Lonen's War (7 page)

Alby followed his nod. Grienon, enormous and
low in the sky, waxed toward full, shedding silvery light on the
quiet field. None of the magical fireballs or earthquakes thundered
through the night. The golems had dropped like corn stalks after
harvest. The Destrye forces moved in a familiar cleanup pattern,
groups of warriors methodically searching the field for the dying,
to either save or dispatch, depending on which side they’d fought
for—and if they
could
be saved. Other groups remained in
pitched battle, but the Destrye had the upper hand. Without their
magic, the Bárans would eventually fall.

For as many years as they’d worked towards
this day, Lonen had expected to feel jubilation, triumph, the roar
of victory. Not the drag of exhaustion and regret. Their plan had
worked far better than any of them had dared to hope—and yet only
bleakness filled his heart.

The copper-haired woman’s fault, for showing
him a glimpse of a dream of something more than monstrous death and
destruction. He’d been better off hoping simply to live to the next
moment, or not to die in vain.

Hope and the promise of wonder could destroy
a man’s spirit more surely than a well-wielded blade.

With one last look at the woman in the
window, he turned his back on her and her false promise. “Come,
Alby. Let’s find a ladder or stairway down to the city inside the
walls, so we can open the gates.” One that wouldn’t plunge him into
that dark abyss. “There must be stairs or ladders that the
sorceresses climbed. By sunrise, Bára will be ours.”

Soon he would be done with this evil
place.

“
Stupid to stand
in the window like that.
You made a perfect target.”

“Advice that might have been useful in the
past and is irrelevant to the present is best not offered,” Oria
replied with one of Chuffta’s favored adages, the oft-repeated
words all her shattered mind could pull together. The impact of the
Destrye’s energy and high emotional state had pushed her even
closer to the edge of control. He had no mental discipline, not
even a shred of control over his raging feelings. They’d doused her
with a bewildering range—wonder, hate blended with an odd
joyfulness, horror, despair, soaring hope, and surprising regret.
Not at all how she had expected a barbarian warrior to feel, but
then she’d never encountered one before.

Yet despite their scope and
potency—especially at such a short distance—his emotions hadn’t
overloaded her. Just left her a bit battered.

She sank to her knees, both because her
weakened legs wouldn’t hold her and to better chafe her mother’s
cold hands.

Blood pulsed weakly in her wrists, a faint
flutter of butterfly wings. The two warriors had been speaking to
each other, though she’d heard them as clearly as if they’d stood
in the same room, the thin cool air transmitting their words. Had
the Destyre been speaking the truth? Everyone dead, Bára fallen.
The night had gone ominously silent, so it seemed so.

“
It doesn’t matter,”
the Destrye
warrior had said of her, of whether she lived or died. The other
man had called him
prince
and he’d taken her measure and
declared her not worth killing, a strange tinge of betrayal to the
bitter emotion. She should be grateful for the reprieve from
imminent death, though the old anger burned at her worthlessness.
Something even a Destrye prince could recognize across the gap of a
chasm.

Enough thinking about that rough man who’d
so strangely grabbed all her attention.

“Mother!” She spoke sharply to penetrate the
trance. Deeper than Oria had ever seen. If all the sorceresses on
the walls had gone so far into sgath, no wonder they’d all died.
Still no response from the queen. Enough of this, too. “Chuffta—use
your talons to cut the mask ribbons.”

“
The temple forbids—”

“I think all bets are off tonight. It’s not
as if Priestess Febe will be looking for trespasses against holy
law to punish in the next few hours.” If the high priestess of
Bára’s temple had even survived. She might have been on the walls,
too.

“
Lift me then.”

Oria held up her left forearm for Chuffta to
land on, his feet gripping as he used his thumb talons to carefully
slice the ribbons at Rhianna’s temple. Holding the mask with her
right hand in a numb parody of the usual ritual, Oria kept it in
place while her Familiar sliced the other two sets of ribbons at
cheek and jaw.

When the mask loosened, she drew it gently
away, then tossed it on the floor. Not proper treatment for the
sacred relic, but the sight of her mother’s wide open eyes, dull
and spiritless in her deathly pale face, sent a fresh rill of
terror through her and Oria forgot all else.

“Oh, Mother,” she moaned, patting the
queen’s cold cheeks. “Come back to me, please. I need you. Don’t
leave me alone.”

“
You’re not alone. I’m always with
you.”
Chuffta, on her shoulder again, stroked her cheek with
his own, his tail looped around down around her arm to her wrist in
reassuring affection.
“Don’t cry, Oria.”

She brushed impatiently at her tears. “It’s
not all mine.”

“
Yes, you’re overloading. We should go
back up the tower.”

“You heard the Destrye. There’s no one left
in charge. I might not be a priestess, but I can’t be so fragile
that I leave Bára without direction. My father and mother would
expect that much.” Her mother, who still stared without moving or
blinking. Perhaps dead inside a body that yet lived. “I’ll get
through somehow.”

“
And if you break?”

“Then I break.”

“
You won’t do Bára any good if you’re
broken.”

She wrenched her gaze from her mother’s
blank eyes to Chuffta’s worried ones. “Look—either I do no good
because I break doing my best to serve Bára in her hour of greatest
need, or I do no good because I’m sitting in my tower preserving a
potential, something that may never manifest. The choice seems
clear. If I can just wake up the queen, she can take over.”

“
Oria, she may be…”

“Don’t say it,” she replied fiercely, taking
her mother’s face in her hands. Wishing for
hwil
more than
ever before, she tried to calm her mind, then she deliberately
reached for any glimmer of emotional energy. Strange and awkward to
go in a totally different direction—to move outward, to attempt to
receive instead of vigilantly defending herself. It opened her to
the crashing terrors, angers, and sorrows around her, but she
focused on her mother, letting Chuffta do his best to screen the
rest of it.

