Stormlord Rising

by Glenda Larke

  He nodded. “I understand. The lanterns were the means to destroy the ziggers, and so those paintings worked exactly as they should.”

  “And if we paint something that is simply impossible, then it won’t happen.”

  “So it’s no use painting my fifteen hundred men killing all of theirs in battle? It’s just too remote a possibility—unless the painting also supplies the means.”

  “Even if I would do it, I don’t think I could,” she said. “I’d need to sketch an approximation of every one of your men. The Reduners wouldn’t be so bad—wrapped up like that they all look alike.” She frowned suddenly, deep in thought. “I wonder if we are looking at it from the wrong direction.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe we need to be more—more creative. Think of new ways to—to—win.” To kill.

  Before she could tease the idea out into a more coherent thought, they were interrupted. An Alabaster man came riding down to the camp from the rim. Sunlight twinkled off his mirrors, blinding Terelle. She raised an arm to shield her eyes as Jasper leaped up and the rider cried out, “More ziggers! Help!”

  The pede rattled to a halt, segments compacting. Jasper held out an arm to the Alabaster, and in one fluid movement the man had pulled Jasper up behind him and the pede was prodded into motion again. Terelle remained seated, taken aback by the suddenness of their departure.

  Her thoughts jumbled, remembering dancing lights in Russet’s rooms, remembering the glare of salt.

  A glimmer of a smile began to play around the corner of her lips. “Now that’s an idea,” she said.

  “What is?” a voice asked behind her, honeyed tones laced with something much more nastily pungent.

  She jumped to her feet. “Lord Laisa. Just a—a thought. About how to fight Reduners.”

  Laisa came a step closer. “I am still trying to puzzle you out. Tell me, were you ever tested for water sensitivity?”

  “Hardly necessary. Believe me, a snuggery madam would have spotted a water sensitive and sold her to the rainlords in less time than it takes a single sand grain to run through a sandglass.” Which was true enough.

  “Doubtless.” Laisa’s mockery was overt, nasty. “Yet there is something about you that troubles me.” She shrugged. “I’m sure I’ve seen you before. You are certainly out of your true element here. Enjoy it while you may; it will not last.”

  She turned and walked away in her usual swirl of silks and subtle perfumes. How the salted damn does she do that? Even here! The best of clothes and the best of smells. The bitch.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Scarpen Quarter

  Warthago Range

  “So, are you going to marry her?”

  Terelle stood facing Jasper in the privacy of his tent. It was dark outside, but a lamp illuminated the interior. She wasn’t sure what had prompted her to ask that question right then. They both had so many more important things on their minds. Stupid. I’m such a child. I still want the world to be fair and just and right. But she wasn’t able to help herself. Seeing him and Senya together like that, talking, laughing even—it had hurt her, a deeply visceral hurt that had no sense to it; it just was.

  He said, level-voiced and apparently calm, “I’m sorry, Terelle. I can’t lie to you about this. I won’t marry Senya against her will, but I have no high expectations she will refuse when the alternative is a lower social position for her, less comfort, fewer servants.”

  She was silent, hearing part of what she wanted to hear: he knew exactly how shallow Senya was. He knew exactly what sort of woman she was becoming. And also hearing something she hadn’t wanted to hear at all: he was still going to marry her.

  “There’s only one woman I want to marry,” he said at last. “And she’s not Senya. But I can’t ask her because people demand I have stormlord children. If I don’t, future generations will die.”

  Terelle stared at him, eyes widening as she finally understood. “Is that what all this is about?”

  He was confused. “Pardon?”

  “I thought it was some sort of silly Scarpen stormlord custom. ‘Don’t marry beneath you. Marry some upleveler rainlord’s daughter because she’ll make a regal consort. You can’t possibly marry an outlander whore who was raised in a Scarpen snuggery.’ I thought you were drinking at that scummy trough. And all the time it was just so you can father the right kind of children?”

