“This—this is where the sneaking and tricking comes from?” she said.
He nodded. “It’s more than a knack or a game for me, Caris. I’ve spent as many hours picking locks and pockets and hearts and studying exotic powders as you’ve spent riding and fencing and drilling with your brother.”
“You think I’m stupid?” Her cheeks darkened. “Is this another lie? There is no such thing as a male courtiste.”
“No, you’re not stupid, and you’re right about courtistes all being female. But my mother went mad and raised me in exile. She never asked her sister courtistes for permission; she just did it. Said she had visions of my importance among the courtistes one day. And I think she trained me in secret as a way to redeem herself in court.” He held his hands palms up before him. “So I am the first male courtiste. Kind of like you’ll be one of the Queen’s first female knights.” He paused, faltering, and smiled weakly. “Wonders and more wonders, right? Chaos Moon must be coming.”
As he spoke, a shadow of horror rose steadily in Caris’s eyes. He imagined he could see all the rumors of Her Majesty’s courtistes—ruthless courtesan spies and assassins—percolating up from all the legends and gossip she’d have heard in her noble family. Tales of deceit and manipulation and betrayals, tales of “good” lords and ladies brought low by wily plots.
She took a step back and looked him up and down, as if struggling to see this new Harric in the man that stood before her.
“Obviously I’m not like her,” Harric said. “I’m still the person you know. And I’m not like the courtistes, because I refused her mission to court.”
“You rejected her,” she snapped, suddenly back on her toes. “But you didn’t reject her ways. You still sneak, you lie, you trick, you con—you are exactly what she trained you to be.”
Each word was true, and each was a stone piled on his heart, and suddenly a voice inside him screamed that this was a mistake, and that it wasn’t too late to lie his way out of this blunder. But it was too late. He’d made sure it would be too late as a safeguard against just this kind of failure of will.
Caris’s hands balled into fists, and she dropped her head to stare at the ground. Her hair fell about her face, concealing her expression, but her voice shook. “That’s the lie you wanted to tell me about?”
Harric forced himself to shake his head. “One more,” he said, with enormous effort. “The true nature of my training was a lie of omission. The real lie was when I told you I never touched the witch-stone in Gallows Ferry. Because I did.”
Her head shot up. “What?” Tears now streaked her face and glued hairs to her cheeks.
“I touched the witch-stone, and…more than that, I have a tryst servant, just like Abellia has Mudruffle, and he’s given me insight into that ring—” He rushed the words out, sensing that if she exploded before he could finish, he’d be tempted to leave something out. He had to clear the air between them. And the more he told her, the more tools he gave her to resist the rings. She staggered back, eyes wide and white, but he pushed on. “We have some ideas on how we might make the ring go dormant again, or at least how we could weaken it, but I don’t want to do anything without your permission—”
“Are you mad?”
He held his hands up in a calming gesture, but something fundamental, something visceral and animal in her, recoiled like he’d transformed into a spider and spoke in some hissing spider language.
“The Black Moon is unclean!” she said. “Unholy—You—you—”
The utter rejection and revulsion written in her eyes changed everything. In that instant, Harric forgot his purpose and panicked—panicked that the hatred he saw was the sort that would last forever, even after the ring was removed; that he’d gone too far and would lose her if he didn’t do something.
“The ring itself is Unseen magic, Caris. Abellia and Mudruffle never told you because they probably thought it would scare you. But obviously the Kwendi use the powers of the Unseen freely and don’t think it’s evil, so why should we?”
She clapped her hands to her ears and fell to her knees, where she began rocking back and forth and groaning.
Cobs. Cobs, cobs!
He ran a hand through his hair and tried not to pace as she escaped into the horses. But his heart had withered like a winter apple. The look she’d given him—like he was some horrible stranger—had stricken him deeply. And in the minutes that he waited for her to recover, his mind scrambled to prepare something to say, and he felt emptier and more alone than ever before.
