His body convulsed and he sprawled on the stones again. When he came back to himself, his mouth hung open in astonishment. “It took my magic away.”
Cazia nodded. “Only temporarily.”
“Soldier,” the prince said, “sheathe your weapons. You have no enemy here. These girls have defeated it. These girls have changed the world.”
Cazia felt a flush of pride. Someone finally understood.
Tejohn blinked several times, then slung his shield on his back. His shoulders were relaxed and he took his eyes off the prince while he sheathed his sword. Good. Old Stoneface recognized the kinzchu stones were a cure for wizardry. And if he could be convinced, anyone could.
“Now, my goodness! I need a barrel of water, a jar of oil, and a scraper. I can’t imagine how I got so filthy!”
“Excuse me,” Ivy said quite loudly. “We have an important question: Where is the library?”
The old man looked put out. “My library? Why, it’s—” He turned toward the tower.
“Not any longer,” Cazia interrupted. “It’s been taken. We need it—and you—so we can make more of these stones.”
“You don’t know how to make them? Then where did they come from?”
“We stole them,” Cazia said blandly, “from someone who was trying to kill us. We need to study them and create more. Many, many more.”
Ghoron scowled at the filth on his hands and his arms, as though they were the most pressing concern. Then he rolled onto his hands and knees and peered down at the stone.
“Easy,” he said. “Yes. Yes, that should be no trouble at all.”
Chapter 13
Cazia’s first instinct was to begin immediately. Did they need specific kinds of stones? How many? What hand motions and mental symbols were required, and where could she get some parchment to write them down? Because she wanted to learn this spell from front to back immediately: how to embed it in an inanimate object like a sleepstone, how to cast it on others, and how to cast it on herself.
Unfortunately, Ghoron was in no hurry. His stomach was grumbling loud enough for all of them to hear, and he wanted to return to his tower so he could clean himself up. The old prince struggled to his feet and began to issue orders as though they were all his servants.
“Pardon me, my prince,” Ivy said with a slight smirk. “I think you should look inside your tower before calling for a bath.”
Ghoron sighed and began picking his way across the courtyard, stepping carefully among the stones. Though his appearance was the same, the change in his demeanor from the creature that had crept through the tower door was astonishing.
“Fire take us all!” he cried when he looked through the tower door at the mess inside. “What am I looking at?”
“Your home,” Cazia said. “Come away from there. If you’re going to wash, you’ll have to do it out here. Catch.”
She tossed him the soft cake thing—the soap—and began to prepare a spell. She could make water that was cold as glacial runoff, but for warm water? The changes she would need to make in her gestures were clear and simple. She cast the Fifth Gift, unleashing a light spray of water—barely warmer than his own body—onto the prince.
He looked at the lump of soap in his hands, sighed, and began to rub it on his arms. Cazia began to circle him; she could maintain the spell for a short while, but not long enough to clean this mess. She suppressed a laugh. How strange it was to be standing here, bathing a member of the Italga family with magic. How absurd the world had become.
They glanced up at the cliff, where a great many faces had gathered to watch in safety. Ghoron scowled at them. “When I’m clean, I’ll want to see my little girl. Jagia must be speaking in full sentences by now! I won’t help you with your research until I see her.”
Things got complicated after that.
Ghoron didn’t believe his daughter was nine years old. He didn’t believe he had been hollow for so long. He refused to accept that the empire had collapsed, that his brother and wife were dead, that his nephew the prince was lost, and that something called The Blessing was overrunning Kal-Maddum.
Cazia went over her story again and again, skipping the more outlandish parts. The Festival, the attack, the flight to Samsit, the spread of the grunts. The prince only shook his head, staring down at himself while he washed. Cazia could see a little smirk on his face, as though everyone were having an amusing joke at his expense.
As suddenly as if a chair had collapsed beneath her, Cazia fell into a cold fury. How dare he call her a liar after she’d lost so much and seen so much pain? Who did he think he was? With Ellifer gone, Ghoron Italga was nothing more than a half-starved old man with a name that would get him killed. Who was he to act like he knew what was happening out in the world?
