Stonewiser

by Dora Machado

  “For everyone.”

  The executioners looked taller and more at ease for the distinction. Outside, the wind groaned with renewed urgency. Sariah felt the cold in her bone marrow. She knew daylight was straining to break the night's hold as surely as the poison in her veins was grinding down her body's weary defenses.

  “Do you have it, Belana?” Sariah caressed Belana's fair hair. “I need it again.”

  The woman relinquished the prism she clutched to her breast.

  “Who will stand for the Domain?”

  Kael stretched his arm before Sariah. He understood precisely what was required next. She was counting on all she had learned about the stone, from the sages, from her terrible experience with the prism, from the sisters. It was time to give the hound a fair scent.

  A little wobbly on her feet, Sariah braced herself. “Only a tiny prick.”

  She used her left hand to turn the prism's point in the blood pooling at the base of Kael's wrist in the same way she remembered the sisters turning the point over her navel. Nothing. She added her useless right hand and tried again. Nothing. She had not a drop of stonewiser power left to spare. Corrupted by the bracelet's poison, not even the last of her vital force was enough to power the thing.

  “Take it from me.” Kael placed her hand over his heart. “Take it all. Without you, it matters naught to me.”

  Tears stung Sariah's eyes. She couldn't accept his precious gift because her palms were numb to his emotions. But she thanked him with a brilliant smile, a smile which brought the furious grin she loved to his face, a fitting last sight to her heart.

  They went to their knees together, she leaning on him, he steadying the both of them onto the cold floor. She rested her forehead on his shoulder and listened to the steady beat of his heart, marking the last moments of her ebbing life. She had been lucky, she knew. She had known the stones, freedom and him. She thanked Meliahs for all three favors.

  Forty-nine

  THE NUDGE FELT shaky at first, a tentative trickle of strength, a contribution of a few more seconds of life, coming from the rhythmic taps on her shoulder. Then the infusion doubled with the addition of a steady rapping against her shoulder blade. She craned her neck. Lexia and Malord were tapping with concentrated expressions on their faces.

  “How do I do it?” Lorian also began to tap. “Like this? Is it working?”

  It was working. Their strength was sweeping through her body like a rising tide, warming her core and heating her muscles, animating her limbs—even her right arm—compelling her organs to function. She channeled the joyous infusion to her core and from there, to the prism. She gasped when the stone lit up in her hands, a wink of yellow glow that gained brilliancy with her sustained effort.

  There was no time to lose. She returned the prism's point to Kael's wrist and turned it slowly in his blood. A light shot from the prism. Sariah ducked to one side but held on to the increasingly unwieldy prism. It was hot and heavy in her hands, difficult to turn. It was like trying to move one of Meliahs’ hulking pylons. The light flickered on the ceiling before dying down. She had managed to power the thing, but she didn't know quite how to use it.

  “What's wrong?” The strain was showing on Kael's blank face.

  “I'll try it again.”

  “We'll do it.” Belana's ghoulish face came into Sariah's field of vision.

  Of course. Why hadn't she thought of it? Belana was the natural choice.

  “This is different from what you've done before,” Sariah said. “It could be dangerous.”

  “We were made for the prism,” Belana said. “Our blood remembers.”

  “You're very brave.”

  Belana placed her hands on top of Sariah's hands, unleashing a harsh issue of smoldering heat. Sariah surrendered to the contact's intimacy, to the striking sense of oneness emanating from the strange union. Her palms began to sweat over the prism's increasing glow. The prism turned with more ease. The point ignited with a particularly bright shade of orange.

  It happened then. Colored shapes shifted within the prism and projected upwards. An ornate symmetrical pattern emerged as Sariah and Belana rotated the stone in the tiny pool of Kael's welling blood.

  “It's working.” Sariah smiled. “It's working!”

  The light flared three times and then died, leaving an intricate pattern carved on the stone ceiling, a decorative rosette similar to a delicate carbon drawing, something that could have been sketched by a most talented artist. Sariah couldn't believe it.

  “You did it, Belana.”

  “Is little sister pleased?”

