“
Will you promise to remain calm? Let me
walk you through a meditation first.”
“I don’t want to meditate.” Her voice came
out too sharply impatient, a bit of wobble beneath. She let out a
long breath. “I’ll be calm, just tell me.”
Chuffta appeared satisfied and folded back
his wings.
“The Destrye accepted your offer of surrender. They
occupy the city, negotiating with your brother, who is now
king.”
Nat was king? Why wasn’t her mother ruling
in the waked of their father’s passing? Nat had no wife yet, not
even an imperfect one to feed him energy. He couldn’t be king.
“
The Destrye king does not know your
laws. Nat and the council stall for time.”
“Time? What good will more time do?”
Chuffta’s hesitation was palpable.
“They
have invited the Trom to Bára.”
That memory came back with force. Folcwita
Lapo arguing that they should send for help from the Trom. The fear
and heightened excitement some of the others felt at the
suggestion. “But we decided not to send for them.”
“It appears your decision was overruled.”
Queen Rhianna, composed again, stood in the doorway, framed by
brilliant sunshine. “Something else I blame myself for.”
“Why?” Oria frowned, more for the fact that
she’d suddenly realized she’d never before seen her mother so often
without her mask of rank. “You didn’t call them, did you?”
“No. High Priestess Febe did.”
“With…Priest Vico sending the call? I didn’t
think he was powerful enough.”
“He’s not. I think—” She sighed heavily,
sagging against the doorframe. “I think Nat must have done it. Had
I been cognizant, I would never have allowed such a drastic,
foolish move.” Moving like a woman twice her years, she came to sit
beside Oria on the bed, gripping her forearms over the long sleeves
of her sleeping gown, preempting further questions. “Let me resume
my apology. I regret, so very much, that I failed you. I lost
hwil
—an unforgivable breach. I apologize with all my heart
and will spend what is left of my life trying to make it up to
you.”
The bed seemed to sway under Oria, the sense
of dislocation, of the bottom falling out of her world so profound.
“You can’t lose
hwil
once you find it.”
Her mother wouldn’t meet her eye, squeezing
her hands too tight. “I did. It’s…it’s thought that when your
father…” She choked on the words.
A chill of horror-filled grief dragged over
Oria, followed by beads of cold sweat down her spine.
“
Steady,”
Chuffta murmured.
“That I broke,” her mother managed to get
out. “Thus I no longer deserve the mask of a priestess.”
“They took your mask away?”
Her mother nodded, weeping again. No
composure at all. “When Tav fell, I—” She couldn’t continue, her
wild grief, despair, and a black rage beneath it all pouring into
Oria. Gasping, she reeled under it, aware on one level of Chuffta’s
tail winding between their hands, breaking her mother’s grip—too
much, even through the silk. As soon as the contact broke, Oria
could orient again, begin to separate her mother’s grief and anger
from her own—though they had so much interface, like mirrors of
each other, that she couldn’t disentangle all of it.
“Rhianna.” Juli, a junior priestess, new to
her mask, was suddenly there. “Come away. This isn’t good for
Oria.”
“I let him die,” Rhianna sobbed. “I wasn’t
enough. The union cracked and…” Her words devolved into a garble as
Juli led her away.
Stunned, Oria lay back, trying to process it
all. Letting the emotional energy drain away. “Why does she say she
let him die?”
“Because her failure resulted in his death.”
High Priestess Febe entered the room, golden mask implacable, hands
tucked into the billowing sleeves of her crimson robe. “A
priestess’s responsibility, even more so a wife’s sacred
obligation—particularly in a temple-blessed marriage of perfectly
matched partners—is to keep her sorcerer husband fed with sgath.
Queen Rhianna failed in this, no matter the reason, and her husband
died. How are you feeling, Princess?”
Chuffta bellied onto Oria’s chest, folding
his wings so he rested his pointed chin on his thumb claws, eyes
green and shining as the leaves of the fruit trees in her
garden.
“
Listen,”
he soothed, no doubt
sensing Oria’s ire.
“Perhaps we shall learn something.”
“Better, but I don’t understand, High
Priestess.”