  He exclaimed, wounded, “Terelle, I don’t give a sand-flea’s piddle about uplevelers’ daughters! I’m a Gibber brat from the poorest village on the Gibber Plains, spindevil take it! I care about you. Surely you know that.”

  “You haven’t exactly said it—”

  He was really riled now, and shouted at her. “Well, I’m saying it now: I love you! Is that plain enough?”

  The silence following was as deep as the velvet darkness of a water tunnel. They both stood still, rendered immobile by the passion behind his words. “Oh,” she said weakly.

  “Well?”

  “Well what? You’ve just this minute told me the way you feel means nothing!”

  The look he gave her almost broke her heart. “It means everything,” he whispered. “Everything. But I can’t do anything about it.”

  “You idiot, of course you can, if we really want to marry each other! What’s Senya’s pedigree, compared to mine?”

  Once again he was bewildered. “Huh?”

  “How many stormlords and rainlords are there in her ancestry? One stormlord grandparent. Rainlords for parents. But me—from what Russet told me, my whole family on his side are either stormlords or waterpainters. That’s stormlords, not rainlords. He doesn’t use that word, but that’s what they are. Water-powerful, the whole lot of them, including my mother and her parents. Sounds like a better lineage than your sulky brat Senya.”

  “You’re a waterpainter, not a rainlord or a stormlord.”

  “So? Russet hasn’t told me nearly enough, but he did tell me the Watergivers of Khromatis, such as he was once, are just as powerful as stormlords in their own way. Anyway, I think I could do by painting much of what a stormlord does. I already do, don’t I? I could do things without working through you, too. I could paint a storm cloud bringing rain to the correct part of the Warthago Range. Or to anywhere else. Unlike you, I’d have to visit every place first, to get the picture fixed in my mind, and I’d have to return there often, in case the place changed, but it could be done.” She hesitated. “Although I’m just not sure what the larger results would be. If I made it rain here, using my magic, how would I know the water I used didn’t come from, say, someone’s cistern?”

  He stared at her, and for once the thoughts warring in his mind were written on his face: hope, chagrin, delight, worry.

  “I’ve been exceptionally stupid,” he said at last. “I’ve been torturing myself, when the answer was under my nose all the time. If there are plenty of stormlords in your family, I don’t have to marry Senya, or the other rainlord girl they found in the Gibber!” He grinned, but his grin faded when he saw her face. “You—you do want to marry me, don’t you?”

  The expression on her face didn’t change.

  “Terelle, I want to marry you. Terelle Grey. Not the waterpainter, just you. But I don’t have a choice. I have to marry where I have a chance to have water-talented children.”

  She considered him seriously. “Jasper, I know most girls marry at my age. But I’m not most people. I don’t want to marry so young. I certainly don’t want to be forced to have a meddle of brats just to satisfy the nation’s needs for stormlords. I’d like the—the luxury of time. And anyway, I’m not sure I want to marry someone who sought solace in Senya Almandine’s arms the moment my back was turned.”

  “Pede piss! Are you going to throw that back at me for the rest of my life?”

  “Probably.”

  “Ah.” He pondered, then said, “I’d—I’d like to think you’d be around for the rest of my life so you could. Throw it back at me, I mean. I
don’t know what to say about what happened with Senya. I am not going to make excuses for myself. Is it—is it enough to say I don’t want it ever to happen again? Terelle, could you at least say you love me?”

  She tilted her head and considered him. “Well,” she said at last, “you mean more to me than anyone else I’ve ever met. I can’t imagine ever wanting to marry anyone else. I know when I think of Senya I want to wring her neck. I know I don’t want to leave you. I know I will miss you while I’m gone. I know I missed you before, and worried myself sick about you. I know when I look at you I want all kinds of things one is not supposed to talk about in public. Is that loving someone?”

