Queen of the Unwanted

by Jenna Glass

  Perhaps it was his imagination, but Jalzarnin could have sworn that Mother Norah looked downright smug when he was shown into her office. Certainly the woman knew about his relationship with Mairah, though she most likely thought it had been one of convenience rather than love. And Jalzarnin had no doubt she was somehow to blame for Mairah’s flight, despite her claims that Mairah had run away because she’d known her mission would fail.

  “How good of you to come visit, Lord Jalzarnin,” Norah said. Behind the layers of smugness and courtesy, he detected a hint of unease she was trying hard to hide. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that Mairahsol betrayed our kingdom and left you in such an untenable position. If I’d had any inkling what she was going to do, I swear I would have stopped it.”

  Jalzarnin considered himself a man of tact and subtlety, and he’d come to the abbess’s office intending to engage her in a complex dance of suggestions and innuendo in hopes that she would reveal more than she realized over the course of the conversation. But faced with her now, knowing she was to blame for Mairah’s terrible situation and his own disgrace, he found that subtlety was beyond him.

  “Let us not pretend to a cordiality we do not feel for each other,” he said, causing Norah to blink in surprise and no small amount of alarm. “I don’t know what you did to Mairahsol, how you caused her to flee, but I know you were responsible all the same.”

  Norah stuttered the start of what was no doubt a denial, but he cut her off with a harsh hand motion.

  “She is a captive of the Abbey of Aaltah, which by all accounts has become a place of unspeakable misery, all because of you. If you hoped that claiming she was guilty of a treasonous lie would save you and your sisters from her revenge, you were very much mistaken.”

  He was not in the habit of bullying old women, but he couldn’t deny a glow of satisfaction when he saw terror and comprehension in the new abbess’s eyes.

  “Oh, you thought I wouldn’t reveal the presence of your Mother of All cult in this abbey because I might be tainted by association?” he asked. “That might have been true if the failure of the mission hadn’t already cost me the office of lord high priest. But when it comes down to it, right now I have little more to lose.”

  Tears pooled in Norah’s eyes, and she rose from her desk to come kneel at his feet, gazing up at him beseechingly. He wished Mairah were here to see this, for he was sure she would have enjoyed the sight. Just as he was sure…well, at least hopeful, that she would approve the alternative revenge he had devised in her absence. For in actuality, he did still have a great deal to lose by revealing the existence of the heretics. The king already blamed him enough for the failure of Mairah’s mission that he’d summarily dismissed Jalzarnin from the royal council. That taint would cling to Jalzarnin for years to come, but at least over time he might hope to win his way back into the king’s good graces. After all, Khalvin was nothing if not mercurial. But in the king’s present mood, Jalzarnin could not trust him not to lose all sense of reason if he learned about the cult. He might just be angry enough to insist Jalzarnin himself be questioned by the inquisitor, and that was a fate Jalzarnin would not risk. Not even for Mairah.

  “Please, my lord,” Norah begged. “I swear to you it was not my fault that Mairahsol fled. I won’t pretend I did not despise her, but I would never risk the lives of my sisters by betraying her. She chose to run because she has been lying to you all along. She has no talent for visions or she would not have needed to force so many of the Abbey’s seers to try to solve her troubles for her. She kept up the illusion that she had the talent to undo the Curse for as long as she could, then made a run for it when she realized her time was nearly up. It probably gives her a great deal of pleasure to imagine you condemning us for her disappearance. My sisters and I are blameless.”

  Jalzarnin snorted loudly. “Even if I believed you were telling the complete truth, you are not blameless! You are heretics! And I may not be the lord high priest anymore, but I am still a priest. It is my duty to root out heresy wherever it may sprout.”

  Norah was too terrified by the threat to question his sincerity, though it would eventually occur to her that his duty to root out heresy had been conspicuously absent from his consideration until this moment. If he were threatening to condemn her because of his great piety, he would have done so long before now. Visibly shaking, Norah prostrated herself at his feet and blubbered.

