by Dora Machado
She wondered if Meliahs and all her sisters had abandoned the land for good.
“Saba?” The keeper gestured with his head to one end of the alleyway.
Sariah's throat barely managed a dry gulp. A large group of Uma's stonewisers were blocking the way.
“I said nobody should know about this,” Lorian spat. “Why are they here?”
“Olden told me we might need them,” Uma said defensively.
Sariah eyed the other way out of the alleyway. Her hopes were for naught. Olden's stonewisers blocked her path with hefty chunks of stones in their hands. She wasn't sure she was going to get to ask her questions after all.
“Stone her,” someone cried out from the crowd.
“She's brought the rot to the keep.”
Sariah's voice was a hoarse whisper. “Keeper?”
“Wise is he who survives the trap, for he shall never be caught again.” The keeper's whistle strummed Sariah's eardrums.
The window shutters on both sides of the alleyway flew open. The few doors opening onto the narrow lane blew from their hinges. Armed Hounds were everywhere, inching down the lane with their backs against the walls, deploying at either side of Sariah, perched on the window sills, standing along the distant rooftops wielding claws, arrows and spears.
A massacre. That's what Sariah had on her hands. One wrong move, from anybody, and the uneasy truce that held the keep together would be over. Panic bubbled in her belly like a ready stew. She surveyed the faces in the alley. The stonewisers were angry, resentful and bitter. The Hounds stood rigidly, ready for the fight.
“Wait,” Sariah said aloud. “We can fix this.”
“Fix the rot?” Lorian said. “How?”
“There's a group of Domainers trained to fix this weaker kind of rot,” Sariah explained. “They're from Targamon. Some of them might even be here. We don't have to abandon the keep.”
“Are you sure?” Lorian asked. “Will you swear?”
“On my stonewiser's oath.”
“Can't you see that she's lying?” Olden said. “She brought the rot to the keep. What are you waiting for? Stone her!”
“So you still believe the old legends?” Sariah let the question hang in the air for a moment. “Please, Olden. Times have changed. We all know that the rot doesn't travel on the bottom of the Domainers’ feet. We can fix this. All this time, you've been playing your own game.”
“This might be a game to you,” Olden said with an aggrieved look on his face. “Me, I'm for the good of the Guild—”
“Save it.” She had to sound confident. “I overheard you at Arron's tent.”
“Overheard me?”
“At Arron's tent?” A few gasps came from the crowd.
Sariah was thinking on her feet. “I was there the night that you, Uma and Lorian visited Arron in his camp. What was it that you promised Arron after the others left his tent? Ah. Yes. You promised you would try to talk some sense into them.”
“Preposterous. I'd never try to—”
“You have been trying to persuade them to join Arron all this time, and when that failed, you tried to empty the keep of stonewisers, a move that could only weaken the defenses here and allow Arron to retake the keep. That would have been a sweet triumph over me, not to mention Grimly.”
It was Lorian who bit on Sariah's lure. “How exactly has he been trying to empty the keep?”
She had only a few moments to transform a convoluted turn of events into irrefutable proof. How? Tell the story. Quickly. Make the case.
“This place that I just mentioned, Targamon. It's a farm out in the borderlands. The family there never looked kindly on Arron's Shield. One day, the rot's shallow lesions appeared in the backfields. There had been no earth tremors, no failed fields, no indications of rot until that very day.”
“What happened then?” Uma asked.
“Even as the rot arrived in Targamon, it was a lighter version. The bushes continued flowering and the soil was fertile. Still, the farm was ruined. The laborers left in droves. In lieu of the orders, the Shield came and took the last of the seed. Coincidence, you think?” She met the riveted stares. “I don't think so. Instead, I ask, how come the farms and villages that refuse to help Arron have a higher incidence of this lesser version of the rot?”
“How does this have anything to do with what's happening at the keep?” Lorian asked.
Instead of answering Lorian's questions, Sariah asked her own. “How was Olden so quickly informed when you found the rot? Did you send a messenger to him?”
