by Erin Hoffman
“Welcome, Captain,” Endera said, bringing her hands together in a gesture of goodwill before she sat at the head of the table. “You return to us an invaluable treasure.” She touched Ariadel's arm gently, and Ariadel gave a demure bow of her head, but Vidarian did not miss how her eyes searched Endera's expression beneath lowered eyelashes. Vidarian himself had not known what to expect from the Sher'azar priestess, now that he was…what he was. But he allowed himself a measure of cautious relief that Endera's demeanor toward him had not changed.
“As agreed,” he said, watching her. “A Rulorat does not fail a contract.”
“Indeed not.” Endera's teeth glowed in the candlelight with her smile. She lifted a hand, and a pair of robed acolytes entered, one moving to turn over each diner's teacup and the other filling them with a pale steaming drink from a silver urn. When the first had turned over all of the cups, she lifted the cover from a porcelain bowl set between them, revealing a heap of wine-red sun cherries, and bowed out of the room with the tea carrier.
Vidarian lifted his tea to stop himself from gaping at the fruit. He had never seen more than a handful of them in the same place in his life, and knew none who had. Endera plucked about that many from the bowl with a set of silver tongs and proceeded to spoon a frothy sugared cream over them with staggering familiarity. He waited until Ariadel had taken a portion before setting down the tea and selecting his own, resisting the urge to put a price on each thumb-sized fruit that hit his plate.
The flavor was extraordinary, as it always was. The summer intensity and gentle sweetness of them took him back to nearly forgotten early childhood, when his mother had strong-armed his father into purchasing three of them for his birthday. And, he had to admit, the cream balanced their vivid tartness perfectly.
“No one,” he said at last, “has really explained to me just what the Tesseract is.”
Thalnarra's crushed-paper chuckle brought the hair on the back of his neck up, much as he should have been used to it by now. The gryphoness had been watching the cherry bowl dwindle with what Vidarian assumed was a mild curiosity, but at Vidarian's question she reached across the table and, with surprising delicacy, lifted a cherry between two hooked claws.
// The Tesseract seals the Great Gate, // she said, as she had on the Sunstar, // because he bridges Substantive and Ephemeral magics. // With a disregard for fabric that made Endera stiffen ever so slightly, Thalnarra pierced the cherry and proceeded to draw a diagram on one of the table's cloth napkins. The juice stained the white fabric scarlet, and she doled it out with gentle claw pressure until a diamond shape emerged. // Air, // she indicated the top corner of the diamond with a droplet of juice, // Earth, // the bottom, // Fire, // the left, // Water, // the right. // And this is you. // She rent the cherry deeply then, drawing a stream between the left and right points of the blurry diagram. // Centuries ago, the Great Gate was closed, but as the years pass the influence of what lay behind it grows. You represent that change, and have the power to seal the gate. //
The emptiness in the center of the diagram, crossed by “him,” somehow turned Vidarian's guts to water. “What's in the middle, there?”
“It is theoretical,” Endera still looked slightly sour for the ruining of her napkin. “Referred to as ‘void,’ and described in some connection to telepathic abilities, and other magics since lost.”
“The other elements have goddesses,” Vidarian blinked against a moment of lightheadedness. “Who is the goddess of the void?”
Ariadel laughed, and her merriment was a flash of silver in Vidarian's thoughts. “There is no goddess of chaos.” She twinkled with mirth, visibly lingering over the absurdity of Vidarian's suggestion-and clearly unaware, as Vidarian was not, of Endera's hands subtly clenched around her teacup. He met her eyes, only briefly, and the grip eased, smoothly, as though without thought.
Vidarian cleared his throat, then took up his tea and sipped it. One of his eyebrows leapt up in curiosity toward Endera before he could quite help himself. The tea was delicate but unsophisticated, surely no prize leaf from the surrounding mountains for which the temple was so renowned-and yet both Endera and Ariadel tipped their cups carefully, as though it were priceless.
“Simplicity, my dear Vidarian,” Endera said only. “We are but a simple priestesshood.”
“And what does this simple priestesshood want of me, Endera? For I suspect all this-“ he took in the hall with a swept hand “-is not merely trapping for the delivery of my sun rubies.”