  Jalzarnin felt no pity for her terror. Why should he, when she had never shown an inkling of pity for Mairahsol?

  “Please, Lord Jalzarnin,” she begged between sobs. “Please do not condemn us. We will do whatever you ask of us. My abigails will service you however you like without charge. We will—”

  “There is, in fact, one way I might conceivably be convinced to keep your perversions to myself,” he interrupted, and Norah turned her tearstained face up toward him with wary hope flickering in her eyes.

  “Anything,” she swore, and Jalzarnin had no doubt that she meant it. He suspected in her place, he would have made the same promise, for he could think of no fate worse than being declared a heretic in King Khalvin’s court.

  In her short stint as abbess, Mairahsol had done only an adequate job of feeding him the information he hoped for. Her abilities had been severely limited by her unpopularity and the resistance she had faced from Norah and the rest of the cultists. But with Norah as abbess—and beholden to Jalzarnin even more desperately than Mairah had been—there was no end to the amount of information he could glean about the fine noblemen who frequented the Abbey. Perhaps enough to restore him to his rightful position as lord high priest in relatively short order. After all, he already knew that his replacement, Lord Thanstal, was a frequent visitor to the Abbey. And just because Mairahsol hadn’t been able to learn anything particularly useful or damaging about him didn’t mean such information didn’t exist.

  Jalzarnin looked forward to teaching the ambitious priest just how capricious King Khalvin’s high regard could be.

  * * *

  —

  Mairah had hoped she’d be allowed to drink the seer’s poison in some semblance of comfort. After all, she would be putting herself through a life-threatening, painful trauma all for the sake of what King Delnamal considered the public good. Surely a sacrifice such as hers—even when made with such great reluctance—deserved some compensation.

  But no. Instead of undertaking her mission in the royal palace, where they could at least have offered her comfortable servants’ quarters, she was forced to trigger her vision in the Abbey in one of the wretched playrooms. From what she’d heard whispered, the playrooms in the original Abbey of Aaltah had been luxurious as the rest of the Abbey was not, in deference to the rich and noble men who were its most frequent customers. However, since the original abigails had been banished and the Abbey razed, the clientele was apparently not so lofty or picky. The room was dingy and airless and smelled faintly of sweat and cum.

  Administrator Loveland hovered over her and glowered as she mixed her special remembrance potion with the strongest seer’s poison she knew how to make. She did, of course, consider making a counterfeit poison, one that would not cause her such great pain or risk her death. If she’d been in Khalpar, needing only a promising suggestion that she could undo the Curse to secure her position as abbess, that was unquestionably what she would have done. But here in Aaltah, with the king’s threats hanging over her head, Mairah feared she would need more than a promising suggestion. She needed something real. Which meant her only reasonable option was to down the genuine seer’s poison and pray to the Mother she didn’t believe in that it would show her a way to save herself.

  Mairah held the small vial of poison to her lips, her mouth gone dry and her pulse racing and her skin clammy with fear-sweat. Loveland was still glowering at her, his expression saying he was willing—maybe even eager—to punish her for her hesitation. At which
point he would no doubt force the stuff down her throat.

  Pinching her nose in the futile hope that she could dull the foul taste, she poured the contents of the vial into her mouth and shuddered convulsively. Willing herself to have a vision of the night the Curse was cast, she swallowed the poison despite her throat’s fervent desire to close up and reject it. Her heart tripped over itself in terror as the poison burned down her throat, the heat stronger and more immediate than what she’d experienced with the milder versions.

  She was climbing onto the bed, preparing to make herself as comfortable as possible, when a burst of fiery pain, worse than anything she had felt before, bloomed in her chest. It stole the air from her lungs, made her heart thud against her breastbone so loudly she thought sure the sound could be heard in the neighboring room. The empty vial fell from her fingertips. It likely shattered when meeting the stone floor, but she could not hear the sound over her own helpless scream.

