Green Wild (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 2)

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  The day had gotten worse, too. She and Twist had a long, quiet talk and at the end, he’d agreed to teach his magic to the Vassay. Then he’d gone off to see her sister like a man under a death sentence. She’d talked to him of duty, too, without any idea of what he considered his true duty to be.

  Thorn stepped out of the crowd and fell into step beside her. “Your guards really aren’t very good,” he said mildly. “All the way back there.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you: they’re not here to protect me?”

  He glanced at her. “They’d be pretty bad at stopping you, too.”

  “They could do what was necessary,” Jerya said stiffly, unclear on why they were even having this conversation. She turned a corner, to a quieter street.

  “Mm. No. They couldn’t. I don’t think anybody here could, not even Miss Iriss. And that’s supposed to be her job, isn’t it? You’ve got them all depending on you.”

  “Not all of them,” said Jerya, nettled and still thinking of Cara. “Why are you mentioning this? Do you think I’m about to lose control and go on a rampage?”

  He watched her for a long moment, then shrugged. “There’s dissension in the ranks. A debate about the different definitions of victory.” He stopped strolling and stretched, and she turned back to him. “How do you define victory, Your Highness?”

  “Keeping everything that’s mine,” she said quietly, and thought of Seandri, laughing with Landry after the Council meeting. She’d tried to keep him, only to realize how little she’d had.

  “Interesting,” Thorn said politely. “I’ve been thinking about my own job. About where my responsibilities really lie. Do you ever think about your job that way?”

  Jerya stared at him, then said flatly, “I am not talking to you about this,” and walked away. He didn’t follow her.

  She all but ran the rest of the way to the inn, hurrying up to Jant’s room. When she didn’t find him, she stalked along the halls until she discovered him in one of the tiny writing rooms set aside for visiting scholars.

  He sat in the desk chair, with the desk itself pushed into a corner. Gisen sat on the floor at his feet, and the air glimmered with the emanations they directed. Neither of them glanced at Jerya as she stood in the door.

  “How is the project going?” she asked.

  “Slowly,” said Jant, in a go-away voice.

  Jerya didn’t go away. “We need it to go quickly. We need a phantasmagory before everything falls apart. I’m trying to hold onto everything, but they keep treating me like I’m a little girl dressed up as a Queen. As long as I have to keep pretending I have access to information they don’t, that’s all I really am.”

  Gisen gave her a wide-eyed look, then shook her head silently. Jant said, “Smart child. Why doesn’t she just be a Queen, that’s what I wonder. There’s more to being Queen than bickering with the Justiciars.”

  Jerya’s face tightened and she started to argue, but Jant wasn’t done. “But I suppose we ought to help her out, or else she’ll get herself killed and we’ll have to take over. Queen Gisen?” He balanced a sphere on his fingers and Jerya couldn’t tell if it was eidolon or emanation.

  Gisen shook her head more vigorously. “Let’s show her.”

  Jant nodded and held out the sphere to Gisen.

  Squinting, Jerya said, “It’s a gestalt eidolon, then? It’s so small. And you weren’t touching each other.”

  “It started as an eidolon. Now it’s both,” said Jant. “The emanation makes the eidolon and the eidolon uses the emanation. But that’s an old trick, only useful for small things. That’s not what we’re showing you. Guess who it belongs to?”

  “You?” said Jerya uncertainly. “You made it; I saw you do it.”

  “But Gisen holds it. The emanations are no longer mine.”

  Jerya looked a moment longer. “So you can pass workings back and forth? That’s interesting, and maybe useful, but it’s not a phantasmagory.”

  Gisen danced her fingers through the sphere, then held it out to Jerya, one hand coiling something invisible.

  Jerya took a step, reaching out for the orb. As she did, Jant said, “Gisen, what did you do—”

  Everything changed. Unseen windows opened and light streamed through. Jerya’s vision flooded with green and when it faded, she was frozen, watching something else, somewhere else.

  Windows along one side of a great gallery glowed in the light of dawn. Tiana stood in front of a painting, half-covered by an emerald cloth. She walked forward, her steps echoing on the polished wooden floor, and tugged on the fabric.

