Trine Rising

by C. K. Donnelly

  “I have to. It is my prime’s order. These people. Our friends. The Ford will be their death sentence.” She peered through the dim light to the line of scholaire’e. “They are paying for my crimes. Maybe with an amulet, I can begin to make up for all of this.” Or maybe she would be the only one punished.

  “I should have taken you away when you asked.” He pressed his cheek against hers. “I am so sorry. This is all my fault.”

  “How is any of this your fault? It’s all mine. I allowed my fear to convince me I was wrong when I knew it was right. Now, so many of these—they will be killed.”

  Their blood. On her hands. Now, she understood Tetric Garis’s words.

  “You shouldn’t be doing this yet. I should,” he breathed, passion making his voice harsh. “I have the blood of defenders, seers, and healers in my veins. I should be going up to that dais. To take up an amulet to protect you. To keep that Ken’nar Dark Trine bastard away from you.”

  He was the only thing she wanted to choose, the only one she wanted to join her life to. “You cannot save me from this. No one can.” Only the Aspects Above could save her now. Unless she wasn’t meant to be saved.

  “We’re leaving. Now.” He pulled her arm.

  “No. It’s too late for that.” She struggled, freeing herself from his grip. “Teague, leave me. Never speak to me again. For your own sake.”

  Tears shimmered in his eyes, reflected by the candlelight. “Don’t push me away. I love you.”

  “You can’t love me. Leave me. Please.” She turned once again to the procession.

  The youth ahead of her climbed the three stairs.

  “Who seeks communion with creation?” Mirana’s mother intoned.

  “Atan,” the boy said. “Atan il’Badif il’Robaar.”

  “What gift have the Aspects Above bestowed upon thee?”

  “The Light to Defend,” he responded, his voice breathless with anticipation.

  “Then, Defender, step forward and allow the living presence of the light of the Aspects to choose thy crystal as a testament to thy commitment to protect creation.”

  Off in a far corner, an amethyst glowed with a violet so deep it was hard to see in the darkness. The boy rushed over to it and placed the amulet around his neck with trembling fingers.

  All too soon, the dais loomed in front of Mirana. Her mother awaited her, her face stern, Lord Garis and the other Fal’kin behind her. Her father stood on the top-most stair, his expression resolute. His thoughts, however, sparked and flashed with martial precision like bursts of amulet fire. His gaze now darted from her to the amulets to the gathering hall exits, a battlefield defender searching for routes of advancement. For routes of escape? Was he going to drag her bodily from the ceremony?

  The amulets. There on the dais. Lying in wait. She had just three steps to wait for a miracle. She began to shake uncontrollably. The unfamiliar weight of her combat boots caught a stair. Her father caught her and steadied her.

  ... Biraena, it will be all right ... I will keep you safe ...

  “No, you can’t. I am in the hands of the Aspects Above,” she replied, shunning the intimacy of his mind’s voice.

  She pushed out of his arms and climbed to the top of the dais. Amulets surrounded her, trapped her. She gasped at the intense pull on her Aspects. They were too close.

  “Who—” her mother paused and pulled her shoulders back, steeling herself. “Who seeks communion with creation?” ... You will be wrapped in my love, biraena, as you were when the Aspects Above granted you life within me ...

  Mirana’s throat constricted. For a moment, she could not make her tongue work. “Mirana il’Kellis il’Pinal.” Her jaw moved, but she heard no sound.

  Her mother nodded down at her, sending love and encouragement from her mind. “What gift have the Aspects Above bestowed upon thee?”

  She simply had to reach for an amulet, a gem that spoke to her and only to her. But, as a Trine, they all spoke to her, needed her. They wanted all she was.

  She lifted her head and searched the dark ceiling once more for a deity that empowered her yet left her a captive. ... I surrender all that I am to you ... Use me as you will ...

  Her mother swallowed back her tears and nodded. ... Speak, child ... It is time for the secrets to end ...

  Lord Garis came forward and stood close. His mind slipped past her feeble attempts to shut him out. ... Choose any of these crystals and be at peace ... I will be with you ...

  Her eyes held his, and for a moment, determination replaced fear. “That is for the Aspects Above to decide.”