She started up her water spell again, but this time she made sure it was neither gentle nor warm. Ghoron shrieked like a bat, then lost his balance and fell onto the stony courtyard. The sound he made next was pitiful, and in truth, he was pitiful himself. The thick brown filth caked onto his skin sloughed off him along with the foamy wet soap. His cleaned skin was bright red and scaly from the mistreatment it had received over the years. He looked like a criminal pulled from an imperial pit, and Fire take her if she was going to suffer his scorn.
Treygar stepped toward him. He held up one hand to Cazia, and contained in that gesture was a gentle admonishment, a weary agreement that the prince was being impossible, and the assurance that he would make the man understand. It was amazing, really, what Stoneface could fit into a single gesture.
She stalked away from the two of them toward the edge of the yard. At the westernmost end, the yard sloped downward a bit and then dropped off at the edge of a cliff. Kinz and Ivy were both sitting there, pitching stones into the water below.
“Kinz and I are arguing,” Ivy said very casually, “about whether the lake below is salt or fresh.”
“Not arguing,” Kinz said, “just making to disagree about the world. I say the lakeboys prefer the fresh, so this must be fresh.”
“I keep pointing out the kelp mixed with the reeds at the water’s edge. That is an ocean plant.”
An ocean… “Do you think Lake Windmark is connected to the ocean somehow? Like the tunnel we found outside the black fortress?”
“Markwind,” Kinz said blandly. “It is possible. I have seen such things in the east. There are more than we realized, yes?”
Did she mean alligaunts? Cazia wasn’t sure. As she stared down into the waters, some two hundred feet below, she saw dozens of the creatures swimming among the rocks. No, not dozens; dozens of dozens. How could so many predators survive in such a small space?
“What do you think?” Ivy asked. “Fresh or salt?”
Two hundred feet away. Cazia remembered how Ghoron—that pampered fool—had simply peered into the kinzchu stone and been sure he could recreate its magic. Simply by staring at it. Cazia had tried the same thing, many times, but it never worked for her. What had he done differently?
Cazia leaned out over the cliff, spurring Kinz and Ivy to hastily grab hold of her jacket. The water was dark green at the edges but night-black in the center, where it must have been very deep. It was also slightly choppy from the wind. With the Fifth Gift, she could make or purify water, but could she know it as well?
She stared down at it, trying to examine it the way Ghoron had examined the kinzchu stone. He couldn’t have used magic, not so soon after touching it, so she didn’t, either. She could think about her magic, though. She peered down at the water. Becoming a wizard had changed the way she understood her magic; had it also changed the way she could understand the world?
“It’s salty,” she said, sure it was true just as the words came out of her mouth. “Not as salty as some places, but… There’s a stream that feeds into it from the west, and…”
She was suddenly dizzy, then fell onto her side. The girls shrieked in terror, dragging her back from the cliff’s edge. Cazia heaved and retched,
her nearly empty stomach spitting up a thin stream of acid.
She lay with her face against the stones—she could see into them, too. The odd structure of them, their weight, and…
Her whole body began to tremble. Kinz held her arms still while Ivy stroked her hair and shushed her. For once, Cazia thought that was advice worth taking. She closed her eyes and did everything she would normally do to fall asleep: she slowed her breathing, relaxed her muscles, and did her best to empty her mind.
It worked, after a fashion. Of course, she didn’t sleep, but she did stop trembling. When she opened her eyes again, the stones were just stones. Just surface.
“Sudden dizziness?” Kinz asked. “That is unlike you. We have made to stand atop greater heights than this.”
“I can look into the world.” The words barely made any sense, and she was the one saying them. “I can look into the world and see its parts.”
“Well, do not do it again,” Ivy said. “We might not be able to catch you next time. You scared Kinz out of the life.”