  He let out the breath he had been holding. “It sounds good to me. More than good.” He ran a hand through his hair in a gesture of frustration. “I’ve made a muck of this from beginning to end, haven’t I? I don’t know the right things to say. You’re the last person I’d ever want to hurt, and yet I managed to do just that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it help if I say I wish I could undo it? That I wish it had never happened?”

  “Not really. Senya, of all people—that hurt. More than you understand. I tried to tell myself I was being ridiculous. That we’d made no promises to each other. That we were just friends, and therefore I had no rights. I tried to be sensible about it, but sometimes being sensible doesn’t seem to cure pain.”

  He desperately wanted to say he hadn’t gone to Senya, that she had crawled naked into his bed, but he thought better of it. Trying to excuse himself would sound so… pathetic. Besides, he was hardly guiltless. There had been Silver, too. He didn’t think he wanted to mention her at all. “What—what do you want to do?” he asked finally. “I want to marry you. I don’t want you to leave.”

  “I have to go back to Russet.”

  “I hate that man. I don’t trust him.”

  “I don’t care about him, either, not after what he did to me. I don’t care if he is my great-grandfather. But it makes no difference, does it? If I don’t go back in the end, I think I’ll die the way my mother did. And I’ll be damned if I want that. But how do we make sure that my absence doesn’t pitch the Quartern back into a Time of Random Rain?”

  “You’re just as trapped as I am, aren’t you? Terelle, I’m so, so sorry.” The pain in him tore at her, and involuntarily she moved closer to him. She tried to speak, but was overcome with her own raw emotion.

  Jasper did the one thing that could help her, enclosing her in his arms and holding her tight. She felt safe, so safe she didn’t want to move. When she lifted her head, he bent to kiss her. And something inside her awakened, something so profound she almost lost her sense of what was real.

  She felt his water against hers. The rush in her veins, the shivering in her heart, the weaving and curling through her blood. His water singing in greeting. Every part of him reaching out to her, her body responding. Music made in the harmonies. Intertwining, plaiting, enmeshing. For the first time in her life, she was aware of herself as a being of water. For the first time, she felt herself, her connections, her place in the world, her desires.

  The tug of Jasper’s water was a force against her own. She felt the swelling in him pressing against her and cupped it with her thighs when he lifted her higher in the strength of his muscled arms. His tongue met hers, water to water, desire to desire, passion seeking—and finding—an equal passion. She knew if she let go she would be changed forever, her body no longer just hers, her life no longer just hers. She would be putting her life in his hands. He could kill her, just by the act of loving. Or they could unite in a way most people never knew. Already part of her was lost in a rush, deliciously lost, no longer just one person but two, poised on the brink of discovery.

  And something made her draw back, take a shuddering breath. Not now. Not here.

  He was the first to speak. “I didn’t—I didn’t know it could be like that.” His chest was heaving as if he had been running.

  Terelle knew what he was trying to tell her: Senya could not do that to me.

  Her smile was deliberately sly. “It seems there may be… compensations in our trap.”

  He laughed out loud, rare for him. “Sandblast, Terelle, I love you. Will you marry me?”

  Raising a finger to his lips, she said, “One day. How could I not? But not now. Not yet. Not with Russet’s water magic pulling me away.” She stepped away from him, straightening her tunic and tactfully looking away from the more obvious sign of his arousal. “You know, I didn’t actually come to your tent for this. I wanted to tell you I’ve thought of some things that might help.”

  The expression on his face didn’t change, but she sensed his withdrawal nonetheless. He was in command once more: the stormlord was back, the more openly passionate Gibberman banished. “You have an idea,” he said, breathing deeply. “About ziggers?”

  “Not exactly.” She sighed. “I wanted simple solutions, but that’s just stupid. There aren’t any. You told me if I withheld my skill I’d hurt even more people than I would by using it, and you were right. I know I have to do this and do it well, so we can start to build a peace. Does that sound a very… girl thing to say?”

  “No. It sounds a very wise thing to me.”