“Of course you don’t. Had you achieved
hwil
and taken the mask before all this happened, you would
be better prepared.” The high priestess sounded weary, on top of
the eternal stain of disappointment. “Knowing what we know now
about Queen Rhianna, perhaps we erred in letting her have such a
strong influence over you.”
Though Oria, of course, could not see Febe’s
eyes, she nevertheless felt certain they rested on Chuffta. Much as
Oria wanted to bristle, it seemed that the High Priestess emanated
something through her careful
hwil
. Uncertainty?
“Anything you can tell me that the temple
will allow would be helpful, High Priestess Febe.” Oria pulled off
the humble tone reasonably well. Chuffta agreed with a mental snort
of amusement.
Febe paced over to a window. “Some of it,
naturally, is a question of whether your mind and spirit have the
maturity to understand. However, the situation is grave enough that
I believe I should endeavor to teach you, though it may be pouring
water into a bucket with no bottom.”
Fortunately, the promise of information had
Oria restraining a smart remark in response to the not-so-subtle
insult.
“Despite all that has been studied on the
flow of sgath to grien, there is a great deal we do not consciously
understand, that lies in the realm of
hwil
. Testing showed
your mother and father to be a perfect match. There were no
indications otherwise, else the temple would not have blessed their
marriage. To all appearances, she’d always provided him an unending
source of sgath, which made him a powerful sorcerer and king.”
“I know all this,” she muttered softly
enough that the high priestess could not hear. Chuffta, however,
heard clearly.
“
No, you know what you’ve always
believed. What your parents believed and taught you in turn. Listen
to a new truth.”
She didn’t want to. Stubbornly, she stared
at her ceiling, the mosaic of clouds and sky not as restful as
usual.
“
Or, if you are not ready to hear, if you
need to rest, we need not do this now. Tell her to keep her secrets
for later.”
Chuffta’s mind-voice, while solicitous, held
enough reproof that she unbent. At the gate, facing down that
bloodied warrior prince, she’d resolved to improve her knowledge.
That included the painful things.
“
Particularly the painful things, some
would argue.”
“We’ve since learned that perhaps some
individuals are able to falsify the appearance of
hwil
, of
compatibility with a mate.” Febe’s voice held suspicion, stopping
short of accusing Oria of faking
hwil
. Though Oria had never
claimed to have reached that miraculous state. Had others done so?
Simply said so without really doing it? Had her own mother? It had
never occurred to her to pretend, and yet…what a simple answer that
would be, to gain access to the temple knowledge, to buy time to
cultivate control of sgath in secret.
“King Tavlor relied on that bond heavily,”
Febe was saying, “believing it to be unshakeable, that with his
temple-blessed marriage and the combined pool of power from all the
priestesses, the sorcerers could not fail. Then the Destrye began
killing the priestesses, an unprecedented event, at least in recent
memory.”
That was why he’d committed nearly everyone
to the battle. Her father had believed they couldn’t fail. Had he
realized the truth before he died? She hoped not. What a horrible
thing to realize, then to die without being able to rectify such a
terrible mistake.
“We knew killing a priestess would obviously
sever the bond between her and the sorcerers. We did not predict
what might result if a number of priestesses died in rapid
succession because it never occurred to anyone that it could
happen. The walls of Bára have never been breached in such a
violent and sudden way. Now that you know it could and did, knowing
what you know of sgath magic, what do you predict? Think it
through.”
Oria quelled her stubborn impulse to disobey
the high priestess’s pedantic instructions. Her obstinacy had held
her back in the past and she needed to learn to do better. She
tried to calm her emotions. One of the clouds in her ceiling mosaic
had always looked like a winged horse to her, ever since she was
little. She found it and traced its lines with her eyes while she
thought about it. “Priestesses absorb energy from all living
things, particularly the focused and purified magical sources, as
below Bára, and transform it into sgath.”
“And some nonliving things. Perhaps an
exacting point, but an important one for this puzzle,” Febe said.
“What are some examples?”