  “More like delighted.” Sariah hugged Belana. “More like mad with happiness.”

  “This isn't proof of anything,” the executioner said.

  “Not yet.” Sariah caught her breath. “But soon. Who will stand for the Goodlands?”

  “I will,” Lexia offered.

  “No, no, let me,” Lorian said.

  Sariah and Belana pricked a point of Lorian's blood on her wrist and then repeated the process, until the kaleidoscopic array projected from the prism and flared three times before stamping itself on the ceiling.

  Sariah understood that it would match Kael's, but the sight of the twin rosette felt like rapture to her soul. She giggled like a wide-eyed girl. “See? They're the same. The same!”

  “I don't understand.” Petrid scratched his head, a caricature of his tiny monkey.

  Lorian narrowed her eyes on the ceiling. “Are they—?”

  “Blood prints,” Malord said. “We're looking at blood prints. This is a tale beyond my wildest dream, beyond redemption.”

  “It's an ancient notion,” Lorian said when she saw that the executioners were still at a loss. “It's a stone practice believed lost generations ago.”

  “Is it like a pennant for a creature's kind?” Metelaus asked.

  “Exactly,” Sariah said. “In a world where greedy stonewisers had broken the pact, the prism was created for the very purpose of recognizing Meliahs’ Blood.”

  “Extraordinary.”

  Yes, it was amazing, but Sariah knew she couldn't afford to delay. “Who will stand for the Hounds?”

  “My blood is yours, saba.” A visibly excited keeper endured the puncture without trepidation. His blood's pattern fit Kael and Lorian's in every way, to the last three light shifts and the matching rosette imprinted on the ceiling. And so did the blood prints of the rest of the men and women in the room.

  “It's true,” Malord whispered when his turn came.

  Delis couldn't take her eyes off her blood's print. “So my blood is no fouler than yours?”

  “We're all of the same blood,” Metelaus said. “Sariah's been saying that for a long time.”

  Everyone in the room was staring at the prints on the ceiling in awe. The chief executioner, however, was perturbed. “This is quite remarkable. But how can I trust this is not a wiser trick when there's no comparison to be had?”

  It was a fair question. “Here,” Sariah said. “Lend me your monkey.”

  “What?”

  Sariah called the little beast. It climbed up her arm and perched on her shoulder, chattering all the while. She cradled it in her arms like a baby. The creature yelped and gnashed a yellowed set of tiny fangs when Sariah and Belana pricked it with the prism, but a tickle under its chin calmed its irritation. The prism flashed briefly and only once before the monkey's blood print embedded itself in the ceiling.

  “You see?” Sariah said. “Your monkey's blood print is different from the rest. If we were to apply the prism to every animal in the land, each kind of animal would share the same print. Yet as you can see, the pattern is quite different when comparing it to yours.”

  Petrid was neither appeased nor content. “Not so fast, wiser. The prism's blood print is proof that there were things created beyond the Blood's purity, things beyond the Old and the New Blood, abominations. But the tale you've wised out of it in no way serves to unite the Bloods. As I see
it, all of these patterns could be of the wrong blood. We could all be abominations in this room. Couldn't we? So you see, wiser, you've furnished nothing helpful, nothing as agreed.”

  Sariah wondered if Petrid understood what he proposed. He was willing to cast the abomination spectrum over his people and himself to claim his assurances and fulfill his greed. But of course, his tortuous argument made perverse sense. What harm was an accusation of bad blood to a people who saw themselves as foul-blooded when they stood to gain so much? Sariah realized that all her efforts had been in vain, unless she could somehow shut down Petrid's objections once and for all.

  Sariah remembered Grimly's prized scroll. She recalled the sisters’ reverence when they spied her name on it. She didn't want to open that door, but a measure of clarity was trying to break up the storming night. The sun would come through the clouds and ash any time now. Her hand was trembling as she put the prism's point like a blade to her wrist. Little sister, they had called her. Could it be?

  “We'll do it.” Belana grabbed the stone and pricked her own wrist. “We're the tale you seek, little sister.”