“Yes, but the princess was unmoved.” Kinz took Cazia’s hand and helped her sit up.
“Thank you. This means something. I don’t know what, but going hollow and then coming back to myself has changed me in a way I do not fully understand. I didn’t even know I could do that.”
Kinz raised one eyebrow. “Make yourself sick?”
“It was the way the prince looked at the stone, yes? I saw your expression when he said it would be easy. You were not sure it was even possible before then, yes?”
“That’s true,” Cazia admitted. “He was hollow for longer than me and he went further. I’m not sure what he’s capable of. Fire take me, I’m not sure what I’m capable of.”
Ivy squeezed her hand. “Collapsing and vomiting, apparently. You wizards are a mighty lot.”
Cazia turned around to look back at the prince. Treygar was scrubbing the man’s back with more vigor than the old fellow found comfortable; that was clear. At the same time, the old soldier was speaking in a low, harsh voice that made Cazia a little fearful. Fire and Fury, she envied him the authority that age, size, and a deep male voice gave him, and she could not help resenting him a little bit, too.
“Let’s go.” The other girls followed her toward the prince, circling around so they would be slightly uphill from him. No one wanted his dirty water to touch the edge of their boots.
Ghoron apologized to her immediately. He explained that he’d mistaken them for Stoneface’s servants, and living a secluded life as he did left him vulnerable to pranks in his younger years. Cazia would have been happier with an apology that didn’t lay the blame elsewhere, but library or no, she needed his help to make more kinzchu stones. She nodded and forced herself to smile.
The soap worked remarkably well on him, but when Cazia rinsed it off--with warm water again, to the old prince’s obvious relief--it left him looking scrawny and scalded. Ghoron needed a sleepstone just for his patchy, scaly skin.
When he was clean, the villagers seemed convinced they would survive the morning and sent down meals for all of them. Ghoron’s came first, so he finished first and returned to the bottom of the cliff.
Esselba allowed herself to be lowered down the rope. She gave Ghoron an old scholar’s robe, and after he put it on, he attempted to embrace her. She wanted none of that. They sat on a flattish boulder at the foot of the cliff and talked quietly. Esselba’s arms were crossed and her feet pulled up tight to her body. The prince kept turning toward her with his arms loose and spread apart, but she only covered herself tighter when he did.
Cazia couldn’t help but wonder what their relationship had been. She looked too old to be Jagia’s mother. Grandmother? It was hard to tell. Eventually, she went back up the rope, and Ghoron shuffled barefoot toward them.
“I murdered someone,” he said. “I killed the girl who took care of my daughter.” He glanced at their faces; Cazia must have been staring at him in horror, because he immediately said, “She was only a servant,” as though that would lessen his crime somehow.
Before Cazia could think of an answer, Stoneface said, “Only a servant?”
“She was a good girl, though. Just a child, really. I don’t remember it.” He looked from one person to another. “I wasn’t myself when it happened. I suppose I shouldn’t keep saying ‘I did it’ when it was actually The Other. I’m not sure that will matter, though.” He turned at looked up to the top of the cliff. “I’m alone out here. No guards. No friends. No one to stand for me.”
“Do not expect me to make stand for you,” Kinz said.
“You’ll have to earn that,” Cazia said, turning the conversation back the way she wanted it to go. “You’re going to have to do the work to help us all. Then, afterward, we’ll see where things stand.”
Ghoron took a step back, drawing himself up tall in a shocked, fearful way. “You’re talking as though I might be hanged. I already told you, she was my servant. It was an immoral thing to do and unworthy of an Italga, but she belonged to me.”
“I have freed the village servants,” Tejohn said. “I have seen the collapse of the empire. Ellifer, Amlian, Lar, and everyone who supported them are gone. Their laws and customs no longer hold.”
The old prince quirked his head. “Is that why you’re here? So I can take Ellifer’s place?”
Cazia rolled her eyes, but the others just stared at him in stunned silence. “Only,” Treygar said, “if we wanted your throat cut.”
