Stonewiser

by Dora Machado

  “And you, Lexia? Do you feel you have to follow me?”

  “I'm not compelled to do as you say, if that's what you mean,” Lexia said. “I just showed you. No matter what Lorian and the others say, I didn't vote for you out of compulsion. We suffered together in the Mating Hall, and together we'll see the Guild's new dawn.”

  Until this moment, Sariah had never known that Lexia believed in a notion as ethereal as the Guild's new dawn. “But how, Malord? You weren't there when Zeminaya sealed me with the legacy. The intrusion couldn't have sealed you herself. Could she?”

  Malord shrugged. “I don't know.”

  Mia had been witnessing their exchange in respectful silence, but now she perked up. “The intrusion didn't seal you, Malord. Auntie did.”

  Sariah's voice was too hoarse for words. “Mia, do you know when I sealed Malord?”

  “It was just the other day, when we were healing you, Auntie. You were unconscious, but you did it easily, a quick kiss of links. I didn't think much of it. I thought you knew.”

  Sariah's brain was boiling. Someone ought to put out the fire in the hearth. Despite the frigid weather outside, she was burning up. She had to face the truth. If she had sealed Malord as Mia said, then Lorian was right and she had sealed Lexia and the women of the pen as well.

  It was a lot to consider. The headache didn't make it any easier. What creature was capable of generating something like a seal? What did it take to imprint a seal on another wiser's mind?

  Arrogance. The belief that one had the right to intrude in another person's core. She, who had once been a slave, was horrified by the mere notion.

  If she lacked the will to do it, how could she have done it in the first place? Was there a trick to the seal or was her wiser's mind able to project it forward at will? Why, if she'd had the seal since her encounter with Zeminaya almost two years back, had she just recently sealed Malord? She had been unconscious, for the goddess's sake. Could the seal propel itself onwards without her leave?

  A self-perpetuating seal. The notion struck her as fantastic, but it was the only explanation that fit. What was its purpose? What was the extent of its power? And how did the damn thing work? What was it that Tirsis had said at the end of her tale? Our apologies, stonewiser, for the legacy unleashed, for the burdens bestowed.

  Sariah sank her face in her hands. She had been used. By long dead, recklessly scrupulous people whose ideals prevailed over time and space. Zeminaya. The sages. One had provided the seal. The others had powered it to spread. All she needed was a wising contact with her fellow stonewisers to transfer the seal, and ostensibly, the legacy. Oh, yes, it was pure Zeminaya; it was pure and devious sage wising. The legacy had never been a task to carry out, as she believed. Rather she, Sariah, had been the legacy's carrier all along.

  “I'm going after Kael and the prism.” She ducked behind the changing screen.

  “You can't go,” Malord said.

  “He's right, Auntie. You're not well.”

  “She has a fever,” Lexia said to the others. “Do you think she could be hallucinating?”

  Sariah struggled with a pair of unwieldy leggings and a rebellious tunic. She stumbled out from behind the screen just in time to spy the bewildered expression on Malord's face.

  “Perhaps you ought to wait for Kael to return,” the old wiser said.

  “Wait?” Sariah grabbed her boots. “We have very little time left. How can I wait?”

  Her latest discovery reaffirmed what she believed. Her search for a tale to reconcile the Bloods had become much more than a way to save Ars from the executioners’ encumbrances, much more than a way to save her life. It had become the only viable part of an ancient effort to unite the Blood, the only remaining way to save a world teetering at the brink of destruction.

  It struck Sariah then that she wasn't just working on behalf of Ars and the Domain, on behalf of the refugees at Targamon, or the Hounds, or to preserve the Goodlands. She was working on behalf of the whole Blood, and that included the Guild. To accomplish the legacy, she would have to try to fix the Guild too. It was the last source of order in a putrid world, a critical part of the healing that had to take place if their world was to survive.

  Curse Zeminaya and all the sages. What right did they have to use her like that? And what if Lexia had been wrong? What if the seal was designed to influence thinking and free will? Was anything in her life her own doing?

