Jeje had not forgotten how good sex with Tau was, but somehow it was even better than she’d remembered.
Most of her encounters were romps with paid professionals, and recently the occasional night with a friend who, like her, enjoyed an un-demanding encounter. Once the passion was spent it stayed spent, and with dawn they returned to work, untroubled by emotional tangles.
Tau made her body feel like silk spun out in gleaming threads. She opened her eyes, loving the sight of him lying at her side, the reflection from the water below her open stern windows spangling him with early morning golden sunlight. Was it his training or her passion that made it so much better with Tau? Probably both. Somehow she found that funny, and shook with silent laughter, which for some reason made her eyes sting. Not tears! She hated tears, but had no defenses, not even a name, for tenderness.
To get rid of the tightness in her throat, she lifted her head to peer out the stern windows just behind her elbow. The open stern windows.
Her mood veered wildly, this time the laughter stayed laughter and bubbled up inside her chest. They must have given the night watch quite a performance! She snickered. A soft noise that woke Tau.
The sight of his long eyelashes lifting hollowed her out inside. “Happy?” His voice was low and husky, and inflamed her so much that she attacked him again.
Presently they lay side by side, weary but content. “Teach me those tricks,” she said drowsily.
“Gladly. Jeje, I cannot express how much I missed you.”
You could have seen me a year ago. More, she thought, but she wouldn’t say it. Nevertheless his antennae were as fine as a butterfly’s; he began, without her having to ask, to tell her his adventures since their last parting.
It took a long time, because he omitted nothing except Evred’s final command. He knew how she would respond and anyway first they must survive the Venn.
Besides, Jeje had no interest in politics. “Huh.” She rolled over, her fingers playing with the ruby earring he’d replaced in his ear. She was glad the diamond was gone. “I can almost feel sorry for that cousin of yours.”
Tau chuckled. “This might be the first time Lord Yaskandar Dei has ever been pitied.”
“Pity for one heartbeat, maybe. Typical of a ’risto! Waits for someone to give him something to do with his life, instead of going out and finding it. Like us. Well, like me.” Jeje patted the bulkhead.
“And me. My family name may be famous, but it did not suddenly bestow land and wealth on me,” he said, smiling. “The title is what they call a courtesy.” He quirked an ironic brow.
Jeje had no interest in titles. “Why’d that queen of Sartor go insane?”
“I don’t know that she’s insane, but crazed . . . perhaps. My mother told me her story years ago. The queen, when a princess, was spoiled beyond belief. She was famed for her temper, but of course everyone around her just smiled and accepted it. Then one day she destroyed some ancient treasure for a frivolous reason, and in anger her father put her to work as a laborer. She ended up rebuilding a house, stone and wood, and the experience was so satisfying that it changed her for life. When he died she declared that all aristocrats would provide service in the same way, and the more they resisted, the more determined she became.”
Jeje puffed a laugh. “They almost sound like . . . like people.”
“Under the armor, symbolic and not, we’re all frangible. The queen also found comfort in physical labor when mentally wrestling with questions of political agency, and so her favorite method of resolving problems was forced on all others. She never married, never had a child. Her heir is reputed to be the most successful hypocrite in court.”
“And so when this Queen Servitude dies, they’ll all go right back to their old ways.”
“Probably. Anyway, Yaska might have stayed, but my cousin Joret thinks he was thwarted in love.”
“Love,” Jeje repeated, throwing her head back on the pillow. The sun had risen enough to shine off the water, sending light patterns to writhe on the ceiling of her dear ship. Love. How she loved Vixen! And Tau. But in such different ways.
Again he seemed to divine her thoughts. “People ridicule the Colendi for having thirty verbs for types of love and twice as many nouns. But communication is important to them, and that means everyone agreeing on how important words are defined.”
Jeje stirred. “Except that everybody says the Colendi hide meanings behind other meanings, which hide more meanings, until they say red and everyone thinks they really mean green.” Tau laughed, shaking his head, and she went on. “Love. Yes. Last night I was thinking it’s so clear just how much Inda hates going back to war again, but here he is, doing it for love of his homela—Tau, what is it? What did I say?”
