by Terah Edun
Ciardis lifted trembling hands. “Let me go, Vana.”
The words were firm, but the assassin didn’t move an inch.
“Listen carefully, because I’ll only say this once,” Vana said flatly.
Ciardis stilled.
“I. Was. Wrong,” said Vana Cloudbreaker.
“About?” Ciardis asked while her heart stilled.
Vana let her go in disgust. “About that bat-winged idiot.”
Ciardis nodded. As if that all make sense. As if Thanar was truly their most important focus in these trying times.
Then Ciardis said softly, “Perhaps it’s time we go back inside. To rest.”
She didn’t know if would help, but she knew for certain that Vana was mentally unwell. This dissociative, neurotic person was not the woman she had left behind. Ciardis was beginning to wonder if Vana had gone clinically insane after being personally tortured by the emperor. She knew that Maradian was adept at breaking an individual down to their core.
Sometimes without even laying a finger on them, Ciardis thought as she remembered the time she’d entered his audience chamber only to see her mother bound in chains and tortured.
In that moment it was Ciardis who had been broken, unhinged even. And he hadn’t had to lay a finger on her, or her mother for that matter. So it would come as no surprise if the emperor had broken the assassin’s mind while doing the same. It especially made since as Ciardis could see no physical wounds or cuts on the woman, and he had just released her from his clutches within the last twenty-four hours.
The emperor wasn’t shy about inflicting physical lacerations, as Caemon could attest. Vana had to have mental ones, Ciardis thought bitterly as she started to rise.
She felt fury rising within her. The emperor had to have known the state they’d find her in when he released her and instructed them that she was no longer in the palace.
He must be sleeping well tonight, Ciardis thought. Like a gleeful child who gave a gift of mud pies to an arch-enemy.
Vana cackled as if she had read Ciardis’s very mind. At the surprised expression on Ciardis’s face, Vana shook her head and explained. “I’m not psychic, just a very good reader of expression. And I am telling you now, I’m not insane.”
Ciardis swallowed deeply and reach out to clutch her hands. “Then tell me and tell me true, what did the emperor do to you?”
Vana shook her head and squeezed her fingers with a strength that belied her size. “Wrong question, Ciardis Weathervane. The right question is, just how is it that Thanar might have saved us all?”
Ciardis didn’t want to go off on this tangent. She didn’t care about Thanar. He was gone, out of her life. But Vana didn’t look like an individual ready to let go.
She doesn’t know he left, Ciardis quickly surmised. It made sense. It had just happened hours before. Perhaps if she indulged Vana’s line of thinking here, they could move on to more pertinent topics of discussion. And then maybe Ciardis Weathervane could finally rest her weary head.
Sighing, Ciardis said, “All right, convince me. You tell me how, then. How did the bat-winged idiot manage to save us? And save us from what?”
Vana nodded and untangled her hands from Ciardis’s own. “Remember when I said the emperor’s torture chamber isn’t where this story begins?”
Ciardis’s mouth went dry. “Yes.”
“Well, let’s go back to that alley again,” Vana said softly while picking at a loose pebble in the fountain. Ciardis wanted to snatch it from her and tell her to focus, but she didn’t dare.
Then Vana looked at her and said, “After that alley incident, Thanar and I came up with a plan. He decided to lie to you, Ciardis Weathervane, and I pledged to help him.”
Ciardis blanked on a response, which was okay because Vana kept going.
“It was an easy way to kill two birds with one stone, after all,” Vana admitted. “Or so we thought. Never did I think I’d live to regret it. Neither apparently did Thanar.”
Vana fell silent, and Ciardis couldn’t take it anymore.
Ciardis shook the assassin’s shoulders with a fierce strength.
“Tell me,” the princess-in-waiting demanded. “Tell me everything.”
16
Vana smiled sadly and said, “It’s better if I show you.”
Ciardis let her go and said in a doubtful voice, “What do you mean?”
Vana hummed, looked away, and looked back at her. “Do you remember when Lillian revealed her memories of the empress’s true death?”
Ciardis was getting tired of sidetracked conversations, but she said “Yes” anyway.
Vana replied, “It’ll be just like that. But it’ll be fragments of memories. Conversations that you had that we took away. Actions that we were careful to erase from your mind.”
Ciardis stared at her, flummoxed. “What are you saying, Vana?”
Impatience flashed across the assassin’s face before she closed her eyes and fought for visible control over her emotions. Ciardis could tell she was unstable, but she needed to know.
Finally Vana stopped muttering to herself and said, “I said we shouldn’t take so much, but your lover was insistent. It was all or nothing. We had to make sure that none of what you remembered would actually hinder you from casting him aside.”
Ciardis shook her head in frustration. “You’re not making any sense!”
Vana stood and looked down at her with wild eyes. “Neither are you. Not right now. Not this you. But you will, you will understand, Ciardis, because I’m going to restore everything we took. And heaven help us all when you regain those memories.”
Ciardis felt panic set in. Vana was going to kill her. She knew it.
I shouldn’t have come here, she thought numbly. I’ve got to get out of here.
She made an effort to stand, and Vana pushed her back down with enough force that Ciardis’s tailbone hit the fountain stone and she lit up in pain.
