Authors: Julie Dean Smith
Then, with aggravating frequency, she would remind herself that even if she could escape the fortress, she was, ultimately, on an island; stranded, with no money to hire a skiff and no spells to call for help.
If there was one aspect of her confinement that she did not look upon with complete misery, it was that the sealing spell’s pressures were not so quick to affect her as they had been the summer before. Then, she had lapsed into forgetfulness within a day of her confinement, unable to keep proper track of time; now she was plagued by little more than a woolly head and a tendency to bump into things if she wasn’t careful. Why that was she did not know; the Sage’s spell was more potent than the one Aldus placed upon her. Although it oftentimes chafed like an ill-fitting boot, Athaya felt Brandegarth’s handiwork within her constantly, the seal’s fetters tight and unforgiving, as if her spells were bound with irons rather than cord. Perhaps, she reasoned, she had gained some small immunity from her past experience with the seal and would thus be able to combat her present ordeal more easily. Or perhaps, she dared to hope, the Sage’s spellcasting grew sloppy, carried off by sheer force rather than technique; a likely surmise, if their hellish translocation to Sare was any indication of his ability.
Tullis brought her supper at the usual time—some variety of fish, by the smell of it—and found her picking through Drianna’s extensive and abandoned wardrobe, having finally concluded that she should change into some other dress after a full week in her own. She hated to take anything that the Sage had provided for her, but the sight of her wrinkled silk gown, so lovely on the day of Durek’s speech in Kaiburn, was beginning to disgust even herself.
“I’ve brought you some whitefish tonight,” the steward said, passing with aggravating ease through the binding spells upon the door—spells that raked her skull with white-hot claws of agony whenever she drew too close to them. “And I found a bottle of Evarshot wine from the mainland in his Grace’s cellars; I thought that might please you.”
Athaya scowled fleetingly at him, more out of habit this time than any palpable sense of resentment, and tossed aside a gown of butter-colored silk, certain that the color would look appalling on her. She had been surly with Tullis all week, and at the moment, relaxed by the gentle sheeting of rain that had finally begun to fall, she felt somewhat sorry for it—he was, from what she had seen, a gracious and conscientious man who was simply doing his duty. He reminded her strongly of Kale: mature and steadfast, without a great deal to say, but richer in compassion and integrity than the casual observer might suspect.
Why then was he here, she wondered, servant to a man who so clearly lacked all of those qualities?
Athaya closed the wardrobe doors and leaned against them. “Why do you serve him?” She asked it as a challenge, daring him to provide a reasonable reply.
Tullis looked up as he set her tray down on the table, startled at the question. Not because it was the first complete sentence she had spoken to him in six days, but because he had never encountered anyone who needed to ask.
“He is the Sage. We all serve him.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But
why
?”
Thoughtfully, Tullis folded a linen napkin into the shape of a seashell and placed it beside her plate, then filled her goblet with the hearty Caithan wine. “He has been a good lord to us, my Lady. And he wants the same thing you do—a better life for our people.”
“Yes, but I never planned to usurp my brother’s place to achieve that.”
Tullis was not eager to argue the point. He frowned, silently disquieted, and Athaya wondered if it was the first time he had considered that Dameronne’s prophecy deftly sidestepped the fact that for the Sage to assume Caithe’s crown, someone else would have to lose it.
She sat down in the chair Tullis pulled out for her and sipped absently at the Evarshot. Its smooth, familiar taste should have comforted her, but at the moment, it only made her more frustrated and homesick.
“He thinks to make me his wife,” she observed, as Tullis graced her fish with a spoonful of slivered almonds.
The steward nodded, painfully aware of her opinions on that subject. “Yes, he spoke of that… after Lady Drianna left.”
“Left? More like he cast her off.”
Athaya’s goblet stopped halfway to her lips; what had she just done? Drianna hadn’t told anyone where she was going when she left Sare, and if he had not already discovered her presence in Delfarham, the Sage might make a concerted effort to do so were he to learn she had joined the ranks of his enemies.
