Oria's Gambit

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “I don’t discuss my cock with all and sundry—just with you, especially as you’re so interested in it.”

  Her gasp of outrage took the edge off his nerves—and hers, he hoped—Chuffta’s eyes glittering at him with what had to be amusement. The priest led him into a small chapel room, similar to the one they’d been married in the evening before. This one, however, looked entirely dedicated to Grienon, with representations of the small, dynamic moon in all his phases.

  Priest Vico cleared his throat. “Normally, Your Highness, a boy is accompanied by his father, who has explained the ritual in advance. Or, failing that, another male relative.”

  “Just tell me what to do, man,” Lonen answered. “Let’s get it over with so we can move on.”

  “All right.” He cleared his throat again. “Perhaps Queen Oria might wish to turn away and cover her ears?”

  “Oh, for Sgatha’s sake,” she snapped, “I can muffle my eyes and ears and sgath will still show me—” She broke off abruptly, her mask swiveling to the sky beyond the stone temple ceiling. “No,” she whispered, putting a hand to Chuffta’s tail wrapped around her wrist.

  “What?” Lonen asked. Then grabbed her sleeve when she only shook her head. “What is it?”

  A sound broke through his words. He knew that sound, like the dull roar of a bonfire. The giant fire-breathing draconic cousins to the derkesthai, mounts of the Trom.

  “Too late,” Oria said, her voice hard, echoing against the metal mask.

  He wasn’t sure if she meant for him, or for them all.

  ~ 15 ~

  “Maybe that’s a riderless dragon roaring. Or could it be Yar returning?” Lonen asked her, unstrapping the battle axe from his back.

  “I don’t think it’s either.” She didn’t sense Yar anywhere near the city. But that densely powerful black sun her sgath revealed was familiar. She hadn’t been skilled enough before to get so much detail about their magical signature, but she recognized them just the same. “Yar may be behind this, however. They have not returned since you left, but I think the Trom are here now.”

  “They are here, yes.” Chuffta’s mind voice shivered with trepidation. Very little frightened the derkesthai, but his larger cousins certainly seemed to.

  “The High Priestess,” Priest Vico said, fear leaking through the hwil. “Febe would have summoned them, rather than give you the crown.”

  Oria stared at him in stunned surprise. “She is the summoner?”

  His mask bobbed. “She and Yar both, as priest and priestess. I, myself, do not possess enough grien for the task She worked with him to do it.”

  “You could have warned me.” Anger burned in her. Along with the terror. The feeling of that thing touching her. Those matte black eyes staring into her heart and finding a mirroring darkness. Princess Ponen.

  “I wanted to, but we were sworn to tell only the king or queen. Since you’re effectively queen now…” he trailed off, voice weakening.

  Wonderful. Oria spun to the doors, hissing when Lonen brushed the skin of her hand before he clamped his own on her forearm over her sleeve. “Sorry for that. Clumsy of me, but you’re not racing out there.”

  She struggled back the near overwhelming surge of his emotional energy that the brief touch sent rocketing through her nervous system. An intense stew of terror, love, battle rage, despair, determination, hope, and more than she could sort even with the luxury of hours, not moments.

  “What choice do I have?” She tried to pull away, but he held on, his touch burning through the layers of silk. “You’re hurting me.”

  He let go, but moved his big body between her and the doorway. “I’m not letting you confront those creatures.”

  “You know what they’ll do! You’ve seen it with your own eyes. I can’t let them kill my people just to get to me.” All those piles of lifeless flesh… she couldn’t bear for it to happen again.

  “How do you know they won’t kill you too?” Lonen shimmered large in her sgath, full of furious frustration.

  “They won’t. Or can’t. You saw that too. I’m something to them. I don’t know what, but they won’t kill me. I have to confront them.”

  He seethed with conflict, the image slamming into her of him picking her up and carrying her off to some safe bower. “If you’re going, I go with you.”

  “Lonen—they can kill you. Don’t make me stand by while you’re turned nothing but boneless heap before my eyes.”

