“So, you change the spells however you like?”
Yes. “No. That’s incredibly dangerous.” She remembered the spell that Doctor Warpoole had cast as they fled the Scholars’ Tower; that one hadn’t been derived from one of the thirteen Gifts. Wizard. Doctor Warpoole had not gone hollow, but where had she learned that spell? How many more wizard’s spells were out there in the world? Cazia would never know. “Making a spell any way you please is a sign of madness. At least, that’s what I was taught.”
“You are holding something back,” Kinz said.
“It’s hard to talk about this,” Cazia answered. “I’ve been trained to keep secrets and tell lies.”
“And when you told me so many days ago,” Kinz said, “that I would need the special ‘knack’ to learn magical spells, was that the lie as well?”
Yes. “Yes.”
Kinz’s eyes narrowed. “That is what I expected. I thought you might be different from the others of your people, but no. You lie and you take and care only for yourself.”
“What? Have you forgotten the king’s ransom in raw iron I’ve already given you?”
“That was scavenge from this camp! By right of discovery, it belonged to all of us and was not yours to give!”
Cazia could have pointed out she had relinquished her share for Kinz’s sake, but her anger was rising and she wasn’t about to start quibbling. She’d lived her whole life as a hostage in the king’s court in Peradain; she knew better than to mince words when someone wanted to be her Enemy. “You have the gall to call me a liar!” Her voice echoed off the stone walls. Arguing with Kinz was awful, but letting her voice grow to a shout felt like righteousness. “You lied to me and to Ivy right from the first moment we met, so you and your brother could spy on us!”
“But you knew we were making to deceive you,” Kinz countered, “because of your translation stone! So, you were just as dishonest with us from the first!”
“And here we see it!” Cazia said scornfully. “The so-called logic and reason of the herding people! Do they teach you to think at all, or is everything you do completely justified because you’re such a victim?”
“YES!” Kinz screamed at her. “We are victims! Your people rob and murder us, and I will never apologize for anything I do to the Peradaini.”
“I”M NOT PERADAINI!” Cazia shouted. Kinz rolled her eyes. “My father is Surgish! Fire and Fury, Peradain is an empire! My people were farmers and woodcutters four generations ago when the Italgas conquered them. The empire is full of all different kinds of people! Do you know why I lived my whole life in the Palace?” Hadn’t Cazia said this already? Why did she have to keep saying it? “Because my father rebelled against the Italga family. That’s why King Ellifer kept me and my brother as hostages.”
For the first time, a hint of self-doubt appeared in Kinz’s expression. To Cazia, it looked like first blood, so she bulled forward. “And you know what? All those different kinds of people are dying right now, and we ought to help them. Fire and Fury, I’m sorry if that’s just too complicated for you, but that’s the way the world is, and if you think everything you do to me is completely justified...”
Whatever Cazia planned to say next vanished from her thoughts before the words could come together. She was done. There was nothing more to say.
“If you were the hostage,” Kinz said without a note of apology, “why were you trained to be the scholar? Why would they teach magic to the enemy?”
So I could be close to the prince and loyal to his family. So I would go hollow and be executed, creating trouble for the tyr my father. “Yep,” Cazia said, squelching through the mud as she marched toward the low corridor. Great Way, but she wanted to be as far from Kinz as possible. “Yep, yep, yep. Too complicated for you. Sorry to hear you don’t understand anything at all.” Without turning around, she dropped low and crawled through the low corridor into the second tower.
Fire take her, why had she said those things? At the far end of the corridor, she crouched in the darkness and peered at the older girl.
Kinz did not seem troubled by their confrontation at all. She stood with her back to Cazia, arms folded, and watched another fish leap through the arch into the mud.
Cazia’s own hands were trembling. Why had she tried so hard to win Kinz over? Why had she spoken that way about her Fire-taken father?
Song knew, she had never heard anything good about her father her whole life, and King Ellifer, Queen Amlian, and Lar himself had always been incredibly kind to her. Yes, the palace had been filled with people who hated her because of the rebellion, the death of Ellifer’s first wife among so many others, but the royal family themselves had looked out for her, and Lar was her friend. Her best friend after Pagesh Simblin, another traitor’s daughter.
And yet, she had just talked about his family as though she approved of her father’s rebellion. She’d never even met her father that she could remember. To talk about him as if he was a hero felt like a betrayal of her entire life. Still, in that moment, it had been the clever argument to make, and even worse, there was a tiny part of her that believed it.
The Italgas were dead. Lar himself had been bitten by a grunt; unless someone out there in the real world had devised a cure for him—which was extremely unlikely—he was either dead or a monster, which was practically the same thing.
However, her father was probably still alive in his tiny holdfast on the western frontier. It didn’t seem possible that the grunts could have gotten that far already.
She felt an inexplicable pang of regret that she hadn’t immediately set out to the west to join him. Maybe--probably--he would have thrown her in a dungeon or had her tortured for information, or... Or something. Something awful like in all the stories she’d grown up with.
But maybe he would have welcomed her. Maybe she would have been safe among people who didn’t treat her like an enemy of everything decent and honorable in the world. Maybe she wouldn’t have ended up here.
