by Terah Edun
Still, as the scholar abruptly pushed forward despite his reticent nature, she thought, Good. He’ll be more useful when he thinks he needs to prove his knowledge and his worth.
Thinking like an Empress already, Sebastian chuckled.
She didn’t acknowledge him publicly or privately, but she swelled a little bit with pride that he had seen what she was doing—and obviously approved.
The warrior lord who wasn’t a general took the scholar’s words in stride, but the small, hard look he sent the man had the scholar gulping so hard, Ciardis wondered briefly if he’d swallowed his tongue.
Still, the warrior known as Fairchild in her eyes now spoke carefully. “No, I am not. I have chosen to defend this city and this palace as the head of the imperial guard…the new head. It is my place to review contingency strategies to secure both the future Emperor and his seat of power.”
“I wasn’t questioning your right of place,” the scholar managed to squeal.
Ciardis turned to him fully then.
“Weren’t you?” she countered. “Words have meaning, and your words certainly brought his credentials into question.”
“I apologize, Your Imperial Highness, Sergeant-at-Arms,” the man said while paling.
Sergeant-at-Arms Fairchild waved away his platitudes. “Enough with your apologies. Defend your words.”
“I—” the scholar said weakly.
“Your words from before. Out of all the scenarios put forth, yours seem most plausible. Moderately sketched out or not,” Ciardis prodded helpfully.
She was careful to pitch her voice higher so everyone would at least catch that last sentence.
Low murmurs in the room died down entirely.
The warrior lord nodded. “If the ley lines were used as a trap and are networked, they could be again.”
“But how? The networks are immaterial and surely just conveyances, not weapons as you’re suggesting,” someone asked.
That seemed to be all the scholar needed to veritably blossom under the gazes of interested parties as the scholar refocused his attention back on his original subject.
“No, they’re more than that. So much more!” he exclaimed. “The ley lines were vast foci of power back then. Think of them as river wells of natural mage gift. Untapped and boundless in reserves. Before the wars, any mage within reach of a ley line was free to use them.”
There were murmurs of agreement around the room. The bladed woman from yesterday stepped forward.
Sebastian looked over at her and raised his hand. “Please. If you have something to say, speak up.”
She bowed shortly to the prince heir, then turned to the scholar and said with a hint of a question in her voice, “Not just any mage could use those lines among the kith. Only skilled ones.”
“You know a lot for a secret of the empire that not many individuals were aware of…even myself,” Sebastian replied in a measured tone.
“It’s my job to be aware of the threats to our peoples,” the living weapon replied.
And then a man spoke up from among the human nobles. “It was and is the same among our…contingent. Only the strongest mages knew of the ley lines and only a few among them could use those ley lines to effectivness. Mostly graduates of the famed mage academy at the edge of the Ameles Forest.”
Murmurs of assent from mages and wonder from the non-mages rose and fell.
“So about half this room?” asked a voice with a sarcastic edge. A human voice, from a person she couldn’t quite see around the warrior lord.
“More like a quarter,” said Thanar with dark amusement. “Power and proficiency are two vastly different quantities.”
Some mages looked affronted, like peacocks whose beauty had been insulted, but as Thanar lightly tossed a ball of black magic between his fingertips like one would flip a coin in a trick, one and all settled back with sweatier faces.
Ciardis grimaced. She didn’t like the thought of the daemoni prince silently threatening anyone in the room. Although if she were honest, it was no different than what the prince heir had done when he had overtly signaled his soldiers to draw their weapons. That had been a tense time as well, and the threat just as clear, if not as deliberate.
She was more frustrated that she couldn’t imagine the outcome of a battle in a place so packed with bodies. They’d already lost against the goddess once, and she’d rather die of embarrassment than see them turn against their own conclave members in direct contradiction to their united front just yesterday. After all, if anyone survived a second battle in this room, this conclave council would certainly go down in the annals as the most ineffective in the history of the empire.
Not to mention the fact that the loss of even one major mage warrior was a loss they couldn’t afford, and everyone in the room knew it.
Trust me, I know that, cooed Thanar. But they forget their place far too easily. We are allies, but even allies must be kept in line.
Ciardis looked over at him with a raised eyebrow but said to the people around them, “Will a quarter be enough to do what we need?”
The warrior lord shifted his broad feet and look to the scholar. “I defer to the strategist in the room.”
You could have heard a pin drop as to a man and a woman, all attention focused on one man. This time with deference in more than one pair of eyes. This scholar just might save them all. If he could get over his stage fright and speak up, that is.
16
“Back to the ley lines,” said the scholar with self-important authority.
“So only the strongest mages before the war could use them. That was true for both sides of the conflict. The ley lines weren’t restricted by affiliation, merely power,” the scholar said. “But the imperial palace thought of a way to counteract that.”
“How?” asked Thanar in an intense voice.
Ciardis glanced over at him in surprise. “Something the daemoni prince doesn’t know?”
