He leaned closer to the light, and the Rocaan leaned with him. The water was brownish and had bits of sediment. The first act of creating holy water was to strain any sediment from the water used.
“Well, we know what it’s not,” the Rocaan said.
Matthias nodded. “I don’t want you to touch it,” he said. “In fact, I don’t want anyone to touch it except me. Then I’ll wash my hands in holy water and see if something happens. I think I can take care of things from now, Holy Sir.”
“No,” the Rocaan said. “I will stay here. We need to get rid of this liquid, and we need to put some new holy water here for Morning Sacrament.”
“It could be an all-night task,” Matthias warned.
“Then we won’t get any sleep,” the Rocaan said. “I will make a new batch of holy water tonight and have an Aud bring it down. You can get rid of these vials however you please. I don’t believe they should be reused. Then come to me when we’re through.”
“You have a suspicion,” Matthias said.
The Rocaan nodded. “I think there are Fey here, and I think they’re substituting something for holy water. I think that’s why you discovered those bones and that blood. I think one of the creatures made a mistake and died.”
Matthias shook his head. “If that was the case, then the Fey that I doused with holy water that day would have been reduced to a pile of bones and a pool of blood. I covered them with the stuff. They died, but still had skin. No. Those bones and blood mean something else. But I do agree with you. I do think Fey were here.”
“It seems the only explanation, doesn’t it?” the Rocaan said.
Matthias set a bottle next to the lamp. “I’m afraid it does. What are we going to do about that?”
“We have to do something.” The Rocaan pushed away from the table. “And we have to do it soon.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
Dello stood over the baby, her stout frame guarding his cradle as if she were afraid Jewel would harm him. Jewel waited behind her, off to the side so that she could see the child for herself. Her father had seen him and had come back to the cabin angry. He had refused to talk with her, so Jewel had come herself.
The Domestics were keeping the baby in the Domicile until Rugar decided what to do with him. They had placed him in a room no bigger than a closet, with a cradle that was handmade. The cradle surprised Jewel. Someone had to have needed it. She was sure her father hadn’t asked who, if anyone, was pregnant.
The boy was sound asleep, his eyes puckered and his nose red from too many tears. He was wrapped in a blue woven blanket decorated with comfort symbols. The magick in that blanket would keep him warm and calm—or calmer, if his distress was too great.
“It’s all right, Dello,” Jewel said. “I’m not going to wake him.”
Dello didn’t move from her stance over the cradle. “It’s just that it took so long to get him to sleep. He cried as if his heart was broken. If I didn’t think Solanda was right, I would say that we should take him back to the people who raised him.”
“Right about his magick?” Jewel felt cold. She had somehow thought that Solanda was justifying her outrageous action. That would explain Rugar’s reaction.
Dello put a finger to her lips. “Let’s talk outside,” she said. She led Jewel from the room. Jewel took one more glance at the little boy. He was pretty in a round sort of way. She had always thought of baby faces in terms of angles and slashes, but this human child had round eyes, a bow-shaped mouth, a tiny nose, and no cheekbones to speak of. Even though he slept, there seemed to be an energy radiating from his body.
She stepped into the hallway. Dello closed the door after her. “The child has magick,” Dello said. “And it’s odd magick, too.”
“I thought children didn’t have magick,” Jewel said. “It doesn’t develop for ten years.”
“Shape-Shifters do,” Dello said, “and others have potential. We just never discuss it—we don’t want parental expectations to get too high. Sometimes all that a child will ever show is potential. The adult will have only glimmerings of magick. I don’t believe that’s what’s going on for this child.”
“Islanders don’t have magick,” Jewel said.
“Well, this child is not Fey, and he has magick. It’s strong. And it’s mostly confined to mental survival tricks at the moment. He can charm, and he can lay paths. I’m sure he laid one right to Shadowlands so that his people could find him.”
“But they can’t get in,” Jewel said.
“If they have magick, they can,” Dello said. “It’s any magick, Jewel, or the knowledge of the chant. We have just not had to worry about other magicks before.”
Jewel glanced at the door and bit her lower lip. Dello was right about that. There had been threats of other magick, but no real magick before. And if that was true, then Caseo would have a hard time discovering the secret to the poison. It might not be a poison, but something enchanted.
For all her egotistical ways, Solanda had seen this child clearly, and she had understood his importance to the Fey.
“Does Solanda want to keep the boy?” Jewel asked.
“I think she was happy to be rid of it,” Dello said. “He certainly was glad to see her gone.”
“Had she hurt him?”
“Not physically. But this child is extremely perceptive. He knew she had taken him away from home.”
