Oria's Gambit (18 page)

“Want to loop me in?” he finally asked and
Oria looked over at him with a flush on her cheekbones.

“Mostly Chuffta is telling me the same things
you are, that I should share more with you and trust you to help me
with the council.”

Surprisingly honored, he dipped his chin at
her Familiar. “Good man.”

Oria rolled her eyes at them both and threw
up her hands, which seemed a good sign indeed. Fiesty Oria would be
far better at his side than the dejected one. “Fine. I can’t
believe I’m going to do this. But I need to swear you to secrecy
somehow. Vow to your goddess or something.”

He considered her. The vow waited to be made,
of course. Would have been already, had they married in Arill’s
temple according to Destrye custom. By altering the words slightly,
they could fit his and Oria’s unusual union. A risk, promising so
much to her, and yet… he was already committed, wasn’t he? They
both were.

As he’d said to her the evening before, he’d
already made the decision, and he wasn’t a man to go back on that.
No matter his other flaws.

He set his plate aside, going to one knee
before her. In the old tradition, he picked up the hem of her silk
robe, kissed it, then caught and held her gaze. “I swear by the
magic that binds us, by the seed of me in you and the blossom of
you in me, that I shall never betray you, my wife, whether by
action or inaction.”

She stared at him, lips parted, pink with the
fruit she’d eaten. If only he could taste her, let her taste him,
they’d be so much easier with each other. Of her own accord, she
lifted a hand and carefully tucked one of his escaped curls into
his tied-back hair. “Thank you,” she said, seeming both moved and
chastened.

Tempted to break the tension with a joke, he
resisted the urge. This was an important moment between them. “We
both have fealties, Oria, people to whom we owe our allegiance, but
we can be united in that. Trust me to help you.”

“All right,” she breathed. For a moment she
seemed about to touch him, but she caught herself and shooed him
away. “Go sit over there. You’re too close for me to keep my head
straight.”

He let himself grin at her then. It salved
his admittedly too-large masculine pride that he affected her as
much she did him. Doing as she asked, he added more food to her
plate, then to his own. She shook her head at him. “This is more
food than I’ve eaten in weeks.”

“Good. Maybe you’ll start making up for
senselessly depriving yourself. Now, tell me what I need to
know.”

Putting her eating picks together, she used
them as a platform to lift the maggoty things to her mouth. They
didn’t move, so maybe they’re weren’t insect larvae after all.

“This is the thing. You asked me what the
Trom said to me that day, why its touch didn’t kill me.” She gazed
at him steadily, no waffling now, but studying his reactions,
probably reading his emotions, too, so he kept his mind calm and
still as the lakes of Dru. “It called me Princess
Ponen
,
which my mother—during a fortuitous lucid period—explained is a
very old word that means powerful potential.”

She set her plate aside and scrubbed her
palms over her knees, probably unaware that she left sweat marks
from them. The memory bothered her far more than she wanted to let
on.

“What it turns out to mean for me is that I
have both sgath and grien.” She lifted her chin, daring him to
comment.

“So you have the male kind of magic,
too.”

“Yes.” She waited, maybe for him to be
horrified or something, but he kept to the placid lake image. No
judgment from him. If that made her more powerful, all the better
for the Destrye. “You have to understand,” she continued, her face
very serious. “Sgath is passive. Priestesses absorb magic, we
gather and pool it, then feed it to our priests.
They
make
it active, using grien to build things.”

“Or make earthquakes and fireballs to destroy
things,” he noted wryly, then regretted breaking his own rule about
not referencing past wrongs. She didn’t seem to notice,
however.

“Exactly. It’s … beyond unseemly for a
woman to be able to wield grien. It’s anathema. If anyone finds
out, they won’t just take my mask and deny me the throne, they’ll
execute me.”

Something hard and mean stirred in him at
that. “They’d have to go through me.”