Tau got up, his face turned away as he collected his things and moved toward the fresh water to wash up. She waited for an answer until she realized that there wasn’t going to be one.
Chapter Fifteen
SHIVERING with cold, Brit Valda stumbled as quickly as she dared into the cave high in the desolate mountains above Searn at the south end of Mearsies, straining every nerve for sign of betrayal. The rustle and flitter of bats overhead made her stoop, arms over her head. The creatures squeaked then were gone, leaving her alone. She sensed it, smelled it.
She flung herself past the first turn, scraping her shin on a stone. Biting back a cry of anguish, she pulled a small glowglobe from her filthy robe and whispered over it, ignoring the tears of pain. The shadows vanished, leaving her in a crevasse with water trickling down from above and flowing away in a shallow stream to disappear beneath the rubble behind her. She yanked up her robe to examine the bark on her throbbing shin. A scrape; she ignored it and surveyed the cave.
Humans had lived here some time ago: there was a ceramic pot, a rough stone ledge too regular to be natural. The cave might even have been made comfortable, she thought, ducking below the slanting ceiling. That argued a place chosen, not run to, a retreat and not a mere hideaway.
She hoped that meant that the ancient map it had taken one of her dags four months to find had been marked true.
She trailed the fingers of her free hand over the stone. Other hands had touched here, enough to blunt the roughness of the stone, but long ago. Another promising sign.
Heartened, she stooped through the small, angled hole which widened into a domed chamber. Animals had lived here more recently; there were two nests. The bats appeared to make their home in an adjacent chamber.
Various sized openings gaped darkly here and there. Valda walked by each, listening, breathing, feeling the air. Faint—ever so faint—came the sound she listened for, though it seemed to reach past her ears into her head. It was a little like singing, midway between human voices and the wind.
She could not yet determine which tunnel led to the Selenseh Reidian, but she knew the mystery was nigh: “selen” was Sartoran for harmony, “se” of, “rei” as a prefix could mean bright but also sun-touched, and “dian” was stone in the plural. Why “dian,” which contained the word “di”—day—she did not know, as “dan” was also a word for stone, but she’d learned that the Sartorans built meanings inside of meanings in their words.
The map seemed to be true. She hoped that meant the claims about the Selenseh Reidian were true—that they were pools of magical power, perhaps even loci for the mysterious beings native to this world. She pushed into the tunnel in which she sensed the subaudible thrum of magic and walked on for what seemed a long time. But there was no way to gauge time, or even direction. Very different from the tunnels of home, with their brilliant mosaics and carvings, so that you always knew where you were, and the currents of subtly scented air blown by ancient magics gave one a sensory connection to time. Here she felt stranger by the moment, as if she walked and walked yet the world became more still around her, all sense of motion and change diminishing.
A glow, like a summer sunset through a prism, was her only warning. She’d braced for the appearanc
e of powerful Sartoran gatekeepers to demand an accounting. She was alone.
Alone in an immeasurable space filled with glowing crystals of every imaginable hue. Crystals, diamonds, perhaps some other stone altogether. She had no name for the patterned complexity of facets reflecting and refracting their own light. The intensity as well as the spectrum of that light dazzled her eyes, making her feel warm, a little giddy, the air too pure to breathe; she knew she was only perceiving a fragment of the phenomenon here.
She fell to her knees, her chest heaving. Laugh or sob, she was overwhelmed, and yet aware that, at least for now, all her hurts had gone away.
But she must not stay. She could not use this chamber of stones; she would not risk defiling what she instinctively felt was consecrated space.
She forced herself to step out again, though the longing to return was sharp. But clear thought returned with even a little distance, and she did not need to test the space to know that whatever magic she did would be untraceable relative to the powerful presence here.