  It pooled on the floor, revealing a woman, or possibly two women bound together at the back. No. It was a woman with two faces. One face lifted to the sky, features cold and expressionless. The other face looked down, smiling tenderly at the garden at her feet.

  While the woman was only paint and canvas, the hilly landscape behind her moved. Plants twined over each other, flowered, dropped seeds, died, endlessly.

  “He gave you death, my blossoms. He insisted you must die, insisted it was unavoidable.” The painting spoke, in a dual voice both enraged and grieving. “The others have given you gifts as compensation. I will give you a—” and one voice said ‘curse’, while the other said ‘blessing’. “Fear death, my flowers. Know it is coming and flee from it.”

  The double voice faded. The morning sun glowed through the eastern windows. Tiana shifted uncomfortably, and Jerya remembered how often her own family sought out danger, courted death, and even embraced it.

  “Is that it?” Tiana touched the painting lightly, rubbed the dry pigment under her fingers. “Any advice for dealing with the Blighter?”

  The painting flashed green, blinding, pure. Then the green ran with blood as a black spear pushed through the painting. The vision became a chaotic sequence of images and sensory input. Jerya sank into the jumble and knew the sensation. She was in a phantasmagory again, a tiny one, and so was every other living soul who carried enough Royal Blood to make an emanation.

  It felt as if everybody in her family had piled into a small closet together. The noise and the sense of pressure overwhelmed her ability to process what was going on. She saw fragments of her family’s surroundings, bumped against flashes of personalities she didn’t recognize. Yithiere and the students he’d stolen hid in a forest, watching a vast darkling army move past, led by the lie she’d told so often. She recognized it, rejected it. Yithiere looked over at her and growled, “What is happening to my daughter?”

  And Jerya saw: saw darklings and men battling, saw Cathay’s eidolon leaping on an eidolon-man with a shimmering blade. Kiar huddled in an aegis with Lisette and two strangers. And Tiana—where was Tiana?

  Where was Tiana?

  The tiny phantasmagory shattered, just like the original had. Gisen stood in the center of the study room shaking eidolon-stuff from her hands. “He was there,” breathed the small girl.

  “Our enemy? Yes, I felt him.” agreed Jant. “Others of the Blood, too, others we don’t know. We’ll have to find them.”

  Jerya grabbed Gisen’s hands. “Why did you break it? Make another one! I didn’t see Tiana. Did you see her?”

  Gisen stared at her wide-eyed, then stuttered, “Didn’t—didn’t break it. Broke itself. It popped like a soap bubble.” She swallowed. “Saw Tiana in the gallery with the Firstborn?”

  “Yes, and a spear came through the painting! Did you see her after that, Uncle?”

  Jant shook his head slowly. “Just the vision of the gallery. I’ll have to run some more experiments but I think whatever Tiana did triggered that... experience. Still, it might be useful—”

  “What are you talking about?” Jerya demanded incredulously. “My little sister is being attacked, right now.”

  “She has that sword,” said Jant, far too calmly. “And there’s nothing we can do about it. She’s fought battles before; we hear about them later. She’s right in the midst of the western invaders. I’d be more s
urprised if she wasn’t in a fight.”

  Jerya wanted to shake his old frame. Somebody touched her elbow from behind and she whirled around. Siana stood there, with Iriss right behind her. “Come have tea, dear,” she said.

  “We just saw—they’re fighting!”

  “I heard, yes. Jerya. Come sit with me and Iriss and have some tea.”

  Jerya stared at her. She and Jant were so calm, as if none of this surprised them. Tiana might be dead. Then Iriss reached past Siana and laced her fingers through Jerya’s. “Help me back to the couch, please. It’s embarrassing to cling to Auntie Siana’s shawl.”

  Jerya took a deep breath. She had Iriss and Iriss needed her help. She could focus on that. She went past both women, still holding Iriss’s hand, and led her Regent back to the sitting room. Siana followed after a few words with Jant.

  Jerya helped Iriss to the couch and sat on one of the high-backed chairs. “There’s not any tea,” she said, and she knew she sounded like a sullen little girl. Like Tiana, in fact. Where was she?