  “Step back, Garis,” her father hissed.

  She lifted her hand, stopping her father from further protests. “Enough.” She raised her eyes to her mother’s. “The Aspects Above have granted—” She fought for breath, but this time, it would not come. Everything, the people’s minds, the amulets, her parents’ deep concern, their pride—it was too much. “They have—”

  Lord Garis turned to face the assembly. “The Aspects Above have granted all three gifts on their servant—the Light to See, the Light to Defend, and the Light to Heal. The Aspects Above have called Mirana il’Kellis il’Pinal as their Trine.”

  ... You bastard! ... Her father’s mind-voice turned venomous.

  Shouts rose from the throng behind her. Questions and shock she could not deflect assaulted her mind.

  “Then, Trine, step forward and allow the living presence of the Light of the Aspects to choose thy crystal as a testament to thy commitment to protect creation.” Her mother’s words rang in her ears.

  Mirana knelt to grasp a red beryl encased in gold lying at her feet. It began to glow, a soft dawn-pink hue in the center, deepening at its edges to the color of blood. Her fingertips touched the gem and accidentally brushed a blue sapphire near it. The beryl gleamed, as did the sapphire. She hesitated. Touching her foot, an emerald set in silver brightened. When she pushed it from her, she set an adjacent amethyst aglow once the emerald came in contact with the purple gem. She drew her hand away as if stung. The harmonics of the scarlet beryl crystal clashed with her life’s rhythms, pulling her into itself, drawing the Aspects from her. She couldn’t breathe. The room swirled, and the floor heaved upward.

  Jasal’s Keep. Thunder crashes. She collapses on her hands and knees. Sleet beats down, biting at the back of her neck. Agony from her abdomen pulses with each heartbeat. Blood from the mortal wound rushes thick and hot over her hand. It drips into a grout line in the paving, rain diluting its thickness in the water. She has failed.

  White light explodes.

  “I’m getting her out of here before she is overcome.” Her father reached down, snatched up the beryl, and began to place its chain over her head.

  “No!” She shoved away her father’s hand and the amulet he held. She stepped back from her parents and Lord Garis. “I will not let this happen. Forgive me.”

  Mirana flew down the three steps, out of the gathering hall, and into the storm-lashed night.

  CHAPTER 15

  “But to harken unto Their Will requires a decision I am loath to make.”

  —The Codex of Jasal the Great

  Mirana ran through the corridors of the learning hall, as empty and unforgiving as a tomb. She sped across the rain-drenched courtyard and stopped when she reached the hall’s library. Catching her breath, she laid her palms and forehead against the great oak doors. She pulled her mind inward, dissolving her presence into the life around her. She did not want to be found. Ever.

  The Aspects Above had shunned her. No saving grace had come from on high, no absolution was granted, no expiation given for the sins she had committed, nor the ones that awaited her. No hope remained, only one last choice.

  She pulled back on the iron rings and went through the doors. The smell of dust and age filled her nostrils. Thunder crashed, and she cringed instinctively at the deafening crack. Lightning lashed at the tall stained-glass windows, illuminating in violent bursts the harsh colo
rs of their facets. The intermittent light put the ceiling corbels in stark relief as they hid high up in barrel and groin vaults. The oil lamps flickered in meek imitation of the lightning outside.

  She hurried deep into the sepulchral library. Thousands of volumes, parchments, linen scrolls, and preserved hides mouldered away on the shelving, corpses stacked within catacombs of knowledge, as useless and dead to her as cadavers. A few leather-bound books around the cavernous room stood tethered to stands by chains, prisoners of false wisdom. As was she.

  Long tables sat before the shelves, great, dark planes of wood like so many altars ready for a sacrifice. Carved under one of those tables were her and Teague’s names. He had cut their glyphs into the wood with his belt knife after she had kissed him for the first time. They were fourteen. She would never taste his kiss again.

  “Teague.”

  Mirana sank against a heavy wooden chair. All of those memories of their primary lessons together in this place, all those dreams, that first timid kiss—they were lies. They were denials of a self she believed herself to be, only to be destroyed by the person she would become.

