“I heard everything.” Freydis placed her mouth right against Oleander’s ear. “All your scheming.”
“Freydis, I’m warning you. Release her.”
“The ex-Wearer is right,” Mulliner said, reluctant. “The Queen Mother must answer to the Prime Minister and the King for her actions. We will bring him back to his cell, and she should be returned to her quarters until they return from the hunt.”
“But what punishment befits such betrayal of blood?” Freydis asked, circling Oleander. The Queen grunted, but her lips remained magically sealed. “I have no tundra to abandon her in with nothing but a broken clan like she did to us so long ago.”
“Sir Mulliner, she is the Queen Mother,” Torsten said, desperate to appeal to the Shieldsman’s better nature despite how he might feel about him. “You have to see reason. This is wrong.” Torsten felt the grip on his chains loosen. A little more and he might be able to pull free and do something before any of the warlocks could assail him with blood magic.
“That’s it,” Freydis said. “I’ll leave her alone. More alone than she’s ever been.” She strolled toward the Queen’s beloved horse and raised her dagger to its neck. Oleander’s muffled screams resounded as she fell to her knees, unable to even beg.
“That horse is the property of the royal Nothhelms!” Torsten shouted. “You will not touch it!” Mulliner’s grip on him loosened a little more. That’s it, a little more doubt. Torsten was about to break free and charge when the castle doors swung open and Redstar strolled out.
“Now, now, Freydis,” he said. “We mustn’t blame the beast for the faults of her master.” He approached the horse with Pi in front of him, hands on the boy’s shoulders like a proud father teaching a lesson.
“Such a fine specimen,” Redstar went on. “Panpingese? A gift from your late husband, no doubt. He kept you locked up here tighter than these noble beasts. I wonder what the whore he was apologizing for looked like.”
“Shut your cursed mouth,” Torsten said.
Redstar ignored him. “Perhaps I will ride her in celebration after we defeat Muskigo. What do you think, my King?”
“My father’s gift would get far more use than standing around here,” Pi said. He glanced at his frantic mother, not a hint of worry in his eyes. His lips, straight as an arrow.
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Drad Redstar, it was as I warned,” Freydis said, reeling her dagger back to her side. “Your sister tried to free the traitor. She is not one of us.”
“She hasn’t been for a long time, but still, she is the Queen Mother,” Redstar scolded. “While I am ever thankful for your loyalty, you will take her to her quarters. I will deal with her betrayal shortly.”
Freydis regarded Oleander, bit her lip, then said, “Of course, Arch Warlock.” She grabbed Oleander’s arm and shoved her along, still keeping the Queen Mother from speaking. Torsten locked eyes with Oleander as they left, holding her gaze until she was out of sight. The vines around the horse’s hooves, withered, and the Whitehair ran back to her pen.
Redstar leaned down, close to Pi’s ear. “My King, perhaps it is time for you to rest as well? It was a trying day, hunting for the lost Caleef. Alas, the search continues.”
“Yes, Uncle,” Pi replied. “I should rest if I want to stay awake through the Dawning.”
“Ah yes, how could I forget? Soon, when the moons cast out the light, all will be illuminated.” He rustled Pi’s hair, and the boy strode off with perfect posture. He didn’t even acknowledge Torsten’s existence as he turned to leave.
“I’m disappointed in you, Torsten,” Redstar said. “Using my sister to get to me?”
“I’ll do far worse when I get out of these chains.” Torsten lurched forward, and the knights reeled him back. “You’ll handle her? What exactly does that mean? Please, tell these fair knights who believe you to be a hero.”
“They serve their King, just as I do.” Redstar bowed in their direction. “And he has already made his decision on you. Take him away. And you two.” He gestured to the two warlocks. “Do not leave his sight and allow no visitors but me. Especially not the Queen Mother.”
The two knights started pulling Torsten along, but he noticed something before the metal chafed his wrists again. Hesitation. Maybe it was little more than hope beyond reason that with Nikserof gone, there was still someone in the Shield he could get through to, but he swore he felt it.
“Rand already took a piece of you,” Torsten snarled. “I look forward to taking the rest.”