There was no hiding the fact that this daydreaming was a betrayal. Lar, his parents, and Doctor Twofin as well had been kind to her, and she had just denounced them to win a stupid argument with a girl from a herding clan. I’m not Peradaini? Did she really believe that?
It suddenly occurred to her that Ivy was nowhere in sight and hadn’t been for a while. She had walked off with Cazia’s jacket and that butchered fish before the big argument and...
And she hadn’t come running toward them when the shouting had started. How could she not have heard them, unless she had left the tower?
Cazia raced up the stairs through the broad, open room full of beds, then through the other corridor into the stinking first tower. The sun wheel lay on the ground floor by the exit, but Ivy was not inside the buildings. Cazia crouched by the open tower door and peered out at the beach. The princess was nowhere to be seen, but there was a crude trail in the stones leading from the hill where they had first come in sight of the ocean to the tower. Someone else, maybe Kinz, would have been able to read the trail to know if there were three sets of footprints or if a fourth showed Ivy heading back out, but Cazia couldn’t do it.
Of course, Kinz was behind her, at the far end of the buildings, and she had their only weapon, that pointed stick. Was Cazia going to run all the way back there to ask her help in searching the beach for the princess?
She certainly was not. Cazia picked up a hefty sharp-edged stone and stepped out onto the exposed beach. She remembered all too well the sight of those servants, so long ago, dragged screaming out to sea. Of course, she and Kinz would have heard Ivy if that had happened to her, wouldn’t they? They would have heard over the sound of their stupid argument, right?
Every moment that passed convinced her even more that the girl had been killed and Cazia had let it happen. More, that venturing out in search of her was its own death sentence. She did it anyway, taking step after step away from the entrance.
First, she hurried to the left, checking behind the to
wers. Ivy wasn’t there, and she wasn’t on the oceanfront side, either. Cazia stalked up the beach, inwardly cringing at every crunch her footsteps made on the stony beach.
Before she was halfway up the hill, Ivy appeared over the crest. She was hunched over and walking backward as if dragging a body. “Ivy!” Cazia clamped her hand over her mouth and sprinted up the hill. The sun was low over the mountains in the west. Night would fall soon.
The little princess turned and waved briefly, then went back to what she was doing. As she came close, Cazia saw that she was trailing a tree branch behind her, obscuring her tracks. “Ivy,” she said, when she was close enough to be heard at a hiss. “What are you doing out here alone?”
“I thought we could throw the Tilkilit off our tracks,” she answered simply. “So I rubbed fish blood all over your jacket and left it near the lake shore. With luck--”
From the sea came the sound of a monstrous roar.
Chapter 7
Ivy dropped the branch and sprinted to the tower beside Cazia.
The bellowing had come from somewhere out beyond the waves, beyond the great black stones standing in the water. Cazia peered at the ocean as she ran, barely looking at where they were going. Somewhere out there was a creature that could make a sound like the end of the world, and if it was going to drag her beneath the waves and devour her, she wanted to see it first.
They reached the relative safety of the black stone tower before the thing appeared above the water. Ivy, being faster, bolted through the doorway first, nearly slipping on the stones inside. Cazia followed her up the tunnel stairs. They met Kinz at the top, and the terrified look on her face must have mirrored their own.
“This way,” Cazia said, even though she had no idea what to do. They ran together out of the stinking room, through the low tunnel, to the room with the flat beds. There, they crouched beside one of the windows and peered at the waves.
There was nothing to see. A second bellow came, then a third. As near as Cazia could tell, it was beyond the ridge of black stone that ran into the sea. Water suddenly splashed high into the air, glittering in the rays of the setting sun behind them. Churning white wakes washed into view, but the creature or creatures that caused them stayed out of sight.
Chills ran down Cazia’s back. Kinz and Ivy had both begun to sweat in the chilly sea air, and Cazia wiped beads from her own forehead. As terrified as she was that some great monster would come out of the sea, now that she could hear it, she wanted to see it, too. She was desperate to see it. That sound, that bellowing, made her imagination run wild.
On impulse, she grasped the blue jewel in her pocket. She herself had cast the translation spell on it, and not only had it made the Tilkilit’s odor-speech intelligible, it had translated the screaming of the giant eagles and the roaring of the grunts. The only thing grunts said was some form of the word “Blessing” over and over, but it was speech. She squeezed the little jewel in her fist while the beasts outside bellowed and roared.
There were no words, just animal noises.
The sun set over the mountain range and the shadow of falling night swept quickly across the tower and the ocean. Things seemed to settle down at sea, just a bit, while the darkness deepened.
Then they heard the noise of churning water, and it grew louder with each moment.
“It is coming,” Kinz said, her voice tight.
“What do we do?” Ivy squeaked. “What can we do?”
Cazia’s people came from the westernmost part of the empire, and although she had never been there herself, she had listened carefully when storytellers and singers told tales of sea giants.
“We hide. Sea giants only come out after the sun has set, because their eyes are sensitive to light. They’ll be able to see us if we stand at the windows.”
“Are you sure this is a sea giant?” Ivy asked.