Where is all this power coming from, she had to wonder while wincing. This strength.
She didn’t have time to ask aloud, however.
Vana leaned over her with her irises no bigger than a pinprick. “My name is Cloudbreaker, Ciardis Weathervane, but my powers are more than a one-trick pony. What I can reveal, I can conceal. What I can unlock within a person’s mind, I can also steal.”
Ciardis stared into Vana’s eyes and she didn’t feel fear.
She felt pity.
“What did he do to you?” Ciardis whispered helplessly.
Vana didn’t respond directly. Instead, her pinprick irises widened like an owl’s eyes adjusting to sudden light and Ciardis was falling. Not into Vana but inside herself.
Into memories she didn’t recognize and places she barely remembered.
As Ciardis landed inside the thoughts and memories she hadn’t been aware she had lost, she didn’t know where she was. They came in flashes like lightning. One minute there, gone the next. The first one that lasted more than a few seconds long, however, was more profound. She no longer felt like she was experiencing a memory from the outside, she was the memory.
It consumed her. It was her.
Ciardis felt her heart beating fast inside her chest. She was turned away from Thanar clutching her arms to herself tightly, almost hunched in on herself but mostly just reacting to the physical cold and the strong sense of self-preservation inside of her.
She didn’t turn towards him. She couldn’t.
She didn’t trust that he wasn’t manipulating her at this very moment. She didn’t trust that he wasn’t using his gifts and their connections to sway her emotions. To push her thoughts to actions she wouldn’t normally take. But most of all, she didn’t trust his heart.
It was surprising to fall into a memory of the daemoni prince, and it was even harder to claw herself out of it. She couldn’t; she was consumed with a rush of feelings that had been locked away too long. Thoughts and emotions that swirled on, focused on Thanar, tried to decipher him, tried to
know who he was and what he stood for.
Ciardis knew that Thanar’s intentions were never pure, unless you considered them purely set on convenience for him. She wondered if this memory was about what he had done to her mind, but a second later she had her answer.
Assumptions flooded her being and kept her rooted in the present moment. She could feel herself analyzing the situation as if it was happening in that very second, not as a distant memory that had just surfaced.
Ciardis puzzled through the ideas foremost in her mind. She wanted to know what this was about. In her thoughts, she felt herself pondering that she didn’t think he’d be upset if they killed the emperor, but neither did she want to share her plans with him on the matter. Not at that moment.
But what she wanted didn’t matter. It never mattered, she realized.
Because Thanar wasn’t to be deterred.
“Who?” he said, and she had the vague feeling that he was repeating what he had said previously. That they had started a conversation and now he was forcing her to finish it.
She didn’t want to stop. She wanted to know. So she played along as he prodded her and paced around. As patient as a panther on the hunt for prey.
Ciardis thought, Two can play that game.
It was almost surreal. Like watching herself playing a game of chess and participating in the game at the same time.
Her chess player-self knew that she wouldn’t be the one to lure him to a feast.
What feast? she wondered silently.
But then it clicked a second later and she knew it was one to be held as an imperial banquet at the palace. A night that had long since passed. She shivered on the rooftop as she thought that she couldn’t be sure the carnage would be limited to the emperor alone, and the observer part of Ciardis wondered how she could have let herself hold back so much, forget so much.
Ciardis watched herself chuckle darkly as she turned away from Thanar and back to the city visage. “Does it matter?”
It was a beautiful night, the observer form of her mused as she walked to the rooftop edge and peered off. They were in Sandrin, she would recognize the beauty of the sloping city and the ocean below even on the darkest night.
Behind her she heard Thanar sigh in irritation at her chess player-doppelganger. She almost smiled. At least she wasn’t the only one having a frustrating day. All three of them were. But then a wave of cold swept over observer-Ciardis so fast that she didn’t have time to counteract it. She wondered if she was being yanked from the memory with Vana’s powerful grip, but she could still see everything happening around her. They still remained on the rooftop. It was just like being thrust into more emotions, more feelings, and diving underwater without a tether. Observer-Ciardis looked back at Thanar in panic, and she realized long before her counterpart did that he in fact was the source of this drowning.
She looked to her younger self desperately, but if she felt like drowning, it was obvious that the chess player-Ciardis was being subsumed as well.
The problem, Ciardis thought as she fought off the tidal wave of emotions from Thanar, is that her younger self didn’t want to.
She was basking in his mental grip. Observer-Ciardis watched, hesitated, and then threw caution to the wind. It wasn’t that she wanted to enjoy the tangle of emotions; it was that she knew that she wouldn’t be able to truly untangle the labyrinth of knowledge this memory was bestowing upon her if she didn’t embrace every aspect of Vana’s gift.
So she waited a moment and then let down her barriers. She opened herself up to Thanar’s mental deluge and she let down her shields. She felt what he was projecting, and she soon realized it wasn’t necessarily a manipulation. It was an open invitation.