Her breathing finally calmed, and as she stopped rocking, she opened her eyes and lowered her hands from her ears. “Get away from me, Harric,” she said, balling her fists in her lap and staring into the light of the lantern. “I warned you what I’d do if you ever touched magic again. Now get away. And stay away. I won’t warn you again.”
Harric let out a deep breath. He’d done it. He’d uprooted the lies and replaced them with truth she could use to fuel her fight with the rings. He’d come clean, and she’d banished him from her presence.
Quest accomplished. All hail the victorious hero.
He took one step back from her, but didn’t leave yet. Her face twitched and one hand trembled. “I know you made no promise to keep any of this to yourself,” he said. “But if you do plan to tell, I ask that you first let me know. Would you? Please?”
Caris could have been carved in stone—the image of some grim and resolute queen—for all the sign she gave him.
Then she was in motion and he stumbled backward in surprise. As he twisted to catch himself with on one hand in the moss, several things happened at once. Rag whinnied, something yanked at a lock of his hair at the side of his head, Willard’s bellow shattered the silence of the glade, and steel clashed on steel above Harric.
When he rolled to his feet, eyes wide as full moons, Willard stood between him and Caris, swords locked. The look on Caris’s face was nothing short of wild fury as Willard shoved her several paces backward and maintained his position between her and Harric.
“Enough!” Willard roared. “Stand down!”
Bristling, Caris fixed her eyes on Harric as if she might brave Willard’s blade to get another shot at Harric.
Harric retreated a step, staring in confusion at the swords, then at the blood on his hand as it came away from an unconscious rub at his scalp where his hair had been yanked.
Blood. It hadn’t been a yank, as with a hand. It was a cut, as from a sword.
Caris’s sword.
His mouth dropped open as he pieced together what had happened. If he hadn’t stumbled in surprise, she’d have beheaded him.
After throwing her sword into the moss, Caris turned and stalked from the clearing, hands shaking. As she passed Rag, who sidled away from her with eyes rolling white with fear, Caris’s face twisted. A moment later, she jolted into a run and vanished among the trees, leaving her frightened horse to comfort itself.
Willard turned on Harric, sword still in hand, the burn of violet in his eyes. “What did you try, knave?” He took a step toward Harric. “Did you try to seduce her? Did she have the sense to repel you? I can think of nothing else that would so stir her. She’d have cut your throat if it weren’t for your bastard luck.”
“No,” Harric said, shaking his head numbly. Blood was now trickling down his neck and into his shirt. “I—”
“Don’t lie to me, or I’ll finish what she started.”
Harric closed his mouth and stared after Caris. His heart had fallen into a widening hole in his chest and was pulling everything else after it.
Willard said something about Bannus finishing the job for him on the morrow, anyway, but if not, the next time Harric tried anything like that, Willard would let Caris cut him. Only reason he didn’t let her finish it that night was what the rings might have done to her if she’d killed Harric—something about how he’d be banished the second those rings came off. Blah blah.
Then Willard was trudging a
fter Caris, his broad back receding in Caris’s wake, and Harric stood still as a statue, his scalp on fire and a trickle of blood on his shoulder. He stayed that way, unmoving, as if he might stop breathing and die and be free of his pain, until a sound beyond the camp alerted him Willard or Caris might be returning, and he forced himself in motion.
He found himself moving away from the camp into darkness. Numbly, he headed in the opposite direction of Brolli’s post and Mudruffle’s path, vaguely navigating toward a mossy bowl he’d spied earlier, and using his oculus to navigate.
He still could not accept what his memory told him had just happened. He kept raising his fingers to the side of his head, where he found a shallow cut and hair sticky with blood. Caris had tried to kill him. He felt like a foolish piglet stunned by a butcher’s mallet, his disbelieving brain unable to grasp the obvious.
