by Holly Lisle
Rone smiled. The boy was no doubt enjoying his first real festival at that very moment. First Festivals were wondrous things—a young man full of drives and hungers found spread before him an endless and eager banquet, and had no more responsibility for the whole of the week than to sate his appetite in a hundred different ways. Rone had actually helped his son design his first costume, and had brought in the finest tailor in the city to make sure it fit perfectly. Solander would be a Dragon— as the son of a Dragon and a young man on his way to the Academy, Solander could legally wear the mask, spined headdress, and winged cloak that set the Dragon costume apart from all others.
The women would be standing in line for his boy, Rone thought, and walked into Artis House whistling under his breath. Life gave of itself to those who deserved good things. It gave of itself to him.
Then he reached his workroom, and shoved all pleasant thoughts behind him. For the next hours—perhaps days—his focus had to be on the preservation of Oel Maritias, and beyond that, the energy needs of the Empire.
He set the temporary spell he’d created to link itself to the Department of Energy in the City Center building. He put a contingency in its basic run order. The instant he successfully summoned soul-energy in the Department of Energy, it would shut itself down. With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, he created travel copies of all the important documents he needed, put them inside a case that would turn itself and everything within it into dust if anyone but him attempted to open it, and left, making sure, as he always did, that the door closed completely and the locks reset as soon as it did. As an added precaution, he reset the spells—he had changed them just the day before, but considering what his workroom held right then, he thought extra caution only made sense.
Satisfied, he headed for the center of the city.
Jess didn’t bother to knock—she was sure Wraith’s room would be empty. So the presence and the panicked reactions of not just Wraith, but Solander and Velyn, too, as she burst through the door scared a shriek from her.
Velyn. She would be with Wraith, wouldn’t she?
Wraith’s festival costume hung untouched in his opened closet. He and Solander looked like they were working; further, from their harried expressions and the amount of paper scattered around the room, and from the sheets of paper pinned in rows on the wall, all of them covered with formulas, they’d been at work for quite some time. They acted for all the world like people who didn’t even know such a thing as a festival existed.
“Missing the festival?” Jess asked, her voice sharp and her eyes on Velyn.
Wraith said, “About time you got here,” as if she’d been summoned and expected.
And Solander flushed and said, “I tried to find you as soon as we realized we needed you, but you weren’t in your room and you weren’t at the … er … children’s festival.”
“No. I wasn’t,” she agreed. She didn’t elaborate. Better neither of them knew what a fool she’d made of herself. Their response soothed her, though. They’d wanted her. They’d been looking for her.
Solander’s expression of bone-weary dismay washed away, and he smiled at her as if she were the first light of morning, and he a man condemned to die unless he stayed awake to see it.
That smile always unnerved her. Solander liked her, and while she liked him well enough as a friend, she couldn’t imagine ever feeling about him the way she felt about Wraith.
But he was on his feet and coming toward her, saying, “You couldn’t have picked a better time to get here—we found out some things tonight that have just … have just …” and his face bleached out again, and he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close.
Wraith stood, too; he’d been crouched over a line of equations that Jess vaguely identified as defining a spell in spatial and differential magic. But he simply smiled weakly at her, stretched, and rubbed his thumbs over his eyes in tight, tired circles. “You and I are lucky to be out of the Warrens,” he said. “We never knew how lucky until tonight. But now that we do know …” He glanced at Solander and Velyn and said, “The three of us have been trying to figure out just how this spell works, so that maybe Solander can develop something to counter it. It’s the scariest thing any of us has ever seen.”
“Wait. Just wait. What are you talking about?”
Solander finally let go of Jess. “You’d better sit down,” he told her. When she took a good look at him, she could see the streaking of tears down his cheeks and how red and swollen his eyes were. She felt a chill working its way from her shoulders and back all the way down her arms and legs. She shivered in spite of herself and sat.
And between them, Wraith and Solander introduced her to a real and present hell.
When they finished, she stood up. Crossed her arms tightly over her chest—her heart felt like it was going to explode out of her body, it hammered so hard at her ribs. “Leave it alone,” she said.
Solander and Wraith stared at each other as if they couldn’t have heard her correctly.
“What?” Wraith said. “You can’t mean that. You have family there. So do I. Smoke is still in there—somewhere—”
“Smoke is dead.” She cut him off and glared at him. “Our families are dead. They were born dead, and if they stay dead, so what? You’re my family, Wraith. You. Solander. That’s it. And if the two of you get involved in this, something terrible will happen, and I’ll lose both of you. I can feel it. I just know it.”
“Smoke is in there,” Wraith repeated.
Tears welled up in Jess’s eyes. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t remember that he went back to Sleep so that you could be free? You can’t help him, Wraith. You can’t save him, you can’t set him free—so don’t waste the sacrifice he made for you. He died for you, Wraith—he died so that you could be free of that hell.” She balled her hands into fists and through clenched teeth said, “So live for him. Stay free of that place, and live, and make your life something wonderful. And never look back.”
