No news there—her head already pounded with
the overload, even this high up, from the miasma of emotion rising
like heat off the desert floor. It would be worse lower down, among
them. But not worse than being slaughtered by the cruel Destrye on
the walls of their own home. Why wouldn’t they just go back where
they came from and leave Bára alone?
“I can’t stay up here while my people, my
own family, are suffering and dying.”
“
What can you do that others
cannot?”
She flinched at the sting of his caustic,
but accurate point. “Maybe nothing, but if I stay here then I’m
certainly contributing nothing. It’s bad enough that I can’t fight.
Don’t ask me to be more helpless and useless than I am.” Due to her
own failure to learn. If she’d exercised some simple
self-discipline, she might not have been slumbering in peace while
others died.
“
You can’t blame yourself. And if you’d
been on the walls with the others, you might be dead as
well.”
A harrowing thought. She didn’t argue with
Chuffta, simply held out her forearm for him. With a sigh that
sliced disapprovingly through her mind, he flew to her and dug in
his talons. They pierced through the padding to her skin,
demonstrating the displeasure that seeped from him. Deserved, no
doubt, and yet…
“Don’t punish me,” she gritted through her
teeth. “I can’t bear for you to be angry with me on top of all the
other emotion.”
“
I apologize, Princess.”
His mental
tone layered contrition over the cuts he’d made, soothing and
steadying. He hopped up to her shoulder and rubbed his soft-scaled
cheek against hers.
“I am upset also.”
“The great guru Chuffta, ever placid and
master of all things
hwil
?” She ran down the steps, only
then realizing she’d forgotten to put on shoes. She so rarely wore
them, only donning slippers for the few court occasions and city
celebrations she all-too-briefly attended. As she passed each
window on the spiraling downward journey, she looked out, searching
for signs of priestesses on the walls and battle magic in the
sky.
“
Watch your step or you’ll break both our
necks,”
Chuffta chided, spreading his wings for balance,
catching one in her hair.
“Like you couldn’t simply take wing instead
of tumbling.” But she slowed and kept her eyes on the stairs. She
couldn’t see much through the windows, regardless.
“
I’d never abandon you to save
myself.”
She nearly threw some of his oft-repeated
advice back at him, not to make promises he couldn’t keep, but the
possibility of separation from him loomed too close, edged too
sharp with blood-drenched Destrye blades. Pausing on a landing to
catch her breath—had she ever run so fast for so long?—she stroked
the long tail he’d wrapped around her waist for extra stability.
“Promise me you will. If the Destrye get to me, you must fly away
and warn the other cities, the other temples. Tell them what
happened here. That the enemy knows to kill our priestesses to
disable the mages. That Bára is in enemy hands.”
“
I pledged my loyalty to you
and—”
“Exactly,” she interrupted him. Something
that surprised them both, as she never had done so before.
“Consider this a last service to me. If I fall, fly away. Warn them
or not, but save yourself.”
With an unhappy mental mutter he agreed and
she continued down the endless stairs, going more slowly to stave
off at least physical exhaustion. Outside, the night had gone
quiet. No more rumble of the earth or crash of thunder. Silence had
never been so ominous.
She reached the ground floor without
encountering any of the usual guardsmen. They’d all been called
away, apparently. Good that they’d gone to help, but daunting to
contemplate that if the Destrye made it to her tower, there’d be no
one to stop them from killing her. Or worse. The history books held
tales both dire and vague of what happened to women who fell into
enemy hands. She’d gone through a phase in adolescence of gruesome
fascination with those sorts of tales. None related
exactly
what befell the women, only that they suffered terribly and it had
to do with sex; sorceresses tormented by intimate flesh-to-flesh
contact with men not only incompatible, but entirely without
magical sensitivity.
The heavy bar on the door gave her some
trouble, Chuffta regretfully unable to help. While he could grasp
things well enough with his prehensile tail and feet, being aloft
gave him no leverage to help lift something that weighty. On his
somewhat helpful advice, Oria bent her knees and wedged a shoulder
under the bar, pushing up with her legs as Chuffta flew circles
over her head, admonishing her to try harder.