So he kept moving. He concentrated only on putting one step after another, searching for the bowl he’d seen, but when his legs tired and he still had not found it, he gave up and slumped against a rotting log in a nest of ferns upon a hillock. He’d scarcely leaned his back against the log when he saw at the foot of the hillock the mossy crater he’d been seeking. It looked as he remembered it, a fuzzy green bowl some three fathoms deep and twice that across. It had probably been a yoab wallow at some distant time. A good place to curl up and die, but he was too miserable to get up again, and a pile of ferns would do just as well.
If only he hadn’t stumbled when she struck. He’d have died right there without any knowledge what had happened. And what poetic justice it would have been for Caris to liberate herself by killing the object of her enchantment. But as luck would have it, she’d missed, and left him only with a throbbing cut in his scalp and the clear and terrible image of the moment when it all went wrong.
Cold sweat broke out on his face and chest, and a wave of nausea rose in his stomach.
She’d tried to kill him. Actually kill him. It hadn’t been a bluff. He had seen in her eyes the same iron determination he’d seen when she’d held a chisel to her own finger—a look of moral certainty born of her truest self, of her deepest values, beyond the influence of the ring.
Which meant she, Caris, fundamentally despised him. She had judged him and tried to execute him as a witch.
Cradling his face in trembling hands, Harric stared into darkness. It was just as Fink had predicted so long ago: if Harric didn’t leave her and the others, he’d end up rejected and alone, maybe dead. But by Caris? Never from Caris. He’d rejected that notion. Thought he could beat the odds and have it all.
Cob it. Cob it all.
The hollowness in his chest pulled inward, as if it would suck him into its void. Then something inside him cracked and his heart spilled out in silent, racking sobs.
How to ride a Stilty horse:
Step One – Drink two bottles of Arkendian Sherry.
Step Two – Allow yourself to be lashed to the beast’s saddle.
Step Three – If still conscious, repeat Step One.
Step Four – If Step Three fails, instruct a squire to brain you with a stick.
—From “Survival Rules for Kwendi Near Stilty Horses,” by Second Ambassador Chombi
38
Blood Rite
Caris woke on her back and stared up at the patches of starlight perforating the lattice of the canopy high above. All around her, the black trunks of ancient trees towered like the legs of giant sentinels.
Her dreams had been strangely torturous, so she sought back in her memory for the reason, before they faded.
Courtiste. Magic. Lies.
Harric.
Then came the memory of leaping up to slice Harric’s lying throat, and she relived the sensation of her entire body bunching and springing and whipping the sword like an extension of her will.
The memories hit her like a runaway carriage, and she curled up in her blankets, pressing her hands to her ears. Horse-touched confusion roared to life in her skull, and with a groan of dismay, she fled into Rag before it could claim her. Thankfully, the mare’s mind was soft and accessible in slumber, and its peaceful senses gradually smothered the roar. It also had the effect of making her doze, but only for a moment or two, and then she was able to piece together what had happened that night.
Harric’s words came back to her, along with the vileness of his secret life and lies.
At the end of his speech, she’d been on her knees, fighting against the roaring confusion that had been rising between her ears. It had seemed he was bragging. That he was proud of pollution, and thought she should be too, like a cat laying the gift of a bloody rat on her pillow. At last, the roaring had been too much, and she sought out Rag, but Rag had resisted…
And she’d found Molly instead—violet fire, terrifying and thrilling.
Gods take the monster.
Closing her eyes again, Caris squeezed handfuls of blanket in her fists and concentrated on Rag’s calm. In her mind’s eye, she saw again the expression on Harric’s face as he explained how he’d lied to her. How he’d touched the witch-stone in Gallows Ferry. How he’d taken it and embraced the power of the Unseen Moon. How he had a servant spirit like Mudruffle—some horrible impit from the Black Moon. How he seemed so proud and almost hopeful in the way he told her, as if he thought she might approve or congratulate him. As he revealed horror after horror, the roar of confusion had begun in her head, and she’d reached out to Rag.
It seemed now that Molly had been lurking right where Rag should have been, and the moment she opened her horse-touched senses to Rag, Molly had pounced. The Phyros had thrust herself into Caris’s open mind, and her violet fire had ignited Caris’s rage for Harric’s treachery like a spark on a fire-cone.