It felt like being thrown into the iciest waters just before the Vaneis River transformed from the cold clutch of winter into the melting dews of spring. She froze for a moment, and in that moment she felt him. His frustration and his wariness, but more importantly, she didn’t feel herself. His emotions were her own. His clenched fist and tightened muscles were hers. As the foreign feelings swept over her, her vision doubled and then resettled into his in seconds. Ciardis Weathervane saw herself through Thanar’s eyes.
Her first thought was, I’m so small!
Her second, What in the world just happened?
She saw herself leaning over the railing. Curls whipping in the wind. Body hunched against the elements and away from him. Her entire demeanor screamed that she wanted nothing to do with him, and to her surprise she could tell Thanar understand that.
The trouble is, Ciardis thought wryly, he just doesn’t care.
And it was true. She looked around, or tried to. Her experience in Thanar’s mind wasn’t the same as diving into her own magic or even Vana’s. She didn’t have an ethereal body to guide her way. Just the sense that she could go deeper, fall deeper, into his thoughts and his dreams…if she dared. She wasn’t even sure if Thanar was aware of her presence. She didn’t hear his thoughts.
Unable to resist, Ciardis felt herself turn. She turned away from the physical control of his vision and his body, and dove deeper towards his magical core. She felt herself transition from the mind to the magic with a distant pop. Like the release pressure from a bubble when a pin pricks its surface. Anxious, she pushed her new body forward into a tunnel of darkness. She had time to see something cruel at the end. Something that made her want to curl up in the darkness and scream until the end of her days. It was reaching for her and she couldn’t get away.
Then she heard Thanar’s enraged scream, Get out!
Before she could respond, she felt a yank on the thread of golden magic that still connected the chess player-Ciardis to her own physical form, and then she felt herself, or maybe it was themselves, dragged backwards as if pulled by a rampaging horse.
The mental feeling of yanking didn’t stop until she was thrown out of Thanar’s mind as well and landed roughly in her own—so quickly that she fell backwards physically and curled on the ground in disorientation for a moment. Unable to process what she had seen, what she had felt, and most of all…what she had sensed.
It was only a flash. A few seconds. But for Ciardis Weathervane it was more than enough. Whatever that darkness was…pure evil didn’t begin to describe it.
Ciardis emerged out of the memory with her mind racing, doubled over in a pant. She was out of breath and exhausted, she could barely see straight, but she straightened up with a struggle to see Vana sitting beside her as quietly prim as if they were just two women chatting by the fountain.
“What was that?” Ciardis managed to ask in a ragged voice.
Vana looked at her with those eyes that had tiny spots of darkness in the center. “A memory long erased.”
Ciardis swallowed deeply. “And Thanar’s…core?”
Vana smiled mysteriously. “Do you really want to know? Are you ready?”
Ciardis looked at her with fury in her eyes. “No more games.”
Vana raised up her hands to brace them on Ciardis’s shoulders.
She leaned forward as her pinprick irises widened once more, and whispered, “No more games.”
Ciardis had seconds before she fell back into the deeply buried memory. But this time she didn’t fight it. She embraced it. She wanted to know.
As she fell, this time Ciardis didn’t come back to consciousness as two forms. She was one with her chess player-self. It was the right choice, she knew. This was no game. This was her life in motion, and she would feel and act out every second as if her life depended on it. She had to know.
Shaking her head to dispel the fogginess in her mind, Ciardis put a hand up under her body and pushed herself into a position where she was kneeling. She was bit too dizzy from the magical rush to attempt standing yet.
Head pounding, she looked up with blurry eyes as she said, “What was that?”
The look on Thanar’s face told her he knew exactly what she meant.
But for a moment an expression crossed hi
s face that she’d never thought she’d see. Fear.
“It was nothing,” he said while looking down at her fiercely.
“Now who’s lying?” she whispered back as she rubbed her aching head defiantly.
He grimaced and looked away. “You don’t want to know.”
This time she stood unaided and glared. “What if I did? What’s more, what if I said I need to know? We’re bound at the soul, for the gods’ own sake, Thanar!”
He looked off into the distance.
She threw up her hands and yelled, “Well?”
He looked back at her and said, “That seeleverbindung is more than a tactic that you can call on when you’re displeased with me. It’s more than a way to snoop into my thoughts and sift through my mind—”
She opened her mouth to object.
“—Yes, I knew you were there,” he said testily, and she quickly halted any protest.
“The seeleverbindung, Ciardis Weathervane, is more than a child’s toy,” he finished.
Then Thanar turned and walked away.
Ciardis shook her head and shouted after him, knowing that this was why the memory was buried. Why she had come here instead of elsewhere. “If it’s not a toy, then what is it?”
He halted and half turned back as he said over his shoulder, “The only thing saving you…and me from annihilation. From having a god take over our very bodies.”
He spread his wings and took off.
Left behind, Ciardis stumbled backward to the ledge. Leaning against it, she tried to take stock of what she had just seen, what she had just felt, what had been revealed. Then she fell again. This time to a very different reality.
17
This time Ciardis heard Vana as she descended into forgotten memories.
The assassin mage famous for breaking through the penetrable barriers of a person’s mind was now breaking down the barriers that resided in Ciardis’s own. Mirages and shields that she had put in place herself, to keep memories from the young woman Vana considered as close to her own heart as her actual Companion trainee Terris.
