The Wizard King (11 page)

“The people of Caithe have been taught for centuries that having magic is a death sentence. In their minds, my refusing to speak their future is like signing that warrant myself.”

“And that’s exactly what Brand wants to happen,” Drianna said, reluctantly finishing her tale. “He wants to tell everyone whether they’re to have the power or not and persuade them that you kept your talent a secret so they’d be forced to join your side after it was too late for them to do anything else. He thinks he can turn them against you that way… the ones that haven’t already left because of—”

She broke off abruptly and averted her eyes in shame. “I’m truly sorry for what he did to Prince Nicolas, your Highness. I know that doesn’t help, but… I had no idea it would turn out the way it did.”

“He’s in good hands,” Athaya said, rubbing the growing fatigue from her eyes. Drianna might know something about the Sage’s compulsion spell that the rest of them did not, but Athaya hadn’t the strength to pursue the subject tonight.

“You haven’t exactly brought us good news,” she observed, “but you’ve given us fair warning. At least now we know what to expect.”

“It’s hard to know what to expect from Brand anymore,” Drianna said worriedly. “The sealing spell… it has changed him. Oh, he was always a bit conceited, I’ll grant you that, but now he acts as if he’s the only man on earth that God has ever deigned to speak to. You may be wizards, too, but you’ve never claimed to be better than I am because of it. I knew he felt that way all along, but it didn’t bother me so much… until I knew for certain that I’d never be one of you. But I’m here for good this time… if you’ll have me.” She sniffled once more and wiped the last bit of moisture from her eyes. “Just tell me what I can do to help stop him.”

“Do?” Athaya laughed mirthlessly. “I don’t have the faintest idea what any of us can do. No yet, anyway. But thank you,” she said, dividing her gaze between Drianna and Ranulf. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all of this information yet, but I’m grateful to have it. And it’s good to have you back.” She gave Drianna’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Both of you.” True, she had been hurt by Drianna’s betrayal, but Athaya had never disliked her. And now that Drianna had gotten a taste of betrayal as well—and been changed by it—Athaya knew that they all had troubles enough without clinging to old grudges.

Ranulf belched his satisfaction. “Now why don’t one o’ you prove how happy you all are to see me by fetching me another beer.”

Grumbling merrily, Tonia snatched up his mug and invited him to follow her to the casks.

“And send Kale to me on your way out,” Athaya called after them, appending a suggestion that Drianna get herself something to drink as well. Drianna was reluctant to be seen among the others at first, but thirst quickly won out—as soon as Ranulf promised to physically close the mouth of anyone who objected to her presence back at the camp.

Once they had gone, Athaya caught Jaren studying her dubiously. “What do you need Kale for?” he asked, easing closer to her. “If you’re thinking what I
think
you are—”

“I probably am,” she confessed with a shrug. “But do you have any better ideas?”

Kale answered her summons as promptly as if the king himself had sent for him. He had been with Athaya from the beginning, having deserted his post in the King’s Guard soon after Captain Graylen’s death. Though not a wizard himself, the old soldier was unswervingly loyal and had saved her life—and Jaren’s—on more than one occasion. Tonight, however, the scarred hands held a delicate handcarved flute instead of a weapon—an item, Athaya thought, much more worthy of his gentle heart than a sword or crossbow could ever be.

“You sent for me, my Lady?”

“Yes, Kale. I need you to do something for me later tonight, once everyone’s gone to sleep. Something very important.” With the toe of her slipper, she prodded the edge of a loose stone in the chapel floor. Beneath it was buried the most lethal of weapons—a priceless crown of corbals, stolen from the king on the day he had tried to force her recantation before the people of Kaiburn. The boy who had stolen it later died for his effort, but little had Cameron suspected that he had procured the very item that could hold the key to their salvation.

“I want you to dig up the strongbox and take it away from camp—a mile, at the very least. Open it up someplace extremely dark; if enough moonlight hits those crystals, we may feel them even at such a distance. Then I want you to pry a few corbals loose from their settings. Get a variety of sizes and wrap each one up tight. When you’re done, come back and bury the strongbox again. Tomorrow morning, bring the loose corbals to me.”

Kale’s brows arched substantially. “To…
you
?”