The priestess smiled. She tapped her knuckles lightly on the table, and the acolytes returned, bearing covered platters that trailed wisps of curling steam. Seeming by chance, but surely it wasn't, the acolytes lifted the silver covers in order: Thalnarra, Endera, Ariadel, and finally Vidarian. Beneath was an artfully arranged spiral of sliced meat-runnerbird, he thought, in a light herbed oil.
“We merely wish to advise you,” Endera said, as they picked up forks, “to prevent you from making, shall we say, avoidable mistakes.”
“Such as?” Vidarian asked, scooping up and eating a polite forkful of the sliced meat. And then dropping the fork with a clatter he saw but did not hear, as unbelievable spice roared up to close his throat and even his ears as he coughed instinctively-managing only with the aid of years of diplomatic drilling to avoid spraying meat and sauce all over the table. His eyes filled with water and the room vanished into heat and color.
“Lambwillow tea,” Endera was saying, when his ears finally cleared enough. “It has certain pepper-amplifying properties.”
“We drink it so often, I'd forgotten,” Ariadel was apologizing, and her own cheeks were flushed, whether with an echo of his pain or mere abashedness, he wasn't sure. Truly, I'd have warned you, she insisted in his mind, and he thought forgiveness at her, but wasn't sure if their connection worked that way.
“These ‘avoidable mistakes,'” Vidarian began.
The doors to the dining room banged open, an admirable feat for such large panels of wood, and what stepped across the threshold threw Vidarian to his feet before he quite knew what he was doing. His sword, brought for ceremony, sang from its sheath, then, exposed, leapt with energy-fire and water, this time his own.
“So it's true,” the first hooded figure said, throwing back her black velvet headpiece to reveal blonde curls and piercing grey eyes. “He is the Tesseract-and you've kept him from us, Endera.” The look she-Vkortha? Priestess?-turned on Vidarian made his stomach turn: fervent. Mad.
Endera, too, was on her feet, standing in Thalnarra's path, which seemed altogether unwise. The gryphoness had summoned a halo of blinding fire energy, visible now to Vidarian's kindled sight, but without this, her pinning eyes and near-vertically stiffened feathers told any wise prey animal to find another acre as far away as possible. “This was not our agreement, Aleha.” Endera's voice was tightly controlled, pitched low to avert gryphon murder.
It didn't work. // Your agreement? // Thalnarra thundered, and reared, flaring her wings in spite of the closed space. One of the spider terrariums was caught by an outflung primary and clattered to the floor, its spider sent scuttling from the room.
Endera, Aleha, and her still-hooded attendant fell back toward the door, and only Vidarian's voice stopped Thalnarra from leaping upon them: “Explain yourself, Endera. Quickly.” As they moved, his swordpoint remained trained on the Vkortha who had spoken. In the dance of fire and water about the blade, crackles of energy snapped between his aura and Thalnarra's.
“There are no Vkortha. These women are Nistran priestesses, envoys from Zal'nehara,” Endera said.
“No. We serve the Starhunter now, Endera,” Aleha said.
Endera spun, her eyes wide. “Madness!” she hissed, and in spite of her betrayal, the sheer alarm in her voice chilled Vidarian's spine. Aleha's eyes were wild, ecstatic.
In the chaos, Thalnarra's voice was acrid smoke in Vidarian's mind alone. // I knew nothing of this. Endera has made a fatal error. I am making arrangement
s. Their minds slip from mine like fishguts, //-the last in frustrated disbelief.
“They'll not have Ariadel, I don't give a damn the reasons why,” Vidarian began.
“Your mistake, Vidarian, is in thinking she is half so valuable to us as you are,” Endera murmured, and Ariadel choked-her thoughts radiated confusion, heartache, fury. “And you'll not abandon her here, we both know it.”
“No,” Ariadel said, her voice distant, numb. “He won't.”
// This is a deep betrayal, Endera. // The word “betrayal” had a cloud of thoughts connected to it, smoky tendrils of a complex language altogether inhuman.
“I am sorry, Thalnarra.”
// You have no idea yet how sorry. //
Ariadel looked across the table at him.