  “I won’t attack. They don’t kill if we show no aggression.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “Just as you can’t be sure that they won’t kill you this time.”

  Stymied, she fumed at him. “Please stay here. I’m asking this of you.”

  “No. I said that you don’t leave my side and I meant it.” He touched her masked cheek and managed a lopsided smile. “At least this keeps the priest’s knife away from my jewels a little longer.”

  She shook her head, amazed he’d made her laugh under such dire circumstances. “I can’t believe you were going to let him do that in the first place.”

  “Nothing gets between me and a goal. I told you that.”

  Yes, he had. And what Lonen said, he meant—and made happen. She could use that.

  “Then remember this,” she said, leaning as close to him as she dared, keeping his full attention. “You’ve said over and over that you’re going to find a way to bed me.”

  Desire rode high in his gamut of emotional energy, though he responded evenly enough. “What are you getting at?”

  “You’d better keep that in mind, because that’s a goal and if you let the Trom kill you, it’ll never happen. Think on that.”

  His stunned and grudgingly admiring amusement did a great deal to take the edge off her nerves. She began to understand why he enjoyed teasing her. He kept himself in front of her as she walked, a pace ahead with his signature big, bold strides as they hurried out the front doors of the temple. He carried his battle-axe two-handed, a black hole of a barrier before her.

  “Leave the axe behind,” she urged.

  He didn’t hitch even momentarily, but his incredulity swamped her. “Not even if Arill Herself asked me.”

  She had to run to do it—Chuffta half spreading his wings to keep balance on her shoulder—but she managed to draw level with him, grabbing onto his leather-clad arm, glad of his thicker Destrye clothes that buffered some of the impact from her impetuous move. He glanced down at her in some surprise, all of him softening, and he slowed somewhat. “Don’t fret. I learned my lesson, too. As long as I’m not aggressive towards it, I should be fine.”

  “Last time you insisted that I put down my sword!”

  “Because you could hardly lift the cursed thing,” he retorted grimly. “I don’t know what in Arill you were thinking. If we survive all this, I’m going to teach you to use a weapon your own size.”

  “I don’t need a weapon. I’m a sorceress. Magic is all I need.”

  “Then this would be an excellent time to use it.” He came to a halt, swiftly sheathing his axe on his back. Not one, but three Trom stood at the bridge to the temple. The sight of them turned her stomach, their magic like Chuffta’s, but as much greater in intensity as the dragons were to him in size, nearly blinding her sgath with the radiance of it.

  She’d been too mind-blind to see it before, their charismatic immensity. To the physical eye, they looked like desiccated husks of humans, skin as dry as old leaves stretched over bones, like corpses left to dry in the desert. As if to make up for all they lacked in robust humanity, concentrated magic filled them out on the non-physical plane. It extended inward also, each of them seeming to carry a black star of contained power and paradoxically infinite magic.

  It made them hard to look at, the way their magic moved both out and in, as if they existed in multiple places at once, giving her a vague sense of nausea and dislocation.

  “I did not see it before, either, but I do through you now. Most �
�� disconcerting.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “Steady, Oria,” Lonen said as she swayed on her feet, briefly cupping the back of her head over her braids. A fleeting touch that nevertheless heartened her. “I’m taking cues from you now.”

  Of course he handed her the decision-making power when she had no idea what to do. The Trom saved her from deciding, however.

  “Queen Ponen,” the one in front greeted her with its mouthless voice that emanated from its entire being. “It gladdens us to see you’ve taken not one, but several steps farther down your path.”

  She hated to contemplate what that might mean. “Bára greets you. We did not expect you to return.”

  The Trom couldn’t smile, of course, and yet it seemed to. Much in the same way that expressions sometimes conveyed themselves from the masked priests and priestesses. She suppressed a shudder and Lonen shifted towards her, his desire to wrap her in his arms palpable. It helped, oddly enough.

  “We come when summoned. Though it’s true it was not your call we answered. Someday you will call to us and your understanding will deepen.”

