by Gail Dayton
Kallista drew hard on her iliasti's magic, till she felt near to floating away with it. Over the past several years, she hadn't needed to use this much at one time, and using it now stretched her, challenged her.
"Stay here,” she said. “One of you—Obed, come with me to grab Omri and get him away while I deal with the murder spell."
"I'll be comin’ too,” Torchay said. “In case there's somethin’ else waitin’ for you."
She nodded, not surprised. After sixteen years at her side, Torchay was as much a part of her as her magic. She divided the magic she'd called; some to find Omri and protect him, some for shielding the boy's rescuers, and the rest to deal with the murderspell and its poison.
"Ready?” Kallista met Torchay's eyes, then Obed's, deliberately not looking at the others. She knew what she would see—the same worry and need to act that she felt. But she would not risk any more of them. She took a deep breath, nodded, and the two men opened the dining room doors.
They blew into the room, slamming the heavy doors shut behind them as the knots—two of them—shot through the air, one from either side of the long, column-lined room, bright with light from the windows behind the columns. They resembled little balls or knotted buttons, just smaller than a walnut, and they glowed a faint poisonous yellow.
"Don't move!” Kallista fumbled a little, getting magic around both knots and pulling it tight. Damn it, she should not be this out of practice. She'd been focusing her magic too much on farseeing and truthsaying rather than more physical types of magic like holding or moving objects. She was ready to do two things at once, but one of them had been meant to find Omri.
Torchay and Obed stood frozen on either side of her, waiting for her signal while she organized her magic, siphoning off another bit from them to search out the boy. A giggle echoed around the empty room.
"Omri, stay there, son.” Obed called out. “Hide. Hide well."
A third poison-bearing knot flashed toward them from the decoration at the top of a column. It must have been hidden there, waiting for some trigger to send it into action. Torchay knocked it away with the flat of his right-hand sword. Kallista looped magic around it, snatching it to a mid-air stop.
"Find me, Papi!” Omri's voice came from the far end of the room.
Obed looked at Kallista, the terror in his eyes mirroring what she felt. What if there were more murder knots? Already she struggled to hold three of them against their magic-spelled need to reach the necessary proximity and burst into a puff of poison. She should have never let her magic practice slide, no matter how peaceful Adara had seemed.
"Go,” she said through lips as still as she could make them. “Get him out of here.” She spun out a bit of magic to make sure. “He's inside the sideboard holding the cakes. There's a door to the kitchens just beyond."
"Yes."
"Don't let the knots touch you and don't let them get too close. Use your sword. Hit them to me. I'll catch them."
"Be careful."
"I will. Take care of Omri."
Obed nodded once, slowly. Kallista felt his love for her and their child flood the magic-born connection between them and sent her own love back the same way. She tightened her grip on the deathspells and spread magic to trap any others.
"Papi!” Omri called, making her heart jump and pound. “Come find me."
In a swirl of black robes, Obed sprinted the length of the room. He knocked aside a fourth knot with his Heldring saber. Kallista captured it, beginning to feel a faint quiver at the strain. She followed, the imprisoned knots bobbing around her like rebellious dogs on leads. Torchay mirrored her, at her side as always. She didn't follow too closely, but close enough that Torchay could help Obed if needed.
The sideboard door opened and Omri fell half out of it, bracing his hands against the floor, his ink-black hair all in his eyes. “Here I am, Papi,” Omri announced to the world.
"No!” Obed bellowed, leaping across the remaining distance.
A fifth poisonous ball flashed into action. Kallista screamed. Torchay shouted. He leaped forward, swinging wildly at the tiny, glowing button. Obed scooped up the child, his billowing robes seeming to distract the spell. Torchay slapped the knot to the ground with a sword and stepped on it to hold it there as Obed slammed out the kitchen door with Omri in his arms.
"Have you got this one, K'lista?” Torchay shifted his weight. “I think it's trying to burrow through my boot."