  A culture of blood took shape before Sariah's very eyes: the Hounds’ revolting worship; the Domainers’ relentless quest to redeem themselves from the execration's accusations; the Goodlanders’ obsessive preoccupation with their blood's own purity. It all came down to the generations’ ingrained distrust in their own ability to contain the crime of creation as the ultimate temptation. They had all been right.

  Belana's blood justified their skepticism. The fantastical light patterns that shone from the prism were a distorted version of the others. The colors blurred; the tonalities were opaque. It shifted six times instead of three. It left a different print on the cellar's crowded ceiling—a muted, blunted geometry lacking the others’ elegant complexity.

  Lorian whimpered. “What have we done?”

  Sariah's voice failed. “Who was your mother, Belana?”

  “The mistress,” Belana said. “She said never to say it.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “We were grown in the stone's belly. The prism is my father. The stone is my mother.”

  Sariah's throat was too tight to make words. “Belana, little sister, how old are you?”

  Black tears spilled on her face like blotched ink. “We were nine as of the last chill.”

  Sariah cursed her own blindness. She cursed Grimly too, for taking her macabre explorations beyond the boundaries of cruelty. In retrospect, Belana's nature should have been obvious to her. She had confused the woman's oddity with her youthful soul. Lost in her own troubles, she had neglected to see Belana's tragedy. In doing so, she had wronged Belana and her dead sister greatly.

  Petrid muttered a curse. “Horror of all horrors.”

  Sariah put her arms around Belana's shoulders. “What gives you the right to judge her blood as worse than ours? You, an executioner of all things. Don't you know how it feels? She's of Meliahs’ just the same.”

  “She's sin turned to flesh,” Petrid said. “She was made beyond the bounds of the Blood.”

  “But with her blood she's proven that Goodlanders, Hounds and Domainers are of the one Blood,” Kael said. “You have your proof, executioners, a tale that can unite the Bloods. And we have plenty of witnesses. Now lift your edict and go.”

  Petrid's pinched face quivered in anger. He opened his mouth to protest, but Malord spoke first.

  “The Domain's gathering will be most interested to hear of your reaction here today.”

  “The Guild certainly considers the tale Stonewiser Sariah has furnished as sufficient for a record of justice,” Lorian said. “You wouldn't want to break a first record of justice, would you?”

  The incensed flush in Petrid's weathered face was mild compared to the ire flashing in his eyes. “This is an evil place. We'll go now.”

  “Not to Ars, you won't,” Metelaus said. “We're free of your encumbrances and safe.”

  “And call off your stinking mob,” Delis added.

  “Aren't you forgetting something?” Kael said. “Your bracelet. Take it with you.”

  Petrid eyed Sariah. “I assume you want it off?”

  Sariah chuckled. Caught in the moment's excitement, Malord, Lexia and Lorian had been distracted from the vital tapping that had deferred the effect of the bracelet's poison. It was strange, this ebbing of strength that surged and receded like a leaden wave, reminding her that although the tale had been delivered, her life was very much at stake.

  “It's not so bad to live like you,” Sariah said. “A little cold and brittle inside perhaps, but one could get used to it. Are you asking me if I have good reasons to live or are you asking me if the bracelet will kill me?”

  “Perhaps you'll survive the bracelet as cunningly as you've survived us,” Petrid said.

  “Poison is poison,” Sariah said. “Take it off, executioner. I want to live. And I want my stonewiser powers back. They may be foul to you, but it's what I am.”

  The chief executioner approached Sariah cautiously, as if she could bite him, as if she and Belana could turn into venomous species at will. Petrid's monkey was not afraid. He climbed on Sariah's shoulder and licked her ear, chattering like a plague of crickets.

  Sariah set the prism aside and watched the executioner intently. She had missed the vital moment before. She wasn't about to miss it again. Petrid mumbled a ritual prayer in the old language, just as he had done when he had invested Sariah with the bracelet. This time, she caught a quick glimpse of the sharp, iron-capped tooth in the very back of his mouth. He clenched subtly, and brought her hand to his mouth. He bestowed a passionate kiss on the bracelet's closed-eyed clasp.