Apparently, now that he’d agreed to this
plan, he was all in.
The bar lifted out of the slats by slow
degrees, then tilted and fell with an alarming clatter, Oria barely
scooting her bare toes out of the way in time. At the noise, the
door flew open and Renzo, one of her usual guards, crashed through,
sword drawn and eyes wild. At least they hadn’t left her entirely
alone.
“Princess Oria!” He pulled back several
feet, visibly calming himself, which she greatly appreciated as his
battle-ready aggression, anxiety and frustration swamped her with a
wave of frenetic energy. Chuffta landed again on her shoulder,
touching her skin with his, which helped dampen the overload
considerably. “What are you doing down here?” Renzo demanded, all
normal protocol discarded. “It’s not safe. You don’t know—”
“I do know,” she snapped, and his eyes
widened at her brusque tone. Normally Oria remained subdued and
quietly withdrawn when he escorted her. On those occasions she’d
been working on her balanced calm, not soaking in the bristling
emotions of a city under attack. “Do you know where Queen Rhianna
is?”
“Ah…” He shook his head, then nodded. “Yes,
Princess.”
“Take me to her.”
At least he adjusted to the changed reality
quickly, saluting smartly and taking the lead—sword still drawn,
eyes scanning the shadows—to guide her through the echoing empty
hallways of the palace.
“Have the Destrye penetrated inside the
city, do you know?”
Renzo shook his head, light brown curls
shifting with the vigorous movement. “I don’t know for sure, but I
don’t think so. The enemy attacked an hour after midnight. The king
called for the princes, emptied the temple of the most powerful
priests and priestesses, and mustered every guard who could be
spared. The priestesses took to the walls and the rest went to meet
the Destrye. Only the queen and her personal guard remained
behind—and me, to guard your tower.”
And they hadn’t even bothered to wake her.
The only person in all of Bára who’d slept through it all.
“
Not all of it,”
Chuffta reminded
her.
She sent him an affectionate thought,
envisioning a hug that was impractical in reality, in gratitude
that he’d awakened her, but didn’t speak it aloud. The nonmagical
tended to be disconcerted by her one-sided conversations with her
Familiar. They did much better in her presence if they all
pretended Chuffta was a pet, nothing more. No one else in Bára had
an ivory-scaled winged lizard for a pet, though derkesthai
populated Báran children’s tales. Amazing what the ordinary person
would accept in order to cope with the existence of magical gifts
they didn’t possess.
They reached her mother’s favored salon
quickly, as it lay not far from Oria’s tower. The queen’s guards
bristled, then gave way as they recognized Renzo and snapped to
attention at the sight of Oria. They didn’t attempt to stop her,
but opened the doors for Renzo to pass through first, speaking to
the guards inside the doors. Renzo’s tall frame blocked the narrow
opening and Oria chafed to push him aside, craning to see past him.
Chuffta simply took off and flew over his head.
“
She is in a deep trance,”
he
reported.
“She does not look well.”
Renzo and the queen’s guards were arguing
about whether Queen Rhianna could be disturbed, the discord
jangling through Oria’s skull, all that much worse without
Chuffta’s buffering contact. She balled her fists by her sides,
reaching for some measure of calm, and failed worse than usual.
“Enough!” she screeched, the sound grating
to her own ears. The men all fell silent, Renzo spinning to gape at
her. In his astonishment he allowed the door to swing wide, so Oria
plowed through them all, slamming through the interior door before
any of them recovered enough to prevent her.
Lit by a few candles that burned low, her
mother sat in a chair by a window that looked out on the city wall
a short distance across the chasm. The way the palace ranged over
the steep hillside, the ground floor of Oria’s tower stood stories
high over the sheer drop to the wall’s base on this side. The
parapet of the wall stood nearly level with the window’s view,
though a significant distance separated them.
“Mother!” Oria cried, rushing to her and
taking her hands. Cold and limp. Such a deep trance. “Should I
remove her mask?” she asked Chuffta, who perched on the window
ledge. Temple law and custom of privacy strictly forbade removing
anyone else’s mask, except in dire emergencies. Surely this
counted? Still, Oria hesitated, looking to Chuffta for his advice,
since he hadn’t yet answered. His sinuous neck curved so his head
reversed from his body, he sat motionless, staring with reptilian
interest at the view out the window.
