by Lori M. Lee
“I’ve been thinking,” he said casually as we walked, away from the communal bath.
“That’s always reassuring.”
He elbowed me, and I snickered, shuffling a few steps out of range.
“I’ve been thinking about your nightmares,” he said.
My good humor fled, and I looked at him. “You shouldn’t.”
Ignoring me, he said, “One of my teammates—his name was Bolin—had a training accident about a month after he received his collar. He still remembered too much, and he was angry all the time. While sparring with one of the newly branded sentinels, he lost control of himself and ended up crushing the poor kid’s ribs. Killed her instantly.”
I fingered my ribs, grimacing. “That’s horrible. Did Ninu punish him?”
“Not really. Just scheduled him for accelerated cleansing. But every night leading up to his cleansing, I’d catch him muttering apologies in his sleep. A few times, he woke the whole team with his shouting.”
“Mason, I’m not suffering from—”
“Guilt is a powerful emotion, Kai.”
“I don’t feel guilty about k—” I stumbled on the word, but forced it out, my voice rising. “About killing Ninu.” Collecting myself, I clamped my lips together and picked up my pace.
“That’s not what I mean,” he said. He hopped into the street as we hurried around two women on the sidewalk wearing full skirts.
“Don’t push it, Mason,” I said. He seemed to sense the unspoken warning in my words, because he gave me a long-suffering look and fell silent.
He wasn’t entirely wrong. That day in the tower haunted me, chasing me into my dreams, and whether that was guilt or just a stubbornly fixated subconscious, who could say for certain? The only thing I knew was that I had no desire to discuss it.
His silence lasted only a minute, but at least he was done trying to analyze me.
“What’s your theory on the mahjo here?” he asked. After my meeting with Emryn, I’d returned to the dining hall to finish my breakfast and to inform Mason and the sentinels about Lanathrill’s mahjo.
“Wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” I said. “But I don’t have any theories. Could be anything.” I gestured to the glimmer glass all around us. “Could be something in the crystals for all we know.”
“Well, if I start spontaneously setting things on fire, I’ll let you know.”
I grinned. “What kind of magic do you think you’d have?”
He looked thoughtful, reaching back to touch the raised red lines of his collar. “I’ve never told anyone, but I’ve always felt a . . . well, a connection of sorts with plants.”
“Plants,” I repeated, somewhat surprised. He stooped over to run his fingers along the satiny petal of an open bloom.
“I know,” he said wryly. “Seems odd. But sometimes . . .” He closed his eyes with his fingertip still resting against the purple blossom. “Sometimes when I touch the flowers in Irra’s garden, I get glimpses of places—a forest, a field, an open sky—as if the seeds can remember, and they want to show me.”
“That sounds wonderful,” I said, watching with keen interest the way his face relaxed as he spoke.
He opened his eyes and straightened up again, looking embarrassed. “It doesn’t happen very often.”
“Why didn’t I ever see you in the courtyard?” I asked. In Etu Gahl, Avan and I had spent time every day in the courtyard because it had been the only place in the fortress with green growing things and a view of the sky.
“I didn’t want to intrude,” he said as we continued walking.
“You wouldn’t have been intruding.”
One corner of his mouth twitched into a brief smile. “I don’t think Avan would have agreed.”
I sucked in my cheeks, uncertain how to respond. It was true I’d cherished those quiet moments with Avan in the courtyard. It hadn’t occurred to me that Avan had felt the same.
“Where to next?” Mason asked, sparing me from having to reply.
I gestured with my chin to the citadel. I supposed it was time to meet the other mahjo.
CHAPTER 16
THE TEMPLE OF the Council of Vethe was a square building that stood in the shadow of the citadel. A brief set of stairs led up to a wide entrance with no doors. Directly following was a gallery. The room had a series of shadow glass pillars at either side that rose as high as the ceiling. I looked up and gasped. Every inch of the ceiling was covered with glimmer glass, flooding the gallery’s black walls with light.