  Answers. Sariah needed answers. She needed proof that her life was more than someone else's game, that she was still the mistress of her own fate. She also needed a mantle. She rummaged through the pegs on the wall until she found one that would do.

  The stones. She grabbed them from under her pillow. She held the amplifying stone's river-smoothed shape in one hand and her polished memory stone in the other. She had to make sure she had all her facts right. The mere thought of wising stones made her stomach churn. Her palms were healing well enough, but she feared the shock of a sweltering tale decanted into her brittle mind. She gritted her teeth and pressed the stones to her palms.

  She got only pain from the touch, a cold jolt to the soul. If that wasn't alarming enough, in a sudden wrench, the banishment bracelet coiled around her wrist. Sariah swore she felt the strike of a single fang on her arm. She doubled over in a flash of body-splitting pain. The room spun like a wobbly wheel.

  “What is it?” Malord said.

  “Auntie, are you all right?”

  The blood in her veins turned cold. Her bones froze. Her skin grew taut and brittle all over. The soft, sensitive plane of her palms thickened and dulled. She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but there was something very wrong with her.

  She couldn't understand. A quick check revealed there was still a pure red glow in the center of the bracelet's last stone. She had a few more days, maybe. But what was it that the executioner had said? When the time comes, Mercy will not hesitate. She'll suck you dry of your essence before abandoning you to die as it's your sworn fate.

  She sought out the power that had fueled her since her breaking, the persuasive warmth that fired her palms, the heat that streamed seductively through her veins. It wasn't flowing through her core. Instead, it was spouting out of it like brew spurting from a punctured flask.

  What was a stonewiser's essence if not stonewising itself?

  Terror. Without her stonewiser's power, her body was an empty shell. She had been muzzled before. She had survived. But this was different. Back at the Mating Hall she had known that her power remained in her body, beyond her reach but inside of her. Now, her power was deserting her, too slippery to grasp and too fluid to stop. How long could she live without it?

  “What's wrong, Auntie? What's the matter with her?”

  A tremor began in her core, a distant murmur growing to a roar, rattling her bones and pounding in her head. Sariah used the last of her strength to bring her thumb to her lips and surrendered to the darkness.

  Forty-two

  “THERE, THERE, IT'S past now,” Lexia said. “You're back and you mustn't be afraid.”

  Sariah's joints ached like the rot. “Has there been word?”

  “No news from your man.”

  “What happened?”

  “You've had your first bout with the prism's darkness,” Lexia said. “It happens sometimes. The Council members’ visit may have had something to do with it. Stress brings it on. Or anger. It's all that darkness. It stays with us even after the prism is gone.”

  Sariah sat up. “How often do these bouts occur?”

  Lexia shrugged. “No one knows for sure. It's different for everybody. There's nothing you can do but stop what you're doing when you feel it coming, find a safe place to stand it for a few hours, and bite down on leather to spare your teeth. But it's over now.”

  “How long was I out?”

  Lexia hesitated. “A few days.”

  Sariah clenched. She tried to keep in her frustration, she tried and failed. She groaned like a wounded be
ast. “Why do you do this to me?”

  “Me?” Lexia stared at her with puzzled concern.

  “Sorry. I wasn't talking to you.” She was yelling at Meliahs, the fickle goddess, who knew very well how much Sariah needed the time she had just lost.

  The bout had left Sariah exhausted, but that wasn't the worst of it. The prism's darkness had struck her at the same time that the bracelet had unleashed its lethal sentence. Lexia didn't know that. Neither did the others.

  Sariah dragged herself out of bed and stumbled to the wash basin. Her reflection in the mirror shocked her. What a frightening mess she was. Too pale, too skinny, too weary, with her razor-short hair spiking like a nest of thorns. She splashed water on her face and neck and then scrubbed herself mercilessly, as if by washing her body she could cleanse her soul's filth.

  So this is what it felt like to be ordinary, empty and cold inside, exposed to life's inclemency and bare of all protection, helpless, destitute, powerless. She had often fantasized about living an ordinary life. But how did normal people exist without the goddess's divine touch, without the stone's authority ennobling their lives, with such a fragile sense of the self?

