by Ken Scholes
Amylé had explained everything. Ria now saw where her faith had strayed. It had been based upon enough truth to make the falsehoods seem plausible. And at the end of that long labyrinth it was about power and vendetta and not about healing the world.
Because the world cannot be healed. The people who had come here, weary of too long a life and too many rises and falls as a species, had learned that lesson and had declared this to be their last home.
“You yourself are one of these Abominations,” Jin Li Tam said. “Your sister, too.”
Ria swung in the direction of the voice. “We are the last of the People,” she said. “And we decided long ago that we stood or fell at Lasthome.” She smiled as she felt the branch connect with something. “We finally, finally fall today.”
“I don’t believe you will kill my son or Amara,” Jin Li Tam said, her voice low and controlled.
“Then bring them to me so we can see together just what I will do.” She threw the branch aside and lunged for the body of a soldier. Ria dug a blade out from beneath it and tested it in her hands. It wasn’t like anything she’d seen—made of a thin white coral or bone—a long haft and then a blade about the length of a sword, razor sharp and serrated. It did not look like a forged weapon but instead like something grown. Like the thorn rifles that the Y’Zirites grew in their hidden gun fields.
She spun the blade and turned. The slightest whisper to her left betrayed someone—she hoped it was Jin Li Tam—and she thrust.
Finish her and help me. Now it was Amylé’s voice in her head, and Ria found herself wanting to scream. When it wasn’t voices, it was dreams; and she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t had images or words in her head that had originated elsewhere.
She glanced toward Amylé. The woman was pressed now, her back to the tree as she fended off the other two. But even as she watched, Ria saw the woman’s axe lash out and knock Isaak to the side with a cascade of sparks.
Another fist brought her back to the moment, and a realization struck her. She is toying with me. These fists were more solid, with the hilt of a knife in them, and so far Jin Li Tam had been careful not to use the blades.
“You think your smooth Tam tongue can sway me,” she said as she feinted with the blade and then twisted the handle up to strike something solid and invisible. “But these words only waste your breath.” She whipped the blade around again and felt the sharp edge connect lightly and heard Jin Li Tam gasp in pain. Ria smiled.
But the smile didn’t live long upon her face. She’d trained with the Blood Guard in her early years and had been a competent fighter, but it had not prepared her for the storm that unleashed now that she’d drawn blood.
She parried the blades away and realized that she could feel the ache in her muscles and her bruised body. Amylé had told her that the blood of the earth would eventually wear off and that there could be a period of time where it required her body to rest before reinfusing her with its strength and protection. Not yet, she willed it.
Jin Li Tam’s precision and pace increased now, and Ria felt a long hot line of pain along her side as one of the woman’s knives connected. “Stand down, Ria, or I will kill you.”
She saw another burst of sparks from the corner of her eye and watched Isaak fall as the axe took off one of his legs. Ria laughed and spun away, twisting and swinging her blade in the direction she thought Ji Li Tam had gone. She found air and felt another line of fire, this time along her left shoulder and down her arm. The pain was just registering when she felt something solid strike the back of her knee and she fell facefirst into a pond.
Hide me, she willed the suit, and she felt it move against her skin, but it wasn’t working. Help me. She wasn’t sure if she meant the words for the pool or for the woman who had baptized her into it. She looked up, sputtering, to see Amylé fending Neb off with Isaak at her feet, grappling at her legs.
A hand made a fist in Ria’s hair and yanked her back with enough strength that bright light flashed across her vision. Jin flipped Ria onto her back and held her down with a foot planted squarely on her chest as she lifted the long sharp blade.
“Reveal me,” the forty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam said in a low voice.
Ria saw the eyes first and nothing after them. They were cold and blue and devoid of compassion. There was a practicality to their level gaze that made Ria suddenly as cold as those eyes and unable to move.
And there was no smile upon those lips, no slight twitch of victory. They were pursed with resolve. “All of this,” Jin Li Tam said, “you brought upon yourself.”
