Company of Strangers, #1

by Melissa McShane

  “Not too exhausted for another explanation, I hope,” Alaric said.

  That woke Sienne up. “Of course not!”

  Alaric seated himself at the head of the table and gestured for the others to sit. He pulled out the goblet and set it on the table, where it caught the light like gold. “I’m afraid this is all the salvage we got from this job,” he said, “if that’s what you’d call it. And I owe all of you an apology. I had a chance to choose one thing, and I selfishly chose this. Selfish, because it’s worth nothing to anyone…but me.”

  “I did not expect to gain more than I already have,” Perrin said. Kalanath nodded agreement.

  “So what is it?” Sienne asked.

  Alaric spread his hands flat on the table and let out a deep breath. “I told you I was looking for something that would free my people. It’s more complicated than that. The wizard who created the Sassaven tried to make them utterly loyal to him, but the best he could do was make them vulnerable to a particular ritual. The binding ritual. It makes it impossible for a Sassaven to betray him in any way, starting with not turning on him and continuing with not working directly against him, obeying his every order, not running away…you get the idea. It also opens a Sassaven to his full potential as a magical creature.”

  “You mean, like breaking the force spell on those stones?” Sienne asked.

  “No, more than that. A team of full Sassaven unicorns could have levitated the entire fallen tower out of the way and maybe even rebuilt it, using just their magic. Even the non-unicorns have access to magic.” Alaric’s left hand closed in a loose fist. “The binding ritual would have happened to me on my sixteenth birthday, but I ran away a few weeks before that. Anyway, the point is, the Sassaven need that part of the ritual to become their true selves. They just need it without the binding. If I could find that, I could become…complete, really.”

  “How can that happen?” Kalanath asked. “You are not a wizard.”

  “The thing about rituals is you don’t have to be a wizard to perform some of them,” Dianthe said. “Necromantic rituals, for example—most necromancers are ordinary people, if you take my meaning, since raising the dead isn’t exactly ordinary. The rituals are lists of instructions on what to do, what to say, what items to use, even what time of day to perform them.”

  “I’ve been looking for information on rituals for the last ten years,” Alaric said. “I’ve seen parts of what the wizard called the coming of age ritual done a couple of times, so I know some of what goes into it. Not much. I wish I could remember more, but…well. What I have learned, mostly from studying necromantic lore—”

  “Alaric!”

  “I didn’t raise the dead, Sienne. Don’t tell me they didn’t teach the fundamentals of necromancy at your fancy school.”

  “Point taken. Sorry.”

  “Anyway, what I’ve learned is that reversing, or inverting, the effects of a ritual require you to know the original form of the ritual. Laying the dead to rest uses a variant on the ritual that raises them.”

  “That is also the province of a priest, Alaric. And I believe we are more efficient at doing so.”

  “True. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s true of every ritual, not just the necromantic ones. If I could find the complete coming of age ritual, I could theoretically invert it to negate the binding while still giving the Sassaven their full magical potential. I just haven’t found it in ten years of searching.”

  Alaric fell silent. Dianthe said, “None of that explains the goblet.”

  “The goblet.” Alaric smiled. “I should have said, I haven’t found anything in ten years of searching—until tonight.” He picked up the goblet and handed it to Sienne. “How much of that can you read?”

  Sienne squinted at the half-uncial lettering. “This isn’t the best light, but… it says ‘heart’ of something… I think this says ‘closed’…” She gasped. “Sa’asava. Faithful. Sassaven!” She rotated the goblet. “And the bottom has… ‘accept the offering’ and ‘by my hand.’ It’s like the lines around the rim are directed at the one drinking, and the ones around the base are written for the one offering the cup. Like a bargain.”

  “Or a command,” Alaric said. He extended his hand to Sienne, and she gave him the goblet. “I recognized this because I’d seen its twin in the wizard’s castle. It’s the only part of the ritual I’ve found in ten years, and when I had the chance, I snatched it up. It didn’t occur to me until later that I owed it to you all to take something more intrinsically valuable. I apologize.”