And there. A thread of soul-killing grief,
dark but potent. Oria fastened on it, pulling it up and out.

“Oria,” her mother breathed.

“Oh, thank all the stars!” Oria gripped her
mother’s still-limp hands. “Are you all right?”

Rhianna’s eyes filled, then overflowed, a
waterfall of tears flowing down her face. “He’s gone. Tav is dead.
There’s a hole where he was. Oh no, no, no. Why did you bring me
back?” She collapsed into sobs, not seeming to hear or feel Oria’s
reassurances.

Oria’s heart bottomed out. Her father dead,
her mother beyond reason. Likely her brothers dead, too. This
wasn’t how it should be. Oria wasn’t the strong one. Of them all,
she had the least ability to cope, much less to lead. She wanted
more than anything to crawl into her mother’s lap and be comforted,
but that wouldn’t happen. Maybe never again.

Not many made temple-blessed marriages, so
the nature of such relationships were long on myth and romance, but
short on facts. The ballads and tales always told of the sorcerer
and sorceress dying together—either in sweet old age, in each
other’s arms, or, tragically, battling some dire foe. Never did one
survive the other.

Maybe her mother’s total and shocking loss
of
hwil
hinted at why. The world quivered under Oria,
spinning into a new pattern. One where her unshakeable parents were
no longer the fixed points in her life, her mother no longer the
single person who believed in Oria. Her father was gone forever and
her mother this sobbing, hysterical wreck of a person.

Feeling sorry for herself accomplished
nothing, however. Though it felt as if the world had ended, it no
doubt continued hurtling headlong into disaster.

“Stay with her, Chuffta.”

“
No, you need me more.”

Too tired to argue, she pulled herself to
her feet, a monumental effort. Her legs leaden, she went to the
door, opening it to find Renzo and her mother’s guard waiting with
expectation so bright and dread so thick that she had to grip the
door handle to keep from bowing beneath the onslaught.

“Take the queen to her chambers and call a
healer for her. Send word round the city for anyone still able to
attend that there will be an emergency meeting in the council
chambers—”

“
At least have it in the tower, so you’ll
reduce
some
of the input. And it’s more defensible if the
Destrye enter the city.”

She nodded wearily, no longer spending the
energy to protect the sensibilities of the guard. She wasn’t
thinking clearly. “All right, that makes sense. Emergency meeting
in the third-level salon in my tower. I’m going there now. All of
you—get as much information as you can about what’s going on. Send
messages as soon as you know anything. I believe the Destrye have
plans and the means to open the gates and let their warriors into
the city. There may be no one left to stop them.”

They made sounds of protest, but subsided
when she shook her head. “Find out if I’m wrong. Make sure someone
stays with the queen, should worse come to worst.”

“I’m staying with you, Princess,” Renzo
said, face grim.

“No, I—”

“Begging your pardon, Princess, but if what
you say is true, it’s possible you are the last surviving member of
the royal family. Who is capable,” he added, carefully not looking
toward Queen Rhianna. Hating that truth, Oria cast one searching
glance at her shattered mother and queen as one of her guards
gently picked her up and carried her from the room.

“We must protect your life at all costs,”
Renzo urged quietly.

With no energy to argue and no thoughts to
muster, Oria nodded. Then went to drag herself up the long climb to
her tower, to find out whether any pieces remained to be put back
together.

B
y the time Oria reached
the third-level salon, the sky beyond the open windows had
brightened with dawn. She went to the window; the view wasn’t quite
as good as the one from her garden several floors above, but there
was little to see of the conflict. Bára lay eerily quiet.

Most likely any citizens who hadn’t been
summoned to the battle were barricaded in their houses, and any who
had answered the call to defend Bára would still be trapped outside
the walls. The main gates weren’t visible from her vantage point,
which came as something of a relief, though that might be the wrong
response to have. A good leader would want to see everything for
herself. But it might be more than she could withstand, the sight
of Bára’s gates hanging open like a wound, Destrye barbarians
streaming through it to spill more blood, to finish the job of
crushing her people.

And her. So far she hadn’t broken, had
withstood more input than ever before in her life, but it felt as
if one more blow would do her in, leaving her shattered beyond
repair.

“
You’re doing very well. Besides, there
is no ‘beyond repair.’ Where there is life, there is always the
possibility of healing.”

“But where there’s death, there is no
healing, only corruption of the flesh.” She sounded bitter even to
herself and Chuffta did not reply. The image of her mother as a
corpse in her chair still filled her head. She couldn’t quite grasp
that her father might be dead. Perhaps her brothers, too. All that
seemed far away, muffled behind a curtain she dared not draw
back.

A scuffling sound at the door made Oria turn
from her morbid thoughts, and High Priestess Febe entered, leaning
heavily on her walking stick of carved bone, accompanied by her
aged husband, Vico. Both wore their golden masks, both alive, if
not necessarily well. Vico had earned his mask fairly, of course,
but expressed the merest trickle of magical power. He served
Priestess Febe well enough to siphon off her powerful energies when
needed, but theirs was far from a perfect marriage and he couldn’t
muster any of the greater defensive or offensive magics. No one had
worried about it, because the high priestess used most of her sgath
to sustain Bára, with the help of the junior priestesses. Vico
mainly functioned to keep her balanced.

“I’ve sent word to the head priestesses of
the temples in the other cities, Princess,” Priestess Febe said,
sitting heavily. “I don’t know if they’ll be able to help—though
they owe us—but they will at least know of Bára’s peril.”