Reader and Raelynx (Twelve Houses)

by Sharon Shinn

  Overhead, simultaneously visible in the sky, the sun dropped and the moon climbed.

  For a moment—a few seconds only—Cammon’s vision blurred. It was as if, instead of Senneth and Coralinda, he saw two goddesses battling, women taller than the Lireth Mountains. One was dressed in moonlight, silver and creamy; the other wore sunlight, yellow and ragged. Their faces were set, their movements stately, but they flung bolts of power at each other like stones, like arrows. And every missile hit its mark, and each goddess cringed and staggered every time she was struck.

  Even as he stared, openmouthed, the image faded. He was again in the middle of a newly green field, surrounded by silent onlookers, watching as Coralinda’s black magic sliced its deadly way through Senneth’s pure band of energy—past the three-quarter mark—half the distance remaining—closer—closer—almost at her heart—

  With a cry, Amalie pitched herself past Cammon and knocked Senneth to the ground. The place where Senneth had been standing erupted into muddy red flame and oily black smoke. The air was suddenly heavy with a bitter odor.

  The rest of them rushed over to crowd around Senneth and Amalie. Senneth was trembling; her gray eyes were wide and pale. Amalie was bending over, both her hands on Senneth’s left arm, and was shaking her with impatience.

  “Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” Amalie cried. “It’s a trick! She’s using your magic against you!”

  Senneth looked dazed and unsteady as she climbed to her feet, but she was trying hard to focus. “No—I don’t understand. I can’t believe how much power she has. I don’t know—I’m not sure—it might be more than mine.”

  Amalie shook her arm again. “No—it is yours. She’s stealing yours and turning it against you! She doesn’t have any power of her own at all.”

  They all fell silent and gaped at her, but Cammon understood it first. “Thief magic,” he said in disgust. “She invites you to a duel, then she takes your magic and turns it back on you. The more you give her, the more she has.”

  Senneth took a long, shuddering breath. “Then I—how can I defeat her?”

  “You can’t,” Tayse said. “You are her weapon. You have to lay down your arms to render her powerless.”

  Senneth pressed a hand to her eyes. Her fingers were shaking. “I want so much to strike her down.”

  “You can’t do it,” Tayse said.

  “But I can.”

  It was Amalie’s voice. All of them turned to stare at her in astonishment—except Valri, who wore a look of horror. “No. Majesty, no,” the queen said in an urgent voice. “If she can steal Senneth’s magic, she can certainly steal any small power you might have to offer.”

  But Amalie, as always, looked serene and confident—aware of dangers but not particularly afraid of them. “I would not send my own power against her,” she said in her quiet voice. “I would take Senneth’s—and Cammon’s—and Kirra’s. Anything they were willing to give me. And their reflected light is what I would use to battle Coralinda’s darkness.”

  “But—Majesty—how can you do such a thing?” Kirra asked in a puzzled voice. “I would gladly give you any power I have, but—” She shrugged.

  Amalie held her hand out to Tayse. “Give me Senneth’s bracelet.”

  Mystified as the rest of them, Tayse dug it out of his pocket and laid it in Amalie’s palm. Instantly, Cammon felt that primitive spurt of dread as some of his energy was siphoned away. Kirra actually gasped, and Senneth’s eyes widened as if someone had just pinched her hard.

  “Oh,” said Kirra.

  “I can feel it, too,” Ellynor said. “But will it be enough? Or will she turn all of our combined power back on Amalie? For that would be unacceptable.”

  “She will not be able to steal it from me because it is not actually mine,” Amalie explained patiently. “It has already been borrowed.”

  “It doesn’t matter! The cost is too great!” Valri cried. “Amalie, you are the one we are all battling for! If you are lost to some—some—trick of magic, the whole fight is in vain! You are the one who must be saved, not the one who should be risked!”

  “But I am the only one who can take the risk,” Amalie said. “And it is my fight. And I am glad to make it instead of asking others to lay their lives down for mine.”

  A hawk circled above them and made a smooth landing, transforming itself into Donnal. “Riders are on the way,” he said briefly. “What’s wrong here?”