Redstar stopped them. He raised his arm so his sleeve fell back and fully revealed the stump he had for a right hand. “He took nothing, Torsten. I did tell you that you would help me discover the secret, and so you did. The power I felt when the deserter you sent for me took this… the connection to her. You showed me why we failed to bring her all back in fullness.”
“You failed because she’s gone. Defeated as you will soon be.”
“I failed because I wasn’t willing to sacrifice everything. Now I understand.” Redstar waved for the men to continue dragging Torsten away. “Enjoy the Dawning from below the Earth, Torsten,” he said as they passed. “It’s the last time My Lady will ever have to. Soon she will wake, and the world will know the truth.”
XXIII
THE MYSTIC
The next morning came and with it, a fresh blaze within Sora. She rose, leaving Aquira asleep on the bed in her room inside the Red Tower. She stared through the arrowslit window at Yaolin City and the lake surrounding them. Dark, gray clouds loomed high above, casting shadows. Although, compared to Winde Port, life seemed to be pretty good here for her people, she tried to imagine what it would have been like when the mystics ruled, before King Liam brought his army and drove them into hiding.
Then, she recalled—as if she could forget—that poor boy Madam Aihara was ready to slaughter for the sake of a lesson. She thought of the repurposed temples now serving Iam, which the locals happily attended. She remembered how that clairvoyant kowtowed at the sight of Sora, thinking her a member of the mystic’s Secret Council.
It wasn’t only men like Liam and Torsten who feared their power. Whitney had tons of lessons, but none of them involved willfully murdering anyone to make a point. Maybe the mystics needed governing, needed to be chased away.
No, that can’t be.
Mad as they might seem, their rule had to be better than living under the control of a far-off king, forced to worship a God that was not their own and serve a Crown they barely knew. She simply didn’t understand the mystics yet, and Wetzel had taught her never to discount anything without first studying it.
A knock on the door startled her. Aquira nearly flew into the ceiling before growling toward the disturbance. Sora quickly threw on a Panpingese dress she'd heard called a kimono.
“Come in.”
The heavy door swung and in walked a young Panpingese man. His brown robes looked worn and old, although he couldn’t have been long past adolescence.
Aquira swooped down to a dresser near the door and continued growling. The man didn’t seem frightened in the slightest.
“Aquira, it’s fine,” Sora scolded as she hurried over to grab the wyvern and place her on her shoulder. “Sorry about her. She’s protective, even though she’s a liar.” Sora shot Aquira a smirk, and the wyvern features darkened. Smoke billowed from her nostrils as she huffed.
“I’m sorry, Miss,” the man said. He carried a tray. “The madams wished me to bring you this breakfast. They didn’t want you hungry for your first full day of training."
“Thank you…”
“Kai, Miss.”
“Thank you, Kai. Would you please put it down there?” She pointed to a table by the bed.
After placing the tray down, he turned, bowed, and went to take his leave.
“Kai?” Sora said, stopping him at the door.
“Yes, Miss?”
“First, my name is Sora. You may call me that.”
“Yes, Miss Sora—”
“Just Sora.”
He blushed and nodded.
“Could I ask you a question, Kai?” she asked.
“Oh, uh—Sora, you are permitted to ask anything you’d like of me,” he said.
“How do they treat you?”
“They?”
“The mystics. Aihara Na and the rest.”
“I live to serve,” he answered. “That is why we are here. To assist the Secret Council with all of our beings.”
She noticed his eyes wander toward the red, stone floor.
“That is not an answer to what I asked,” Sora said.
“Miss Sora, please, I have much to do this morning and time is dwindling.”
His face betrayed something his words did not; that the mystics were listening and he couldn’t speak freely. Or at least that’s what she thought his face said. Considering they could seemingly appear at a whim in their spirit-like state, Sora wasn’t sure how she’d slept so soundly the night before.
“Thank you for the breakfast, Kai.” Sora bowed, and Kai returned the gesture before hurriedly exiting the room.
Left in silence, Sora sat down and pulled the lid off a delicious looking fried turnip cake and orange dumplings. She ate it all, washing it down with a large cup of rice milk.