“Yes, Kale,” she said, knowing it sounded as odd as a prisoner requesting that another rat be placed in his cell. She offered him a crooked smile. “I haven’t had a headache in a while and thought I was about due.”

Jaren crossed his arms over his chest, visibly displeased, but also aware that they were rather short of options at the moment. “I knew it.”

“If we can learn how to stand up to these crystals, too, then we’ve got a chance to surprise him.” Athaya curled into a tight little ball in the pew, hugging her knees to her chest. “I remember the first night that Rhodri came to me in the dungeon—the night I accused him of trying to torture you to death with that corbal crystal. He told me—how did he phrase it?—that it was all a trick, just like Ranulf said. That the corbal doesn’t
cause
pain, but deludes a wizard’s mind into thinking the pain is there. He said you could have stayed in agony forever, until you either went crazy, or killed yourself to escape a pain that didn’t really exist.”

Jaren stiffened a bit; the memory of that raking pain, however false, was powerful still. “But to start off cold, without any idea of what to do—”

“We may not know, but I’ll wager Drianna does—at least in theory. And if she’s sincere about joining us, she’ll be glad to tell us anything she knows about how the Sage wields his power.” Athaya’s eyes blazed with dark intensity as she listened to the singing and laughter of her campmates, as yet ignorant of the peril rising in the west. “Maybe my power isn’t as strong as it was, but I’m going to figure out how the Sage resists those crystals. At this point, it may be our only chance at stopping him.”

The morning after the midsummer feast, Athaya, Jaren, Kale, and Drianna packed a basket of food, a flagon of watered wine, and a menacing collection of tightly wrapped corbal crystals and set out from the camp. Their destination was a small clearing roughly a mile north of the monastery grounds; at that distance, Athaya’s experiments with the crystals should not disturb the others.

She was, on the contrary, expecting to get the headache of her life.

“If you’re so certain of making yourself ill, then wouldn’t it be best to stay closer to home?” Kale ventured, increasingly unsettled at the growing distance their footsteps took them from the sanctuary of the forest camp. He cast furtive glances over his shoulder every so often, as if suspicious that the seemingly tranquil expanse of pines and brambles and snowy white trilliums around them cloaked the presence of the Tribunal’s agents—or the Sage’s. “Can’t you just do your…’experiments’ inside a set of wards?”

“I wish it were that simple.” Athaya smiled resignedly at him, grateful for his concern but powerless to alter the reason for it. “Wards may act as a barrier against magic, but they don’t work against corbal crystals. Remember the day we found Cordry and that priest—Father Greste, it was—surprised us with a corbal-studded candlestick? Ranulf had conjured wards to keep Cordry’s spells from harming anyone, but the crystal’s influences passed right through them. Luckily for Cordry, he was early enough in his
mekahn
that the crystal couldn’t hurt him much. No,” Athaya went on, somewhat pensive, “whatever power a corbal has, it doesn’t work quite the same way spells do. I’m afraid we don’t know everything about corbals yet,” she conceded with a shrug, “but thanks to Drianna, we’re about to find out a little bit more.”

“Have you told Master Hedric about any of this yet?” Jaren asked her, drawing back a snarled curtain of ivy and grape vines from the trail to let Athaya pass.

“I opened a panel to him earlier this morning,” she replied. “He was as surprised as the rest of us to learn that there’s some way other than a sealing spell to avoid being hurt by a corbal. And as you might expect,” she added with an obligatory air, “he told me to be careful.”

“I just don’t see how this talent can be commonplace on Sare—and has been for centuries, apparently—and yet not even our Great Masters know a thing about it, much less how it’s done. There’s not even the slightest reference to such a thing in the
Book of Sages.
”

“It was probably something the Sarians stumbled across by accident. I can’t imagine they set out to conquer the corbals on purpose.” She tossed a wry grin over one shoulder. “After all, how often did it occur to
you
to sit in a room with some corbal crystals and see how long it would take to make them stop hurting? That’s like pressing your hand against a hot cauldron and trying to make your flesh stop burning—not something any sane person would do to enliven an otherwise dull evening.”