As the blade came up, Ria closed her eyes to it. Vlad had told her upon her cutting table that he would build his pain into an army. And in that moment, in the shadow of the Grandmother Tree, Ria realized for the first time that she had pain but that she had fashioned it into nothing at the end of it all and instead had let it shape her in its awkward, bloody hands.
She opened her eyes, as if opening them to truth for the first time, and experienced a moment of confusion as she saw the tree and meadow and sky spin and dance about, saw Amylé fall beneath Neb’s fists as Isaak pulled her down, and then came to rest at last to see Jin Li Tam standing over a headless body with a bloody blade gripped in white-knuckled fists. Then light slowly swallowed everything and carried Winteria bat Mardic the Elder, Daughter of Salome, into the waiting dark.
Lysias
The night wind was warmer than usual, moaning through the evergreens, as Lysias walked the perimeter. The camp behind him was bustling with activity as they stacked supplies and queued passengers for the airship just an hour out.
All of it boggled his mind. Invisible ships in the sky. Dragons that hunted them and carried people to and fro. All controlled from the moon. He shook his head and longed for simpler days.
Still, the tree was ever before him now, and he found himself spinning fanciful yarns of what he’d do, retired and free to settle some small tropical farm far from the complexities of kin-clave and the exigencies of war in the shadow of the Moon Wizard’s Tower.
“General Lysias? Your sergeant of the watch told me I could find you here.” Captain Thrall caught up to him as he turned.
“Yes, Captain?” The young man’s face was grave.
“Petronus will be here soon. I’ve word that we’re to send Rudolfo and Winters with him.”
He felt his brow furrow. The last message, borne by the man’s aide, was that Petronus had retasked the kin-dragons so that the New Espiran fleet was no longer at risk. And that the old Pope himself was en route within one of the very beasts with some urgent matter for Rudolfo’s attention. “The general is not expecting to travel. And I do not think he’ll willingly leave the Named Lands with so much here to do.”
But even before the captain answered, Lysias saw the cloud behind his eyes and felt his stomach sink. “He is needed in New Espira with his son and Lady Tam,” the captain said, “and I suspect that he will agree.”
There is trouble of some kind. Lysias sighed. Already, his mind spun the list of things that needed doing. He would stay on here and see the Gray Guard remnant back to the Ninefold Forest. Rudolfo had sent the moon sparrows out earlier calling for the capture of any Y’Zirite soldiers found in uniform and not bearing the mark of the white tree; those bound for the moon would not be interfered with. The Wandering Army would join the last of Turam’s resistance and clean up Pylos. He sighed again and looked to the captain. “Let’s wake him, then. Have you told Winters already?”
Thrall nodded. “Yes. She is ready.”
Lysias turned and made his way back to the camp. Thrall fell in behind him, and they went quietly. When they reached Rudolfo’s cabin, he nodded to the guard, tapped at the door, and then opened it. “Lord Rudolfo? Captain Thrall needs a word. It is urgent.” Then he stepped back and let the New Espiran in.
He closed the door quietly and found himself filling with dread on the man’s behalf. Someone was dead or dying, and as much as he hated it
to be anyone, he hoped against hope it was not the boy. Because Rudolfo, as strong as he was, could not weather facing that loss a second time.
And Jin Li Tam is at heart first and foremost a soldier. Certainly a shadowy ghost of a soldier in the Whymer Maze of her father’s house, but soldiers were made for war and graveyards were made for soldiers. Not children.
The thought of children brought his own child to mind. He’d not seen her since she’d left for the north with Lady Tam and Lord Jakob. And she’d been in Ahm’s Glory. Though the others had been too, and they seemed to be alive. Still, there’d been no word of her among the New Espirans.
Some part of him told Lysias that she could be dead—that she likely was dead—but he couldn’t accept that. He wanted to believe that it was the power of some fatherly connection to his daughter whispering to him that she still lived, but he knew that he’d done nothing to foster that kind of bond. He’d been away working for an army more bureaucratic than military at least until the War for Windwir. And he’d rejected her and her child there at the end—the one she’d had with the secessionist, the one whose name he could never remember because he’d refused to sit down with them when they showed up at his home unannounced. He’d repaired what damage he could of that when he joined her in the Ninefold Forest to serve Rudolfo and build his standing army. But any bond they had was tenuous, and he knew that the denial he lived in was likely fueled by his own guilt.