She looked around the spartan room. A storage chest sat in the corner, a desk by the window, and the bed in the middle. In the far corner, she saw something she couldn’t believe she’d forgotten. She slid open the semi-transparent paper door and was greeted by a bright room, though she couldn’t find the source of the light. Steam rose from a tub in the center but there was no room to fan a flame beneath it—a self-heating bath.
Sora nearly tripped over herself in her haste to remove the clothing she’d only just put on. She hadn’t had a hot bath since she’d been a guest of that brute Muskigo in Winde Port, and that had only been her first time experiencing one. She shuddered at the thought of the afhem.
Evil like Kazimir’s, she could understand—his thirst made him wicked and forced him to see other human life as little more than cattle. Muskigo’s evil she could not. He had been kind and hospitable to her, as well as his handmaid Shiva, yet only moments before had led a massacre of innocent people in Winde Porte. And not long before that, had razed Troborough and so many other villages.
Sora had experienced more in the past couple of months than nearly her whole life combined, and so much of it was evil. Sure, she’d survived a war she didn’t remember, traveled across Pantego in a refugee wagon, lived within a crazy old man’s house who happened to have an interest in the occult, and gotten into her fair share of mischief with Whitney, but that was nothing.
If she closed her eyes, she could find herself back in the Webbed Woods, listening to Whitney poke egg sacs of monstrous spiders that he didn’t know were egg sacs. She’d seen creatures she didn’t know existed. She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t woken up in a puddle of sweat after a nightmare over the demonic satyrs or Redstar’s dire wolves.
But right now, all she wanted to think about was hot water.
Sora drove the memories from her head and tried to enjoy a moment for once. She climbed the stone steps of the bath and tested the waters with her toe. It was hot, but not scalding—the perfect temperature. Soon, she was waist deep. She hadn’t even realized how her bones ached until they found relief. She dipped below the surface, allowing the hot water to soak her hair and face. Eyes closed, she blew bubbles, slowly releasing the lung of air, then came up for air, pushing her hair back.
“Better than a pirate’s cabin, isn’t it?” she said to Aquira who flapped into the room and perched on the rim.
The wyvern screeched in response.
“Yeah. Maybe we won’t burn this one down.”
Sora stretched her arms out, extending one toward the creature. Seeing smooth and not scarred skin on her limbs surprised her once again. She’d grown so used to water making the fresh cuts on her hands sting. Aquira nuzzled her warm nose into Sora’s palm, the steam pouring from her nostrils making the hot water seem cold.
“Friends again?” Sora asked.
Aquira chirped. Sora smiled ear to ear. They had been apart for less than a day, but she missed her tiny friend. All the deception wasn’t her fault. Even had she’d been told Tayvada was going to die in the process of sending Sora to them like they somehow foresaw, Sora wasn’t sure she truly understood what death meant. The permanence of it that even the mystics apparently couldn’t undo. Or rather, refused to.
“Sora, report to training room posthaste,” someone said suddenly. The voice echoed like it had been shouted in the Pikeback Mountains—not that Sora would’ve known what that sounded like, not really. She searched the room, but it was empty.
Then Sora recognized that the voice belonged to Madam Jaya, her new teacher, as Aihara Na had called her. She reluctantly exited the bath. She didn’t see a towel, so she pricked her thumb on Aquira’s tail to summon warmth from within. Once dry, she slid on her kimono again and slipped into her heavy boots.
She considered bringing her knife, then decided against it. If she needed weapons, she was sure Madam Jaya would provide them, plus she wanted to seem open to their instruction rather than nervous. It was her first day as a mystic acolyte, after all, and she had no idea what training even entailed.
“Aquira, are you coming?”
Aquira, who had already made herself comfortable on Sora’s bed, cracked one eye open and released a mouthful of air as she yawned. Then she turned her head and trilled her tongue.
Sora took it as a ‘no’ and left the room.
She reached the level of the tower below the lake without incident. Staring at the door to the training facility, she took a deep breath, then knocked. When no answer came, she decided to push her way inside. When she’d come with Madam Aihara, she hadn’t had the time to take in the room. It was massive; she knew that. She didn’t, however, notice how high the ceiling was.