  Sariah might have missed the quick lick of blood if she hadn't been watching so carefully. She gathered Petrid had pierced his own tongue with his iron-capped tooth. Unbeknownst to the rest, he smeared a lick of his blood on the clasp when he kissed it. She should have known. After a day like today, she should have guessed that only blood could harbor liberation.

  It was surreal. In one subtle pulse, the hinges reappeared on the bracelet. The clasp's silvery lid lifted to reveal the glowering eye. It yielded with a muted hiss. With a twist and a turn, the pin was out.

  Sariah had to smile. The bracelet's designer had either a preference for irony or a knack for consolation. One by one the links lifted from her wrist, first Pride, then Courage, then Strength, followed by Hope, Shrewdness, Loyalty, Generosity, Faith, and last, perilous Mercy. She thanked each of Meliahs’ sisters. They were all the company a banished traveler might need to endure the journey's hardship, if one ever looked beyond the bracelet's curse. She had never been truly alone in her banishment.

  Sariah's arm felt obscenely bare and impossibly light. Nearly a year of torture and despair was suddenly gone. The strength returned first to her body, a surge of vitality which flushed her veins with healthy vigor and returned the sensation to her limbs. Then it traveled to her wiser's core, jolting it out of stillness with a shudder and a shake, until her core was pumping steadily. She basked in the warmth flooding her mind and body, and decided privately that she was after all better suited to exist as the hot-blooded creature she had been born to be.

  Kael welcomed her back to the living with an embrace. “Well done, wiser,” he murmured in her ear. “You're the stone's bravest heart.”

  Ars was safe and Sariah had been true to all her debts.

  She was just rising to her feet when she spied one of the Hounds slipping into the chamber and talking urgently to the keeper. Shock flashed on the keeper's face. At that moment, Sariah knew that her reclaimed world was far from mended.

  “It's Mia,” the keeper said. “They're leaving.”

  Fifty

  THE SIGHT THAT welcomed Sariah to the keep's main lane was horrifying and oddly familiar. Despite the time, dawn was lost to the penumbral darkness. The frantic torches cast more shadows than they gave light, illuminating a chaotic scene of frenzied motion and gl
eaming weapons. She thought she had seen the long epic line of armed Hounds heading to the keep's massive gates before, the brisk-walking snippet of a curly-haired woman leading the terrifying procession.

  “Mia!”

  “What is she doing?” Kael asked.

  “Stand aside, Auntie. I'm going to war.”

  Meliahs help her. The child had gone sick with grief.

  “You can't go to war, not you, Mia. You don't understand what's happening here.”

  “But I do, Auntie. The evil Shield is loose upon the land and you won't challenge your former master. He kills people and wastes the Goodlands and you do nothing to stop him.”

  “It's not like that—”

  “I can't let him kill any more good people.” Mia's luminous eyes were strangely blank. “Not anymore.”

  “Mia, if this is about Rig—”

  “Rig died,” Mia said. “Arron killed him.”

  “Is it true?” Lorian arrived, an unsettled jumble of long limbs and gasping breath. “Is she mad? We have effective ways to deal with rebellion in the Guild.”

  “Ways I hope you're about to revise,” Sariah said.

  How was she going to keep Mia safe?

  She spotted the keeper, arguing with some of the Hounds. “Keeper, command your Hounds to stand down.”

  Shock was etched all over the keeper's face. “They won't listen to me. It's Torkel. He's of Vargas's line. He's convinced a good number of Hounds to follow him.”

  “Where is he?” Sariah found Torkel directing his Hounds out of the gates. “Torkel!”

  Torkel signaled and a line of Hounds stepped between Sariah and him.

  “Let me pass.”

  They didn't move.

  “Torkel,” Sariah called out. “What are you doing? Stop this. She's just a grieving child.”

  “She's a wise one,” Torkel said without meeting her eyes. “Wise is he who finds wisdom in the clash of orders. Wise is he who chooses as Vargas would have chosen.”