I can’t afford to believe she is dead, because I failed her as a father and it robs me of the chance to make things right.
He swallowed the shame he felt and looked up to the moon. Maybe he wanted to go there—maybe all of them wanted to go there—because it was a chance to start again and do it differently.
“And I would, too,” he told the moon.
But in the end, he was a soldier. An officer in service to a king with an out-of-the-way kingdom rapidly becoming the center of the Named Lands that Windwir once had been. And a war newly won. And new allies from seemingly thin air. And a colony of Marshers, Y’Zirites and other followers of the dream growing upon the moon.
And a dragon bearing a dead Pope, he thought.
Even as he thought it, the camp went to third alarm and he heard a commotion on the other side of camp. He saw something dark moving against the dark sky to hover above the field that marked the edge of Windwir’s grave. Lysias moved quickly toward it, noting that both the New Espirans and Gray Guard did the same. He had no doubt that Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts, magicked and on alert, were nearby and ready.
The kin-dragon settled into the field, and there was a slow build of light that suddenly burst, blinding him momentarily.
When Lysias opened his eyes, a man and woman stood before the beast. The man wore silver robes that shone, and the woman had curly hair and—
Lynnae? He squinted and blinked, taking another step forward. “Lynnae?”
“Father?” Her voice shook, but he knew it and homed in on it like a moon sparrow.
She was in his arms within that instant, sobbing. He held her, his own tears flowing, too. “How?” He tried to find more for his question and could not so he simply asked again. “How?”
“Vlad Li Tam,” the man beside her said. And of course, it was Petronus. They’d told him Petronus was coming. But he’d not expected his daughter, and he wouldn’t have recognized Petronus if he hadn’t known it was him. His balding head had a thick mane of chestnut hair, and he’d lost at least forty years. His compact body was squat and muscular. “He is up to something. I have a dragon looking for the Kinshark, but we’re not entirely sure if they’re still here or if they’ve crossed the Seaway into the lunar sea.”
Lysias released his daughter and wiped his eyes. “Father Petronus,” he said, inclining his head. “I do not have adequate words for my gratitude.”
Rudolfo was beside him now, and Lysias stood straighter. “Lady Lynnae,” he said, “I am glad to see you reunited with your father.” His eyes went dark for a moment. “I’ll have you reunited with Lord Jakob soon, as well, if you intend to continue in your care of him?” Rudolfo paused and glanced at Lysias. “I have no idea where or how that care will unfold. But he is alive, and I will do whatever is necessary to keep him as such.”
Lynnae nodded. “I love him as if he were my own, Lord Rudolfo. When I thought he’d been—”
Rudolfo raised a hand at her choked sob. His own voice cracked. “Then your home is with us. Your place in his life is even more vital now, Lady.”
It’s Jin Li Tam, then. Lysias felt no shame in his relief. But he did feel shame that the sight of his daughter overjoyed him despite the dark circumstances they faced. And he felt a small stab of guilt that he’d even considered for a moment leaving his duties in the Ninefold Forest in favor of a simpler, quieter life upon the moon. There would be much work to do. And the elation of Jakob’s survival still lived in the shadow of threat—the boy’s life had been saved by blood magicks, and that bore dark tidings for his return.
Still, Lysias knew, they’d come this far. And now they had new allies. He glanced at the wreckage of the airship now carefully sorted and stacked for removal. Between the New Espirans, the resources of the library mechoservitors and the so-called Library of Elder Days, some solution would be found. It was only a matter of time.
Winters joined them, and Lysias could see that she’d been crying. It was no new thing; his own face was still wet with tears, and he wasn’t certain there wouldn’t be more. The times they’d lived had been washed in tears of deep sorrow and it seemed imprudent to believe those days were behind them.
But change was indeed the path life took, Lysias knew, and that truth applied to dark circumstances as readily as to comfortable ones.