The black floor was embedded with chips of colored glass. With the light from above, the glass chips glittered like stardust. At the end of the room, a table with four occupied seats rested on a raised platform. Behind them, a mural of stained glass occupied the length of the wall, depicting a cityscape with a white castle that looked quite a bit like the citadel. That had to be the original capital—Vethe as it had been before the war, the city set against the backdrop of giant, ancient trees and looming mountains.
Only one of the four people at the table looked up when I entered. The girl who stood to greet me appeared to be the youngest of the group. She wore a modest blue gown beneath blue robes with gold starbursts embroidered along the hem. The starburst, I’d learned, was Lanathrill’s emblem. The other Council members wore matching robes.
The girl’s long auburn hair was pulled back into a braid, which I’d noticed was a common style for the women. Or at least the women who weren’t servants. Men or women, the servants wore their hair short.
My footsteps echoed through the gallery, bouncing off the high walls and the glimmer glass ceiling. As I approached the platform, the girl extended her arm, indicating that I should join her up there. I did, and she held out her hand.
“I’m Cassia,” she said. “It’s so good to meet you, Kai.”
I shook her hand, and she introduced me to the other members: Brienne, Finn, and Henna, all of whom looked like they’d been sucking on lemons. I could already tell we would get along spectacularly.
“Lanathrill thanks you for coming to our aid,” Cassia said.
“Don’t thank me yet.” All I’d done so far was write a few letters and watch from the sidelines as the others saved that farmhouse from the chimera.
Emryn had said one other mahjo was strong enough to fight the chimera. As Cassia rattled on about their gratitude, I looked between their wearied faces and wondered which one of them he’d been talking about.
But something else caught my attention. They all looked . . . ill. They were too thin, their cheeks hollow, their eyes sunken. Henna’s weathered hands had a grayish tint that I didn’t think had to do with his age, and there was an unhealthy pallor to Finn’s brown skin.
“Kahl Emryn tells me that you wish to see the Fields of Ishta,” Cassia said, breaking my scrutiny.
“He thinks the chimera’s nest might be there. Their attacks mainly happen at night or in the mornings, so we’re hoping they’ll be asleep at this time of day.”
“May the goddess protect us today.”
“Have you always worshipped the goddess or is this a new thing?”
Cassia looked affronted, and the other Council members bristled. “We have always looked to the goddess for guidance,” she said.
I held up my hands. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you,” I said, which seemed to placate Cassia. “I’m trying to understand—has she always been able to communicate with you?”
Cassia’s lips tightened. “We do not discuss our connection to the goddess. Such knowledge must be protected, kept within the Council.”
“But what makes you so certain she’s the reason you have magic?”
“We would never presume to understand or question the will of the goddess.”
Of course they wouldn’t. I wanted to believe that, even prior to meeting the Infinite, I wouldn’t have put such blind faith in a deity that promised so many good things without asking for some form of repayment. But I suspected I m
ight have—the part of me that had wanted to know who I was, that had yearned to believe that my magic had been given to me for a purpose.
In the end, I did have a purpose—to kill Ninu. But now, here I was again, potentially in the middle of some Infinite’s manipulations, and I didn’t even have my magic to rely on anymore.
Footsteps echoed through the hall. Yara walked briskly through the gallery until she reached the bottom of the platform. She smiled when she saw me, but she addressed Cassia.
“I’ve readied your horse,” she said.
“Thank you, Yara,” Cassia said, sweeping her robes aside and descending the stairs.
“You’re Cassia’s servant?” I asked Yara. When she nodded, I looked at the back of Cassia’s auburn head. “You ordered her into the Outlands?”
Yara’s eyes went round. When Cassia turned to me, Yara gave a tiny shake of her head. Maybe she was worried about being punished this time.
“Yara did what had to be done for Lanathrill.”
While you sat safely here inside the mountain? The words were at the tip of my tongue, but Yara’s desperate eyes begged me to stop.
I managed to say politely, “She was very brave.”
Cassia’s expression softened. “Yes, she was.”