Vidarian, the name was a whisper in his mind, a quickening of his being. “Run.” They breathed the command together.
Vidarian leapt across the table, and Thalnarra let out a deafening shriek that nearly stopped his heart. Thalnarra, Aleha, and the other Vkorthan priestess staggered away from the door, and Vidarian and Ariadel fled through, Thalnarra quick on their heels. Ariadel grabbed Vidarian's hand and led him at a run through the maze of temple passageways; Endera's voice echoed behind them, a command to her acolytes: “Control this situation!”
When they emerged at last on the ground floor of the temple and staggered out onto the stone courtyard, two pairs of familiar golden-painted wings were waiting. “Kaltak! Ishrak!” Vidarian shouted.
The two brothers, harnessed again to the little “flying boat” (as Vidarian had come to think of it), parted their beaks in welcome, feathers rousing-but they clacked shut again and smoothed, all business, when Thalnarra roared out onto the courtyard behind them. The acolyte who had harnessed the two harrier gryphons started babbling at Thalnarra in confusion when she saw the gryphon priestess's flaming aura and battle-raised feathers, and Thalnarra curtly ordered her back into the temple, lifting her own lead harness with her claws and climbing into it by herself.
// We meet again, brother! // Kaltak welcomed cheerfully, oblivious to his commanding officer and the acolyte.
The acolyte fled, shouting, back into the temple, just meeting Endera and the two Vkorthans as they emerged.
// Up, // Thalnarra barked, and the three gryphons leapt into the air, leaving Ariadel and Vidarian to scramble into the craft behind them. In moments, they were aloft. // Shield yourselves, // Thalnarra warned, and auras of fire leapt up around Kaltak, Ishrak, and Ariadel. Vidarian clumsily followed suit, but his blended energy made things difficult-the water pulled at the fire, which snapped back at the water. The strange buzzing he'd felt over the Vkorthan island filled his mind again, and that strange murmur, the wordless song that brought to mind Aleha's wild eyes.
You're doing well, Ariadel encouraged, and he worked to focus words back at her: Where are we going?
“To sea,” she shouted, and Thalnarra cried a piercing agreement. “To Val Harlon, and the Quest. To my father.”
The steep and winding tracks of Sher'azar dwindled in moments of arrow-swift gryphon flight. Robed figures boiled up out of the temple as the mountain dropped away beneath them, and when the two so-called Vkorthans emerged, they raised their arms, and immediately the air chilled around the airborne craft. But Endera, now mouse-sized with distance, pulled their arms back down, pointing and shouting an objection, and the chill dissipated.
// You're no good to her dead. // Thalnarra spoke his thought, but in her voice it was with pungent irony, and more of that predatory focus that made the small mammal inside his brain want to find cover.
Below, the twisting river marked their path to Val Harlon, perched on the horizon and marked by the sparkle of the western sea and the sun that arced slowly toward it as late afternoon advanced into evening. The two younger gryphons flew unevenly, even to Vidarian's ill-practiced eye, but Thalnarra's determined, angry wingbeats kept them from voicing any question, at least where their passengers could hear. Feather-tipped ears flicked back toward them now and then with what could have been speculation or silent conversation with their leader.
“I should have known Endera was capable of this,” Ariadel said, breaking him out of his contemplation of gryphon and skyview. “But I didn't.” Her eyes and her voice were full of hopelessness that cut at his heart, and he shifted carefully in the basket to wrap an arm around her.
“This whole business blew off course long ago,” he said. “If I'd had my father's business sense, I'd have seen Endera was angling to betray us.” A laugh escaped him, hard and bitter, and Ariadel squinted askance. “Marielle,” he said, battling a surge of guilt and the flash of anger that came with it. “She said fire priestesses were trouble, before all this started.”
“Well, they are,” Ariadel said, all lightness, but her fists clenched and unclenched for just a moment.
“There are many in your family?”
“No, actually,” she said, surprising him. “I'm the first in several generations.”
“But I thought-“ he began, but stiffened when she gasped, staring fixedly at his neck. “What-?”