There were no windows or secondary doors, just the exit behind her and the white walls before her. Sora took a few steps toward the center of the room. An overwhelming sense of its magnitude washed over her. She felt vulnerable.
“Hello?” she said, listening to only her echo as a reply. “Madam Jaya?”
The sound of metal scraping metal bounced off the walls. Sora spun but still saw nothing. Footsteps pounded behind her, but again there was nothing.
“Who’s there?” she asked, her voice shaking.
Sora felt a dull thud against her lower back, followed by pins and needles up her spine, and then a hard crack as her face hit the floor. Stunned, she barely managed to roll over before a familiar face bore down on her.
Muskigo’s gray skin and tattoos were unmistakable.
Sora scrabbled backward, kicking with her feet at his impossibly hard abdomen. She rolled over and drew up to her knees. Her heart sank as she reached for her knife. Why would I leave it behind after everything? The better question would have been how Muskigo entered the Red Tower, but she was too distracted to give it much thought.
Not daring to take her eyes off him for more than a split second, she used her peripherals to search the room, hoping to see a weapons rack she’d missed, something that might help her fend off the afhem. There was nothing. Just a stark, empty room with supernaturally tall ceilings, and no exit beyond the one she’d come in. And now, Muskigo stood squarely between her and it.
“What do you want?” she huffed.
His scimitar glistened, reflecting the light of a burning brazier. Elsewhere begged her to draw on its power, sacrificing her blood, but there was nothing to be done without a blade. Muskigo charged her, rearing his weapon back and preparing to slice down. She sidestepped so the sharp edge of the blade would gash her arm. If he drew blood, then she would rain fire down upon him, delivering him swiftly into the arms of the fallen gods.
He rotated the scimitar just in time to slap her hard with the flat of
the blade. It would be sure to leave a bruise, but it drew no blood.
He lashed out again, but Sora rolled out of the way.
“Stop this!” she panted as he pursued again. “The mystics will be here any moment, and you’ll be killed. Stop now, and they might spare you.”
He only smiled and pressed again, that debonair grin that hid the monster he truly was. Sora punched him, but Muskigo palmed her fist and forced her to the ground. He dropped the scimitar, and it clattered against the stone. Straddling her, his gray hands wrapped tightly around her wrists, he leaned in, breathing into her ear. She squirmed, but couldn’t move, couldn’t break free.
“Without blood, you are useless.” She heard the words, but they weren’t in Muskigo’s smooth, accented voice.
“Madam Jaya?”
“See me now for who I really am,” she said.
Before Sora’s eyes, Muskigo’s visage changed, color coming into his skin, tattoos disappearing. The muscles disappeared, giving way to a pair of unclothed breasts. Suddenly, the weight of the mystic’s body vanished as well, and she rolled over, her limbs passing through Sora to quickly find her footing. Sora remained, back on the ground.
“Wha… Why?”
“Tell me, child,” Madam Jaya started. “What did you see?” She rolled her hand, and her yellow robe materialized out of thin air. As she dressed, Sora climbed to her feet.
“I saw Afhem Muskigo of the Black Sands. How did you...”
“Curious. Very curious.”
“I’m sorry, what’s curious?” Sora asked.
“The spell I used was designed to show you the image of that which you most fear. Most people see themselves or their parents. Who is this Muskigo, and why do you believe you hold such fear in your heart for him?”
The question gave Sora pause. If asked who she most feared, she’d have thought Kazimir would have been the obvious answer. The upyr had terrified her, nearly killed her, held her captive, and tortured her—mentally if not physically. But as she heard this, she realized the truth.
“He destroyed my home. Killed the man who raised me, everything I loved.” Even Whitney was gone because of Muskigo, though she didn’t say that part out loud. If not for Muskigo’s rebellion, they'd have passed right through Winde Port. They wouldn’t have needed a ship, leading Bartholomew Darkings to find them and sic the Dom Nohzi upyr on Whitney in vengeance. Which meant Tayvada wouldn’t have been killed to serve as prey for them...
The Redstar Rising Trilogy Page 99
