He looked up, mossy green eyes fixing on the point where she watched him through the Rose.
"Do your injuries limit your ability to cast, Lord Aristide?"
The words were quiet, marvellously calm. For the first time in her life, Soren had found an absolute certainty. It left doubt quite behind, and brought that worried foreboding back to Strake's face. He mightn't fully understand why she had struggled against Halcean's death, but he could hardly fail to recognise the blasted fury locked beneath her rigid composure.
Aristide's expression barely changed. "I am not a follower of the Tybol School. Few castings would be unmanageable."
"And do you think yourself equal to sewing with lightning?"
This was quite incomprehensible to Aristide, but Strake knew what she meant, the only possible course of action left to her.
"Soren, it can't be done–" he began.
"It has to be!" She shouted it, loud enough for distant guards to lift their heads. She found herself bent forward, her hands flat on the table. "Has to be, Strake. Right now it's the weakest it's ever going to be. The longer you're here, the more Rathens you produce, the bigger the power backlash will be. Am I right?"
"Quite true." It was Aristide who answered, unblinking. "But weak is a relative term, and you are not equipped to survive so much raw power. I could try and shield you from it, but your chances are slim."
"I know that." She was still staring directly at Strake, at her Rathen. "Your rose isn't black any more." It was, in fact, a very bloody red. "Hypocritical of it to kill Halcean for attacking, when it was quite ready to let you die a week ago. That's what it is, Strake. Something prepared to do whatever it needs to survive, something full of anger and malice. Inside me."
"This isn't the way, Soren," Strake said, shaking his head. "The price is too high."
Soren turned away from him, looked at star sapphire eyes which did not mock. "You said it slept. That it was something which had grown inside the Rose, not particularly developed. What happens if it does? Isn't it inevitable? What do we do when it's awake all the time, when it's more than a sleeping bear? What if the next person it kills is someone we do mind being dead?"
"Yours isn't a life I can throw away!" Strake shouted it, was on his feet. But this time she remained steadfast.
"What happens if, next time it rouses, it makes it impossible for us to stop it, puts a blank space in our minds for that? Or simply decides to replace me with a more complaisant Champion, as soon as this child is born? Or sooner. You know, after all, that it's willing to sacrifice individual Rathens. And it can always get another child off you."
He went white, veins standing out at throat and temple, hands clenching. But he couldn't deny it, knew very well she was speaking bare truth. "You're asking me to kill you."
She took a deep, sobbing breath, full of hate and fear. "Strake. If you don't destroy it, I'll go take a sledgehammer to it myself."
And he bowed his head.
-oOo-
"I'll never forgive you for this."
"No." He probably wouldn't.
"But I'll miss you."
For the first time her determination wavered, and Soren quickly put a hand on his arm. "Please don't make this harder." She couldn't keep the quaver from her voice.
"There isn't any way to make it easier."
Aristide, politely not noticing their embraces, studied the reflected moonlight patterning the walls beneath the great bell. After a suitable interval he said: "I cannot cross this."
"No." Strake's arms tightened convulsively around Soren one final time, then let go. "Only King and Champion. You'll both have to stay here."
"Very well." Aristide glanced at Soren. "Has it shown any awareness?"
"Nothing." That had been Soren's great fear, the reason this had to be done now, tonight. It could so easily stop them, once it read this resolution in her mind. The next time the worm at the Rose's heart roused, it would know.
Her Rathen walked away from her, very tall and upright, with a face from the frozen north, but paused at the entrance of the room beneath the bell.
"Aristide–" He glanced at his Councillor's face. "I doubt I'll forgive you, either."
For not sewing with lightning. Aristide's eyelids dropped, but no smile touched those exquisite lips. This could put King and Councillor at each other's throats, and only their awareness of the potential for disaster, their forbearance, would save them.
"I imagine not," was all Aristide said.
Strake nodded, and walked down the stair into a black, unlit room of runes, outside the limits of her palace-sight. He didn't look back.
Quite perfectly expressionless, Aristide turned and looked at her. Soren could only guess at his thoughts, at how he felt to participate in the destruction of the enchantment which had kept him from the throne. Did he curse her for oversetting all plans, or did his mind race with possibility, of the turning tide of fortune? After this, only Strake's life to keep him from the crown. Would his oath hold him over a lifetime of servitude?