Yara blushed as Cassia rested her fingers against Yara’s shoulder.
When Yara realized I was still watching, her cheeks grew even redder. She mumbled down at the floor, “Kai, I wasn’t sure if you’d be wanting a horse or if—”
“I’ll ride my scout,” I said.
“Are you ready?” Cassia asked me.
The rest of the Council members had moved on to discussing other things and were completely ignoring me, so I hurried down the steps. “You’re coming along?”
“My magic is an asset to your team, no matter how skilled your sentinels are.”
I guessed that meant Cassia was the other mahjo Emryn had mentioned. Maybe that was why the others deferred to her.
Emryn was in the courtyard, already mounted and waiting. When he saw me, he pushed his horse forward.
“We should take more soldiers with us.”
“No,” I said. I didn’t need a bunch of people tromping through the grass and drawing attention.
“If the nest is really there, then it’s too dangerous with just—”
“Emryn, have you seen the way my sentinels move?”
His nostrils flared. He wasn’t used to being interrupted. “Yes,” he said. “I observed them sparring this morning.”
“I’m sure you have brave, well-trained soldiers, but mine are faster, stronger, and can walk, run if necessary, without making a sound. Anyone else—you, me, Cassia—is a risk, and I’d like to keep those risks down. I wouldn’t even want Cassia along except she’s right: her magic might be helpful if we run into trouble.”
Emryn fell silent, which must have meant he’d gotten the point.
It took mere minutes for me and the sentinels to mount up. Everyone in the vicinity stopped to watch our scouts stir and rise from what looked like sleep. Their rippling sheets of metal produced a startling imitation of life.
Emryn and Cassia led the party through the city, back toward the tunnel built into the mountainside. We had to pace our scouts to match Emryn and Cassia’s much slower horses. Once we’d descended from the mountain and the Silver Road leveled out, I took the opportunity to get a better look at Lanathrill’s landscape.
Beyond the enormous trees with trunks so thick that even the huge Grays in Ninurta would probably fit inside them, the land rose and fell in gentle hills. Farmhouses stood amid fields of wheat that stretched across countless acres, interspersed with patches of other crops. I didn’t know much about farming—okay, I knew nothing about farming—but plants needed sunlight to grow strong and healthy. How were they able to maintain so many crops with the sun hidden behind clouds for the majority of the year?
I had often worried that the production district in Ninurta might actually be relying on Kalla’s magic to produce the quantity of food necessary to keep the city fed. I’d never confronted her about it, but if it were true, what would happen when she left? With Ninurta surrounded by the Outlands, farming would never be a viable option. If we could find a way to get safely down the cliff to the sea, we could try to revive the fishing industry. Maybe Irra would teach us to build that pulley system he’d installed in Kalla’s tower. That was assuming the sea still had fish in it. Who knew what havoc the war had caused to the life there?
We turned off the Silver Road onto a dusty path that narrowed until it disappeared into the weeds. Emryn and Cassia led us past farms several times larger than the ones we’d encountered on our way to Vethe. Servants hurried through the yard between multiple buildings, feeding livestock and going about their daily chores. I lingered along the borders of a pasture, watching animals graze. If asked, I wouldn’t have been able to name what they were, but I was charmed by their furry bodies and how their jaws gnashed the grass. Nearby, a farmer was herding more animals into pens.
I could only imagine the struggle these people faced between choosing to stay and work or to flee to the safety of the mountain. Maybe Emryn had ordered them to stay. He still had a city to feed.
We traveled single file along a depression in the waist-high grass until we passed through a copse of trees, younger than the ones by the Silver Road. When we emerged on the other side, Emryn and Cassia drew their horses to a stop. I pulled up beside them, taking in the view.
The Fields of Ishta stretched out before us in rippling waves of yellow-green grass. I urged my scout a few steps forward. The grass rustled against my legs and prickled the backs of my hands.