Tullis put that particular fear to rest at once. “I knew she would go to you. Where else was left to her?” He let out a heavy sigh, genuinely regretful. “Lady Drianna was a charming and spirited woman. I saw her leave the fortress that day, heading for the port. His Grace did not ask what had become of her, so I suppose it wasn’t too deceitful of me not to mention what I’d seen. She was devastated by his rejection.” He shook his head sadly. “I miss her a great deal. She brought much laughter to this place. His Grace should not have hurt her so; if he did not wish to marry her, at least he could have broken the news to her more gently.”
Athaya lanced a bit of fish with her knife, savoring the tender filet in spite of the lord who provided it. “If he had wanted to marry Drianna as much as he claimed, then why didn’t he simply put this lunatic plan of his to the test and give her a seed of power? But no,” she went on, biting down angrily on an almond, “he heard about me and decided a trained adept would be a more suitable wife for someone of his godlike stature.” She cast the knife at her fish again, fancying that the blade sank deep into the Sage himself. “But if not Drianna, he will try his scheme on someone else, presuming to do what it is not our place to do by granting the gift of power. Not satisfied with God’s miracles,” she finished scornfully, “he sets about working his own.”
Tullis’s face was profoundly blank. “What are you… I don’t—”
“Hasn’t he told you yet?”
She knew by the bewilderment in his eyes that the Sage had not. Perhaps Brandegarth had shared his schemes only with her, hoping to lure her from her convictions—and her husband—with the untold glory of founding an unbreakable dynasty of wizards in Caithe. As the Sage’s devoted servant, Athaya waited for Tullis to launch into a fervent defense of his lord’s plans, confident that anything the Sage did was sanctioned by God. Instead, his gentle face sagged with despair, as if he had long anticipated bad news and was simply saddened that this was the day he received it.
“The books,” Tullis murmured, as if she were not there. “He was reading those books…”
Then he aimed his gaze at her like a blade, and Athaya felt an ensuing tickling sensation around the inside edges of her skull; feathers of inquiry, silently seeking proof of her claims. When the feeling subsided, Tullis sank down at the table across from her, his eyes hollow and lost.
“You speak the truth. His Grace has indeed told you these things.” He drew in a long, melancholy breath, and for a brief moment, his lower lip trembled as if his composure was close to crumbling.
“Tullis, I know this plan of his sounds crazy, but I can’t promise you it won’t work. It just might, if he ever gets the chance to try it. Don’t you realize what that means? Once he starts interfering with the natural order of things, taking magic from those he doesn’t think worthy of it and giving it to those he does, the power will consume him. I tried to tell him that the ability to see the seeds will fade in time, but he didn’t believe me. And I can’t even guarantee that I’m right,” she pointed out. “Drianna told me his power was released from its seal under rigid controls—that it took you and two others to contain it—whereas mine flooded out in a rush and made me ill for weeks. Maybe that made a difference—I just don’t know. But even if his ability does fade, it won’t do so for months yet… and think of all the lives he can disrupt in the meantime.”
Never mind stealing Mailen’s future from him,
she added inwardly. As Durek’s heir, Mailen’s very existence would be a constant threat to the Sage’s position; Athaya put no credence in the Sage’s claims that he would let the boy live in peace as long as he remained in exile. At the very least, he would seek him out to determine what kind of foe the little prince might grow up to be. And were he to discover the dormant magic within the boy—as Athaya had done months ago, without intending to—the Sage could stop that precious seed from sprouting, robbing Mailen of his gift before he ever realized he possessed it.
Tullis avoided her gaze, fixing his attention on the half-eaten filet on her plate. “His Grace could not… he will see his error…”
“He won’t reconsider,” Athaya told him, as sure of that fact as she was that the full moon would inevitably follow the new. “Rhodri never did.”
It was too much for Tullis to bear; everything that he had believed in was suddenly disintegrating before his eyes. He scrambled from his chair and hurried away, shaking his head in fervent denial, as if he had just been told of a beloved wife’s infidelity. “I must go. I can hear no more of this tonight.”
“Tullis, wait—” But he paid no heed to her as he stumbled blindly from the chamber, and Athaya could not pass beyond the binding spells to pursue him.
* * * *
Tullis did not come to her chamber the next day. Nor did he come on the second day… or the third. Her meals were delivered by another of the Sage’s staff, this one far more dreary and closemouthed than his predecessor. When she asked whether the steward was ill, she was first ignored, then told it was none of her concern, and finally informed—quite tersely—that an unspecified emergency had called him away from the palace for a time and that she should not inquire about it again.