Jewel nodded. The idea of magick on Blue Isle had her reeling. She touched Dello’s arm and thanked her, then went out the back door.
No wonder her father had been angry. He understood the implications as well as Jewel did, perhaps better. If there was another magick system here, one they didn’t understand, then the Fey might not be the most powerful people in the Isle. The defeat that had been clouding their work since their arrival might be more than a fluke; it might be their future.
She detoured to Adrian’s lean-to. When she allowed Caseo to take Ort, she had a Domestic clean the place. The Domestic cast a spell of cleanliness to get rid of its odor and found a bed, extra clothes, and blankets. Now the place was at least livable. Besides, all the bedding had been spelled as well, so that Adrian’s desire to leave Shadowlands was tempered.
Jewel knocked, then pushed the door open. Adrian had a real lamp lit on the ceiling, and he was standing beneath it, putting on a shirt. He was already wearing pants, but his feet were bare.
“Where’d you get the lamp?” Jewel asked in Fey.
“I’m sure you didn’t barge in here to ask me that,” Adrian said in Nye. His Fey was improving, but not quickly enough. “But since you want to know, I asked for it. I found out how you make your lamps, and I figured I didn’t want to live around the dying light of my countrymen’s souls.”
“How noble.” Jewel switched to Nye also. She leaned against the door. “I have a question to ask you.”
“And here I was hoping this was a social call.”
“The sarcasm doesn’t help you.”
He smiled. “Ah, but it does. There is nothing in our agreement that says I can’t express myself. I must only be truthful with you all.”
Jewel hooked her thumbs on the waistline of her pants. In truth, she liked Adrian’s sarcasm. It was an example of his spirit that she didn’t want to see broken. “I want to know about Islander magick.”
“Magick?” Adrian deftly tied the wrist thongs on his right sleeve with his left hand. “We have none.”
“You know what will happen if you lie,” Jewel said.
He stopped tying. “I’m not. I have been truthful every waking moment of my life in this dreary place.”
“Then what do you call your extraphysical abilities?”
“We have none,” Adrian said.
“None?”
“Of course not,” Adrian said. “We don’t turn into cats, and we don’t conjure rooms clean, and we don’t practice warfare with another culture’s blood. We have no magick.”
“We have twice discovered evidence of magick here,” Jew
el said, “and that makes it no coincidence.”
Adrian sighed and slowly tied his left sleeve. “Look,” he said in a measured tone. “If we have ‘magick,’ we don’t know it, and we certainly don’t use it. If some of our people practice magick, I have never been around them. It isn’t part of us.”
“What of your religion?”
“It always comes back to that, doesn’t it? If you wanted an expert on Rocaanism, you should have kidnapped an Aud.”
“We have you,” Jewel said.
“And I know nothing about holy water, or magick, or any of that. I barely know who the advisers to the King are—and I have already shared that information with your father. Pretty soon you’re going to have me teaching classes in Islander because I don’t have any more information to share.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “When you made a bargain like this, you should have thought about who you were pumping for information.”
“It’s not solely for information that we kept you here,” Jewel said. “It’s also for interpretation. Now, I’ve asked questions about magick, and you’ve dodged them. I want a straight answer.”
“I have given you a straight answer,” he snapped. “I don’t know.”
“Then interpret.”
He uncrossed his arms and sat on the bed. “I don’t have enough facts to interpret.”
“You know what the poison does to us. That’s magick. Now one of our people has found an Islander who leaves a mental trail. That, too, is magick. What do you make of it?”
“Beyond what we see, an entire world exists, a world beyond our understanding.” He spoke in a half chant and smiled when he was finished. “The Words Written and Unwritten, the foundation of our religion.”
She took a deep breath, about to curse him for being obtuse, when she realized that for all his sarcasm, he wouldn’t risk lying to her. Not this early. Not with the memory of his son still fresh. “So you just accept things you don’t understand as part of that unseen world?”
He nodded. “Unless we are taught that it should matter to us, we figure that we do not understand it. We leave it to God and our betters to make sense of such things.”
“God and our betters.” She frowned. “You have no curiosity at all?”
“Curiosity is a different matter altogether,” he said. “We all have curiosity. We just never satisfy it.”
“You have seen things like this before? Magick things?”
“I have seen things I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t understand why a people who have conquered half the world would want our small island. I don’t understand why the sky is blue, or why storms rage strongest near the Stone Guardians. But I have accepted those things. They are all beyond my capability to change.”
“Such a philosopher,” she said.
He shook his head. “A realist. I will never learn the answer to all my questions. So I accept the fact that there are things I will never, ever know.”
“And you said you weren’t a philosopher,” she said. “I have business to attend to. Are you sure you have nothing more to say on Island magick?”