But it wasn’t Molly who slashed at Harric. No. It might make her feel better to think that Molly’s blind violence had overcome her, that she hadn’t known what she was doing, but that would be another lie. She had known exactly what she was doing. Molly’s touch had merely freed Caris from doubt and enabled her to act.
She lifted her chin to look square at that fact: the blow had come straight from her heart, and it had felt good. It had felt right.
Kicking off her blankets, she rose and paced, her face flushing hot. I will not apologize for that. I will not feel guilt for the only pure thing I’ve done since this cursed ring caged me. A week ago, she would have crawled back to beg forgiveness of Harric. But now the notion made her sick to her stomach. It had been a moment of freedom and honesty. She felt like a young filly must feel when she stretched her legs for the first time on a wide field away from her mother.
But that would make Harric your mother, said a small part of her mind—some new and strange and somehow wiser part. The mother that restrains you is Rag.
The notion made Caris stop in her tracks. She’d always thought of Rag as a sister—almost a twin—as a partner in mischief and best friend. But when she tested the thought against her feelings, she sensed the truth of the statement: at some point, Rag had become her mother. Rag protected her. She nurtured her. She served as her rock, for Rag calmed Caris’s horse-touched confusions and gave her the stability she needed to function in the human world.
Mulling this over, she lit her lantern and hung it on a captured lance.
And if she is your mother, said that new, wiser part, then it is only natural that you leave her to run your own fields, just as you left your birth mother to seek your fortune as a knight.
A flicker of fear flashed through her mind. Leave Rag for Molly? Leave a lifelong friendship marked by shared history and devotion for an intoxicating violet fire that quelled the ring and bolstered her spirit?
Rag was her soul mate. Her heart. How did one abandon one’s heart?
She looked over to where the mare slept, only to find the horse’s head up, watching her with big, dark eyes. Caris’s heart swelled and tears streamed from her eyes. Hurrying to Rag, she embraced her neck and buried her face in her mane. All the years the
y’d spent together flashed before her eyes—all the trials Rag had endured, all the miseries she’d suffered with Caris, all the triumphs shared.
“I vow it now,” she said, also sending the ideas directly to Rag. “I vow I will never betray you like Willard betrayed Anna. I will never touch the Phyros fire again, and we will be as we have always been. I swear it!”
Rag pulled away, and the openness she’d displayed in sleep drained off as hard walls rose between them. Her distrust smote Caris’s like a fist to the gut. But the vow gave Caris a new clarity and focus by drawing the clear boundary between right and wrong, devotion and treachery, that she needed.
Coaxing Rag back into her embrace, Caris stroked her cheeks and murmured soothing sounds. Henceforth, she’d have to be doubly wary of Molly: whenever she felt the ring’s influence, she’d have to resist the temptation of touching Molly’s fire, and whenever she opened her senses to Rag, she’d have to guard against Molly’s ambush.
I can do it. I will do it. I’ve vowed it.
Caris stayed with Rag until the mare fell back asleep, then she returned to her bedding, packed it up, and stowed it. Willard would be rising soon, and she would need to be ready. Splashing water on her face helped wake her. As did a long drink from a cold waterskin. And since the aches in her shoulders and legs were agreeable ones, she ran through her stretches to get her blood moving. As she finished, she heard Molly’s chains rattling in the camp above—not the sound of the Phyros shuffling her hooves, but the continuous clatter that signaled Willard was stowing the hobbles and preparing to ride.
A few minutes later, when Willard and Molly loomed out of the darkness into the circle of her lantern, Caris waited for them in her saddle upon a very sleepy Rag. He gave her a grim nod and led her a mile or so north of their camp, where they found an appropriately sized tree, and Caris chained him to it. He agreed to let her gag him as soon as he’d drunk from the cup, and by the time Krato was raging into the gag, she had her back to him. She mounted Rag and turned her west through the maze of logs, to find the edge of the forest and take her up and down the river valley.
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