  Lexia hovered like a bee over a hive. “Look, I know how you feel. It's always tough afterwards. Sadness sometimes follows a difficult birth. You had a hard birth, plus the prism's darkness. There's also Violet's betrayal. The gall of the wench, to tell the mistress you were turning wising tricks in her pen. But the body heals, sometimes slowly, but it heals. I've lost four, Sariah. It doesn't get any easier.”

  Sariah couldn't imagine enduring four times the pain.

  “I get to keep this one.” Lexia patted her belly and smiled. “You should hear the debate at the Hall of Numbers. But I'm going to keep her even if I have to quit the Guild, move to the Domain and eat the soles of my boots.”

  Sariah dried herself, blotting her watery eyes as well. “The others,” she said. “Do you ever—?”

  “Rumors about a wiserling nursery are just that. We looked everywhere. I think they kill them if they're not gifted.”

  Images of Violet's dead baby flashed in Sariah's mind. She held the bile down.

  “I'm not really helping, am I?” Lexia said. “I thought perhaps you wanted to talk.”

  Talk? No. She needed to do. Something. But where to begin?

  Lexia took a deep breath. “Sariah, you can't waste your time looking for the prism. You can't even think about leaving the keep right now. The halls are leaderless. The councilors are scheming. No one knows what or who to believe. You've got to assume your election.”

  “My election?” She felt like cackling. If the other stonewisers knew that she couldn't wise, they wouldn't be so sure about her election. Would they? She had a vision of blood splashing the Hall of Stones’ walls; of Hounds slaughtering stonewisers by the hundreds and Goodlanders hunting Domainers by the pound of flesh.

  The prism, the baby, Kael. It was as if all of her life's losses had coalesced into a monstrous cudgel that beat down on her soul with crushing finality. She feared the end of Ars, the war, the rot. She feared she was going to live long enough to hear firsthand the news of Kael's death.

  Mercy is a fickle friend when it's all self-pity, a tidbit of Tirsis's Wisdom echoed in her mind. She glanced down at her bracelet and traced the tiny tears etched on Mercy's link. Sariah had once found the strength not to cripple Kael with her sorrow. Could she do the same for herself?

  “You can start by taking this back.” Lexia pulled something out of her pocket and put it between Sariah's hands. It was round, heavy and cold between her fingers, but by the way her hands tensed around it, it could have been stinging hot.

  Her stonewiser's brooch. Lexia must have retrieved it from Grimly's abandoned quarters. In contrast with the brooch's coldness, the round onyx stone embossed at the center was pulsing with warmth. Sariah couldn't have managed a word through her constricted throat if she tried. With the exception of the last two years, she had worn that brooch all her life, a symbol of her faith, a sign of her obedience.

  She traced the intricate lines of the ivy of knowledge edging the brooch, the intertwining vines of light that radiated from the black onyx, the four garnets on the subsidiary bosses, the honeycomb of silver filigree. She craved the brooch's presence between her breasts, the cold metal standing like a shield to her battered heart.

  She shoved it back into Lexia's hands. “I don't ever want to see that thing again.”

  “But Sariah—”

  “The answer is no, Lexia, and no again.”

  “But the stonewisers, they took a huge risk, they voted for you. Won't you at least think about it?”

  “I can't come back to the Guild. I just can't.”

  “Sariah, we need you. Those Hounds are ready to slaughter us at any time. We don't know what to do about the Domainers streaming into the Goodlands. The chill is never ending, the crops are sure to fail. And then there are those stories…” Lexia actually shivered.

  “What stories?”

  “There are tales, that stonewisers are no longer welcomed in some places. They say that Meliahs’ own, the stone eater, has returned to clear the land of stonewisers. They said Grimly sent a party to investigate the claims. They never returned.”

  “Rumors. Who can believe anything that Grimly does or says?”

  “Things aren't as they used to be,” Lexia insisted. “The world's changing. We're changing too. Think about it. Maybe that seal just gives stonewisers courage.”