"Get off it then.” Kallista took hold with her magic and at the same time, reached out to seize a sixth knot before it could leave its flower arrangement hiding place. Was that all of them?
She bound the spells into a mid-air bunch, save for the one Torchay had crushed, which seemed to have lost its aerial ability, and sent the magic to scour the room clean. She found one more murder knot tucked into the frame above the servants’ door where Obed had exited. Seven spells. The number of misfortune.
Kallista let curses fall from her mouth as she fought to control the deathspells. Only the seventh gave her no trouble. The “seeker” part of its spell hadn't yet been triggered. But it felt as evil as the rest of them. The knots made her skin crawl with an ugly, blighted, invisible something that oozed off them like stink off old fish, creating a miasma of awfulness around them.
"Even after all the legends I've seen come to life, I thought these things might not be real.” Torchay stood glaring at the hovering, quivering knots, body balanced and ready, short swords in his hands. “I should have known better."
"North Academy has records. We studied weapons like this, even though supposedly no one had proper magic to make them, not in a hundred years or so. We knew they were real.” Kallista put her gloved hands into the fetid atmosphere and gathered up the little balls, hoping it would be easier to use her magic to keep them from bursting open if she held them in her hands. It still took both magic and physical strength to keep them prisoned.
"Let me help.” His lower sword back in its sheath, Torchay had a hand out to take some of the knots. His bare hand.
"No!” She didn't want him near the evil things. “You're not gloved. This poison can soak through the skin's surface. You can't risk it.” Kallista still wore gloves in public, like the soldier naitan she'd been.
Military magic was considered too deadly to risk getting loose among the populace. Any covering over the hands stopped magic, save for that under the most exquisite control. But gloves hadn't stopped Kallista's ability to throw lightning, the magic she'd been born with. They had even less effect on the Godstruck magic she'd wielded for the past six years. Still, they made people more comfortable around her, so she wore them.
"Well then, smash the things and be done with it.” Torchay's left-hand sword was in his hand again.
"I'm trying.” She pried at the deathspell's protections. They were sealed tight, like oysters in their shells. How could she immobilize the things without bursting them and releasing the poison contained within? She drew more magic, and then more, finally shaping it into a great fist and squeezing until the knots were crushed flat.
Carefully, she pulled her gloves off, turning one inside the other to contain the terrible stuff. The awfulness seemed to cling, but she didn't dare try to shake it off. Who knew what it was or where it would fly? She rolled her gloves into one of the napkins laid ready on the table.
"No luncheon in here today.” She led the way to the doors where the rest of their family waited. “Have the kitchens send everything to our quarters."
"Yes, my Reinine.” Torchay held the door for her.
She sighed and shifted her shoulders as the Reinine's robe of responsibility settled its weight back into place. Her captain's ribbons, even the major's gold ribbons she'd worn for a short time, hadn't weighed nearly so much. Not so much that she'd minded Torchay calling her “Major.” Being called “Reinine” by her mates was different.
The crowd outside the dining room was larger than they'd left it. Obed had made his way around to join the rest
of the ilian with Omri clinging to his neck, excited and frightened by all the attention. All of their troop of bodyguards had arrived, along with a squadron of regular soldiers. Her administrator, the High Steward, hovered in the background.
"General, Steward—” Kallista held out the napkin-wrapped bundle. “Get a dispatch bag to hold this. It's the remnants of seven deathspell murder knots."
"Seven," whispered around the antechamber from a dozen throats.
"I want our best people on it. Gweric first, then whoever else we have.” Kallista named the eyeless Tibran youth she'd brought back from their first demon-hunting quest. Grown man now, he was their oldest West naitan, the best of any at sniffing out demon-taint. She shifted her shoulders against the odd discomfort she felt. “Anything that can be learned about who made it, where and how, I want to know. And find out how they got it into that room, if you would be so kind."