Drianna, having fallen a few yards behind to pick a handful of rose hips for the evening’s tea, stuffed the tender treasures into her basket and hurried to catch up. “Bran—the Sage,” she hastily corrected with a sneer, determined never to use the endearment again, “told me that it was Dameronne himself who first discovered how to do it—and it wasn’t any accident.” She snagged her sleeve on a protruding sumac branch and paused for a moment while Kale stepped up to free it. “After King Faltil killed most of the wizards in Caithe two centuries ago, the handful that escaped to Sare knew they needed to find a way to withstand the crystals. Before Faltil’s scourge, the crystals had never been used as a weapon on such a large scale. No one truly realized the damage they could do.”

“I can believe that,” Jaren observed. “In Reyka, everyone knows what corbals can do, but nobody worries much about it. The crystals are all but nonexistent, and there hasn’t been a single instance in our history when they’ve been used for a massive assault like Faltil’s. So why would anyone bother to suffer through a great deal of pain to learn how to defend against a weapon they’ll probably never face?”

“But the Sarian wizards expected to face it,” Drianna pointed out solemnly. “Dameronne’s prophecy convinced them that they were destined to return to Caithe and rule one day—and they knew they would be confronting the crystals then. In order for the Lorngeld to rule Caithe permanently, Dameronne knew they had to find a way around this weakness. They took some of Faltil’s corbal-studded weapons back to Sare to use for practice, and then, once the technique was finally discovered, each wizard to become Sage passed the knowledge on. Brandegarth learned how to resist corbals from the man who was Sage before him. That is,” she added sourly, “before he Challenged him and took his place.”

“But where did Dameronne begin?” Athaya asked, overwhelmed by the immensity of such a task, as if someone had just handed her a pickax, gestured to a vast limestone quarry, and told her to build a castle by sunset. “How did he even know where to start?”

Drianna lowered her thick lashes, shamed by this fragment of her Sarian heritage. “He started with drugs,” she murmured, her voice as soft as the summer breeze stirring the pines. “Pastle seed, specifically; the plant is native to Sare. Inhaling the powdered seeds sharpens your thinking and makes physical sensations more acute—that is, as long as you don’t use too much or grow addicted to it. No small number of Sarians have, and it eventually leaves them unable to cast a simple witchlight, much less anything more difficult. I’ve heard it said that Dameronne used pastle seed from time to time—some believe it’s the only way he could have foreseen your crusade so far in advance—so it’s logical to believe he would have used it to try and defeat the corbals, too.”

“Just the reverse of looca-smoke,” Jaren said thoughtfully, pondering Drianna’s story with a scholar’s studied detachment. “Looca-smoke numbs the mind so the corbal’s pain isn’t as intense, but at the same time, it leaves you too addled to use your magic. Pastle seed does exactly the opposite.”

Athaya felt a sickly flutter in her belly. Surely there was some other way of mastering the power of a corbal crystal! Even if the pastle plant could be obtained, she staunchly refused to scramble her brains by experimenting with its dangerous seeds. After enduring both her
mekahn
and the sealing spell in the span of a single year, the thought of forsaking complete control over her wits was abhorrent to her. “But Ranulf didn’t say anything about the Sage using a drug…”

“No. Pastle seed is only a stepping stone. Once you know the secret of the corbal’s power, you can gradually wean yourself from the drug. Theoretically, anyway. Most wizards still need it as a crutch to defy all but the smallest crystals. But the Sage never had to use pastle seed at all—not even when he engaged more than one crystal at a time. His adept abilities gave him the skill he required without it.”

Athaya let out a thin sigh of relief; if Brandegarth had learned to battle the corbals without the drug, then she should be able to do the same. “The drug explains how the trick was discovered, but what exactly
is
the trick itself? What did the pastle seed allow Dameronne and the others to learn about the crystals?” Athaya stepped over the rotting remains of a fallen birch and then turned back to Drianna. “You’ve seen the Sage work with corbals before… did he ever tell you exactly how he does it?”

Drianna bobbed her head, eager to be of use to her new allies in any way she could. “He liked to talk to me about his magic, though I didn’t always understand everything he said. Once, he told me that all a wizard has to do is learn to tell the corbal is
doesn’t
hurt as strongly as the corbal is telling you it
does.
I can’t imagine a piece of rock actually ‘saying’ anything,” she added with a baffled frown, “but I know that’s what he said. If you push back hard enough, you can suspend the crystal’s power over you.”