  “When we were in Russet’s rooms one day, you were playing with your water skills and there was a shaft of sunlight hitting the water in a certain way. It shone into my eyes, blinding me. Do you think you could do that—on a larger scale? Shafting sunlight through water, or bouncing it off water, down onto the Reduners below, so they couldn’t see what we were doing up here?”

  He understood immediately. “Yes! Oh yes… When the sun is high overhead… I wonder how thick the water would have to be? And how wide… have to angle it just right. I’ll have to think about this. And experiment. But to do it long enough and well enough to hide the descent of our men to their camp? Difficult. They would still hear them. And they would know something was up and release their ziggers anyway.” He began to pace to and fro, thinking.

  She continued, “My idea was to do this in order to cover some other tricks. You can move a large block of water, at least for a short time, can’t you?”

  He stopped pacing and nodded. “Clean, fresh water, yes, certainly. As long as it’s not too far away.”

  “There’s a lot of water in the mother cistern down there.”

  “I did think of dumping it on them. But the effect won’t last. Wetting people is hardly warfare.”

  “Ice might hurt more than water. When I was in the White Quarter, Russet told me about ice falling from the sky. All by itself.”

  “Ice? How is that possible?”

  “Apparently the higher you go into the sky, the colder it gets, or so he said. If you were to send water very high, it would turn into ice.”

  The glance he gave her was dubious. “Ice might have more impact than water, I suppose. I’ll try.”

  “I’ve thought of another way in which you could dump a whole lot more than just water on their heads. Something somewhat heavier: rocks.” She swallowed, pushing away her distaste. Her reservations. People will die.

  “I can’t move rocks,” he protested.

  “No. Water can, though.”

  “Lord Laisa?”

  Laisa had been asleep, but Terelle’s words in her ear woke her instantly. She propped herself up on one elbow and gave her a sour look. “What is it?” she asked, sharp-voiced.

  “I have a request to make of you.”

  “And that gives you the right to enter my tent in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t care much about your rights. Any rights you had, you lost when you betrayed Jasper and married Taquar. I came to ask you for some sinucca leaf.”

  The older woman stared at her in stupefaction. “What?”

  “You heard me. I need some, and I thought you were the most likely person to carry such a thing around.”

  “How dare you insinuate—”

  “Oh, don’t giv
e me that outrage. You aren’t the kind of woman to remain faithful to a man who could spend the rest of his life a prisoner. And you’d always carry something, just in case. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “If I did, do you think I would give you some when the man you’ve been eyeing like a pede in heat is the man my daughter will one day marry? You have the gall to ask such a thing when Senya is asleep in the next tent!”

  “Look at it this way—if I become pregnant to Jasper, you are going to find it even harder to marry him off to Senya. It’s in your interest to give me some sinucca.”

  Laisa looked as if she couldn’t believe her ears. “Well,” she said at last, “the sauciness of a snuggery whore, I suppose.” She dug around in her travel sack and produced a pot. “Here,” she said. “Take it. It’s already ground, ready for use.”

  Terelle smiled pleasantly. “Thank you. I knew you’d see it my way.”

  “One of these days Senya will have to deal with you. And I have no doubt she will.”

  Terelle, unworried, shrugged. “Thanks for the sinucca.”

  She ducked out of Laisa’s tent and headed for Jasper’s. His lantern was still lit, which didn’t surprise her at all. She lifted the flap and entered without indicating her presence; she knew he would have sensed her anyway.

  “Is anything wrong?” he asked. He was lying flat on his back, hands behind his head.

  “Yes,” she said. “You should be asleep.”

  “I think you know why I’m not.”

  It could have been any one of several things: he was planning for the next day, he was worried they would fail, he was wondering if the Reduners would have time to release ziggers, it could even be because he was thinking of her—but she knew it was none of those things.

  “Mica. You are afraid what we are going to do tomorrow will kill him, too.”

  He gave the slightest of nods. “Terelle, until you came along, he was the only person, ever, who stood up for me. The only person who cared. You know what that’s like. You only ever had Vivie.”