The door chime rang, and all four of the room’s occupants turned toward it. Wraith and Solander quickly threw evidence of their foray into the magic workroom under the bed; Velyn sprawled on the floor in front of the bed with a viewsphere, and pretended that she was watching one of Wraith’s collection of ancient dance recreations.
And Jess, blinking away tears that she refused to let the other three see her shed, went to see who was at the door.
A short, dark-haired man in a Security uniform that fit so badly he seemed to have shrunk inside of it looked at her and said, “We have a missing girl from one of the children’s festivals. I need your name, miss—and …” He shook his head, looking at the other three. “It looks like your name will do.”
Jess flushed. “Jess Covitach-Artis,” she said.
He looked at the little board in his hand and said, “Not the one. Thank you.” And left.
Jess closed the door and turned back to her friends and Velyn.
“We’re going to have to find someplace safe to work on this,” Solander said to Wraith.
And Wraith nodded.
Neither of them had listened to a word she’d said.
Grath Faregan took back the Security uniform he’d borrowed from the Silent Inquest’s costume room and tucked it away in a bag. “Jess Covitach-Artis?”
“Yes, Master Faregan.”
“I see.”
“Shall I watch her? Or remove her?”
“No. I’ll find out about her. I’m in no hurry. She’s a lovely little thing, and she’ll still be a lovely little thing when I …” He looked at his servant, who knew the details of Faregan’s private hobby, and smiled.
The servant, who sometimes got to play with discards from Faregan’s collection when they broke—before Faregan disposed of them—returned the smile. “Of course, Master Faregan.”
By the time Wraith finally got everyone out of his room, the night was half over; Oel Maritias would be getting ready to light the sunlights soo
n. He fell into bed, so tired the mattress seemed to roll and slide beneath him—and someone knocked on his door.
“You cannot mean to bother me at this hour,” he muttered, but he rose and made his way through the dark room without doing too much damage to his shins, and opened it to find Velyn there again.
Wraith leaned against the door and managed a weak smile. “Forgot something?”
“Yes,” she said, and brushed past him, pulled the door closed, and took his face in her hands. She kissed him—kissed him with such passion and such hunger that his knees turned liquid and his spine tingled and every part of his body woke up. “You were supposed to go to the festival today. This was to be your initiation into adulthood, and I was going to make sure that I met you there, so that I could be the one who … initiated you. And then”—her thumb started moving in circles on his chest, each circle a little lower than the one before—“you didn’t go to the festival, and when I checked for your bracelet, I found that you hadn’t even put it on yet. It was still in your room. So I came here to find you”—the hand had moved much lower, and Wraith discovered that he was having a hard time following what she was saying—“and you were here, but so was Solander, and then along came Jess. And I couldn’t very well interrupt this work to … well. But this is the festival. And if you can’t go—and I understand why you can’t—at least the two of us can celebrate here.”
To Wraith’s amazement, his sleep pants slipped free of his waist and slithered down his legs to pile around his ankles as if they had a life of their own.
“I’ve waited, Wraith,” Velyn was saying, as she undid the laces of his sleep shirt. “I’ve waited for you for a very long time, when I didn’t want to wait a day, because I knew you were special, and because this needed to be … right. You had to be a man, not a child. And now you’re a man, and so help me, I don’t want to wait another instant.”
Wraith found himself standing naked in his room, with Velyn running her hands all over him, and the lump in his throat almost kept him from breathing, much less from speaking. “Ah,” he said. That didn’t seem like the right thing to say, but he couldn’t think of anything better.
Velyn decided that sufficed, though, because she started kissing him again, and taking off her clothes at the same time.
He reached for her arms, slid his hands to her wrists, and stopped her from removing anything else. Finally, finally, he found coherent words.
“Let me,” he said, and led her over to his bed.
He moved the blind over his window into the side wall so that he and Velyn could see the glorious festival lights. The lights served a second purpose, too—they illuminated the soft curves and long, smooth lines of Velyn’s body, one bit at a time, as he undressed her.
“Beautiful,” he whispered.
She shivered at his touch and said, “You, too.”
And when they were both undressed, she said, “I wanted this to happen a long time ago. But now … now … now I don’t have any reason why I shouldn’t be here, and I want you. I love you. I’ve wanted to touch you, to feel you and taste you and hold you, for the longest time.”
Her hands never stopped moving, and Wraith lay back on his bed and watched as she moved above him, outlined now in silhouette. She touched his face, his shoulders, and then put her hands to either side of him and shifted until she held her body along his length but just above him, so that he could feel the heat of her skin but no touch except for the points of her breasts brushing against his chest.
“I …” he started, then stopped. He tried again—and tried not to get so lost in the sensation of that twin-pointed touch that he forgot what he wanted to say. “I fell in love with you the first time I saw you—when you came into Solander’s room that first day. But you never gave any sign that you … that you considered me anything special.”