“Hold still!” Her hand darted out to brush his collarbone, then came back, curled. She cupped it with her other hand, and when she parted her fingers just enough for him to see, a tiny golden spider skittered across her curved palms.
“Not another one,” he said, beginning to be unnerved by the whole thing, in spite of considerably more shocking recent events.
“No, it's the same one,” Ariadel said, motioning with her elbow for him to dig through the craft's storage crates for something to keep it in. “Thalarra knocked over its enclosure, and it must have jumped onto you when we escaped.” He suppressed a shiver at the thought.
He found an oiled packet of string, but Ariadel vetoed it with a shake of her head. A tiny traveling tinderbox passed muster, and she gingerly emptied the spider into it, then tucked the box into a pocket of her robe. He didn't bother asking what in the world they were going to do with it on ship.
“My parents came from air and earth families,” she said, picking up the earlier, spider-free thread. “'Windhammer’ is a conjugate name. I have an aunt four generations back who was a fire priestess, but no one since.”
“Your family from air and earth,” he said, “mine from fire and water. Trouble, the lot of it.”
She laughed, and said, “My father will like you.”
“Your father,” he said, remembering her instructions to Thalnarra. “Why are we going to see him? And where?”
“The Selturians, and he can help you,” she said. “He's a magus. An Air monk.”
“What?” Vidarian was stunned. “I've only read about them. I thought they were all gone.” A male element-wielder…
“He's one of the last. The priestesshood doesn't like to admit he exists.” Ariadel smiled sadly and seemed about to say more, but Thalnarra called out from ahead.
// Angling down. // With her words she sent a dizzyingly sharp mental image-via gryphon-enhanced eye-of the shoreline, just now coming into view. They squinted against the sun, and what Vidarian caught sight of made his gut clench with anger.
“Is that what I think it is?” he shouted up to Thalnarra.
// Yes. They've surrounded your ship. // Another mental picture, impossibly detailed from this distance: the Quest, Marielle at the port bow, her sword arm raised angrily-while the knife-prowed messenger craft of the fire temple hedged the ship in from all sides. // I doubt they intend to let you board. //
“She'll not steal my ship from me-“ Vidarian snarled, a white rage bubbling up in him now. Elemental priestess or not, Endera had gone too far.
“Not that I disagree,” Ariadel murmured, in a tone he'd begun to recognize meant she was trying to defuse a situation that she recognized as unreasonable, “but at the moment we have a question of resources. Not even the five of us can succeed against so many ships and priestesses-if we try, they'll have us back on the mountain by nightfa
ll.”
// She's right, // Thalnarra said, breaking over his immediate argument like a drenching tide. // You must focus on what you need, not what you want. //
“We need to get to sea,” Ariadel said, again her voice calm, persuasive. “We don't necessarily need the Quest-yet.”
In his fury, Vidarian couldn't mask a flash of recognition as he caught sight of another ship on the edge of the harbor.
“What's that?” Ariadel followed his sightline, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. “You know that ship?”
“I might,” he prevaricated. “It's been a long time.”
“Thalnarra, can you land us close to the harbor but outside the city?”
// There's an inlet north of the harbor-we can take you to the shore there. //
As one, the gryphons banked, tipping their right wings down while their lefts went up, catching the wind coming in off the ocean. The flying craft tilted sharply and Vidarian and Ariadel scrambled for purchase; soon they were angling around the southeastern edge of the city, turning northwest. The broad loop would keep them out of eyesight of Endera's messenger ships, and perhaps buy them a little time before discovery.
They landed in a long clearing flanked by a stand of coastal pine and then the shore beyond. Vidarian thought that Thalnarra would remain and see them to their destination, but she didn't move.
// We must go to our flight at once, // she said, her mind still clenched with thought and anger as it had been since Kara'zul. // There's much I must discuss regarding our alliance with the priestesshood. //
“Thalnarra-” Ariadel began.
// This is beyond your reach, Priestess, // Thalnarra said, and an apologetic softness only just took the sting out of her words, but Ariadel lowered her head, chastened. // Endera does not yet know what she's set in motion. But I suspect neither do you two. // Some of her old humor was back at this last, and Vidarian managed a brief smile.
