by Terah Edun
“It’s not a personal vendetta with me,” she continued, almost with elation. “It’s the fear of a new ruler. A new unknown. They know of me, but they don’t know me. They fear who I’ll be. What battles I’ll wage in their meddlesome court politics.”
“More than a possibility,” Thanar said dryly.
Ciardis froze, and then, unbidden, a laugh erupted from her mouth. As though this was a signal, Thanar dropped his wing as he stepped out of the way of their view. With his wings went the buzzing blockade, and so her small, joyous laugh had heads turning to see what the triumvirate were up to now.
Their eyes were assessing wondering if this new imperial would be as insane as the last one.
Ciardis Weathervane would have been amused if they knew just what she was laughing at, but that would have spoiled the surprise. It was a laugh of relief really, but they didn’t need to know that.
Instead she demurely covered her mouth with her hand and turned to whisper in Sebastian’s ear. “To think I didn’t imagine I was going to enjoy ascending the throne.”
17
“So it’s done,” Sebastian said almost an hour later with relief in his voice.
Ciardis didn’t blame him. They came to this conclave meeting with nothing but hopes and were emerging with a solid plan to battle their opponent.
Anyone would be proud. But considering that up until this time they’d stumbled from enemy to enemy like drunk sailors going between alleys inhabited by prostitutes, well, this was a nice change.
Not that killing someone in an offhand manner didn’t have its own joys—at least, according to Vana it did—but this…this felt satisfying in a way those deaths didn’t.
“It feels constructive,” Ciardis murmured as they looked around the room.
“What was that?” Sebastian said as he looked up from a map where he, the scholar, and another lord were busily marking out the exact locations of the old ley lines from the wars.
Out of the corner of her eye, Ciardis noted something odd. None of the locations were anywhere near the Ameles Forest.
She opened her mouth and said, “Nothing. Just thinking aloud.”
Sebastian raised an eyebrow but didn’t question her further. He turned back to the scholar, who was so excited he seemed to be having a seizure as he pointed out something about “massive” and “nexus.”
Ciardis tuned him out. Sebastian would go over the map in detail with her later. They couldn’t act in concert as a triumvirate if they weren’t honest with each other about something as big as this. He knew this. She knew this. They knew this.
Instead she was focused on the other third of their bond. At the moment, Thanar stood surrounded by kith who had seemingly decided to mingle with their human compatriots toward the middle of the table.
“For now,” she mused as Thanar animatedly mimed something, using his hands and wings in concert.
He looked like a giant beast with six legs from a children’s story, she thought with an internal giggle. But she wasn’t going to say that aloud.
There were limits to their bond, and she had the sneaking suspicion that they firmly ended at making fun of Thanar.
So she wisely smoothed her face into a more appropriate expression of interest as she made her way over to his small group with polite words to individuals along the way.
It took her longer than she would have liked to get to him, but it would have been impolite for the new Empress-to-be to snub souls at only the second conclave meeting under Sebastian’s very new rule, and she couldn’t exactly regress into her former status as meek Companion either.
She had to stand up for herself and for her seeleverbindung bondmates by being the perfect partner, which meant being polite when it was called for, standing firm in the face of opposition, exuding charm and class when she could, and not breaking under pressure.
I’m exactly what Lillian wanted me to be, Ciardis thought in horror as she finally made it to Thanar’s side. I’m the perfect wife.
Thanar apparently heard her thoughts, since she hadn’t bothered to shield or keep them private.
As her hand slipped onto his shoulder, he teased, The perfect wife? I like to think of you as the perfect weapon. Unassuming until your opponent underestimates you. You’ve killed more people than even I thought you were capable of all those months ago.
Ciardis looked at him askance as she fought to keep control over her expression. She wasn’t sure if laughter was going to come out or a groan, but either wasn’t necessarily an appropriate reaction.
She settled for telling him, Thank you. I think that was a compliment.
The highest a daemoni can give his intended, he said suavely.
His intended what? she said in mock horror—half teasing him.
It works just as well referring to our intended dinner and to our lovers.
Ciardis opened her mouth, thought better about what she was about to say in response to that sanguine comment, and said instead, “So, my lords, what are we discussing?”
The foxlike kith, who seemed to be the head of this representational delegation of kith to the conclave, quickly said, “How to kill the goddess.”
“Oh?” said Ciardis politely.
It wasn’t like she was surprised. They’d been discussing that since yesterday afternoon after being summarily defeated and revived in one sitting.
The representative nodded. “Your prince has told me of the one who holds the collar used to defeat the bluttgott.”
Ciardis nodded wisely in return and tried to look up-to-date on the matter.
Thanar didn’t help by completely ignoring her pinches—silent requests for help.
If she didn’t know any better, she would have said he was laughing at her, but she couldn’t turn to look up at his assuredly dancing eyes to confirm her guess.
Instead she forged on. “The one in Kifar?”
“That is so,” the kith representative said. “Among my people there is lore that confirms the mantle is necessary.”
Kicking herself for being so lax in memory, Ciardis swiftly said, “And is there more needed to kill the goddess? How does the collar work? Is the bearer a requisite?”