  Kirra instantly poured the story into his ears, while Valri continued arguing with Amalie. Tayse had put his arms around Senneth from behind and she leaned against him, literally seeming to draw strength from his body. She put one hand up to the gold charm she wore at her neck, the pendant he had given her upon their marriage. She closed her eyes, but some of the color began to return to her face.

  Cammon felt as if he had been slapped by certain knowledge. “Senneth!” he exclaimed. “Give it to me!”

  Senneth opened her eyes and stared at him. “What?”

  He had his hand out to her but he was looking around at the others. “And Kirra—give me your lioness charm. Ellynor, what do you have? One of those black opals you Lirren girls wear? Let me have it. Donnal, do you carry anything you can give me?”

  Kirra understood first. “Oh, this is like the time you helped me change Justin!” she exclaimed, rooting through her pockets for the small stone lioness she always carried. “You’re going to feed our power to Amalie.”

  “I’m going to try,” he said.

  Senneth had already stripped off her wedding gift. She lifted it to her lips, gave Tayse a smile from over her shoulder, and passed it over. “If it melts in your hands, I swear I’ll never forgive you,” she said.

  Ellynor offered him a gold bracelet set with black opals, but Donnal shook his head, smiling. “I don’t carry anything like that,” he said.

  Kirra took his hand. “I’ll be his charm,” she said. “You can pull his magic through me.”

  “I don’t understand,” Valri said.

  “Cammon is an amplifier,” Senneth said. “He can take someone else’s magic and boost it with his own.” She shook her head. “Impossible to explain. Impossible to understand. But he seems to think he can feed all of our power through his own, and give it to Amalie, and make her even stronger.”

  Cammon slipped Senneth’s pendant over his neck, fastened Ellynor’s bracelet around his wrist, and cupped Kirra’s lioness in his hand. He felt prickles of magic dance along his skin; his blood was bubbling in his veins. It was hard to stand still. “I think I can,” he said.

  “Please don’t,” Valri whispered. “Amalie, please don’t do this.”

  Amalie kissed her stepmother on the forehead. “Valri, I must.”

  From across the field came Coralinda’s voice, raised in mockery. “Senneth! Have you failed so quickly? Have you spent all your power on one attempt to destroy me? Or do you finally see how my goddess protects me from all such abominations as your magic?”

  Without another look at Valri, at any of them, Amalie turned to face the Lestra and took a few steps deeper into the valley. “I will duel with you on Senneth’s behalf,” she called, and quiet though her voice was, it carried across the field that separated them. “Coralinda Gisseltess, I will strike you down.”

  Amalie did not throw her hands in the air or take a melodramatic pose. She merely folded her fingers before her, and bowed her head, and thought about Coralinda Gisseltess. Cammon could almost see her mind building a bridge across the valley, a tumbling, haphazard structure that nonetheless raced across the grass and flowers with an implacable speed. And across this insubstantial structure her curious soul went questing, and crowding behind her came the blinding energy of a half dozen mystics.

  It was as if she had opened a tunnel for an invading army, and Cammon felt himself standing on the threshold of the tunnel door. They stampeded across him—Senneth blazing in the lead, Kirra and Donnal bounding after her, Ellynor and even Valri stealing behind the others,
armed with dark and mysterious weapons. They were across the pathway—they were descending upon Coralinda—they were laying about them with blade and claw and sorcery.

  A shriek of pure rage went up from across the valley, and it was so forceful it seemed to rock them all backward. Amalie stumbled, and Cammon briefly lost his footing. A silver onslaught had set all their own soldiers in retreat—Coralinda’s mirror magic turning their own weapons on them, forcing their armies back across the bridge.

  But only briefly. Cammon felt Senneth’s surge of renewed determination, racing through him with an actual heat, pouring into Amalie and back across that bridge. The others, too, pressed closer, offered him more, filled him with wild and kaleidoscopic impressions. Senneth raged in orange and gold; Ellynor and Valri brooded in saturated blue. Kirra and Donnal danced between them, shifting and uncontainable. Cammon had the strangest thought that he was a prism in reverse, collecting the whole spectrum of color, feeding it into an indescribably delicate piece of crystal, and compressing it into a single beam of pure unadulterated light.