  No doubt that day would come—had to, if she planned to wrest control of them from Yar and Febe—but she dreaded discovering what that deeper understanding boded for her. No sign of either of those summoners, cowards that they were, so she took the situation in hand. “None stands here who summoned you, so you may leave again.”

  They didn’t move. “You do not yet command our obedience,” the leader replied, just as it had when they met before. If it was, indeed, the same being. Difficult to discern.

  Silence whistled through the chasm, a hot wind kicking up a swirl of sand on stone. Lonen’s desperate curiosity to know what the Trom said reminded her that they spoke a language he didn’t know but she somehow understood.

  “Mind to mind,” Chuffta said.

  Ah, yes.

  “We will see the one who summoned us, as required.” The Trom spoke as if observing the weather, without inflection.

  Much as she disliked Febe, Oria couldn’t stomach watching her turned to pulp by the Trom, nor did she wish to hand power to the High Priestess in case the dread guardians would respond to her commands.

  “The priest you seek is not within the city,” she replied, willing the honesty of that to suffice to convince them to leave.

  “But I am.” Febe stepped before them, her sgath shivering with her temerity, her hwil strained. Both afraid and tremulously delighted with herself. “As Summoner, I invite you to enter the temple.”

  Lonen swore at that, able to understand those ritual words from the previous ceremonies, though he did not draw his axe, his hands clenching into fists and rage going black. “Stay behind me, Oria.”

  And watch him die? Never. She didn’t move, staying right beside him as the three Trom crossed. “Summoner,” the lead Trom greeted the high priestess. “What do you require of us?”

  “Kill this one.” Febe pointed at Oria.

  ~ 16 ~

  Everything blurred into a high, colorless whine in his head. Even as Lonen reached for his axe determined to die protecting Oria if he had to, Chuffta spread his wings, breathing green fire that raised the already broiling temperature on the exposed bridge to unbearable levels. Oria’s magic, too, as familiar on his skin now as her scent in his head, billowed up. Tornadic gusts spun into life, catching Chuffta’s fire into swirls.

  The Trom remained untouched by any of it, as if encased in one of Oria’s transparent drinking glasses. The leader regarded Oria and Chuffta, then stepped closer without concern for the fire, unbuffeted by the wind and sand that scoured Lonen’s exposed skin. Axe in hand, he moved to intercept the thing’s lethal caress.

  And found himself immobilized. By Oria’s magic, Arill take her.

  “Oria!” he shouted, fighting her grip that held him as surely as chains. “Release me, curse you.”

  She shouted an unintelligible reply, her voice harsh as a carrion bird’s.

  The Trom spoke, strange words he couldn’t parse. But Chuffta stopped the defensive fire and Oria lowered her hands, seeming stunned. Whatever it said, Febe understood and clenched her fists in impotent rage.

  “If you won’t kill her, then kill him,” she screeched over the howling wind.

  “No!” To his terror, Oria imposed her slim form between his frozen one and the Trom.

  “Defend him and die at their touch,” Febe crowed her victory. “Lose him and join your broken mother as a widow who will never gain the crown.”

  Oria raised her hands. “I’ll take option number three.” As it had on the rooftop, her powerful grien magic surged, gaining that sharp edge, and struck the high priestess like a giant fist.

  She staggered. “Impossible!” the woman nearly howled. “Abomination! You’ll die for this. Kill her. Protect me and kill the foul grien user.”

  “Not me, not today,” Oria said, quietly enough that he almost didn’t hear it. Abruptly her magic released him as she drew it back, her braids snapping in the unfelt wind of it.

  With a cry of despair, Febe fell, punched again by the fist, then scrabbled for purchase, fingers sliding on the sand as an invisible grip dragged her to the edge of the chasm.

  “Mercy, I beg you!” she sobbed.

  Then Febe plummeted over the edge, her long, wailing cry echoing back before attenuating into nothing.