Lorian's head swiveled on her wiry neck. “No.”
“Then how did he know to show up here? Why did he bring Uma along, and all these other stonewisers?” She didn't wait for a response. “Because he knew. Because he decided to use the same strategy Arron has been using to control villages and farms—planting rot roots on the lands of those who defy him. It was Olden who carried the rot root into the keep, the only possible way of bringing the rot inside these thoroughly wised walls.”
“Olden planted a rot root in the keep?” Lorian's mouth wouldn't close.
“How else does this lesser version of the rot make sense?”
The crowd went into a stunned silence. A gust of icy wind blew through the narrow lane, chilling Sariah and the crowd. Anger rose from the alleyway like vapor steaming from a boiling pot. It happened suddenly.
“Stone him! Stone him!” the crowd began to chant.
“He should be quartered first,” someone else yelled.
“Wait,” Sariah said. “What you want is justice—”
An irate Olden confronted his followers. “Are you so stupid as to believe her word over mine? Did I not tell you about the seal she forced on you? Can't you see this is not your own doing, but rather the seal working its strange power on you?”
Sariah couldn't let the notion go any further. “Did I call you here today? Were you forced to come to this alleyway and stone me out of a sudden compulsion? Did you hear strange thoughts in your head? Did you experience some sudden decrease in will that made your actions possible? No? Neither did I.”
Olden tried to speak. “But—”
“I came here because Lorian called me, with words, brought by a messenger. She called me. Somebody called you here as well, not with a mysterious seal that somehow affects your reason but with words, with rumors, perhaps even with innuendos. Why? Because someone wanted you to kill me. I ask you, why would I try to command you to kill me? How will that serve my purposes? And if I have this power over you through this mysterious seal, why are we here at all? Why haven't I asked you to kill Olden instead? Or Lorian, or Uma for that matter?
“Because I have no sway over you. And if you're feeling persuaded in any way by my words or my actions, then chalk it up to your reason, not to the seal.”
“She's right,” someone said.
“The seal didn't bring us here.”
“Olden summoned us.”
“He planted a rot root in the keep.”
The stone that hit Olden was followed by others. Uma dove into the crowd. Lorian took cover beneath the eaves. Sariah's voice was drowned in the uproar. Olden stumbled under a hail of rocks, but managed to stay on his feet.
“I am a Guild councilor,” he bellowed. “You'll refrain from such disrespect.”
A jagged rock sliced open his forehead and drenched his face with blood.
“Stop!” Sariah shouted. “Stop!”
Her Hound escort closed ranks around her like a human shield.
“Let me out!” Sariah pounded on the Hounds’ backs. “Move, you oafs. Move!”
“But why, saba?” the keeper asked. “Why would you want to protect that fickle man who wanted to stone you?”
“Protect him? Nay, I don't want to protect him, but this is not justice, this is murder—”
“He deserves it,” Lexia said.
Sariah tried to squeeze herself between the tightly linked Hounds. “Let me pass!”
“An
d where would those stones go if you tried to stop them?” the keeper said. “No, saba, we won't incur the stonewisers’ rage for no reason. You said we have to make friends. This man is their problem. What is blood drawn but blood unleashed to freely flow?”
The keeper was right. The angry crowd would turn against the Hounds in a heartbeat if they intervened. Once attacked, the Hounds would exterminate every stonewiser in sight with compulsive efficiency, unleashing the massacre Sariah feared. To make matters worse, she didn't have any stone power to help persuade anybody to do as she willed. She couldn't even make a simple stone burst.
But just beyond her escort's fringes a man was dying a terrible death. He was a crooked man, a fickle soul, perhaps even a man who deserved the stoning sentence. Yet he was dying a death without justice within the land's last bastion for justice.
Sariah tried to stop the stoning. She tried to shout above the crowd's noise. She tried to push the Hounds out of the way and then she tried to crawl in between their linked legs. But the Hounds stood with unshakable determination, her strength was ebbing steadily, and so was her hope. She winced at the memory of Kael, who had once been unfairly stoned. She remembered his pain, his nightmares. Kael and Olden were hardly similar men, but all men, good and bad, felt pain and injustice just the same.