  Sienne gaped at him. Perrin said, “And give up on your quest for the sake of mere money? I could not have accepted gold at that price.”

  “We do not mind,” Kalanath said. “I am certain of this for all of us.”

  “Thank you,” Alaric said. “But I’m prepared to compensate you for your loss.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Sienne said. “And cheapen what all of us went through to get it?”

  “She has said it exactly,” Perrin said. “But I wonder now about the rest of the items in the trunk. Could they, too, have been ritual items?”

  “That makes sense,” Sienne said. “They were all locked away where nobody could easily get at them, but none of them were magical. And most of them, like the daggers, were the kind of thing you could use in a ritual. At least, most of the necromantic ones I’ve studied require daggers. For bloodletting, you know. What I want to know is, if this wizard uses the ritual to bind the Sassaven, and he created the Sassaven, what is a ritual cup with their name on it doing way south of the Pirinin Peaks?”

  Alaric opened his mouth, then shut it again, his brow furrowed. “That’s a very good question. I was so astonished at the find it didn’t occur to me to wonder that.”

  “But it doesn’t say Sassaven,” Dianthe said. “It says whatever the Ginatic word for ‘faithful’ is. Suppose this wizard used a ritual that existed for some other purpose in the before times? Or corrupted a perfectly innocent ritual to his purposes?”

  “Can I see that again?” Sienne asked. Alaric handed her the goblet. “I might be able to work out the full translation, given a few days and…damn. I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Alaric sounded alarmed.

  “Because I’d need access to the University of Fioretti library, and I can’t get that unless I tell them I’m Sienne Verannus. That would get back to my parents, and they’d…I don’t know what they’d do. Drag me back home kicking and screaming, probably.”

  “There are other scholars who work with scrappers,” Dianthe said. “We could ask around. Do you need, I don’t know, a dictionary or something?”

  “Something like that. If I had access to the right materials, I could work out the full translation. That might give us some idea of what else the ritual requires, or even if it was originally intended for something else.” She set the goblet down and glared at it. “It’s a start.”

  “This is more than I had yesterday,” Alaric said. “And…honestly, I didn’t know how relieved I’d feel, finding part of the ritual. I guess I felt, deep down, I really might be mad. Like I’d made up an entire race to explain away my other self.”

  “That would be quite a delusion, to cover more than a ton of magical equine,” Perrin said with a grin.

  Alaric smiled and shrugged. “People do stranger things to avoid facing the truth.”

  Sienne opened her mouth and found herself yawning. “What time is it?”

  Perrin consulted his watch. “It is nigh on two o’clock. Well past a sensible person’s bedtime.”

  “We all deserve a good night’s sleep,” Alaric said.

  Sienne trailed along after him up the stairs, followed by Perrin, Dianthe, and Kalanath. She’d been surprised at Perrin joining them, having forgotten he’d arranged to spend the night. It seemed like that had been ages ago.

  Safely in her bed, with the spell pages tucked neatly into her own spellbook for safekeeping, she lay on her back and stared up at the c
eiling. Her mind still fizzed with plans for the morning. Copy out the stolen spells. Find some way to translate the Ginatic script. Buy bedding—the mattress was scratchy. She went through her relaxation routine again, but sleep eluded her. Finally, she squeezed her eyes tight shut and told herself, They’ll all still be here in the morning. On that thought, she drifted off to sleep.

  24

  Sienne loosed the band from around her left arm and pressed a cloth against the cut vein inside her elbow, bending her arm to hold the cloth in place. She wiped the blood from her forearm and moved the shallow metal bowl out of the way so she wouldn’t accidentally spill any of the carefully collected fluid. It was awkward, doing this at the chest of drawers in her bedroom, which was just a little too high for the kitchen chair she’d hauled upstairs, but she’d been taught never to collect blood at a table where people ate. That sounded disgusting enough she hadn’t needed the warning.