  That light broke against the blackness that was Coralinda Gisseltess, and was absorbed, and reformed into something still and dark and insatiable. She ate their light, she negated their color; they drove themselves against her, and she did not waver at all.

  He felt Senneth’s body burn higher; he was flushed with fever. Hotter. Impossible that anyone could sustain such a temperature. Hotter. She staggered a few steps toward him, cried out in a hoarse voice, and fell to the ground.

  Instantly, there was chaos. Amalie faltered; Kirra dropped to her knees beside Senneth. Coralinda’s black-and-silver counterassault came charging across the bridge, straight for the princess.

  “Kirra!” Cammon shrieked, frantically summoning some of his own buried power, feeding to Amalie any of the fuel left in his own magic. Coralinda’s dark force was halted at about the three-quarter mark. “Leave her! I need you!”

  Tayse was on the ground beside Senneth, and Kirra leapt to her feet again, pouring a furious stream of energy directly into Cammon’s head. It wasn’t enough. Coralinda was regrouping. In seconds, she would begin battering against their greatly weakened defenses.

  Cammon sent an impassioned plea a mile away, across the battlefield. Jerril! Areel! Help me! he cried. He felt Jerril’s attention jerk his way, felt Jerril’s power immediately and completely accessible to him. More slowly, he sensed Areel scan the battlefield, comprehend the plea, and unlock the closed treasure chest of his mind.

  Power poured through him like rainwater through a parched riverbed.

  But there were other mystics on the battlefield this day.

  He sent his mind skipping across the royal camp, seeking out those Carrebos recruits, begging for assistance. One by one, startled or frightened or pleased or confused, they responded to him, turning from their ordinary tasks to wage an extraordinary war against a common enemy. Their power rolled to him in a bewildering array of strengths and colors, but he bundled it all up, coiled it into a weapon, and thrust that weapon into Amalie’s hand.

  Coralinda’s army was halted, but he was not sure it could be defeated. For a long moment they all stood frozen, tense, suffused with magic, perfectly balanced and perfectly opposed forces that could move neither forward nor back.

  A single plaintive yowl split the silence. Cammon was startled to feel a warm weight suddenly push against his thigh, and he stared down into the savage face of the raelynx. It made that piteous noise again, and again batted its paw against his leg.

  Sweet gods. This lawless creature was offering him its own wild power.

  Cautiously, Cammon opened his mind to the raelynx, but even so he was not prepared for what boiled into his body. A rush of violent red, a fever-bright fury, a thoughtless and primitive instinct for carnage. He took the raelynx’s rage and magnified it and fed it straight into Amalie’s veins.

  From across the valley, Coralinda choked and stumbled, and Amalie’s forces pushed her back to the halfway point of the bridge.

  But only halfway. They were locked again in symmetrical combat—too strong to yield to the Lestra, too weak to destroy her. All the mystics in all of Gillengaria could not defeat Coralinda Gisseltess.

  Behind him, small noises—a whispered word, the rustle of clothing. Help me stand, said a voice, very faint. There was the sound of a boot striking a rock.

  Senneth was on her feet.

  He felt her presence in his mind first as a gentle glow, the faint gleam of candlelight in a room at dusk. But quickly the fire gained strength, gained brightness, began to consume everything in its vicinity. Soon it was a blaze, then a bonfire, then a roaring inferno of uncontainable rage. From ten feet away, Cammon felt the heat radiating off her body, intense enough to make him perspire. He turned his head just enough to glimpse her from the corner of his eye. Her eyes were closed, her arms were raised above her head. As he watched, her whole figure erupted into fire.

  As if he were connected to her by a powdered fuse, Cammon saw a spark race toward him across the grass, and he was enveloped in flame. He was a coruscating wick, a walking conflagration. He cried out, more in wonder than in pain, and lifted his hands to watch himself gesture with fire. His breath rasped in and out of his seared lungs; his skin burned like kindling. Cinders stung his eyes and skittered across his skin. He thrust his hand through the air and sent the blaze straight for Amalie.