“You and Philemus know your work,” Rudolfo said. “I will be back soon.” He glanced to Captain Thrall. “And I’ll have an ambassador in tow to begin negotiations with the New Espirans. So have the manor readied for dignitaries and send word to the others.” He paused. “And set the mechoservitors remaining to the task of solving our water issue. Have them work with Blakely and Symeon.”
Lysias met the man’s eyes and saw hard truth accepted there. “We will take care of the home front, Lord Rudolfo. Journey safely.”
Rudolfo glanced over his shoulder at the kin-dragon and then back to Lysias. “I should hope so, General.” He looked to Lynnae and smiled. “I am pleased that you are safe and sound, Lady Lynnae. Jakob will be pleased as well.” Then he glanced at Petronus. “You’re looking well, Father. Take me to my family.”
Petronus glanced around and nodded. “I’m new to this, so bear with me.” He closed his eyes and stepped back into the beast as it rose up and wrapped his arms around him. There was a flash, and Petronus was gone.
Lysias stepped back and guided his daughter back with him. The kin-dragon opened its arms, and this time Rudolfo stepped forward. He vanished with a flash, and then Winters followed after.
Now all that remained was the kin-dragon, massive and dark as it reflected back the night sky. It stood on two legs and waved four in the air as its two pairs of wings began to beat rapidly. The tail twitched, and Lysias and Lynnae took another three steps back.
Then the dragon launched itself at the sky and climbed quickly to hover above Windwir in the light of the blue-green moon. And it seemed to Lysias that the dragon tipped its head, inclining in respect to a holy place made even holier by the blood that sanctified its ground. The Androfrancines had built their city as an island of light—some hidden and some shining brightly into the world—and Petronus had shepherded that city and its people for a season of his life. And then, while Lysias worked to win the war against Rudolfo and the Marshers, the old Pope had stayed with the boy, Neb, to bury all of those bones.
When the dragon turned south and built speed to crack the sky, Lysias realized Petronus was likely saying his goodbyes. He and Winters, after this, would no doubt be bound for the moon.
But not Lysias. He would never forget
the dream and the white tree, and maybe someday, before he died in his sleep peacefully as an old man, he would sail to the moon and see what kind of home the others had made there.
That dream was powerful, but it had reminded him of a more precious dream he had not yet dreamed fully.
Because I love my daughter more than I love the moon, Lysias thought. And he would make a home with her and with Rudolfo and put aside war in favor of something better. Hunting, perhaps, with the little heir and his father if they could find a way to bring the boy home. For now, the fact that Jakob lived was enough.
Lysias smiled and looked to his daughter again. For that brief moment she was six and missing a tooth in a face full of tangled curls. “There’s sweetbread and chai in the galley,” he said, reaching a hand out to her.
She took it and smiled. Then in silence, they turned their back upon Windwir’s grave and followed the smell of baking bread and frying bacon toward a table waiting for them in a place of warmth and light.
Rudolfo
Not even the wonder of flight, with its smells and sights and wind upon skin, could shake Rudolfo from the anchor that held him to his heavy heart.
My wife is dying. Jin Li Tam had done exactly what he would’ve expected—had given herself completely to her work, this time the work of saving their child. And now, his wife had hours to live.
It was hard to think of her in that role—she’d only spent a brief amount of time with him, and most of it was during a difficult pregnancy. And they’d been separated as soon as Jakob was born, with those separations continuing until she left the Named Lands with the boy.
Rudolfo had been angry. Not just because of her actions, but because those actions reinforced further what he didn’t want to believe—that as hard as he tried, as clever as he was, he could not protect his family, or himself, any better than he had before. He’d lost his brother first. Then his parents. And for a span of days had believed he’d also lost his son. Next he would lose Jin Li Tam, though he doubted he’d ever completely had her. She’d been her father’s daughter first and foremost. Death and loss were the counterbalance to life, and in Rudolfo’s life, those deaths and losses were initiated by the work of Jin’s father, Vlad Li Tam, and his father before him.