“He needs food and rest,” Kinz said. “Yes, he is made the bit of the fool, but people can not think clearly when they are half starved and exhausted.”
Cazia looked back at Ghoron. He stared down at his feet, his face flushed with embarrassment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I would like to lie down again, I think.”
Treygar moved away from them. “I’ll talk to the people in the village.”
A new tray of food had been lowered, so Ghoron ate and drank his fill. “Better,” he said. Then he went to one of the wooden flats, pulled a blanket over himself, and fell immediately into a deep sleep.
By this time, Ivy and Kinz had already followed Stoneface up the side of the cliff. Cazia was alone with the prince and sat on the flat beside him. She wasn’t a bit tired, but she couldn’t just leave the old man sleeping alone in the open. There were worse things than Durdric and hill lions in these mountains.
She sat beside him and stared out over the courtyard. It suddenly occurred to her that it had been created by scholars. The Eleventh Gift had been used to make this space flat, and the loose stones—well, some had fallen from the mountain behind her, obviously, but many more had the strange squarish shape that mining scholars often created. She picked it one up and tested the weight of it.
Could she stare down into it and see it magically, the way she had with the lake? Probably, but ugh. Why would she want to put herself through that again? And why hadn’t Ghoron gotten sick when he’d done it?
There were too many questions. She stared southward over the courtyard, past the tower to the gray and black stones of the mountainside. There were clumps of grass and odd pink flowers growing from between the rocks, and twisted trees on the few ledges in sight.
To the north were the cliff and the rest of the village. That was the wondrous land of dinnertime, but she couldn’t enter. Not while the foolish old man they had come to see lay helpless.
She was startled by the idea of how she would have reacted to this situation just half a year ago. Having lived almost all of her life in the palace, with only a few excursions into the city of Peradain itself, she would have hated and resented old Ghoron just out of habit. One or two of his clueless remarks would have labeled him an Enemy. The only way she would have looked after him was if Lar or one of her other friends had asked.
Now she felt little more than pity for the man. She’d seen and done too much to think of him as an Enemy; he had become the worst boogeyman of her nursery stories, the hol
lowed-out scholar, and they had dealt with him easily.
Going hollow was a curable condition now. Just that simple fact would change everything about the way people lived, assuming human beings survived the war that was overtaking them. She looked out eastward, down the long, long length of the valley. The green shallows, the fringe of brilliant green marsh plants that surrounded it, and even farther away were the green grasses, patches of bright yellow, blue, and orange of the wildflowers growing there.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she wiped them away with a dirty hand. Colchua should have been here with her. She’d seen and done so many amazing things…it wasn’t right that her brother had missed out on them. He was the one who liked adventure stories, not her. He was the one who had been born to be a hero.
Lar, too, if she thought about it. Before the Festival, he’d had a plan to change the way the empire worked, a plan he’d said would make things better. Now the empire was gone, and so was he.
Kinz began to climb down the rope that connected the village with the prince’s courtyard, then once she’d reached the bottom, it was hauled back up and a basket of food lowered. The herder girl carried it to her, stepping carefully among the loose rocks.
“You have made tears,” the older girl said. She placed the bowl in Cazia’s hand and embraced her. “The quick hug now, so you can get something to eat. After you eat, I will make the longer one.”
Great Way, she was glad they had figured out a way to be friends. “I’m sorry,” Cazia said. She didn’t like to cry in front of Kinz, who had lost so much more than any of them. “I know things have been hardest for you—”
Kinz put her hand on the bottom of the bowl and pushed it up toward Cazia’s mouth. It was rice, of course, with carrot and some sort of dark roasted bird meat. “There is no competition in grief,” Kinz said. Cazia didn’t want to look up at her, so she began to eat. Fire and Fury, she was hungry. The older girl sat on the flat beside her. “No race to be made the most painful. All of Kal-Maddum should know this now.”
The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way Page 16