She laid her transfer tokens upon the ground in a wide circle, so that if any two mages arrived at the same time they would not try to share the same space and impel one another violently into the stone walls.
She said aloud, in Sartoran, “I promise my purpose is peaceful, though I know my people have been proscribed by the Sartoran Mage Council.”
No answer.
Hoping she did not summon her diminishing group to their deaths, she whispered the contact spell over and over, touching each token.
Ulaffa arrived first, looking impossibly old and frail, his once plump body diminished almost as much as Valda’s own. “Erkric is about to give the signal for the war fleets to depart,” he gasped. “I cannot stay.”
Valda said, “I just returned from Twelve Towers. King Rajnir’s chambers are free of the Norsunder wards again.”
Ulaffa’s frizzy hair floated around the dome of his head as he smiled. “Again? Erkric was furious the last two times. I cannot begin to tell you how enraged. He’s not sleeping, feels conspirators all around him—”
“As there are,” Valda said. “Good. Let him fear. So long as you are safe.”
Ulaffa smiled sadly. “He has assigned me to Seigmad, just in case I might be tempted to sympathize with Durasnir. But Byarin holds fast. He complains of Durasnir most bitterly all the time. Unfair watches, too slow and old, sleeps too much, drinks dark beer on duty. Erkric cherishes every slander.”
Valda gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Tell me about the conspiracies. I overheard some young dags-in-training talking, when I was in the royal chambers. They thought the chambers empty, and safe of spiderwebs, poor heedless children. If I had not just removed all the wards! Never mind. The report was that Nanni Balandir had been killed by that terrible stone magic,” Valda said.
Ulaffa made the sign of Rainorec. “Yes, but not by Erkric. It was Yatar. Nanni was adamant that Signi Sofar had become a Seer, and she would not act against—” He waved a hand as if to push aside the subject. “There is no time. Erkric has taken Yatar to be his assistant night and day. Under his eye. The others have been placed under threat of a stone spell if they use the Norsunder magic except when ordered, and he won’t give them access to any more of those spells. That means his responsibilities just grow. I cannot stay, Brit. Tell me this: Is Signi safe?”
Valda thought of Signi, visibly pregnant, sitting unnoticed among the beginner or unambitious mages who renewed Fire Stick spells. Two months of tedium earned enough pay for a modest year’s living, and furnished all the gossip out of Sartor’s capital. “She is in Western Sartor, serving as a Fire Stick Mage.”
Ulaffa smiled. “Good, useful work, and so many of them, her traces will be buried by all the other efforts. Even if he had time to seek, Erkric could never find her there.” He made a sign and vanished.
Presently Dag Anchan appeared, barefooted, wearing the coarse midden-brown clothing and iron torc of a thrall. She was a young woman, her hands rough and red from daily labors in the laundry.
She straightened up, looked around, and breathed deeply. “Oh.” She clasped her work-roughened hands to tug ineffectually at the iron torc circling her throat. “Oh, it feels good in here.”
“What can you report on the king?”
“I’ve only been able to get near enough to put the spindle through twice,” Anchan said, her blue eyes tired. Then she gave a quick, triumphant smile. “But I felt it work, and Dag Erkric has stationed even more Guards around the king’s chambers.”
“You are the main reason we are met here,” Valda said. “Do you have the spindle?”
“Of course.” Anchan’s humor died away. “If I am caught, I can plunge it into my own heart. Better that than what he does to people.”
From her robe she pulled a sharp-pointed silk spindle which Valda took into her own hands. She’d prepared layers of spells to make this task easier. They were far harder to hold, but she’d gained practice in the past three years. She layered the spells on, casting them to overpower Erkric’s evil shroud of magic lying over the king’s living space. These spells did not remove the mind-magic, alas, but they did remove the terrible protective spells that kept the king isolated.
“I am going to try to get near the king again,” Valda said. “But you know Erkric must first be at a safe distance. Now. I just finished removing all his work at Twelve Towers, and I left my signature over everything. As soon as he finds out, I trust he will transfer back and feel sufficiently threatened to commence replacing all his wards yet again. Maybe he’ll take more time and lay some traps. It will keep him busy and at a distance from Llyenthur.”