  She crossed her arms on the leather seat and buried her face in them. Caresses touched her mind, insidious in their insistence, sickening in their supplication. She lifted her head, blinking through rain- and sweat-matted hair. Amulets. Statues of Fal’kin, most of whose names were lost to time, stood in niches and alcoves around the library. Amulets hung from their cold, stone necks and whispered to her now.

  She bit back another cry, her chest constricting with the effort. She could choose every one of them. All she had to do was hold one and let it into her being. When she did, though, it would taunt her with its gleaming, a sign of the power she held but could not find a way to safely use.

  She sat up and leaned against a statue plinth. She let her head fall back. Jasal Pinal’s carved likeness stood over her, his chest devoid of an amulet. Once, the sculpture had been whole, but for as long as she could remember, great chunks of marble had been missing, leaving little more than a torso, chipped arms, and half a face. Scorch marks blemished the pure white marble. She traced the deep grooves and scratches marring the black onyx pedestal.

  Before the statue on a stand sat an unadorned leather-covered book secured by a chain and locked by a simple metal clasp.

  “The Codex of Jasal Pinal,” she whispered.

  She had read the journal many times. It once was a mischievous pleasure, browsing it with Teague because it was banned from their primary lessons. Later, she studied it, pored through its pages, scrutinized every quill stroke, hoping to find the answers to control her Trine Aspects. Filled with his teachings of the Fal’kin way, his love for his Tash-Hamari wife Antiri, the book also told of the battles he fought against Ilrik the Black and other Ken’nar warlords, and the walls and gates he built to keep Deren safe. Of his keep, however, she had found almost nothing written. The last entries of his journal ended just before the completion of the watchtower. Fear, angst, and emotions far darker lived within his words but no answers.

  Mirana pushed herself to feet. As she had done so many times before, she laid her hand on the lock. She reached out to the mechanism with her mind, and the clasp released with an audible click. She gently opened the cover and turned back several blank pages of vellum to Jasal’s first entry.

  “‘What mysterious things are the Aspects Above to choose me as their servant,’” she read aloud, her voice shaking. “‘For I can see no talent, no strength real or designed by artifice, no skill in my life that separates me from any other man or woman.’”

  And yet, they have chosen me their Trine.

  She knew the words by heart. Jasal’s quill strokes were bold, but the sense behind the words was not. The Codex of Jasal Pinal the Great was not a book she merely read, she lived it. Imbued within its pages was the reflection of her ancestor’s presence, echoes of his thoughts and emotions as he wrote the passages. He spoke to her in his pages. Sometimes, she wished he did not.

  He had been all but consumed by grief in his last writings. It was there, embedded in his words. Then, at the end of his Codex, his trapped, agonized emotions abruptly disappeared from the pages. No room remained for misinterpretation.

  Jasal Pinal had committed suicide.

  Wind-driven rain battered the windows, followed by a low rumble of thunder. She shivered in a draft, her clothes and skin damp from the storm and sweat. The sword in the statue’s broken and scarred hands gleamed in the lightning. The mighty blade which defeated the Dark Triumvirate: the Ken’nar defender Ilrik the Black, and the Ken’nar seer and the Ken’nar healer who both fought alongside him. The three once stood, battling as one, as an evil counterpoint to Jasal’s Trine Aspects. Thrice-cursed. Thrice-blessed.

  Why would the Aspects Above even call forth someone cursed? It made no sense—unless they were so disgusted with their creation tearing itself apart for more than three thousand summers, they wanted to wipe the land clean of the stain of their Aspected people. Maybe the Thrice-cursed would purge all of creation for the Aspects Above. Maybe the deity was just as ignorant and uncaring as the ocean she once believed her escape. Maybe there simply were no Aspects Above at all. Maybe Lord Garis was right, and prophecies were just meaningless words written by senile old men and women. Or maybe all the evil in Kinderra had been brought about, not by divine vengeance, but by the choices of men. Or of a girl.

  Mirana hid her face in her hands. “Why did the Aspects Above choose you as their Trine, only to have you die in failure? What sense is there in that?”

  Were the Trine powers too terrible for him to bear? To control? Was ending his own life the only answer to his grief and self-loathing? Why had the Aspects Above brought him to that?