“No. I’ve never seen one, but this matches the stories. I thought they were only in the west, but--” Another bellow echoed across the beach and through the tower. Cazia tried to make her voice calm, hoping the princess would be reassured. “This tower has stood here for a long time. Either they’ll leave it alone or they won’t be able to damage it.”
It turned out to be the latter. None of the girls raised their heads to look through the window, but throughout the night, they heard gigantic forms splashing through the shallows and stomping on the beach. The bellowing was painful to hear, and the thunderous blows to the side of the tower were even louder. Cazia wasn’t sure if they were punches or kicks, but the wet slaps against the black stone made the whole structure tremble.
For half the night, it continued. The bellowing, the keening, the massive impacts against the side of the tower raged on and on. Cazia began to have flashes of the grunt she’d killed at Fort Samsit. There was no reason for that particular memory to come back, but there it was, large in her mind. In her mind’s eye, she saw the beast leap onto the prince--the king, Lar was king then--and bite him. She had used the Tenth Gift to strike it down. The moment was right there, vivid in her thoughts. It was only later that she’d realized the grunt had been her own brother, transformed.
As far as she could remember, the grunt had died without a sound, but with every boom came the image of the iron tip of her dart sliding between her brother’s ribs, piercing his heart. The flinches. That’s what Old Stoneface Treygar had called it.
Despite everything she had been taught, she withdrew from the others and allowed herself to weep in the darkness. She allowed tears to touch her cheeks.
Eventually, her fear began to ebb and the whole thing became annoying. The tower was going to hold, it seemed. The beasts outside--whether they were sea giants or not—seemed less like deadly monsters and more like the worst neighbors in the world.
Somewhere near midnight, the moon rose and the noise began to recede. If Cazia was ever going to see the creatures, it would have to be right this moment. She rolled to her knees and peered through the nearest window. Kinz hissed at her in disapproval, but Ivy joined her.
She saw it, but not well. The silver moonlight shone on the thing’s back as it moved into deeper waters. It looked like a silvery mound or a glacier. It was rounded, and where it might have had shoulders, there was no head. It was like watching a mountain of dirty ice glide into deep water.
The girls immediately fell into a deep sleep right there on the stone floor, and when they woke late the next morning, they began a long debate over what they should do next.
Ivy wanted to leave immediately. She abjectly apologized for bringing Cazia and Kinz to the water for her pilgrimage and considered it complete. She also thought they still had a hope of reaching the Northern Barrier before the Tilkilit. Cazia bit back a few sharp remarks about the religious significance of their night of terror; the princess had an exhausted, hunted look, and Cazia thought she might have caught a bit of the flinches herself.
Kinz wanted to stay there for a long while. At least a full month, possibly longer, if they could manage it. They had found a safe place, one that no one knew about, and a source of food. They needed to rest here before they moved on.
“What about the Tilkilit?” Cazia asked. The grunts were her main concern, but it wasn’t Kinz’s.
“They think we drowned, yes?” Kinz looked from Ivy to Cazia, checking their expressions. “They were still able to make read of our minds, and I kept thinking about how I had fallen in and was drowning.”
“Yes,” Ivy said. “So did I. Is that not what--Oh, Cazia.”
Her expression must have given her away. “I thought a message to the queen asking to be rescued from the riverbank on the north side because I thought we were swimming to the southern bank.”
Kinz exhaled loudly. “Inzu’s breath, if you had thought about dying in the water, they would not be searching for us at all.”
“I don’t believe that,” Cazia countered, but she did believe that their idea had been better than hers. She folded her arms so she wouldn’t be temp
ted to sulk.
“They would have searched for us,” Ivy said. “The queen would have insisted. That is why I laid out Cazia’s jacket on the lakeshore where they can not miss it. They will find it before they find this place, and since Cazia’s the only one they really want, I think they will give up.”
“Even so,” Kinz said, “we can stay here the while to make provisions. All I need is wood for the drying rack and the fire. If we can collect that early in the day, we might have it smoked before tomorrow morning.”
Of course, they did not rush out to gather it right away. They slunk into the first tower and peered carefully through the windows. Luckily, for once, there was little fog. The beach showed no evidence of any activity of the night before, not even footprints. The stony beach looked much the same as it had the previous day, except there were more clumps of tangled gray seaweed. Whatever had come out of the water had left little evidence of the incredible commotion it had created. More importantly, it was not in sight now.
All three girls left the tower together, hiking over the steepest part of the hill to the land beyond. What they found surprised them: whatever had come out of the sea had ventured farther inland than they thought. Three trees had been crushed beneath a terrible weight, and the girls eagerly rushed forward to collect the splintered wood.
It stank faintly of sour salt water and rotten fish, and some pieces had a nasty reddish jelly on it. Blood? None of them were quite sure, so they didn’t touch those. Cazia and Kinz loaded their arms with so much wood, their shoulders ached, while Ivy swept a leafy branch over their footprints to obscure them.
It was a little after mid day, and everything was still except the endlessly rolling waves. Cazia had to admit that while she still hated and feared the ocean, after a full day living beside it, she’d learned it was alluring, too.
The Way Into Magic: Book Two of The Great Way Page 8