At a man running along the parapet,
illuminated by the blazing torches.
Destrye. Wearing a dark fur cloak that
swirled heavily around him, he loped in a half-crouch, a dully
gleaming knife in one hand, an enormous axe strapped to his back.
Furred boots rose to his knees, crossed with leather, his muscular
thighs bare except for black curls that matched the thick locks of
his wildly tangled hair and beard. He melded from one shadow to the
next, and Oria might not have seen him if Chuffta hadn’t spotted
him.
As if feeling their attention, however, he
froze mid-step at the rim of a pool of light. Still but for the
swivel of his wolfish head, he scanned his surroundings, thorough
and unhurried.
Then locked gazes with Oria.
L
onen had seen many strange
things in the past weeks. Impossible magic and horrific deaths that
would take him years to purge from his nightmares, if he ever
could.
If he lived that long.
The sight of the woman in the window hit him
with enough force to unbalance him. Through the blood-drenched
night, he’d kept focus on one kill after the next and only on that,
much the way he’d climbed the wall, except that he slit the throats
of defenseless women, one after another, instead of reaching for
holds. They died so easily, seeming oblivious to his approach,
focusing their placid attention outward to the battle where the
booming assault of the sorcerers diminished and ceased as their
sisters succumbed to the blades of Lonen and his men.
The fact that they didn’t fight back, that
they remained so vulnerable, sickened him, each death layering on
unclean guilt that he’d ignored until the vision of the woman in
the window knifed into him like an unseen blade. Maybe it was
because her fair coloring was so much like the first woman he’d
killed. After that one, he hadn’t looked at their faces, taking the
dispensation offered by their featureless masks.
For whatever reason, the sight of her
gripped him, standing in the open window, illuminated by
candlelight in an otherwise dark tower that rose from a deep abyss.
Her hair shone a copper color he’d never seen on a living being,
like a hammered metal cloak that shifted with her startled
movements. She put a hand to her throat, eyes dark in her
fine-boned face. A creature from children’s tales perched beside
her, staring at him intently. He would have thought it a statue
carved from alabaster, but it swiveled its head on its neck to look
at the woman, then back to him.
Lonen had seen illustrations of dragons in
his boyhood books, but they’d been huge and…fictional. This thing
looked very like those, only smaller—maybe as long as his forearm,
not counting the tail. All white, it shimmered in the bright
torchlight from the walls much as the woman’s hair did. It sat on
its haunches, taloned feet clutching the stone windowsill,
bat-winged forearms mantled. Large eyes with bright green shine
dominated a wedge-shaped head with a narrow jaw and large ears. It
lashed its long, sinuous tail against the stone, as a cat watching
birds would.
Beautiful, both of them, and as fantastical
as if they’d stepped out of one of those storybooks. The wonder of
the sight swept away all the bloody horror. She was the bright face
of the terrible magics—something lovely, pure and otherworldly.
Something in him lunged at the prospect of such beauty in the
world, a part of him he hadn’t known existed. Or rather, a part he
hadn’t thought survived from childhood. That sense of wonder he’d
felt looking at those storybook illustrations, long since lost to
the grind of the Golem Wars. He lifted a hand, not sure what he
meant to do. A salute? A greeting?
“Prince Lonen!” Alby ran up, bow in hand.
“Why do you—a sorceress!” He reached for an arrow and notched it, a
smooth, practiced movement that Lonen barely stopped in time.
“No,” he commanded. “Stand down. She wears
no mask. She isn’t one of them.”
“They’re all the enemy,” Alby insisted
through gritted teeth, resisting Lonen’s grip. “She’s seen us.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Abruptly weariness
swamped Lonen. Far too soon for him to wear out, as much remained
to be done. That bright bubble of the fantastic had distracted him,
the shattering of that brief moment of childlike wonder more
painful for the sudden loss of it. He’d have been better off not
feeling it at all. “Her people are largely dead, their defenses
falling around them. Look out at the plain.”