“Dangerous,” Anchan said.
“But I do not intend to go back. We are all running out of strength, and time. Our efforts must be concentrated on the coming battle.”
Anchan bowed her head, took the spindle back, and slid it into her clothes. She vanished back to the laundry at Llyenthur, leaving Valda leaning against the wall, forearms across her middle as she recovered from the effects of the magic. Even that was easier to bear here, leaving her to wonder if anyone would ever know of Anchan’s heroism. Not many would have the strength and conviction to wear the iron torc of a thrall and labor ceaselessly in the laundry wherever the fleet went just to gain access to the king’s chambers.
The next one to appear was tall, massive Dag Byarin, attached by Erkric to spy on Oneli Stalna Durasnir.
“We’re about to leave,” Byarin said. “I dare not stay but a moment.” Passing his hand over his eyes, he drew a deep breath, then said rapidly, “It has been terrible. Oneli Stalna Durasnir has had little success in getting wood. There isn’t any. So the war fleets sail as is. Erkric drives him mercilessly.” An inward jolt—some private signal—and he whispered and vanished.
You, too, feel the strain, Abyarn Erkric. Our efforts must be everything, or nothing.
After a time, Valda realized her last two transfer tokens were not going to bring anyone. She made her way slowly out, tears of grief cold on her face as she mourned dags Audir and Falki. She hoped their deaths had been quick.
In Llyenthur Harbor, the remnants of the Southern Fleet not on blockade duty lay with anchors atrip, the drakans on station in ranks of nine across the inner harbor, sail crews motionless at sheets and halyards, awaiting orders.
Much farther out, the North and East War fleets were just visible hull down, awaiting their signal to sail. The West Fleet was only present symbolically: in reality they were strung out in orderly patrols all the way to Nathur, the raiders forming a search net to stop and question every ship they could catch at the west end of the strait.
Oneli Stalna Durasnir worked hard on controlling his fury as he finished climbing the long switchback brick-patterned stair cut into the palisade leading to the manse that had once belonged to a prince. That prince had been replaced by the Venn governor when the area fell to the conquerors, who redesigned and rebuilt the house. On the departure of the Venn the house
was taken over by a self-proclaimed duke as Llyenthur declared itself part of a new kingdom. The duke—some said a former thief—had vacated in haste, leaving the harbor to the delegation of the guild Durasnir had met the day of the typhoon.
Now the manse—in the process of being expanded to a palace—was the king’s royal headquarters, guarded at every door and hall by silent white-clad Erama Krona. The number of Guards was double what the king required for his own prestige at home. Because the locals had caused no difficulties whatsoever, Durasnir wondered if Valda was having any success against Erkric. He had heard nothing whatsoever for an entire year, but he judged from Erkric’s increasing tension that the silent war in the magical realm paralleled the military efforts.
In silent resistance to Erkric’s magic, Durasnir refused to use transfer tokens. So he was rowed in, had to walk down the long pier, across the wharf, and up the switchback stairs.
It gave him time to think and to get a grip on his emotions. He knew he would lose this contest, but his own sense of justice—his determination to do everything he could to preserve the lives of those under his command—required him to make the attempt.
He reached the doors.
Durasnir was waved through into the circular chamber that had been converted to a throne room. Curved windows were cut to let in the strong southern light. The banner of the Golden Tree hung from the domed ceiling.
The senior captains were all there, winged helms under their arms. At his approach they moved to either side in strict rank order. Durasnir stood alone before the king, who sat on the throne, his magnificent robes hiding how fleshy he’d become. His gaze, as ever, was blank. Durasnir noted, then regretfully dismissed, the faint sheen of sweat across the king’s brow. He had tried to descry signs of intelligence there over the past year, coming to the reluctant conclusion he was fooling only himself. Maybe Rajnir’s clothing was too heavy for the warm weather.
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