  Just like Tiana, because the tea tray showed up a moment later, carried in by a wide-eyed inn servant. The tea things were haphazardly placed on a tray clearly prepared in a hurry. The servant put it on the table, gave Jerya a frightened look, and left the room.

  “You were screaming,” said Iriss lightly, reaching for a tea-cake and knocking it to the floor. Jerya picked it up, set it aside, and handed her another one. “And there were unformed eidolons climbing the walls. I don’t know who did that but I think it frightened the staff.

  “We were all in the phantasmagory again,” Jerya tried to explain. “All of us. Except for Tiana.”

  Siana poured the tea delicately and handed the cups around. Jerya sipped hers dutifully. Instead of their their usual afternoon tea, they drank a calming herbal mixture the Chancellor blended himself. He insisted the Blood drink it whenever possible after they trained with their magic or had a meltdown. Repetition created habit, and Jerya felt some of her adrenalin draining away.

  “Now,” said Siana. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. I wonder now if I should have asked you long ago.”

  Jerya sat up straight, feeling like she had that morning at the Tabernacle, as if any minute the world would collapse under her. “Go ahead.”

  Siana hesitated, which didn’t make Jerya feel any better. Finally Siana said, “Why have you been treating the Justiciar’s Council as enemies?”

  Being slapped couldn’t have shocked Jerya more. She swayed back, and then leaned forward, into an argument.

  And sat back again. Because it was Siana. Siana, who had hugged her after her mother left, who had lost her husband but stayed with the family anyhow, and so Jerya bit her tongue on her immediate response. She went over her experiences with the Council: the insults, the snubs, the way they treated her as a child. She looked at her own behavior, trying to decide if she’d been acting irrationally or worse, telling herself stories to justify her desires. It was easy to do; she simply asked herself what Tiana would have done.

  Finally, cautiously, she said, “I’ve been a little irrational, but they’ve been awful to me. To us. They want us to be leashed dogs, Siana.” Then she hesitated and said, “They have been awful, yes?” What was really awful was that she couldn’t trust herself, even now. Not with her father, not with Yithiere for an uncle.

  “They’ve been extremely rude and antagonistic,” agreed Siana. “But you’re good at turning antagonists into allies when you try. Every day you go to the Tabernacle and convince people who hate you that you’re on their side. But when you don’t do that with the Council. Why is that?”

  Jerya tilted her head back, closing her eyes. “Because they’re trying to take what’s mine. They’re not my allies, not even potentially. They want nothing from me except my nonexistence. They’re my enemies. Just like Vassay.”

  Porcelain clinked as Siana sipped her tea, but that was the only sound. Jerya thought about Seandri, about his sweet smile turned toward Landry.

  The spear went straight through the painting toward Tiana.

  Iriss said cheerfully, “You’ve always been so possessive, Jer. Hasn’t she, Auntie Siana?”

  Without opening her eyes, Jerya said, “I share.”

  “Yes, you certainly do, as long as everybody knows something’s yours,” said Iriss, and her cheer was threaded with tartness. “

  “I wonder,” said Siana gently. “What else is yours, besides Lor Seleni and what it contains? You have spent so much of your energy here.”

  “Ceria,” said Jerya, then lowered her head and put her hands over her face. “Tiana. I need to go to the duchies myself and convince them to give us the armies, don’t I?” Her voice turned sour. “Make allies of them. So Tiana, if she’s even still alive, has a chance to do what the damned Firstborn want her to do. So I don’t lose everything.” Jerya glanced up at Siana, who had her hands folded in her lap. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

  “If you don’t, I think the price will be very high.”

  Jerya put her face in her hands again, breathing hard as what had to be done unrolled before her. “And I have to leave Iriss here. I just got her back again.”

  “What?” cried Iriss. “No, of course you don’t. Only, I’ll need a carriage. Or a wagon.”

  Jerya shook her head. “You’re a resource to more than me now. You have insights, intelligence we wouldn’t have. You need to stay with Alanah and the Guards.”