The foxlike creature said with a stretch of its shoulders, “As I was telling your bondmate, the lore is extensive on certain weapons used to kill the gods, but the book which tells of the weapon in detail is not here, unfortunately. It lies in my home in Ameles.”
Of course it does. Ciardis cursed mentally while remaining calm externally. She couldn’t stop her eye from twitching, though. It did that when she got nervous sometimes. Or frustrated.
If Lillian had been here, she would have kicked her daughter in the shins for it.
Thanar finally decided to be of some use. “Fortunately, the text which talks about the mantle and the bearer is not exclusive to the kirasi.”
“Kirasi?” Ciardis asked politely.
The foxlike representative smiled, showing canines sharper than her daggers, and bowed gently. “My people, milady.”
Thanar continued as if uninterrupted. “My people too have heard of this…legend.”
This time Ciardis couldn’t stay quiet. “I’d have thought you would have mentioned that before we left for Kifar.”
Thanar snorted. “I said we’d heard about it. I didn’t think it was anything more than lore until we stumbled upon that decrepit ruling body Kifar called a council. Even then we hadn’t found the bearer.”
Ciardis sighed. “That’s right—he found us.”
If her tone was bitter, well, she had a right to it. That bearer had been the cause of death for several of her friends. Trapped alone and ill in the bottom of a dank pit. And several more simply by falling in with the machinations of the dead Emperor and his court.
“And now,” the kith representative said, “this bearer needs to be retrieved. For we need a two-pronged attack to defeat this goddess in totality. Her army must be defeated and so must she.”
Ciardis stiffened in
warning. Not at the representative’s words, but at the unspoken narrative behind them.
They all knew that Amani would need to be confronted. The question until now had been how. But the kith and the daemoni seemed to have found a solution together. But they wouldn’t come out and just say what it was.
It was almost as if they were alluding to something they didn’t want to speak of. Thanar was keeping secrets.
She was tired of courtesies. Of polite platitudes. Of being the perfect future wife.
Ciardis looked Thanar in the face. “Start talking now.”
“You’re like a dog with a bone,” he said.
“Oh, you haven’t seen how stubborn I can be,” she said fixing him with a gaze filled with warning anger. “You’re up to something. I want to know what.”
The surrounding kith, apparently all with excellent hearing, laughed good-naturedly.
Ciardis ignored them and focused on Thanar.
Thanar conjured up a small black mage ball. That wasn’t a good sign.
But he didn’t throw it at anyone. Instead, he began playing with it, as if the action were a nervous tic.
He stared off at the wall for a moment. Which turned into a minute and then minutes. Ciardis wasn’t sure what to make of his demeanor.
When she softened her voice and said his name, he finally sighed and looked down at her.
“We’ve known for a while how to defeat the god,” Thanar said finally. “Magic is in play, but we need more than that. We need warm bodies to man the fields, and we need to locate a bearer who is far too damned good at disappearing. We have the instructions but not the instruments needed to finalize this.”
Ciardis flapped her hand at the people around the room. “We have instruments. The people here. We’re deploying everyone we can.”
“It’s not enough,” Thanar snarled. “Not at the critical nexus points.”
Ciardis frowned. “What do you mean?”
“We need more than just mages and power,” he said in frustration. “I would normally be the last person to say this, but…I’m forced to because of your stupid human practices. We need unity. We need trust.”
Ciardis looked at him as though he was insane, then turned to look at the kith representative.
Helpfully, the kith cleared his throat and spoke. “During the Initiate Wars, your government was besieged on all sides. They were fighting a multi-front war against their own people—mages fed up with imperial edicts.”
Ciardis was getting heartedly tired of hearing about a two-centuries-old war, but she didn’t interrupt.
“They figured out how to harness the ley lines and use them as a trap against the enemy forces,” continued the kith representative with a gnash of his teeth. “But—”
Oh, here it comes, Ciardis thought with a drop in the pit of her stomach.
“—the Empress during the wars needed to make sure the enemy mages couldn’t just turn around and use the ley lines against her forces. There was nothing stopping them, after all,” he said. “Just sheer ingenuity and craftiness.”
Ciardis bit her lip but couldn’t stop the question. “What did they do?”
Thanar looked directly at her. “Not they. She. The Empress decided to tie the use of the ley lines to her subordinates.”
Ciardis frowned. Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.
Just wait, Thanar told her with uncharacteristic restraint. Outwardly he said, “Normally my people would have just tied it to our bloodline and been done with it. But for reasons unknown, the Empress of Algardis during the Initiate Wars didn’t particularly trust her own cousins and nephews. So instead of having the ley lines keyed to family or to, say…the most powerful mages of her time, half of whom were working for the enemy forces, she decided to key it to her loyalists.”
“And?” Ciardis asked impatiently.
“Loyalists who went beyond those who’d sworn a blood oath to her,” Thanar said flatly.
Ciardis looked from the foxlike face with suddenly sad eyes to the daemoni prince’s visage which looked…defensive.
