. He started to lift the wreath from his head, but his brother stopped him.

  “No,” he said, with a firm shake of his head. “Wear it. Make those cursed Bárans see you for the king you are, not they barbarian they name us.”

  “You’ll need it, if I don’t return.”

  “If you don’t return,” Arnon replied with grim conviction, “none of us will need anything ever again.”

  ~ 28 ~

  “Oria?” Juli bowed her head in unusually somber grace, grave concern wafting off her—though the red curls springing out from behind her mask added a note of irreverence. Seeing with sgath instead of one’s eyes changed the way colors appeared. The mask forced Oria into seeing more of the resonance of light on objects, with the wavelengths of the sun very different from the rays reflected by Sgatha or Grienon. But Juli’s hair was a particularly impudent shade of orange, which ma
tched her unruly character, so Oria always saw it that way in her mind.

  “Come sit, Juli. Give me your news.” Focusing on her task, Oria finished working seed oil into Chuffta’s hide while Juli crossed the rooftop terrace. Simple tasks like that, ones she’d done so often that she could accomplish them with her eyes closed, made for good practice. She had to consciously concentrate on “seeing” her work, looking for the spots she’d missed, rather than feeling them. Working on Chuffta added an extra layer of difficulty, as he radiated magic on another spectrum entirely.

  Amazing how much she hadn’t seen before.

  “Captain Ercole wishes to speak with you.” Juli didn’t sit, instead gesturing to the inner chambers. “He waits at your door. I wasn’t sure of your equanimity today.”

  In all truth, she felt amazingly good. Tired, yes, from all the practicing and studying, but the morning sun soothed and relaxed her, so that she felt as oiled and supple as Chuffta. “Send him in. It must be important news for him to bring it himself.” Or secret news.

  “I hope not. We’ve had enough grave news to last several lifetimes,” Juli tossed over her shoulder, already on her way to admit the Captain of the City Guard.

  Oria watched him approach while seeming not to. Another aspect of the mask she’d never understood, that it allowed her perception to move out in every direction. Where her eyes pointed wasn’t necessarily where she looked, at all. Ercole had survived the Siege of the Destrye, as the poets had come to call it, where so many had not, and she gave him credit for giving her the backing of the city guard, though he’d never admit to it. His usually vital energy thrummed with nerves. Oh yes, something had him gravely concerned.