  The room fell away immediately, her vision going dark as she writhed and cried and tried to escape from the pain. She could not feel the bed beneath her as the fire spread from her chest to her belly then crawled down her arms and legs at a leisurely pace.

  She was dying. The poison was burning her flesh away from her bones, consuming her from the inside out. It was the price she had to pay for her hubris in drinking so strong a seer’s poison when she had no reason to believe she could withstand it. But this death—as excruciating as it was—was better than the alternative fates that awaited her had she refused to drink.

  It went on and on and on until Mairah thought she would surely lose her sanity before she lost her life. And then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

  Mairah couldn’t feel her body anymore, but the darkness slowly lightened, bringing into focus a humble but comfortable room filled with worn, mismatched furniture and lit by several bright luminants. A middle-aged woman dressed in the red robes of an abigail sat in a shabby armchair by the fire across from a younger abigail to whom she bore a striking family resemblance. The younger woman’s body was rigid with tension, her hands clasped together so tightly in her lap that the knuckles were white. The older woman—her mother?—wore a stern expression that carried the undeniable air of authority and perhaps even a hint of impatience.

  “Nadeen,” said the older woman, whom Mairah now suspected was the late Abbess of Aaltah, “I told you before that our work would require a sacrifice. What did you think I meant?”

  The young woman—Nadeen—was visibly shaking, her eyes filmed with tears as she stared fixedly at the floor. “I-I don’t know,” she said in a quavering voice. “I just…I didn’t expect…”

  The abbess’s voice softened, although there was too much steel in her expression to make her tone truly gentle. “We have many years yet to prepare. I trust that when the time comes, you will be ready to do what must be done.”

  A hint of fire flashed in Nadeen’s eyes, then was quickly replaced by misery as she shook her head. “I can’t, Mama,” she whispered. “I am not brave like you.”

  “Maybe not now,” the abbess said, and Mairah winced in sympathy for Nadeen. The abbess appeared not to be the warmest and most nurturing of mothers. “You need time to make peace with your fate. I certainly did not enter the Abbey planning to slash my own wrists for the greater good, and I was not especially receptive to the idea when my abbess explained it to me. But time and maturity have made me see that it is for the best.”

  Nadeen shook her head again. “And what if I refuse?” she asked. “Will you then slay me with your own hand?”

  The abbess made a sound of impatience. “Have you listened to nothing I’ve said? Our willing sacrifice will produce something that is akin to Kai, but it isn’t Kai. At least not the Kai that we are familiar with and that men produce. That Kai is the element of death and vengeance. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect thanks to our special breeding, you and I and Vondeen would produce ordinary masculine Kai—and be able to see it—if we suffered a violent death. But that is not what we need to make our spell work. And since our spell is designed to sink through the earth into Aaltah’s Well, I can only imagine what damage we could do if we activated it with ordinary masculine Kai. It would almost certainly poison the Well, and it might even spread to the Wellspring. So no, Daughter, I will not slay you with my own hand. Only a woman’s willing sacrifice can create the kind of Kai we need. And only the three of us can create motes that can be combined with one another in the way I have foreseen.”

  Mairah caught her breath. She had heard of men’s Kai that was generated on the battlefields, and the new women’s Kai that was generated by rape; but she had never heard of a special Kai generated by a willing sacrifice. Her mind reeled at the very thought of this unknown form of Kai. And that it was somehow capable of affecting the Wellspring itself, the source of all magic.

  Tears streamed down Nadeen’s cheeks. “How can you ask this of your own daughter?” she choked out. “How can you ask me to ask this of my daughter?”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything I’m not willing to do myself. I’ve foreseen a future where women are no longer shut up in abbeys or bought and sold like cattle. And having seen that future, I cannot turn my back on it. I believe that when the time comes, you will do the right thing. You and I and Vondeen will lay down our lives to make the world a better place. What better fate and legacy can a trio of Unwanted Women hope for?”