  Courage? Not when panic was running rampant and the keep boiled with frightening, improbable tales. The seal wasn't giving Sariah any courage at the moment either, but then again, she wasn't really a stonewiser anymore. Was she?

  “You taught us to stand on our own,” Lexia said. “Did you know we made our own way out of the Mating Hall?”

  Was that true?

  “We took advantage of the siege,” Lexia said. “We followed your plan. We lit the fire at the height of the last attack. It wasn't the keep's guard we met at the courtyard. It was those creature warrior things—”

  A knock startled them both. Lexia went to answer the door.

  “I've got a message for Stonewiser Sariah,” she heard a man's voice say.

  “I'm sorry, but she is sick and can't receive you.” Lexia began to close the door.

  “But it's urgent,” the messenger said.

  “I'm fine, Lexia.” Sariah stepped to the door. “What is it?”

  “Mistress Lorian summons you right away.”

  What did the witch want with her now? Sariah couldn't hazard a guess, but she had her own reasons for wanting to see Lorian.

  “I'll go. Do you know what this is about?”

  The grim expression on the messenger's face chilled whatever little warmth remained in Sariah's body.

  “Something bad has happened,” he said. “The mistress says it's something terrible.”

  “I'm not sure you should be up and about,” Lexia said.

  “It could be a trap,” the keeper grumbled. “She who walks without caution risks the final tumble.”

  “You and your men are my caution,” Sariah said. “And I'm not going because Lorian summoned me. I have questions for her and her friends.”

  Sariah, Lexia, the keeper and her Hound escort were following Lorian's messenger down the keep's busy main lane. Sariah was having trouble keeping up with the others. Her breath was short, her heart was faltering, but she had to find a way to secure the keep while she figured out the rest. Sariah didn't know what was more surprising—the sheer numbers crowding the keep or the astounding mix of people bustling about despite the frigid weather. Hounds, Domainers, Goodlanders and stonewisers were living together in an uneasy truce, a miraculous if nerve-racking sight.

  The hostility among the different factions was palpable in the air. But the changes in the keep were almost shocking. Above the gates, the Guild's usually lonely black and gold standard was flanked by the Hounds’ five-bladed slash banner
and the blue gonfalon of the house of Ars. Even if Kael wasn't there, the sight of his pennant warmed her heart. It was surrounded by other Domainer banners, including the yellow one with the three embroidered tupelo trees. The forester was playing her game. The green banner with the massive “T” on the oak's trunk gave it away as Targamon's new standard. Good old Mara. She had taken the legacy to heart. When had it all come to this?

  Lorian met them in the back alley as high-strung as a charging bull. “No one must know. Do you hear me? If this gets out, we're doomed. Doomed.”

  “Know what?” Sariah said.

  “This is a day of penance and lamentation.” Olden appeared out of nowhere with Uma in tow. “Meliahs weeps at the sight of our wickedness. We must leave, before it's too late.”

  “Leave?” Uma asked. “You mean abandon the keep?”

  “Hush,” Lorian said. “Someone might hear you. How did you two find out about this?”

  “About what?” Uma asked.

  “It's all her fault.” The point of Olden's newly sculpted staff aimed at Sariah.

  “He's right.” Lorian clutched Sariah's arm and dragged her along. “If you hadn't gone on about lies in the stones, if you hadn't caused a war and brought all these strangers to the keep, this would have never happened.” She halted abruptly before a crack in the cobblestones and yanked Sariah to her knees. “Look!”

  Sariah couldn't believe her eyes.

  “Are you happy now?” Lorian said. “For the first time in the Guild's history, the rot has breached the keep.”

  The rot had breached the Guild's keep. With the wall so powerfully wised, it didn't seem possible. Sariah stared at the small lesions bubbling faintly among the cobblestones. At least it was the weaker kind of rot, the easier form to contain, like the lesser lesions she had seen at Targamon. Sariah struggled with the notion. The rot had defeated the wisings of generations and now simmered like an innocent little rain puddle just a few steps from the Hall of Stones?