The faintest curve of lips suggested he read her face a little too well, but all he said was: "Ground the sword."
Obediently she drew the overlong shaft of metal, that pleasurable tingle running through her arm. She touched its tip to the treasury floor, and Aristide nodded.
"It will help, a little," he explained. "It, at least, was created to channel power." He came to stand beside her, lifted one bandaged hand and rested it lightly on the back of her neck, placing the other on the wrist of the hand holding the sword. And turned his head as the sibilant murmur of casting came from down the moonlit stair.
Soren's stomach twisted, and a shudder ran through her. She was really doing this rather than compromise, rather than accept bad with worse. "Will the – could the saecstra strike at you because of this?" she asked, needing distraction more than an answer. Her voice shook, betraying her terror.
She couldn't read the look Aristide gave her then, but he answered with perfect composure. "Be assured, I will be making every effort to preserve you. That should fulfil the terms of the oath."
"I'm glad." She didn't need any more lives on her conscience.
Because that was the worst of it, what none of them had said but all had known. Her baby, unwanted, forced on her. Her child she was willing to risk too, to take with her into not quite certain suicide to save it from becoming a puppet of a festering enchantment.
"Selune forgive me," she groaned, hating herself, refusing to turn back from this. It had to be done.
Something stirred behind her eyes.
"It knows!" She felt it uncoiling, twisting up to jar her thoughts awry. The panic of unlooked for attack, of threat, of fear and fury.
"Too late." Aristide's brilliant eyes were unwavering, fixed on her face as the soft chant in the darkness fell silent and there was a moment of nothing, then a tiny little ticking sound.
It burned!
Her back arched, spine curving, throat distended, every muscle in her body locking as her head snapped back. Unseen fire ran the very length of her, up through her feet, scorching the course of her bones, twisting joints to their limits. Her eyes bulged and her jaw cracked as that burning force rammed itself past throat and tongue and blasted with a rising scream out and up and away. Agony, all-consuming and complete, beyond compass.
Fragmentary things touched her. Rage, the worm in the Rose, boiling with fear, fury and no way to save itself. Aristide's hands tightening on her arm, the back of her neck. Palace-sight, the images carving into her mind. She knew every true-mage in the palace by the way they leapt in shock. Guards, battering the treasury door. The Tzel Aviar dropping a silver sigil. Shaol with tears in his eyes.
The sword was drawing some of the power, channelling it in a focused and purposeful manner. That, in some way, was also the Rose. But too little. Her heart was going to burst, a knot crushing her chest, pushing out her ribs.
Then a crack, like a frozen lake in winter melt: sharp, echoing, abs
olute. Soren's scream cut off.
She sagged and Aristide went down with her, borne over by her greater height. A scrape of boot on grit heralded Strake's arrival, and she heard him moan as he flung himself to his knees, snatched her into his arms. She coughed, all she could do with the pain it caused. Her hand wouldn't work, the fingers fused around the hilt of the sword, melted together. It hurt. So much.
"Soren. Oh, Sun, Soren." Strake was weeping. She could hear it. There was a lot of banging, which she belatedly connected to the guards trying to break down the door. Her head rang with every blow.
Aristide moved beside her, there was a cool touch on the back of her wrist and the pain went away.
"It worked." She heard the delight in a creak of voice scarcely recognisable as her own. "It's gone. It's all gone. I'm not dead." She found Strake with her undamaged hand, touched his face. Smiled. "Not dead. It worked."
He made a choked noise and clutched her all the more.
"The baby?" she asked then, and waited a very long moment before his sigh, pure relief, gave her an answer. She cried then: release, guilt.
"The Rose was shielding it," he said, to her surprise. "Not this instinct, but the Rose itself, still carrying out its basic function. Shielding it and you, preserving the Rathen heir and Champion."
"Ah." She tried to feel some gratitude, but there was only relief. Then she turned her head toward him, started to lift a hand to her own face, and stopped. It seemed an insignificant thing, compared to the life of her child. She thought about it, then added, almost apologetically: "I don't seem to be able to see."