Olden's heavy body crashed on the ground. The stones kept raining on him, a deadly hail of granite against bursting flesh. Through a forest of legs, Sariah saw Olden's face, contorted in a grimace of pain. There was a sickening crack. The brain began to ooze from his broken skull, spilling onto the ground. Hands grappled with her limbs, but Sariah was unable to tear her stare from the gruesome spectacle. Even as the Hounds retreated in silent synchronicity, dragging her away from the carnage, she spotted the dark flow of Olden's blood trickling between the cobblestones and joining the bubbling rot pools.
Justice had no hope in a world where stones killed propelled by rage.
Her heart dropped into her stomach when she spotted Malord knuckling his half-body through her escort, coming toward her at top speed.
“What is it, Malord? What's wrong?”
“I have news,” he wheezed. “You never told me. They've come. They're here!”
“Is it Kael?” Sariah's heart raced. “Has he come back?”
“A last chance,” Malord said. “You've given yourself, all of us, a last chance.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Metelaus has arrived,” Malord said. “The executioners are here.”
Forty-three
THE SHOCK AND grief on Metelaus's bearded face when he set eyes on her confirmed what Sariah already knew—that she looked as dead as she felt, that all hope was lost. But his expression changed when Mia landed in his arms like a whirlwind of affection, as if her kisses revived his weariness and her laughter restored his hope.
Metelaus beheld his daughter adoringly. “You've grown taller by a head.”
“Wait until I tell you about Rig and my Hounds,” Mia said.
“You and I have a lot of catching up to do,” Metelaus said. “But first, might a dutiful daughter find some fare for a weary traveler in this whole grand keep?”
Mia scurried out the door of Sariah's chamber. Metelaus watched her go with a measure of pride. When she was gone, he took a stool next to Sariah and squeezed her hand. “I'm sorry about your loss. We lost a baby once, Torana and I. Only Meliahs knows the purpose of pain like that.”
“Did they tell you Kael's gone?” Sariah asked.
“He'll be back. I promise you that.”
“I don't think so. Nobody wants to tell me, but I think he's dead.”
“My brother's not dead. No one's heard from him for a time, that's true, but he's a roamer. He knows how to take care of himself. You can't think the worst.”
As if the worst hadn't already happened many times over. “If he isn't dead, then why isn't he here?”
“He might not be finished with his task,” Metelaus said. “Or perhaps he encountered some unexpected complications.”
“Unexpected complications?”
Metelaus sighed. “I might as well tell you. There's a Domainer delegation scouring the Goodlands for Kael.”
“As in armed delegation?”
“They mean to return Kael to the Domain, by arms if necessary.”
“Why? Kael hasn't broken any Domainer laws.”
“No, but strange things are happening in the Domain. People are scared. Every day messages come for Kael. Marchers want him to take a look at their water, at their demesnes, at the strange animals they're finding in the Barren Flats. It's the same thing at Ars. We had a flock of geese land on the Crags the other day. Geese! The honking devils scared the crap out of the goats. You think we should all be glad for Meliahs’ small favors—they taste pretty good, those geese—but people are scared, especially about the weather.”
“Has it been bad?”
“Seasonal variations are fine, but this chill seems to have no end. Worse. I got lost in the Barren Flats the other day. Me. A marcher. Lost! And before I left, we measured a full span of new growth at the Crags. The dead water is somehow retreating from the Barren Flats, only it's not possible. The flats are a closed geography. There's no draining the dead water, which means—”
“That the rot is on the move?”
“That as it seeps elsewhere, the dead water's volume is going down.”
“Is it because the wall is broken?”
“It's possible. Before, the wall contained the bulk of the rot in the Domain. With the wall broken, things could be changing.”
And not necessarily for the better.