  “Insights I have for you, Jerya!” Iriss stood, agitated. “It’s you I see best. Without you I’ll be blind. It’s for you I don’t listen to him. Don’t leave me behind. I don’t know what will happen if you do.”

  Jerya hunched in her chair and tried to find the right words to convince her. But she never could, not with Iriss, not with Tiana. Pretty words only went so far. “You have to. If I took you along, that would be for me and for you, not for Ceria—”

  “I am for you!” flared Iriss, her face red. Eidolon substance flickered on her skirt. “I’ve always been for you, since we were seven years old.”

  Jerya shook her head again, more slowly. “No. You’ve been for Ceria. Regents stand between the Blood and the people. You know that, I know that. And we both know you couldn’t do what you had to, if you had to. I love you, Iriss. And you must stay here.”

  Iriss burst into tears and stumbled out of the room, one hand held ahead of her so she didn’t bump into a wall. Jerya wanted to go after her, and couldn’t. She turned to the remaining woman instead. “Aunt Siana, I do need some companion. A companion who knows my weaknesses. You’ve watched me all this time. You said something today. Would you come with me instead?”

  “Of course, sweetling.” Siana’s gaze stayed on her, level and calm, as Jerya stood.

  “Thank you.” She cast around for something else to say. “I have to talk to some other people. And I suppose arrange the journey...”

  “I can do that, at least.” Siana found a small book in her knitting basket and opened it up to start making a list.

  Jerya nodded, distracted by her own mental list of people she had to speak with. Work was better than thinking of Iriss’s face, and the eidolon energy crawling over her dress. Instead she thought of several of her city folk who awaited advice from her. Alanah, who would need to write her regularly about the Blight. The Chancellor, who needed to be warned about Cara. Seandri, who deserved an apology for things she’d never felt sorry for.

  Then she remembered Thorn, remembered his murmuring about jobs and the threat she offered but didn’t see. It made sense now. He thought she might be able to unite Ceria so that they didn’t need foreign support. If she went on this trip without neutralizing him, she’d always be looking over her shoulder.

  She looked over her shoulder now, the hair on her neck prickling. Was he was getting information from within the inn? There was nothing out of place, nothing that stood out, but she didn’t have much time to deal with him.

  �
��I’m going to go get started on farewells.” She backed out of the sitting room door before her aunt could notice her sudden tension, then turned around and ran out of the inn, sending an emanation circling lightly around her body. It wasn’t one of Kiar’s aegises but it was better than nothing when it came to arrows.

  Only a few steps down the street, she saw him out of the corner of her eye, moving in the same direction from near the inn. He kept pace with her like he was just another person on the street, close enough to talk to if she wanted. She didn’t. She kept walking until she came to a warehouse she knew to be abandoned. Then she turned around and held out her hand to the guards always behind her. “Stay outside, please.”

  She didn’t wait to see if they’d obey before going into the warehouse. Thorn had vanished from the street already, although she didn’t think he’d used the front door.

  The dark warehouse smelled awful: the last trace of whatever had once been stored there. Maybe if her head stopped whirling so much she could remember what it had been but all she could think about was her list of things to do.

  Not getting assassinated was at the top.

  “What are you doing here?” came Thorn’s voice, from somewhere in the gloom.

  “Giving you an opportunity.” She coiled an emanation in both her hands.

  “Do you really think I’ve been waiting for one?” His voice moved around the warehouse.

  She unleashed one of her emanations and diffused it so that it was nothing more than a current of air, then let it carry the distant movements of Thorn to her skin. “Why does your employer want Ceria to remain disorganized in the face of this Blight? Do they think they can reason with it?”

  Thorn stilled. “This one? I think they might. After all, he shares your powers. You are the true Blight.”

  The flat statement stole Jerya’s breath. “That’s a dangerous thought,” she muttered.

  Thorn remained still. He didn’t fidget like a normal man, as if no background thoughts distracted him from his focus on her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jerya told him. “It doesn’t matter if we are. Ceria is mine and I’m not going to let it be torn apart by Vassay and Ohedreton for their own satisfaction. I’m leaving Lor Seleni soon, to organize the duchies.”