  With her right hand, she took a pinch of ground cinnamon from the container open in front of her and sprinkled it over the surface of the bowl. It settled in a thin layer over the blood. She took a slender steel rod and stirred it slowly counterclockwise, careful not to slop any over the sides. It took forever for the spice to blend, and she’d had to learn patience in preparing this ink, but she used the time to focus her mental energies inward, on scribing the spells to come.

  When no trace of the cinnamon remained, she wiped the rod on the cloth in the crook of her elbow and set it aside. She picked up her pen and flicked the freshly-trimmed nib with her finger. Then she angled a clean sheet of paper just so, drew the spell page containing force toward her, and began the laborious process of scribing the spell.

  It really did take forever this way, she reflected, what with having to switch her attention between the two pages, and forgetting where she was if she was too slow. But the end result was the same as if she’d had someone read it off to her. She probably could have waited until after breakfast, but the urge to add these spells to her book was overpowering.

  It was hard not to be excited about the prospect of gaining new spells, two of which were far more powerful than anything she currently had. If her experience with summoning spells like slick was any guide, castle would rip shreds out of her mouth. It was still worth it. And, she thought, once I’m done I can sell these pages in the market, or trade for others! She felt like a real scrapper—but then she’d felt like a real scrapper from the first night she’d fallen asleep in Dianthe’s tent, all those days ago. Only eight days ago. It felt like a lifetime.

  She finished force and set it on her bed to dry. You never blew on spell pages to hasten the drying process; that could ruin the spell. No, you had to, again, exercise patience. She switched pens—always use a fresh nib for each spell—and started on the staccato lines of castle. She was saving sculpt for last because she loved the swooping peace of scribing a transform.

  Someone knocked on the door. “Are you—oh, you’re busy,” Dianthe said.

  “It’s all right. We were expected to be able to scribe amid distractions,” Sienne said, dotting another short horizontal line.

  “Kalanath is going to talk to someone who might have a library we could use. He asked if you wanted to come.”

  “That’s all right. I want to finish this. If he doesn’t mind.”

  “No, I think he was just being polite. He seems to prefer to work alone.”

  Sienne paused a little too long as Dianthe’s words sent a pang through her heart, and had to read the summoning twice to find where she’d left off. “I suppose he’ll be leaving soon.”

  “I suppose. I thought…but he never stays with a team long.”

  Sienne came to the end of the summoning and laid her pen down. “Is that what we are? A team?”

  Dianthe smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re looking to leave, too.”

  Sienne shook her head. “No, I…no. But I don’t want to impose.”

  Dianthe leaned against the door frame. “It may take some convincing to get Alaric to believe it. He really—”

  “—doesn’t like wizards, I know. I’m a special case, he says.”

  “He’s also never told anyone the truth about himself before. I think…” She shook her head. “Perrin’s still asleep. He’s even less of a morning person than I am. I’ll see you downstairs when you’re finished.” She shut the door quietly behind herself.

  Sienne laid the second page on her bed and gave the blood ink a little stir to keep it from congealing. She didn’t have time to sit around woolgathering if she didn’t want to waste the blood, but it was suddenly hard to focus. Dianthe thought they were a team. Kalanath didn’t. Alaric was in denial. And Perrin…he was as independent as Kalanath, in a different way. So why couldn’t they all see what was obvious—that what they had together was greater than anything they could dream of separately?

  She sighed and picked up a new pen, hoping the transform would calm her mind. She could almost taste the honey-sweet flavor of the spell as she scribed the flowing lines. She could have stayed home, studied confusions and transforms, made political connections, and learned to live with Rance and Felice’s marriage. Could have done all those things, and shriveled and died inside. The six weeks since she’d left home had been anything but peaceful, and nothing she’d endured made her wish she’d given them up.

  She laid aside the third sheet and stretched. The cut in her elbow had mostly clotted, and she wouldn’t even have a bruise this time. She was getting better at drawing blood, and better at estimating how much she’d need—there was barely a splash left in the bowl. She summoned a tiny glob of water that turned pink immediately when it hit the bowl, swirled the water around, and then dumped it in the chamber pot.