“If I think of anything, Princess, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Thanks a lot.” She closed the door and headed back to her cabin. The sensation she had had since she’d seen the child was building. A bit of terror mixed in with everything else. She hurried up the stairs to the cabin and opened the door.
Her father was inside, standing in his favorite spot beside the fireplace. He was holding Jewel’s wrap, the one Solanda had worn earlier. Jewel knew that he wasn’t thinking of her, but of the child and the knowledge Solanda had brought them.
“I tried to talk with Adrian,” she said without greeting him.
“And what does he say about their magick?” Rugar crumpled the wrap in his hand.
“He says there is none. And so I challenged him on it, and he quoted some religious text to me about not understanding the world around them.”
“Is he lying?”
She could sense the blood-thirst beneath Rugar’s words. He wanted someone to pay for this new twist.
So did she.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It seems as if they shrug off magick and grant the abilities to powers beyond them.”
Rugar turned. He tossed the wrap onto a chair. “If they don’t understand what they have, then they can’t use it.”
She shook her head. “They may have already found a way to use it without recognizing it for what it truly is. As they did with their poison. If they don’t know what they’re capable of, Papa, then neither do we.”
He sighed, sat down in the chair next to him, and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve gotten us into quite a mess, haven’t I?”
“Yes,” she said. “And it frightens me.”
He studied her for a moment. “Frightens you?”
Normally he would have ignored that sentence, but this time he focused on it. She felt a flush build in her cheeks.
She nodded. “If they do have magick, then the slaughter we suffered on the First Battle for Jahn was not a fluke. We could lose the entire force, and Grandfather would not be the wiser. He might not send anyone to Blue Isle for some years, but eventually someone would come. And more Fey would die.”
“What should we do? We can’t fight them one on one until we learn the secret of their poison.”
She took a deep breath. He was going to hate this idea, so she braced herself for his anger. “If we discover the secret to the poison, we attack. If not, we negotiate.”
“Negotiate?” His voice rose higher than she had ever heard it. “Fey don’t bargain with their enemies, girl. Especially not when we were the ones initiating the battle.”
She swallowed, hard. “I know. But sometimes we make agreements with a government after they have lost, and then break those agreements. We did it in Nye when we said they would have complete control over their local governments. And from what Grandfather said, we’ve used that tactic a number of times before.”
Rugar brought his head up. His interest was obvious. “You’re saying we should make an agreement and then break it?”
“Negotiate a peace,” Jewel said. “We should do it in a convincing manner, so they think we might coexist here. If they don’t want us to do that, they can give us the way out of the Stone Guardians, and we can go back to Nye. Then we can talk to Grandfather and attack when he’s ready, after we have learned the secret to the poison.”
“They would be fools to give us the way out of the Stone Guardians,” Rugar said. “They would know that we would get reinforcements. The Black King would never suffer a defeat under his rule. It’s a nice idea, Jewel, but not workable.”
“I’m not done.” The phrase came out harsher than she wanted it to, almost imperial. Rugar raised his eyebrows at her tone. Despite the urge to apologize, she didn’t. “If they refuse to let us have the route, then we play the defeated people. We give them a show of faith—return the prisoners, turn in our weapons, something—and once we learn their secrets, once they’re complacent, we attack again. This time we know their weak points, we’ll probably have access to their King, and we’ll win the Isle.”
“You make it sound simple, Jewel.”
“It is,” she said.
He shook his head just a little. “Treachery is never simple. We have to keep this secret from most of our forces. Some might rebel. Then we have to watch for the right moment, the right time to attack. It might take years. Do you want to stay in Shadowlands for years?”
“Why won’t you consider this?” she asked.
“I’ve already considered it,” he said. “It’s a nice idea, but not necessary. We will find the secret to the poison. Once we do, we attack. They’ll surrender more quickly than any other people we’ve ever encountered. They’re used to winning and haven’t really experienced the pain of losing. They’ll do whatever we want.”
Jewel stared at him for a moment. She didn’t remember him being this blind in the
past. He had always been able to see a situation clearly, whether it looked like the Fey had an advantage or not.
“I hope you’re right, Papa,” she said. “I hope you’re right.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
Eleanora’s ribs hurt so badly, she could barely stand. The fact that Helter made her lean on a pair of handmade crutches didn’t help. Pier had made a splint and tied it to Eleanora’s right leg, keeping her foot bent and off the ground. Her good leg was tired, and her armpits ached.
She had been waiting now most of the afternoon. Helter had wanted to take her to the palace, but he was told she wasn’t important enough. Somehow he got her a meeting with one of the King’s advisers, a Lord Stowe, in his home.
Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey Page 57