“Magical energy also comes from the sun,
from Sgatha and Grienon, and from certain kinds of rock and heated
gases in the earth below Bára. Depending on her nature, a woman
might absorb one kind of energy more than another.” Oria had no
idea what her nature tended toward, which had always been part of
the problem. Without
hwil
, the energies just piled up into
in a meaningless jumble. “A priestess releases sgath ideally to a
priest who’s her perfect mirror. Through their bond, he converts
that into grien, supplementing his own and repurposing it into
whatever element his nature dictates.”
“And for those without marriages, let alone
without temple-blessed ones?”
“Those priestesses direct their sgath into a
kind of pool that all sorcerers can dip into.” The logic began to
take shape. She wrenched her gaze from the winged horse in the
mosaic sky to Chuffta’s discerning, somber gaze. “When they died,
if they were effectively bonded to the pool of magic, then all
their energy poured into it, one after another.”
“Yes. One life, even with the violence of
murder, would not have made a difference. That energy would have
been diluted into the rest. But, with so many powerful priestesses
dropping their entire life energy into the Báran pool, within
minutes of each other…” Febe sighed, her sorrow palpable.
“The priests overloaded. I can see how that
would happen, though I don’t think they could.”
“No one imagined that scenario. But then,
never before have so many priestesses been so actively contributing
to a common pool, nor so many sorcerers drawing from it so heavily.
The battle magics consumed so much that the priestesses offered
more and more to sustain it.”
“So what happened?” Oria asked, mouth dry
with dread.
“It’s difficult to explain to one without
hwil
, and the framework of teachings to support your
understanding. But what you need to know is that King Tavlor
overspent himself and died, which left Queen Rhianna unmoored. She
should not have survived.” There was a question there, an
expectation, and Febe’s mask faced Oria, scrutinizing her with
uncomfortable intensity. “How is it that she did?”
“I—I don’t know.” She hadn’t expected to
feel accused of something, especially not knowing what she’d done,
right or wrong.
“You were alone with her. Think back. What
exactly did you do?”
“Nothing.” Oria tried to think, so much of
that a blur. Aware also that maybe telling the exact truth would
not be the smartest step. “I chafed her wrists, called her name,
and she woke up.”
“That can’t be all.” Though Febe remained
serene, an impatience crawled through the room. “Tell me, moment by
moment, how you—” Her chin snapped up, head swiveled to the window.
“I must go. Don’t leave the tower, Princess.”
She swept out so abruptly that Oria frowned
after her. “When she says ‘overspent,’ does she mean they
broke?”
“
Sounds that way to me.”
“I didn’t think men could break, because
they can always release the grien.”
“
Now we know they can. Like you, they
lost consciousness from the overload. Many of them died
immediately.”
“Did I… For a while I thought I was
dead.”
“
We feared as much.”
His mind-voice
became a gentle stroke.
“I couldn’t sense you at all. I suspect
that… Well, it’s not relevant.”
“It is to me. What do you think?” She
studied the jade-deep eyes, full of some uncharacteristic
emotion.
“
That perhaps you did die, that your
essence departed your body, but then returned. Much as your
mother’s did.”
“Why did I come back?”
To her surprise, he sounded vaguely amused
when he replied.
“I don’t know—why did you?”
It took her aback, to contemplate that she’d
somehow made this choice and caused it to happen. She’d think about
that later.
Shouts reverberated outside. A new energy
sliced through Oria’s mind, unlike anything else she’d ever sensed.
“What is that?” But she knew. That was why the high priestess had
rushed out so precipitously.
“
Unless I am mistaken,
that
is the
arrival of the Trom.”
T
he Destrye demand that
masks be removed had not gone over well. King Archimago had agreed
with the wisdom of the strategic move—though Ion couched the
proposal in terms of transparency of expression—with no mention of
magical influence. Their father balked at discussions of magic.
All of them did, really, despite all they’d
seen.
A rapidly heating argument seemed to be
headed directly toward renewed combat, a prospect Lonen actually
welcomed as it would be far better than this endless debate—killing
a few of them would go a long way to releasing the building
tension—when Ion’s first captain ran into the room. He whispered
urgently to Ion as Lonen’s stomach dropped. And as shouts rose
outside.