She gazed at him in momentary astonishment.
“I don’t think you—”

“It’s not a matter of debate, and I’m sorry I
interrupted you again, but I’m not going to argue about this. If
any of those red-robed golem wannabes make a move to lay a finger
on you, I’ll burn down Bára before I let that happen.” The anger
felt good. She wanted him to channel it? There it was. “You’re mine
now, Oria, which means I’ll protect you with the last breath in my
body.”

“What about your responsibility to the
Destrye?” she challenged.

“Don’t give me that. You’re my queen now and
the best hope of saving my people. My loyalty is one and the same.
I’ll wield my axe for you as I would for them.”

“Some things can’t be resolved with brute
strength.” Her eyes flashed as she said it and he began to see the
sides of her she’d described. Both the sensitivity that allowed her
to read his thoughts, feel his emotions, and even absorb some of
those energies, and also the direct ferocity in her restless
nature, the courage and willingness to fight.

“I know that,” he replied calmly. “That’s why
I came to you, after all.”

“I thought you came to me with the intention
of throttling me for supposedly breaking my word to you.” She said
it with the same tone of challenge, but a hint of mischief lurked
in her composed expression.

“A good warrior is ready for all
eventualities—back up plans are key.”

“A salient point, as we need one for the
council session, in case things go awry.”

“Sound reasoning. Are the three of us the
only ones who know about the grien in you?”

Looking thoughtful, she scratched her
Familiar’s breast, who seemed to be for all the world, smiling at
him. A strange sight on a lizard’s face. “Chuffta will never tell.
But there’s also my mother.”

“Who loves you and would never put you in
jeopardy, even if she’s upset about this marriage.”

“Hopefully, unless she gets it in her head
that she’s helping somehow, in her fugue state. She’s not the
greatest danger, however.” Oria grimaced apologetically. “Yar might
guess.”

“Y
ar?”

Lonen knew he must be gaping at her,
but … “Yar? As in your brother who’s battling you for the
throne and can be expected to use any and all weapons against you
to win—that Yar?”

“It’s not like there are others,” she bit out
and stood, picking up her mask.

He held out a hand for it and she sighed,
coming to sit beside him, giving it to him. He studied the pattern
of the braids, looking for places to weave the ribbons back in.
Maybe he could learn to do the braids also, if she insisted on
keeping them, so he could take her hair down as often as he liked,
then help her get ready for public appearances, too.

“As zealously as you guard this secret,” he
said, “I’m assuming you did not confide in him.”

“No. Not at all. In fact—I didn’t know I had
grien magic until a confrontation with him.”

“A confrontation?” He kept his voice neutral,
focusing on making the ribbons tight enough to hold the mask on,
but not make her uncomfortable. She must have washed her hair, too,
while he was working off his mad, because she smelled of a
different flower now. And he should have killed that officious
twerp when he had the chance.

“Don’t think I can’t detect those thoughts
beneath that pretty mountain lake and musing about my hair. It’s
honeysuckle and, yes, Yar and I had a fight and I attacked him with
my grien magic. He ran away. It’s over. I defended myself and won,
so you can forget about those revenge fantasies you’re
brewing.”

“The lakes of Dru are very beautiful, lovely
to swim in during the hot summer months. I’ll take you to my
favorite.” His favorite that still existed, as the first two were
nothing but holes in the ground, but he wouldn’t burden her with
that guilt as well.

“I don’t know how to swim.” She sounded
bemused.

The ribbons took a lot longer to weave in
than to undo. “You don’t?”

“I’ve never seen enough water in one place to
be able to swim in it. The baths are as deep as it gets around
here.”

“What about the bay?”

She shook her head minutely, so as not to
disturb his work. “Outside the city walls, remember?”

“So what’s up with that aspect—what does it
do to you to go outside them?”

“You saw.” She made a disgusted sound. “I
don’t know how it works, but somehow the city walls shield the
priestesses. They allow us to focus on the sgath beneath Bára, to
absorb what’s described as a concentrated, clean magic, rather than
the chaotic variety in the outer world. Outside, we kind of
overload.”

“Just as you do with skin-to-skin contact
with someone who’s not shielded with
hwil
.”

“You do pay attention.”