  The vision faded, but Mairah’s mind continued to whirl as she tried to absorb and make sense of everything she’d heard. Her eyes blinked open, and the physical world came back into focus. She was aware of movement around her, of the dim light of candles, of a man’s sharp and impatient voice, and of her body’s bone-deep aches and soul-deep weariness. Her vision went dark around the edges, and she allowed her eyes to drift back shut.

  There would be time to think later, she assured herself as she sank into an exhausted sleep.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Mairah groaned and lifted her head from her arms, which were folded on her worktable. Her body was stiff and her hands were filled with pins and needles. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, had only meant to rest her eyes a moment, but exhaustion had sunk its teeth into her and dragged her down.

  Stifling a massive yawn, she forced herself to her feet in the small, deserted workroom that had become her newest prison cell.

  Administrator Loveland had told her she’d been unconscious for two full days after she’d triggered her vision, but she still felt as though she could sleep two or three more without being truly rested. The seer’s poison had sapped much of her strength and left her stomach so sensitive she could keep nothing down but broth and gruel. And yet despite the ravages of the poison, she had found—once she’d recovered her wits enough to sort her thoughts—that the vision had granted her a clarity she hadn’t even realized she’d been missing.

  The vision had told her very little about what exactly Mother Brynna had done to pull off her spell, for it was clear the Kai she and her daughter and her granddaughter had created was used only as a trigger element. But what Mairah had gleaned from what she’d heard was that spells triggered by Kai could affect the Wellspring itself. Traditional men’s Kai could apparently have a destructive effect, but such was not the case with the special feminine Kai created by willing sacrifice. A Kai that—as far as Mairah knew—no one but the three women who cast the Curse even knew existed.

  The vision had given her no clue how she might go about reversing the Curse. However, it had spawned an entirely new idea. Instead of merely developing a potion to close the Mindseye when slipped into a water supply, what if she were to trigger that potion with feminine sacrificial Kai instead? And what if instead of putting it into the water supply, she fed it into Aaltah’s Well?

  If that spell were to force the Mindseye of everyone within reach of Aaltah’s Well closed, then Aaltah would be so
severely crippled they could never hope to attack Women’s Well! Surely eliminating the looming threat of Aaltah would be enough to convince Princess Alysoon of Mairah’s worth and good intentions and would win her forgiveness. Especially if Mairah were also to invent an antidote to her spell so that once Aaltah fell to Women’s Well or its allies, she could repair whatever damage was done. Instead of being reviled, she would be a hero!

  To achieve her goal, Mairah needed to refine and strengthen the potion she’d made for Kailee. And she had to gain access to Aaltah’s Well, for she did not know what Mother Brynna had done to her own spell to make it “sink through the earth into the Well” as she had described it doing.

  When Loveland—and after him, King Delnamal—had questioned her about the vision, Mairah had concocted what she feared was an implausible story about how she’d watched Mother Brynna and the others cast the spell and therefore knew how to undo it herself. To provide some verisimilitude to the lie, she’d explained the use of the special motes of Kai the three women had created with their willing sacrifice, and she’d also said she would need direct access to the Well when her spell was ready.

  She didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified when King Delnamal had accepted her story and then given her no more than seven days to research and develop the spell she claimed she needed. She had tried to plead for more time, but whether because he didn’t truly believe her or because he was too impatient to wait, he had refused.

  Pacing the room, Mairah stared balefully at the worktable, at its scattered clutter of vials and scribbled pages and indecipherable notes. Administrator Loveland poked his head in every once in a while to make sure she was hard at work. Which she always was, although not on the spell she’d claimed would undo the Curse. He had given her back the Devotional with its store of special feminine elements from Women’s Well, and though he often tried to watch what she was doing, he could not see the feminine elements at all, and he seemed to have only the most minimal ability to see even the masculine and neuter ones. His attempts to “monitor” her activities were, therefore, nearly useless, and she was free to work on the potion to her heart’s content. Even her notes were safe from his prying eyes, for he knew no Parian, but she kept them cryptic anyway.