"Yes, my Reinine.” The general bowed low as she held open the hurriedly located leather bag for Kallista to drop her wrapped gloves inside.
"Tell them to be careful. The poison is as much magic as chemical.” She used the new word created by those studying the physical properties and interactions of all sorts of strange things from ground rock to salt to—she didn't know what. One of her first projects after becoming Reinine had been to open academies for such studies. The Tibrans had once invaded with non-magical cannons and gunpowder. Adara needed to know more than merely magic.
"Now.” Kallista held her arms out to her iliasti and embraced the first one to reach her. “I am starving. Lunch. In quarters."
"But, Majesty, it's already half of noon.” The head of her council quivered in protest. “We are meeting delegates from the far south at first chime after."
"Postpone the meeting. I am having lunch with my family."
"But, my Reinine—"
Kallista ignored the protests. She ignored the hovering sense of impending catastrophe as well, the bad taste lingering in her mouth, tucking it into the back of her mind to deal with later. The murder spells changed everything.
But the children were waiting.
Chapter Two
Lunch was noisier and more chaotic than usual, and Kallista delighted in every ear-numbing moment. At least with a ten-strong ilian, they had plenty of adults to deal with nine small children. Their family had blossomed, despite the challenges. Because she'd agreed to be Reinine when they selected her six years ago, Kallista couldn't do anything about some of those challenges. But the rest of them would end. Starting today.
Kallista managed to hold her temper until the children were gone, back to the Temple school or the nursery rooms. The moment the door closed and the ilian was alone again, Kallista burst from her chair. She fought her way out of the red robe of her office and threw it across the room.
"No more!” she cried. “I have had enough!"
"Enough of what?” Torchay asked.
At the same time, Viyelle said, “I don't think you can resign."
"I don't want—I thought they'd finally given up.” Kallista couldn't hold still, her restlessness carrying her to the far end of the somewhat battered family dining room and back as she paced. “It's been, what? A year since the last assassination attempt? And then they were caught before they got out of Boren. The generals tell me how hard they've been working to dig out the last of the rebels and destroy the Barinirab heresy."
"They haven't lied.” Viyelle Torvyll had grown up at court, daughter of the prinsep of Shaluine, a prinsipality on the central plains. She acted as liaison to the interlocking intrigues of Adara's courtiers as well as keeping an eye on the bureaucracy, serving as Kallista's chief of staff without the official title. “You know how many rebel strongholds have been rooted out, how far they have traced the secret membership. You presided over most of their trials yourself as truthsayer."
"The Order of the Barbed Rose has been virtually eliminated.” Joh Suteny had once been a low-level member of the ancient order. Deceived and betrayed by the Master Barb, he now personally oversaw its dismantling, as well as assisting Obed in the family business.
"It's not enough.” Kallista paced the room, destroying the hairstyle created by her dresser that morning, running her hands through it over and over again, her temper on edge. “This has to stop. Bad enough they keep trying to kill me, but our children—They could have killed Omri today. My son."
Torchay caught her as she stalked by, tried to hold her, comfort her, but she was in no mood to be comforted. She didn't understand the mood, but there it was. She fought free of him.
Obed touched her shoulder, his expression haunted beneath the swirling script of the tattoos on his cheeks. Kallista paused, unable to ignore him. “Our son,” she whispered.
Her hands began to shake, the first crack in the wall she had built inside herself this morning so she could deal with the death magic sent against them. The tears she hated, the ones that had been frozen behind her aching eyes, sheeted down her cheeks. Obed gathered her into his arms, holding on tight enough to keep her from shaking apart.
The rest of their ilian crowded close, embracing, touching, sharing the fear and relief. Kallista could feel it through the links of magic that bound them. She reached for the magic, weaving it between them. Often the magic brought a rush of almost sexual pleasure, but today it was comforting. Reassuring. She stretched and found Keldrey, bound as ilias but the only one of them not godmarked, and managed to weave him in too, a little. The strangeness eased.