“And here you say I don’t listen. So I’m also
thinking this is why the priestesses were on the walls for the
battle—because they can’t go past them.”

“That and the source of magic is below Bára
and we can’t go far from it.”

“You said sgath comes from Sgatha.”

“It does, but via her communion with the
earth. Bára sits on a special place—as do our sister cities—where
the sgath filters through the rocks and soil, becoming harmonized
in a way, so that we can take it in without damage. We have to
learn to do that judiciously, so we don’t overload.”

“Thus your high lonely tower.”

“Thus my high, peaceful, and quiet tower,
yes.”

He let that go. “But you can’t use this
chaotic magic in the greater world that you mentioned?” Two ribbons
down, one more to go. The intricate task helped him order his
thoughts and questions.

“I think it’s like trying to light a candle
with a lightning bolt. But nobody tries, that I know of, because we
can’t leave the sgath provided by our cities.”

“What happens if you do?”

“What happens to a plant without water?”

A too apt analogy, sitting in her dying
garden. She hadn’t been exaggerating about the impact of her trying
to go to Dru. Ah well, that road lay over the next rise.

“So, Yar might guess and would surely use
this knowledge to undermine your bid for the throne, but he’s not
here. Do you think he told anyone?”

“I don’t think so—it would be to his
advantage to keep the knowledge to himself. Also, I can’t see the
temple not acting on it if he told anyone there, and I’m clearly
not dead. But I do think that’s part of his hurry to find a bride.
With an ideal partner, he’d have more than enough power to handle
me. Failing that, he might try to expose me if I’m not crowned
before he returns.”

“Why not expose you after that point—get the
temple to execute you and take the crown once you’re gone?”

“The queen—or king—trumps the temple. They
would not be able to act against me.”

“All the more reason to succeed this
afternoon then. There. All tightly masked again.”

“Thank you.” She adjusted to face him, but
didn’t move as far away as she might have once. “I know the mask
repels you, so I appreciate your helping me with it.”

Slowly, so she’d have time to stop him, he
raised his hand and ran a fingertip along the cheekbone of the
metallic face, just as he’d longed to do with her. “There’s one
advantage. At least I can touch this.”

“You’re obsessed with touching me,” she said,
but without her usual exasperation.

The metal was strangely cool, not as hot from
the sun as he might have imagined. “I’m a man of the physical.
Maybe I need to feel things to believe in them.”

“Maybe I’m not real.” A bit of whimsy from
her, but also hints of darker pain beneath.

“Sometimes I wonder.” Sometimes all of it
seemed like a dream, that he might be still standing on that wall,
blood dripping from his hands, while he glimpsed her, a vision from
fantasy, candlelit in a window. He tapped the mask. “But this feels
like it.”

“And it allows me to fake
hwil
,” she
replied, all seriousness. “That’s what you need to know if you’re
going to help me. If I lose that façade in the council session—and
it’s entirely possible because I’m already bursting with sgath and
I can’t vent to grien—then I’ll lose all chance at being
queen.”

“So, you’d faint again?”

“Possibly. Or worse.”

She meant exposing herself as a wielder of
grien. “Maybe we should wait. Let you rest another day or two.”

She wrung her hands together. “We can’t
afford the time. Yar could return at any moment.”

“I don’t like risking your health.”

“That’s not important.”

“It is to me. It should be to you.”

She waved that off, though Chuffta rustled
his wings in a way that made him think the Familiar agreed. “I’ve
survived similar crises so far. But I mean that the real worst case
scenario is that I could accidentally use grien like I did with
Yar,” she said, confirming his speculation.

“Then you’d be forced to lay about with that
battle axe of yours and that can’t end well.”

He smiled grimly for her little joke, but
didn’t let it distract him. “Then why not get rid of some on
purpose now, before we go? Vent it like you say. Bleed off the
energy.”

She stood, scrubbing her hands together.
“Because I’m afraid of hitting myself in the noggin with my own
sword,” she admitted ruefully. “Women aren’t taught to control
grien, only sgath. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve only ever
used it impulsively, out of emotion, not
hwil
.”