  She dried the bowl, burned the pens and the cloth, and put all her supplies away in the little case that usually lived at the bottom of her pack. She checked the pages and discovered they were dry, focused her will, and turned them invulnerable. They shimmered briefly and took on the pale brownish tint typical of invulnerable paper. Carefully, she laid them in her spellbook, then latched it closed. She would have to experiment with making that latch more secure. If she could think to break open that wizard’s spellbook, somebody might think to do it to her.

  She left her spellbook in her room and went downstairs, hoping for a late breakfast. The kitchen was empty, with even Leofus gone, but a pot of porridge bubbled on the back of the stove. Sienne helped herself to that and a big chunk of sugar. Stirring idly counterclockwise in memory of preparing her ink, she sat at the table and thought of nothing in particular.

  “Good morning,” Kalanath said, startling her out of her reverie. He propped his staff against the wall and sat next to her with his own bowl of porridge.

  “Good morning. I thought you were going to talk to someone.”

  He shrugged. “I have decided it is better to wait and go together. Then I do not have to return and go again.”

  Sienne nodded. “That…makes sense. I—”

  Dianthe entered the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee. “Is Alaric not back yet?”

  “I didn’t know he was gone.”

  “He said he had something he wanted to investigate.” She drank deeply and sighed. “I can quit any time I want.”

  “Sure you can,” Sienne and Kalanath said in unison. They looked at each other in surprise. Sienne laughed.

  “Whoever said laughter is medicine for the soul never heard it at…dear Averran, is that the time?” Perrin said, stumbling into the kitchen and aiming directly for the coffee urn. “Please, I beg of you, silence until I have had some of this bitter, life-giving nectar.”

  They sat in silence watching him pour himself a cup and drink it down, black and unadulterated. He let out a sigh and finally opened his eyes. “Ahh. Truly a gift of God to us poor mortals.”

  “And you, too, can quit any time you want?” Kalanath said with a smile.

  “Blasphemy! Why on earth would I want to quit? Averran does not need co
mpetition for the title of most cantankerous being, which I assure you I would challenge him for were it not for glorious coffee, first thing in the morning.” Perrin poured himself another cup, sipping this one.

  The outer door banged open, and Alaric appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, good, you’re all here,” he said. “I had an idea—go ahead and sit—” He took his seat at the head of the table. Sienne scraped up the last of her porridge and pushed her bowl aside. “Is that all there is for breakfast?”

  “Eat it and be grateful,” Dianthe said.

  “I’ll pass, thanks.” Alaric settled back in his chair. “I went to talk to Sabinia Pelegrus just now. She’s hiring scrappers to investigate a ruin south of here, along the coast. It’s half-submerged even at low tide, so it’s hard to get into, but she wants stones from the ruin itself as salvage. I told her no two weeks ago, because it requires a team of at least five, but the pay is good, and…” His voice trailed off, and he looked at each of them in turn, his expression slowly growing impassive. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Then Kalanath said, “You thought we are a team.”

  “I was wrong to make assumptions,” Alaric said.

  Kalanath shrugged. “It is not wrong to assume truth,” he said. “But I cannot go with you.”

  “Why not?” Alaric demanded. “Are we, or aren’t we?”

  “Because I must first speak with this woman who has a library Sienne may use. We should not forget what is the important thing, and that is your quest.” Kalanath nodded to Sienne. “You will come with me?”

  “Yes, because I still have to translate that goblet. Oh, and we have to go to the market so I can sell those spells,” Sienne said, solemn in the face of Alaric’s growing surprise. “And it sounds like we’ll need a water breathing spell. If you can bring yourself to let me cast it on you.”

  Perrin cleared his throat. “As to that…I have been thinking about what you said last night, about being unable to remember much of the ritual you seek. Averran has been gracious—well, I say ‘gracious,’ but in truth he was rather testy—at any rate, he granted me a blessing that enhances the memory, and perhaps this afternoon we might test its efficacy?”