Finally, her shuddering slowed, and stopped. Kallista dried her face on Obed's robe and her own sleeve, and she let the magic slip gently through her disembodied fingers and home into their separate bodies. Her ilian moved apart, allowing her to emerge from their center.
She began once more to pace. “This has to stop."
"You said that already.” Stone, the first of her godmarked to find her back when it had all begun, a Warrior in the invading army from Tibre across the sea, leaned a hip against the table and folded his arms. “Any suggestions as to what we might do that we aren't doing already?"
"Yes.” Kallista combed her fingers through her hair. Pulling out the rest of the pins, she began to braid it. It was too long for a proper military queue, as it hadn't been cut since her selection, but that could be remedied later. “It's time I remembered who I really am. Who we are together."
Leyja shook her head. “How can you be anything but what you are? The Reinine of all Adara. Godstruck by the One."
"That's the problem right there.” Kallista let Torchay take over the braiding of her hair. He was better at it to begin with and he hadn't let himself get out of practice. “I have been Reinine first and Godstruck second. But I was Godstruck before I ever became Reinine. That needs to be first.
"We were marked to deal with demons, and there is still one out there. As long as it exists, Adara will not be safe, not for our children or anyone else's.
"But I have let peace trap me. I've let it fool me into listening to these prinsipi and councilors, bureaucrats and rulemakers. I've been lulled into thinking the danger was past. That I didn't have to worry about war and demons and could concentrate on trade regulations and grazing permissions. I let myself get caught in the endless, niggling, petty, bickering politics of being Reinine, and I have forgotten my true purpose. We are godmarked."
"How can you say you have forgotten?” Obed protested. “Every day, you spread your magic and search for this demon. Every night, even while you sleep, you search in your dreaming."
Kallista sighed, touched his hand. “But don't you see? After so long, hunting every day—I let it become rote.” She put a sing-song foolishness into her voice. “Morning. Time to get out of bed. Stretch. Yawn. Scratch my head. Oh yes—time to send out the magic to find demons. There you go little magic, hunt away.” She frowned.
"I stopped expecting to find it. I stopped—I think I stopped wanting to find it."
No one spoke, though she could tell they wanted to. Torchay
glared at her down the length of his hooked nose. Fox glared too. Another Tibran Warrior, Stone's battle partner since childhood, he'd lost his sight and very nearly his life when the One's magic had marked him—had marked them all—back at the beginning.
That day seven years ago, on the walls of Ukiny, when the magic had poured into Kallista, a red, raised mark had appeared on the nape of her neck and on the others marked that day. Kallista's mark was the shape of the complete compass rose, the symbol of the One. The rest were marked with the rose alone, the symbol appearing at the time of their marking.
Blindness had cost Fox his caste, made him into less than nothing until he'd run away, driven to find Kallista. She had used the magic to give him an odd sense that let him know where things were around him, but he couldn't see them. The lack of sight made his glare no less effective.
"Don't you understand?” Kallista stopped to clear her throat of the guilty tears threatening to choke her. “Despite all the ... complications of becoming Reinine and the hard years when we rode across Adara putting down the rebellion, it was good. We were together and we were happy. I was, anyway."
"We all were.” Aisse didn't often speak in these meetings—she tended to focus on running the family—but when she did speak, she had the knack of saying what everyone felt.
Aisse was as Tibran as Stone and Fox, but as a woman, she'd been outside the Tibran caste system, abused by it—until she'd escaped when brought to Adara to serve the vast invasion army. She'd attached herself to Kallista, first as a servant, then as one of the four original members of their ilian. She hadn't been godmarked until later.
Kallista took a deep breath, accepting the truth. “And then, when things quieted enough, I had Omri, and when the magic came back after he was born ... Happiness—peace—had seduced me. I still hunted the demon, but I was only going through the form of hunting. That ends today."