  Brutally reminded of his brother’s death by the same unending fall, horror crawled through Lonen’s heart. But he still had Oria to defend. She recklessly still stood between him and the Trom.

  “The Summoner is dead,” she declared, her voice reverberating with strange harmonies. “You may depart.”

  All three inclined their heads to her and the first spoke. They turned and walked over the bridge, disappearing back into the palace. Moments later, three dragons lifted into the sky and wheeled out of sight.

  Suddenly realizing by the scream of his straining shoulders that he still held the axe mid-swing, Lonen lowered it, then spoke to Oria’s back. “If you ever do anything like that again, I’ll kill you myself.”

  Oria, unbelievably exhausted, could barely keep to her feet. Not in the overloaded, close to breaking sense, but in a different way, one she’d never experienced before. Her mask moved slickly over her sweating face and she longed to be rid of the thing—especially as her sgath showed the world only dimly, as if through a haze of smoke. Empty and aching, she turned to face Lonen.

  “I could say the same back to you.”

  “It’s not funny.” He sounded weary, too.

  “I didn’t mean it as a joke. But it’s irrelevant now. They’re gone.” For now, she didn’t say, though the unspoken words hung in the air between them.

  Lonen acknowledged that with a grunt. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” Though she wasn’t sure of the truth of that. She felt… odd. But physically unharmed.

  “What did they say to you—why didn’t it kill you when Febe commanded it?”

  “I—” She didn’t want to give voice to it any more than she already had. That the Trom had told Febe they could no more kill her than one of their own. And it wasn’t clear if they’d meant they actually couldn’t or if they didn’t want to. “I’ll tell you about it later. We must go through with the coronation.”

  “You’re clearly exhausted,” he said in a neutral enough tone, though his concern and frustration with her snapped and snarled like two dogs fighting over the last piece of meat. “You have to rest and build up your reserves, or you might not survive whatever the ritual involves.”

  “We don’t have time.” It ticked away inside her, the imminence of Yar’s return.

  “That’s not the most important consideration at this point,” he insisted.

  “You were the one who came to me for help.” She would have snapped it, but she didn’t have the energy. Really she wanted to sit. If she could just sit on the ground for a moment or two. Or lie do
wn…

  Lonen snapped fingers in front of her mask. “You’re dead on your feet. Let’s go back to your tower.”

  “I can’t help you if I don’t have control of the Trom, and I can’t do that unless I’m queen. We’re so close—let’s just go in the temple and get it over with.”

  “Oria.” Lonen spoke her name sternly enough to command her attention, if not her obedience. “Arill knows I was willing to let that priest near my cock with a knife so you could get that crown on your head, or whatever you Bárans do, but you won’t be any good to Dru or Bára if you’re dead. I am not letting you do this right now.”

  “You don’t get to boss me around, Destrye.”

  “He has a good point, Oria—you’re very tired and you have very little sgath in you.”

  “It’s not fair,” she complained to both of them, vaguely aware that she sounded pitiful and whiny. “Either I have too much energy in me or not enough. I’m sick to death of being fragile.”

  Lonen laughed. “Right—so damn fragile that you knocked that priestess into the chasm like a woman sweeping dirt off the porch.”

  She choked back the remorse. Febe had tried to kill her, but Oria had never thought she’d be capable of murder. Though once the priestess had realized the truth about Oria’s grien magic… Well, there had been no choice.

  “Come on.” Lonen said more gently. “Let me be strong for you. I can carry you up, if you’ll let me.”

  “It’s too far,” she protested. “Even you can’t climb all those stairs carrying me.”

  “How do you think you got up there last night?” A few mischievous sparks made it through to her weakened sgath vision. “Besides, you weigh no more than a kitten.”

  “A kitten!” She sputtered, unable to come up with a retort.

  “A drowned kitten.” He leaned in, wrapping her in his bracing energy, for once only a comfort and not at all too much to bear. “All fur and spitting feistiness.”

  “You did not just call me feisty.” She thought that had put up her back enough to rally, but she swayed on her feet.