“Go on…” Ciardis said. She knew there was more. What could possibly be beyond a blood oath? The very nature of such a bond required absolute loyalty…or hideous consequences if violated. That was kind of the nature of a blood oath.
Thanar said slowly, “She didn’t want her nexus points and the control of the ley lines to fall into the wrong hands. So she didn’t tie it to individuals who’d just sworn the blood oath to her. That wasn’t enough for her.”
“And let me guess,” Ciardis said harshly. “Whatever she tied it to sets the precedent for us.”
The kirasi nodded as did the daemoni prince.
“That is so,” the foxlike kith said.
Bile rose in her throat as she looked to Thanar to continue. “So what did she do?” Ciardis asked reluctantly.
“The Empress of Algardis was a crafty one,” Thanar said as he tossed his black mage ball up and down in the air. “She tied it to the people who had died for her.”
He said this in a distant voice, almost uncaring voice.
Ciardis managed to lick her dried lips as she said the words she didn’t really want to say. “What do you mean, ‘died for her’?”
Thanar looked her dead in the eyes as he said, “She resurrected her spies who had died in her service. The servants who had sacrificed their lives for her. Even her family, who refused to turn on her. And she used them for her greatest magical act. She used them after death and brought them back to life.”
18
Ciardis set her jaw and took a deep breath with her eyes closed.
When she looked back up at him, he was watching her with interest.
Not out of concern; more like a cat with a toy who was wondering when it would break.
Ciardis’s lips twitched as she thought, Too bad that’s how Thanar shows he cares. To the foxlike kith, she said blithely, “Is this in your lore as well?”
The kirasi stirred as he spread his paws almost apologetically. “It is not lore. It is history. It is fact. This is how your Empress did this.”
“You keep saying your,” Ciardis said in semi-frustration.
The kith representative gave her a withered look. “If you think our lives in this empire are bad now, they were worse then. We weren’t second-class citizens; we were hunted, betrayed, killed for existing. We were forbidden. All of us. So, yes…your.”
Ciardis didn’t respond. She’d put in her foot in it. She deserved that bit of censure.
With a sigh she turned to Thanar. “Anything else? Maybe we can have ghosts ride the winds and howl in warning of approaching armies?”
Thanarcrossed his arms and leaned forward on the chair between her and him. “You’re joking, but that’s not a bad idea.”
Ciardis couldn’t take it anymore. She looked back and forth between kirasi and daemoni. “You both must be mad!”
“Because you believe your human Empress wouldn’t have done this?” the kith representative said with a quizzical tilt of his head.
“No,” Ciardis said with a startled choke. “After Maradian, I’d believe just about anything of the imperial rulers.”
“Then what is it?” asked Thanar.
Ciardis fought the urge to throw up her hands in frustration in the middle of the crowded room. “For one thing, it wouldn’t be seemly. For another, the human contingent might see it as a sign that she was in trouble surrounded completely by kith detractors,” the daemoni prince included.
The humans and the kith may have been working together now, but she could still feel the tension in the room. She had the feeling that some people would take anything as an excuse to shed a little blood first and ask questions later.
So she said in a calm voice, “There must be another way.”
“This is it,” Thanar said. “We’re barely scraping by on time as it is. We have five days and nothing else can be activated in time. This is it.”
She set her jaw stubbornly. “Yo
u just need mages, right? Well, there are powerful ones around us, and unlike a long-dead Empress, we are not psychotic people who think the world is out to betray them.”
“Perhaps you should be, Lady Weathervane,” the kith representative said solemnly.
Ciardis gritted her teeth. “What does that mean?”
“It means the goddess could already have foreign agents in this land with the express intention of undermining your cause in the coming battle,” the foxlike kith said.
Ciardis was flummoxed.
“With no disrespect to the daemoni prince,” the representative continued, “if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes the steps he’s taken in direct contention to his own deity…I might have suspected him of subterfuge as well.”
Ciardis glared, half affronted on Thanar’s behalf.
Thanar, however, shrugged. “No offense taken. It was my original plan, after all. Things just got…sidetracked.”
“And now you want to do this?” Ciardis said in frustration. “There are people we can trust.”
“Not wholly, not completely,” Thanar said. “And we can’t afford for any of this to go wrong. We’ve already personally seen the consequences of underestimating Amani.”
His voice was ominous, and Ciardis knew he was right. They had no time to execute a backup plan if this original effort failed.
As an afterthought the daemoni prince added, “Besides, the precedent is set. We can’t reforge the very fabric of what the ley lines are based on. Not if we want this to work.”
Still, Ciardis Weathervane tried to dissuade them. Better to get a good plan in place that they could all support now instead of this.
“You can’t seriously think we’re going to bring back dead loyalists to fight for us again and potentially die for us again...just to act as ley line anchors?” Ciardis said. “Are you insane? It’s barbaric.”
“It’s necessary,” said Thanar slowly.
“It’s inhumane!” Ciardis pleaded.
“We’re not human,” the representative and the daemoni said at the same time.
Well, I walked right into that one, Ciardis thought as she shook her head in irritation and rethought her strategy.