“I did. I always have—but women who take advantage of boys don’t fare well in Oel Artis. Same goes for men who set their sights on girls. Instead, we have the festival—and anyone old enough to go to the festival is old enough to be acceptable, and anyone younger than that will get the adult sent to the mines for a few years. I had no wish to be a miner, Wraith. I had to wait. For you, for me—for any chance of a future for the two of us, if even you wanted one, I had to wait.”
Wraith wrapped his arms and legs around her and pulled her tight against him. “You don’t have to wait anymore,” he said.
“No. I don’t.” She moved just a bit, and without warning he was inside of her—and equally without warning, he lost control, and everything exploded in a thundering rush in his ears and a warmth that rushed from his loins outward and left him limp and panting and sweating beneath her.
“Oh, god,” he whispered. “It wasn’t supposed to go like that, was it? I’m … I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said, and nipped lightly along his neck. “We’re just getting started.”
The second time went better. The third time went better still—and by the time they got to the fifth time, after some hours, one shower, and having to have food brought to the room once, Wraith no longer felt embarrassed about that first time.
“We should probably sleep,” Velyn said at last.
“We should. But Solander and Jess will no doubt be showing up at the door soon. Far too soon.”
“We could pack a bag and go to my suite for a few hours—and just sleep, I promise. No one will look for you there, and I have a feeling that one of your friends won’t be too happy to find me here with you.”
Wraith frowned at her. “Who wouldn’t want me to be happy?”
“I think Solander and Jess both want you to be happy. I just suspect that Jess would rather you weren’t happy with me.” When he gave her a puzzled look, she said, “I think she would take my place here with you if you asked her.”
Wraith sighed. “Jess is … Jess. She’ll get over it when she grows up and finds the right man. I’ve known her since the moment she first woke up. She and I have always been good friends; when she sees how right you and I are for each other, she won’t resent my happiness.” But as the words were coming out of his mouth, he really thought about them. Thought about Jess watching him out of the corner of her eye, of the way she would bring things to him that she thought he would like, of the special smile that she reserved for just him. In fact, Jess probably would resent Velyn.
Well, she would just have to, then—because Wraith had decided that if Velyn was willing to be seen with him, he would not hide his feelings for her, nor would he hide the relationship they shared. He wanted everyone to know that he was in love with her, and that she was his.
Velyn. Beautiful, mysterious Velyn.
He desperately needed to get some sleep before he got back to work on trying to understand the soul-fuel equations and how they might be countered. He wanted to be with Velyn, too—to go to sleep with her at his side, and to wake with her in his arms. Solander and Jess would be able to work for a few hours without any help from him. He decided going with Velyn to her suite would be his best course of action.
“We’d best hurry, then,” she said. “You won’t need much—just a change of clothes for when we wake up—maybe two, just in case—and your personal kit. I probably have everything else, and if I don’t, we’ll just send one of the servants to get it for us.”
Wraith kissed her, and ran the palm of his hand down the long curve of her spine. “We ought to get dressed.” But he knew what he was doing wouldn’t lead to getting dressed.
She stood up and turned around and said, “We will get dressed. You haven’t seen my bed yet, and you should.”
She started pulling on clothes.
Intrigued, he followed her.
Rone had spent the whole of the night and most of the morning prepping the spells that would bring the new soul-energy on-line. He’d developed a massive buffering system that split the rewhah into two streams—one that poured back into the Oel Maritias Warrens, and one that drained s
traight into the sea. He was a bit concerned about the effect that the rewhah would have on undersea life—the ecology of the shelf was delicate, and he and other Dragons had spent a great deal of time making sure that the presence of the city of Oel Maritias wouldn’t disrupt it. But if he had to choose between fish with two heads and wings or the implosion of the city, he wouldn’t have to think twice.
But the spell wasn’t ready yet. The little setup he’d linked from his workroom kept a thin but steady trickle of the new energy pouring into the city’s magic grid, but that trickle only buffered the little bit of energy that had been short over the past months. It helped, but it didn’t cover new expenditures—and someone had badly misfigured the energy consumption of the festival. He could see the power usage patterns on the flowsheet that shimmered in the air in front of him—and Polyphony Center had dipped out of clear, reassuring purple and started fading toward white.
Too many people in there, too much magic being used—and he had no doubt figuring what some of that magic was, either. Trivia. Gods’-damned trivia. Sex spells, seduction spells, compulsion spells, perverse glamours—all utterly unnecessary in the grand scheme, but within the tiny lives of the fools casting them, essential. Add to that the planned magic—the vision centers with their spells that would put a couple or a group into the heart of a shared and jointly concocted illusion, and the multiple float bases for dance floors and beds, and the magic necessary to sustain the bracelets and the privacy spells and the contact tracing, and beyond that, the lights, the water, the air purification, the pressure control—and it wouldn’t be long until the whole Center dropped straight through the white zone and into the red.