-oOo-
Enthroned in the King's bed, all bandages and exhaustion. Healing was a tricky thing, even for the best of mages, and the burns on Soren's hand would require many days of work. She wouldn't lose use of her fingers. Her eyes were beyond repair.
It had taken Strake a long time to accept it. When his own and Aristide's divinations had failed to give hope, he'd even gone so far as to summon the Tzel Aviar. But although magic was good at hurrying healing, and doing straightforward things like binding bones and warding against infection, living bodies resisted enchantment which replaced or made as new. She was blind.
Strake and Aristide had stayed a long time away after escorting the Tzel Aviar out. Soren drifted on the edge of dozing, feeling she should stay awake, feeling it was all unreal and that she'd died after all and was only dreaming she still lived. Any moment now, surely, the Moon would welcome her back.
A step at the door told her it wasn't true. Strake, though the Rose was no longer there to underline the guess with perfect awareness. She felt the bed shift with his weight as he sat beside her, and then the echo of another step as someone else crossed from the door.
"Champion–" Aristide began.
"Not Champion any more." She said it with open pleasure, and heard Strake swallow.
Aristide responded with that light, polite, almost chiding tone which had once made her writhe: "There was a Champion before there was a Rose. And is one after."
"Blind Champion?" She thought that funny, made a little hiccupping noise.
"Yes." All hint of mockery had gone. "Without the Rose, Darest is now exposed to the full force of the malison. Strake will bear the brunt of that, and you will be a vital shield against its effects. There are many ways to serve: don't underestimate this one."
She supposed he meant she'd take the edge off Strake's temper, keep him human, or sane. Save him from Lady Arista's fate, from becoming a grieving, brooding king, a whirlwind eating out its own heart. A most important factor for Aristide, bound to serve. But something else was more interesting.
"You called him Strake." She said it in an awed, dizzy kind of way, and had the signal pleasure of hearing Aristide Couerveur laugh.
"So I did. Remiss of me."
Soren wondered if it was possible to shield Aristide as well. Two kings in Darest, and the uncrowned just as important, but before she could say anything he went on.
"We cannot repair your eyes, Champion. But we have been to view the structure of spell which allowed the Rose to see, and I believe we can adapt it to our purposes."
"Palace-sight?" She sounded appalled, and shook her head to underline that. To suffer that overwhelming press again – she'd rather the alternative.
"It wouldn't have the same range," Strake said quickly. "The bounds of a room, no more. And you'd be able to go out of the palace. You'd not be able to see into the distance, though, and we'll have to keep renewing the thing, but – Soren –" He gripped her uninjured hand painfully.
"We will attempt a casting tomorrow morning," Aristide said, with an amused edge to his voice. "Until then, Champion. Majesty."
He went out. Soren wondered if he was smiling, and knew that she'd be glad to see again. She especially wanted to see the look in her Rathen's eyes, right this moment.
"This isn't your fault, Strake," she said softly.
"Does that make it any better?" He leaned over her, pressed his cheek against hers and inhaled as if he, too, couldn't quite believe the Moon hadn't taken her, and had to have some proof beyond – sight. "You screamed, Soren. I've never heard anything worse."
"Well it hurt." That seemed so obvious. "But I'd do it again."
"You should never have had to do it in the first place."
"Maybe not. Who can know what Darest would have been if Domina Rathen had never created the Rose? Perhaps the Kingdom would have died young, or would have been taken back by The Deeping these past couple of centuries. Or perhaps Aristide would be King, and doing very well indeed. I do know I couldn't go on as a puppet, and I'm so happy to have my mind my own I can barely stop myself screaming. And that there's one thing that hasn't changed, even without the Rose."
"What?"
"You're still my Rathen."
He was silent, and Soren found her inability to see his expression suddenly overwhelming. Could she somehow be wrong? Had they not come far enough?
Then a touch on her uninjured hand, and his fingers curled through hers.
"I'm Strake," he said, and that was all the reassurance she needed. Not her Rathen, but her friend. Without the shadow of the Rose, it was a way forward both of them could accept.
--ooOoo—
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"Champion of the Rose"
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Andrea K Höst
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