Nasty laughs erupted all around the room from the human contingents. They thought their future Empress was mocking the daemoni prince. She wasn’t, and she quickly turned to reprimand them, but Thanar got there first.
“I don’t keep up with human histories. You die so quickly, after all. Short lives. Short dramas,” he said in a nasty tone.
Thanar, I didn’t— she quickly thought at him.
I know, he said with quiet indifference. Let them be. It’s good for them to think they can drive a wedge between us.
How so? she asked, flummoxed.
They already think that you, and by extension the prince heir, the newest belle at their ball, are far too cozy with the dirty kith, he responded.
His tone may have been indifferent, but she could sense the hurt in his thoughts. Not at their words, but hers.
Sebastian stepped into the mental conversation awkwardly. Thanar is right. Although he won’t say it, their prejudices will undermine an alliance before it can even form.
Silently Ciardis took stock of the room. The kith once more isolated in a collective corner, almost in a phalanx, positioned as if they expected to have to fight their way out of the room at any moment. The humans standing and sitting around the room in small collectives. Everyone was tense, but even she could see that emotions were also frayed.
She also noticed that now that the biggest threat was over even the nobles had withdrew. Only Sebastian stood anywhere near the kith physically. And even he was within a stone’s throw in a packed room.
She huffed and folded her arms but didn’t push the subject any further. Outwardly. Inwardly she was seething.
“Right,” said the prince heir in a firm manner while giving Thanar an ice-cold look for the benefit of the room. “And what was this way, Scholar?”
“It’s said the Empress of the time had the ley lines blocked so no one could use them,” the scholar said. “And that when the enemy mages did…all the magic they tried to direct into their attacks blew back into their faces in a ferocious rebound. Killing the mages
who had tried to use it.”
There was silence around the room.
“Nasty stuff,” said one person.
Ciardis spoke up. “And this trap…it worked?”
The scholar looked over at her with a haunted expression. “It ended the wars.”
She rocked back on her heels and thought about it. “And what makes you think we can use this trap effectively ourselves?”
“Well,” the scholar said, “the manner in which the ley lines were locked is still well known. The blockades are still in place and have been since the wars.”
A lord with a ruddy face stood and thumped his meaty fist down right across from the scholar in anger. “Damned straight they are. The magic in this empire has been off in the countryside for the past decade, and I can’t do a bloody thing about it.”
More of Maradian’s doing? Ciardis wondered at the mention of the “past decade.”
“What do you mean?” Sebastian said with an intense look.
The lord turned to the prince heir. “I mean, young prince heir, that either you or your family have been mucking with the natural order of magic in these lands. My farms are dying. My people are frightened, and instead of redirecting imperial mages to drain wayward magic from the land, all I’ve seen are mages trotted one after another to the northern lands never to return.”
“Well, Sedgewick,” said the sarcastic voice, the owner of which Ciardis could now see seated far down the table, “at least now we know why. They were fighting a phantom invasion in the northern lands while really imprisoning thousands of kith for whatever the Emperor had planned.”
The farmer glared at the practical jokester. “What about my lands?” he said flatly.
“One thing at a time,” Sebastian said quietly. “We defeat the invasion. Then we set the lands back to what they once were.”
“That’s not good enough!” the man said with a baritone shout. His face was turning an interestingly bright shade of red, and soldiers around the room were shifting in readiness.
The scholar broke the tension this time.
“This is the same battle they fought decades ago!” he shouted with excitement in his eyes. “The Empress’s own people wanted the power for their lands, and she wanted it to save her empire.”
There was silence for a moment.
Ciardis said slowly, “Assuming that is so—”
“And they got past their nasty little differences,” Thanar added snidely.
“—how do we do what she did?” Ciardis finished. “How do we stop entire battalions in their tracks?”
“The ley lines! They won’t just kill our enemies, they’ll readjust to put the land back to right…or at least they should if we use them as they are designed. We’ll first have to unblock them,” he said in a hurried tone, obviously afraid that if a fight broke out, he’d be caught in the crossfire.
Tensely Sebastian said, “And?”
The prince heir might have been speaking to the scholar, but his eyes were locked in a stare-down with the angry lord.
“And unblocking them means releasing the power pent up behind the blockade,” the scholar said quickly. “Imagine…centuries of magic has been pooling underneath surface lines. Ready to use. Most of it will wash back into the land to correct the breaks in the natural order of magic, as you say. The rest can be used by our mages to ‘restock’ ahead of the deity battle, if you will.”
They all thought it through in silence.
“And the trap?” the foxlike representative of the kith finally asked.
“The goddess’s army should be drawn to the open ley lines like flies to honey,” said the scholar. “In the records, most god creatures are.” He looked around the room in nervousness as he ended in a high-pitched tone, “We just have to spring a trap to massacre them that the goddess herself will never forget.”
There was a moment when everyone looked at each other.
Ciardis knew what they were all thinking. Could this work?
She was wondering the same thing.