  She did not burst into fire but she seemed to bloom with light. She was suddenly wrapped in so much radiance that she appeared to be twice her size, and she was too bright to look at. Within that fierce halo, he saw her arms move—he almost thought he heard her speak. She pointed her right hand toward Coralinda Gisseltess, and a white fireball exploded across the valley and incinerated the Lestra where she stood.

  Cammon was deafened by the noises that followed.

  Surely everyone heard that cannonball crack of thunder. Surely the others should have been knocked off their feet by those percussive repeating booms. Cammon covered his ears and went rolling to the ground, trying to drown out the elemental cacophony of a deity falling to her knees, but no one else seemed to hear a thing. Amalie was beside him, her face worried, her lips moving, but it was as if she whispered, as if she made no noise at all. Ellynor had knelt beside Amalie, and her cool hands tugged at his hot ones, pulling them away from his ears. She said something to Amalie, but he had no idea what. The world was empty, erased of all sound.

  Something jerked Amalie’s head around, and he saw her staring out at the field, with her hand pressed against her mouth. He struggled to sit up, for if he could not hear, he could still see. He experienced a moment’s horror at the sight of Coralinda’s black-and-silver soldiers tearing across the valley straight for their small party. But then he became aware of a contingent of their own soldiers sweeping out to meet the enemy, and he realized that reinforcements had arrived while the mystics were battling. There—that was Wen, that was Coeval. A dozen other Riders raced out shoulder to shoulder with Justin to meet the Lumanen soldiers in the middle of the field and plunge into furious combat.

  Tayse was not among them.

  Scrabbling on his hands and knees, Cammon swung around to locate the other Rider. Tayse was sitting in the grass, Senneth across his lap, rocking her gently against his chest. Cammon felt a spasm of fear so intense he might almost have been facing the Lestra again. He had been burned so clean by magic that he could not even tell if his own talents were still intact. He could not, at this moment, sense Senneth—sense Amalie—sense any of them at all.

  It was not possible that Senneth could be dead.

  Kirra was on her knees beside Tayse, and she had wrapped both of her hands around one of Senneth’s. Kirra’s face was white and exhausted; her lips moved as if she was praying. Tayse didn’t even look at her. He didn’t glance at the battlefield. All his attention was on the woman in his arms.

  Terrified, Cammon grabbed Amalie’s hand. He couldn’t speak; he couldn’t hear her
if she answered. Is she alive? Is Senneth alive? he demanded silently.

  Amalie put her hand to his cheek and brought all his attention back to her. Her pale skin was flushed; her dark eyes seemed, in a day, to have acquired some impossibly ancient knowledge. She looked unutterably weary, as if she had not slept for days, and peaceful, as if that didn’t matter.

  Senneth is unconscious, but alive, she replied, and her voice reached him as clearly as if she had spoken and he could hear. And Coralinda Gisseltess is dead.

  He stared up at her, consumed by too many emotions to sort them out—relief, hope, wonder, exhaustion, and bewilderment. I saw them, Amalie—I saw the goddesses sparring, he told her. The Bright Mother and the Pale Mother, using our power to battle each other. But if—but if—if the Lestra fell, is the Pale Mother gone, too? Destroyed on this field before our eyes?

  Amalie took his hand and spread it against her heart. Her smile was utterly tranquil. The world changes and the world stays the same, she told him, still in those utterly clear syllables that sounded only in his head. The old moon sets. New moon rises.

  CHAPTER

  42

  SENNETH missed the immediate aftermath of war.

  When she regained consciousness, everything had been settled, everything had been tidied up. Romar Brendyn and her brother Kiernan had accepted the surrender of the rebel army. The Arberharst forces had fled to the various ports where their ships lay waiting, chased halfway across Gillengaria by royal soldiers. Troops had been sent to secure the major cities of Fortunalt, Storian, Gisseltess, and Tilt. The mystic Lara had healed every last wounded soldier—from both armies—then walked the length and breadth of the battlefield, repairing the damaged earth and coaxing shy blades of new grass to poke through the churned and bloodied soil.