The steward’s continued absence made her uneasy. Their last conversation had clearly unsettled him, and Athaya feared he may have gone to see the Sage, perhaps to gain his lord’s assurances that her dark prophecies were simply the ramblings of a desperate woman.
Then, three days later, she was eased awake in the predawn hours by the gentle shake of a knotted hand. She blinked against the nearby radiance of an oil lamp, glimpsing in its dim glow a weathered face framed by white hair, and thought—for only an instant—that it was Master Hedric’s phantom come to haunt her.
“Tullis, where—” He placed his finger over his lips and Athaya quickly dropped her voice to a whisper. “Where have you been?”
He offered her a pensive smile. “Out searching my soul.”
As Athaya slid out of bed, Tullis gallantly turned his eyes away until she had covered her shift with one of Drianna’s embroidered robes. Strange, she thought as she looped the silk belt around her waist, how unusually alert she felt despite being roused at such an hour. Her head was unclouded and she did not feel even slightly off-balance.
She looked at Tullis sharply. The sealing spell was broken.
“It was not easy,” he remarked, subtly proud. Even in the dim light, Athaya could see the fatigue shading his eyes. “The Sage sets a powerful seal.”
She groped for adequate words of thanks—did he truly realize the precious gift he had given her?—but Tullis did not need to hear them. “A small number of wizards came back to Sare to recover from injuries they sustained during the invasion. Without going into my reasons for doing so, I asked them about the Sage and his actions. The things they told me…” Tullis flinched at the mere memory. “His Grace was always an exacting lord, but never a brutal one; his viciousness in murdering the priesthood… it grieves me terribly. He may not agree with them about the nature of our gift—I certainly do not—but Caithe’s priests serve the same God we do, though in an admittedly wrong-minded fashion. He could have given them a quick and honorable end.”
Athaya was tempted to observe that men like Lukin and his Tribunal of Justices doled out little enough mercy—why should they be granted any in return? But she also knew that just as all wizards did not believe their power endowed them with inborn supremacy, not every priest shared in the official opinion that the Lorngeld should be systematically hunted down and destroyed. Sadly, the Sage would not bother to discriminate between the two.
“I should have seen this coming,” Tullis went on, sinking down on a cushioned stool at her bedside. His fingers absently followed the scalloped tracery on the bedcurtains. “I feared something like this might happen… months ago, after I released him from the sealing spell. His Grace was an ambitious man before, of course—no man without aspirations could attain the office of Sage—but he was always mindful of his proper place; God’s chosen, but also His servant. He forgets that now, I think. He disavows his limitations and reaches for more than is his due.”
“Should that surprise you?” Athaya asked. Try as she might, she could not envision the Sage in the more humble form Tullis described.
“It does, because such folly almost killed him once and not so long ago that he should have forgotten.” Tullis looked to the oil lamp, idly watching the steady flame as he spoke. “It was at his last Challenge, over a year ago. His opponent, a wizard named Bressel, feigned weariness and defeat as the contest drew on. As a result—a result that Bressel anticipated and exploited to perfection—the Sage grew confident… and thus careless. Bressel then surprised him by lashing out at full strength with his deadliest spells. The Sage was the better magician, but it took every bit of his talent to save himself that day. Even so, he came away badly injured.”
Tullis turned from the lamp, blinking away the afterglow that danced before his eyes. “But he is more powerful now than he was then, and it makes him feel invincible.”
“But you knew he wanted more power all along,” Athaya pointed out. “And you knew the sealing spell would give it to him. You even cast the seal yourself.”
“Yes,” Tullis admitted, without pride, “but only because he commanded me to do so. I never favored the plan, Princess, as Lady Drianna herself can tell you. In my mind, it is ungrateful for any wizard to deliberately try to gain more magic than God chose to grant. But his Grace did not care to listen to my reasoning—in fact, he rebuked me for it and caustically suggested that I tender my ethical complaints to the Circle of Masters. I had no choice but to obey his orders if I wished to retain my place in his household. And though he trusted me above all others, he still had me watched after that; Connor—the man you knew as Lady Drianna’s husband—was put under a compulsion to kill me if I failed to release the Sage on the prearranged date.”