The sergeant-at-arms gave the first sound of approval she’d heard him make all day. He slapped the scholar on the back with a broad hand which left the man huddled over the table like a whipped dog as Fairchild said in wonder, “The little man just might have found our solution!”
As people seemed to be getting used to that idea, the scholar not the least among them, Sebastian signaled to Ciardis with a gesture that they needed to speak privately.
She made her way back over to them and huddled down with her triumvirate. Two soldiers stood on either side of their group to ensure no one else tried to join them.
For a moment she, Thanar, and Sebastian were off on their own. As much as they could be in a crowded room. But Thanar’s lifted wings did afford some modicum of privacy. They couldn’t put up sight and sound shields right now. It would have been the height of impropriety for a ruler to cut himself off from his powerful subjects so crudely. Doing so would suggest he didn’t trust them.
Which he doesn’t, jibbed Thanar.
Not fully anyway was Sebastian’s dry response. True, the people in this room had died for him, but it remained to be seen if they would die for their empire. There was a difference between what had passed just yesterday, a battle fought of desperation because they all knew they wouldn’t get out of that room alive otherwise, and a battle to save their fellow citizens. If Sebastian trusted these conclave members too much, nothing would stop them from running off to their estates and battening down the hatches to await the immortal storm passing over them.
Fortunately for the triumvirate, Ciardis had the feeling that the majority of those here realized they wouldn’t escape the goddess’s notice so easily. They needed to work together to defeat her, so that was what they were doing.
If you’d focus, Thanar said as he threw up a barely-there blockade as an extra level of security. It wasn’t a shield so much as a buzzing noise that surrounded their heads, making eavesdropping hard but not impossible.
Ciardis just barely managed to restrain herself from grinning. It would have been more inappropriate for the prince heir to throw up his shields among such illustrious court members—after all, they were aiding the empire which meant they should be above such precautions. But for Thanar to do this? Well, they considered the daemoni prince just a thimble short of uncouth anyway, so it didn’t matter.
Besides that, Thanar was just following the concept of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the goddess of death and destruction certainly counted as any mortal’s enemy. The conclave members understood that as practiced players of the imperial games as well as some of the shrewdest practitioners of magic Ciardis had ever seen.
Meaning that they were about as trustworthy as venomous snakes and twice as likely to bite the hands that fed them.
She looked at Sebastian. Sebastian looked at Thanar. Thanar looked off over their heads into the darkness of his wings as if the shadows held all the answers.
Still, she asked in a tentative voice, “You two think this will work?”
“We don’t have any better ideas,” Thanar finally ventured in a flat voice.
“Mother of the gods,” Sebastian said in a harried tone. “We’re actually going to do this.”
“Looks like it,” Ciardis said in a bright voice.
They both turned to peer at her. “What’s got you so chipper?” Thanar finally asked.
She shrugged. “It’s something to do. It’s a plan. And for once, we don’t have an Emperor looming over our backs with a double cross in the wings.”
“Well, that’s true enough,” said Sebastian with a wheezing laugh.
Thanar muttered something uncomplimentary about their dead imperial leader.
“Let’s get this plan going, then,” she said with a gentle squeeze of their shoulders.
“Wait!” Sebastian said as they all stood from their huddle, just before Thanar lowered his wings.
“What?” Ciardis asked.
“Ci
ardis,” Sebastian said in an awkward whisper, “don’t let those ungrateful snakes get to you. You know your place in this war and in this court. They can’t undermine that if you don’t let them.”
She paused.
She thought about denying her rage, even her pain at the nobles’ response to her. But she settled on honesty.
“I’m not too sure about that,” she finally said.
“Well, I am,” Sebastian said firmly. “And even if I wasn’t, you have enough sass for the both of us. Plug them in the nose and keep going.”
She laughed. “Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
Thanar ruffled his wings and cracked his knuckles. “You know, Golden Eyes…if you’ve got some problems in particular, those are easily taken care of.”
“No,” she said after a moment of deliberation. She wasn’t averse to Thanar’s method of helping. She just knew if she cut off the head of one known problem, two unknowns would grow in its place. “I need to stand up to them. It’s just harder than it looks.”
Thanar snorted derisively, but he didn’t try to dissuade her. For which she was grateful. They had fought time and again about him giving Ciardis her own freedom of choice. At least now he was finally starting to listen.
At least she hoped so. She couldn’t take another instance of learning he was controlling her emotions or wiping her memories, not after what had happened the last time.
“You think I can do this?” she asked them.
Sebastian answered with a smile in his voice. “Even if you the Weathervane can’t, know that that isn’t your only seat of power now. You’ll be the new Emperor’s wife. Therefore, they are required to please you.”
For a moment she was flung back into an earlier moment in time. When anxiety and horror had crossed the faces of the nobles who had lost her in the crowded room.
“Perhaps that’s part of the issue,” she wondered aloud.
She didn’t know why this hadn’t occurred to her before, but things were happening so fast that sometimes the largest transitions became the smallest concerns. The nobles hadn’t forgotten, though.