“I've brought water samples and stones with hundreds of reports for Kael. But Domainers want explanations for all these changes. Kael is the only one who might be able to give them.”
“And you think they might have caught him?”
“I doubt it,” Metelaus said. “But it's a possibility.”
Sariah regretted it was she who had taken him away from his people.
Metelaus pulled a rumpled parchment from his bag. “This is making its way through the Domain. I can guarantee that it's not the only one.”
Sariah recognized it immediately. “I have no idea how—”
“How it got there doesn't matter. What matters is what you're going to do about it. Keep it, if you'd like. I've got no use for it. I'm here, am I not? You've got to rally, wiser. You've got to fight back.”
“I don't know what to do, Metelaus. The peace at the keep can break at any moment. There was a stoning at the keep. A stoning. Arron's out there, harrying the Goodlands. Grimly took the stones and I have no way of completing my search. Worst of all, I haven't told anybody else, but—I can't wise.”
Metelaus frowned. “What do you mean you can't wise?”
“The bracelet. It's sucking my wising essence. I can't wise stones and every day that passes I'm getting weaker.”
“It's frightening. I'll admit it. It's bad. But you can't give up hope, sister of Ars. You've got to figure out a way. You've done it before. There must be something you can do.”
“I swear I've tried, but nothing is working. I was trying to find a way to secure the peace at the keep today. Instead, I got a man killed.”
“That man killed himself, Sariah, and only after he tried to kill you.”
“Still, everything I try goes wrong.”
“Not all. Look. I've done all you asked.”
“I didn't ask for you to bring the executioners here.”
“Not in those words, you didn't, but when you left the Bastions you sent me a message with those Hounds of yours—mind you, their appearance caused quite the commotion at Ars—telling me to do my best to persuade the executioners to come as close as possible to the wall. You didn't think you would have the time to travel back to Ars and you didn't want to risk missing the deadline. That was clever, Sariah. You anticipated the current situation quite accurately. So I tried. And when the executioners wouldn'
t heed my arguments, I resorted to kidnapping.”
Sariah's jaw dropped. “You kidnapped the executioners?”
“Not the entire tribe, of course not, just Petrid and his seconds, enough to conduct a proper witnessing and make a decision if necessary. Mind you, the tribe is livid and threatening blood. We've got just a few days left before the deadline, and the executioners aren't happy with their lodgings at the keep's cages. So here's the deal. I made war on the executioners. I crossed the broken wall. I fought the Shield and came clear across the Goodlands. Now it's your damn turn.”
Metelaus was right. She couldn't give up. It wasn't in her nature, despite the bad odds.
“I think Auntie needs more healing,” Mia said. “Go ahead, Daddy. Get some rest. I'll stay with her and infuse her with some of my strength.”
Sariah was thankful for Mia's generosity.
“What is it, Mianina?” she asked when Mia's nose wrinkled in puzzlement.
“I don't know, Auntie. It looks like your core is, well, kind of dim or something.” Mia closed her eyes and tried again. “Your links are slippery. It's like you're getting worse instead of better.”
That was a good description of her life at the moment. The girl was doing what she could, but Sariah's links were withering. Despite Mia's impressive healing skills, Sariah couldn't feel the child's luminous presence in her mind.
Sariah drew in a deep breath. “Mianina, I want to thank you for everything you've done for me. I'm sorry I've put you in danger and dragged you so far away from home. I'm sorry you've grown up so fast and I haven't been able to help you as much as I should.”
“But you have helped, Auntie. Lots. You taught me everything I know. Well, maybe not everything, but almost. I figured out the part about the honey all on my own.”
“Honey?”
“Your craving fulfills my craving,” Mia said. “As long as I have honey, I can control my need to be with you and check my power. The honey makes the distance between us bearable.”
“How—?”
“Malord said the craving led me. The farther you traveled from me, the more I needed something, although at first I didn't know what. Thank Meliahs you craved honey.” The blue and green eyes sparkled with mirth. “'Cause green sprouts would have meant the Goodlands’ doom for sure.”