  No. Jasal’s failure was not the fault of the Aspects Above. His failure was his own. As was hers. Jasal Pinal was right. This time, answers would be found in something other than books. She slid her back down the pedestal to sit heavily on the floor once more.

  Mirana pulled one of the long knives from a scabbard at her waist, the soft, sinister song of its unsheathing reverberated up her arm and across her chest. The blade, the length of two hands, gleamed dully in the torchlight. No ornamentation decorated its steel. It was strictly utilitarian, forged for but one purpose.

  She pressed the knife’s edge against the hollow of her throat, the steel cold on her skin. She could not find a way to use her Aspects without destroying Kinderra, so she would make certain they were never released.

  The library doors banged open against the stone walls.

  “Stop! What do you think you’re doing?” a voice rang through the vast building and her mind.

  Tetric Garis rushed past the endless shelves and somber statues, frighteningly agile for a man of his size. Once he reached her, he fell to his knees and tried to pull the knife from her hand.

  She struggled in his grip. “Leave me alone!”

  “We have no time for these adolescent melodramatics.” He wrestled with her for the blade. “Kinderra is too important. You are too important.”

  She refused to release the long knife. “Let me go.”

  He dug his thumb into the sinews of her wrist, and the blade fell from her grip. “I know what else it was you saw when we viewed the Ford vision together. The images you tried to hide from me.” ... You saw Jasal’s Keep erupt in light ...

  “If you saw it, then you know why this has to be.” She fought him again, grappling for the long knife.

  “You will end this nonsense now!” The Trine wrapped his long fingers around her arms, holding her fast. “We must understand the power we both saw unleashed by Jasal’s Keep.”

  “What is there to understand? Because of me, our scholaire’e will have to fight at Two Rivers Ford and so many may die. Our troops. They will be decimated because of me.”

  He shook his head. “You had no way to know exactly what it was you were seeing in the first vision of Two Rivers Ford.”

  Sh
e tried once again to pull away from his grip, but his hands were like iron bonds. “You’re wrong. I knew exactly what I saw, what I sensed. I just didn’t want to believe it. I must pay for my crime.”

  He released her and sat back on his heels. “Being frightened of one’s powers is not a crime.”

  “Withholding the information I saw is.” His hematite amulet hung too close to her. Could she choose it? Right off his neck? Fire it on herself? “Lord Garis, I didn’t want to believe what I sensed. I lied to myself. I allowed myself to believe I was wrong when I knew, deep inside, I was right. Because of my fear and my cowardice, I didn’t tell my parents of the first Ford vision until it was too late. If anyone knew I was a Trine, they would have demanded I choose an amulet immediately. I was trying to save lives by keeping silent. I swear it.”

  She deflated against the base of Jasal’s statue, her eyes on his amulet. “If you’ve seen Jasal’s Keep exploding in light, then you know why I cannot choose an amulet. Stop me now before I truly become the Dark Trine. The only way I can save lives now is with my death.”

  He shook his head slowly. “You are not the Dark Trine.”

  “But the keep—”

  “We don’t know what the keep is.” Lord Garis gestured toward a window and the watchtower looming outside. “Ai, there will be losses at the Ford—that is unavoidable regardless of any vision, but if we can find out exactly what Jasal’s Keep is, you won’t have condemned Kinderra. In the end, you will have saved her.”

  A bead of grief-wrought sweat trailed down her temple and followed the curve of her jaw to her neck. Its salt stung the cut at the hollow of her throat. “You’re wrong, my lord. Everything is falling apart because of me. You are the Light Trine. It is your duty to save Kinderra from me. Kill me!”

  ... Mirana— ...

  ... Kill! ... Me! ...

  He grabbed her arms again and pierced through the protective psychic walls she had raised. ... STOP! ... She gasped as his mind stormed through hers. “I need your help as much as you need mine,” he said. “That is why I am here. I told you, I, too, saw the keep and the unimaginable power it contains. That was no nightmarish memory of yours. It was a vision. Your Aspects and mine were together at that moment. It was my vision, too. That keep could end this conflict that has plagued us for three thousand summers. We must understand what all of this means. But, to do that, I need your help.”