I understood why Emryn thought the chimera nest might be here. I could feel the echo of something in the way the wind breathed through the dry grass, the way the blades whispered of memories held within the earth around their roots. It wasn’t anywhere near as powerful or oppressive as the Void, but it was still a physical presence.
“What is this place?” I asked, although I suspected I knew. Had the chimera been drawn here because the traces of old magic felt familiar to what they’d known under Ninu’s control?
“A battlefield from the Mahjo War,” Emryn said.
CHAPTER 17
“AS THE STORY goes, no one survived the battle,” Cassia said. Her gaze swept across the Fields as if imagining the bodies strewn through the grass. “The warriors fought as though crazed, driven so mad by magic and bloodlust that they turned their swords on their own comrades, screaming the name of their god Ishta even as they lay dying.”
“Bet that made for a pleasant bedtime story,” Mason muttered from behind me. I suppressed the smile that tugged at my mouth.
“Well,” I said, “let’s have a look around.” We’d already discussed what to look for: areas in the grass that might have been recently trampled, chimera tracks, and scratched tree trunks. The chimera weren’t as fast or agile as the gargoyles, but they were just as powerful, and with their extra bulk, they would definitely leave evidence of their comings and goings. “If you see chimera, run for backup. Don’t try to fight them alone,” I told everyone.
The sentinels split off on foot. They kept low to the ground so that I could see only the very tops of their heads moving through the grass.
I remained on my scout as I retreated into the trees to search along the perimeter. A moment later, Cassia joined me.
“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.
“You can stay alert,” I said.
Somewhere to my right, deeper into the woods, I could hear the crackle of Emryn’s horse stepping through the dry underbrush. He and Cassia were trying to be silent, but every snap of twigs and crunch of leaves made my nerves bunch tighter. The paws of my scout moved much more quietly than I’d expected, seemingly understanding my desire to step lightly.
“He’s a good Kahl,” Cassia said, her voice almost a whisper.
“I’m sure he is.”
“
You shouldn’t have scolded him.”
I almost rolled my eyes. “I don’t think it’s possible to scold a Kahl.”
“Emryn is doing the best he can. His father wanted nothing more than to restore the glory of Lanathrill, and when he died, he left all his ambitions to Emryn. If Lanathrill was to collapse under his rule, the shame would kill him.”
I wasn’t sure why she was telling me this. I understood that Emryn had a lot on his shoulders. He was Kahl. That kind of responsibility came with the job description. I’d told Emryn that the three of us were liabilities because we weren’t like the sentinels, not because I was picking on him.
A shout rang out. My body snapped into motion, my hands clenching the sensors as my scout surged forward. Emryn and Cassia’s shouts faded behind me, their horses unable to keep up. We wove through the trees and burst out into the open.
Aylis was trying, and failing, to fight off two chimera. His tunic was dark with blood, even while he ducked into a roll to avoid the deadly swipe of claws. Gret and Winnifer were sprinting through the grass toward us, but they were still too far away.
Aylis’s torch blade rested in the dirt a few feet from me. I reached for it. I had no idea how to use a sword, but Mason had always said I was fast. Without the threads of time, I hoped speed would be enough.
One of the chimera circled around to attack Aylis from behind. He shuffled sideways, trying to keep them both in sight without giving either of them his back. It was impossible. The chimera nearest me puffed up, preparing to lunge at him. I attacked first, striking its flank.
Blood splattered the torch blade. The chimera screamed and rounded on me. I dived into the grass, the chimera’s jaws snapping at the spot where my head had been. I rolled, dodged the lash of its tail, and then pushed to my feet, stabbing the blade into its other flank. I yanked the blade free just as its claws swiped at me, scoring the blade and my forearm.
Pain tore through me. The torch blade slipped from my hand. I tried to make a grab for it, but the chimera’s massive mouth snapped at me again. I leaped away. My feet tangled in the grass, and I tumbled. I landed on my arm. Fire ripped up my shoulder. My vision blurred. Focus! I choked back the bile and scrambled backward. The chimera reared up, its shadow falling over me.
