Lonen's War Read online

  “I don’t want broth. I want to know what happened. Am I sick?”

  “Yes.” Her mother looked away as she said it. “You’ve been very ill and you must take care not to relapse. You must rest and heal.”

  “That’s what I just told Chuffta—I’ve been doing that.”

  “He’s wise and you should follow his advice. That’s why you have him. This is not something to be quickly overcome. Recovery follows its own calendar.”

  Oria struggled to sit up, to look around, not sure who or what she sought or why her body responded so sluggishly. Then realized her mother was holding her down by the shoulders, the slight pressure more than Oria could muster the strength to resist.

  “Why am I so weak?”

  “Because you’ve been ill,” her mother replied with strained patience. “It’s not good for you to become agitated. Sleep. Rest. Heal.”

  The familiar calm of her mother’s soothing energy spun through her. Reminding her of something. Her mother, face creased with devastation, unresponsive. In a chair, overlooking the wall, where a Destrye warrior covered in blood, carrying an axe, paused in a pool of light, just as in those lurid paintings that had aroused the fascination of adolescent self. So vividly real and—

  With a choked gasp, her eyes flew open. “The Destrye!”

  Her mother winced in regret. “Don’t think about it. It’s done. You must—”

  Harsh reality cut through. “Father is dead. What of Ben, Nat, and Yar?”

  The queen passed a shaking hand over her face. “Nat and Yar are fine.”

  Oh no, not Ben. Not her gentle brother, who’d never once teased about her lack of hwil. Who’d taken his mask after his little brother and never showed bitterness or any kind of grudge. She’d secretly hoped Ben would even things out by finding his ideal wife first. Now he never would. She lay back, letting the deep and formless grief move through her. Something else. “And the Destrye?”

  “Try not to—”

  This time Oria managed to struggle up to a sitting position, mostly because her mother seemed unable to resist further. Oria’s body protested, stiff as a corpse and weak as a newborn’s. What in Sgatha had happened to her?

  “I have to know.” The memories came back, jagged, sharp-edged scenes, and her head began to throb. Descending from her tower. Her mother unconscious. Enemy within the walls. Her brothers without. Meeting with what remained of the council.

  The granite-eyed Destrye prince. Something in her shied away from thinking past him.

  “You were overcome,” she said, touching her mother’s arm. “Are you all right?”

  “I will live. Thanks to you.” Something in her tone made it sound more like an accusation, but only sorrow showed in her mother’s face. “Though I shall always regret that I failed you in your hour of need.”

  “Failed me?”

  “I’m so, so sorry, my baby girl.” With a broken sound, she stood. “I need a moment.”

  Oria watched her mother, the unflappably hwil, ever cool and composed queen and priestess, as she hastened out to the terrace, a hand over her mouth to muffle the sobs that nevertheless blew back in on the breeze. Chuffta remained on the light blanket beside her, the tip of his tail lightly clasping her wrist. Steadying her. As he always did.

  “She believes you would not have fallen ill had she remained cognizant,” he explained with great gentleness.

  “What does my being sick have to do with…” But the rest came back, reverberating through her skull. The excruciating agony of stepping through the gates, the cascade of energy and emotion, along with vibrations she’d never before encountered, one upon the next, until—

  “Stop it.” Chuffta’s sharp thought cut through the rest. “That’s in the past. You survived it. But thinking of it can recall the damage. Exercise some self-discipline and cut it off.”

  Gaping at the lizard, whose green eyes sparked with unprecedented ferocity, she wrenched her thoughts from that moment. The pounding in her head receded, a welcome reward. “Tell me what happened after.” She put a finger to her temple to stop the distracting pulse beat. “Are they—gone?”

  A pair of stone-gray eyes in a scarred, blood-spattered face.

  “Will you promise to remain calm? Let me walk you through a meditation first.”

  “I don’t want to meditate.” Her voice came out too sharply impatient, a bit of wobble beneath. She let out a long breath. “I’ll be calm, just tell me.”

  Chuffta appeared satisfied and folded back his wings. “The Destrye accepted your offer of surrender. They occupy the city, negotiating with your brother, who is now king.”

  Nat was king? Why wasn’t her mother ruling in the waked of their father’s passing? Nat had no wife yet, not even an imperfect one to feed him energy. He couldn’t be king.

  “The Destrye king does not know your laws. Nat and the council stall for time.”

  “Time? What good will more time do?”

  Chuffta’s hesitation was palpable. “They have invited the Trom to Bára.”

  That memory came back with force. Folcwita Lapo arguing that they should send for help from the Trom. The fear and heightened excitement some of the others felt at the suggestion. “But we decided not to send for them.”

  “It appears your decision was overruled.” Queen Rhianna, composed again, stood in the doorway, framed by brilliant sunshine. “Something else I blame myself for.”

  “Why?” Oria frowned, more for the fact that she’d suddenly realized she’d never before seen her mother so often without her mask of rank. “You didn’t call them, did you?”

  “No. High Priestess Febe did.”

  “With…Priest Vico sending the call? I didn’t think he was powerful enough.”

  “He’s not. I think—” She sighed heavily, sagging against the doorframe. “I think Nat must have done it. Had I been cognizant, I would never have allowed such a drastic, foolish move.” Moving like a woman twice her years, she came to sit beside Oria on the bed, gripping her forearms over the long sleeves of her sleeping gown, preempting further questions. “Let me resume my apology. I regret, so very much, that I failed you. I lost hwil—an unforgivable breach. I apologize with all my heart and will spend what is left of my life trying to make it up to you.”

  The bed seemed to sway under Oria, the sense of dislocation, of the bottom falling out of her world so profound. “You can’t lose hwil once you find it.”

  Her mother wouldn’t meet her eye, squeezing her hands too tight. “I did. It’s…it’s thought that when your father…” She choked on the words.

  A chill of horror-filled grief dragged over Oria, followed by beads of cold sweat down her spine.

  “Steady,” Chuffta murmured.

  “That I broke,” her mother managed to get out. “Thus I no longer deserve the mask of a priestess.”

  “They took your mask away?”

  Her mother nodded, weeping again. No composure at all. “When Tav fell, I—” She couldn’t continue, her wild grief, despair, and a black rage beneath it all pouring into Oria. Gasping, she reeled under it, aware on one level of Chuffta’s tail winding between their hands, breaking her mother’s grip—too much, even through the silk. As soon as the contact broke, Oria could orient again, begin to separate her mother’s grief and anger from her own—though they had so much interface, like mirrors of each other, that she couldn’t disentangle all of it.

  “Rhianna.” Juli, a junior priestess, new to her mask, was suddenly there. “Come away. This isn’t good for Oria.”

  “I let him die,” Rhianna sobbed. “I wasn’t enough. The union cracked and…” Her words devolved into a garble as Juli led her away.

  Stunned, Oria lay back, trying to process it all. Letting the emotional energy drain away. “Why does she say she let him die?”

  “Because her failure resulted in his death.” High Priestess Febe entered the room, golden mask implacable, hands tucked into the billowing sleeves of her crimson robe. “A prieste
ss’s responsibility, even more so a wife’s sacred obligation—particularly in a temple-blessed marriage of perfectly matched partners—is to keep her sorcerer husband fed with sgath. Queen Rhianna failed in this, no matter the reason, and her husband died. How are you feeling, Princess?”

  Chuffta bellied onto Oria’s chest, folding his wings so he rested his pointed chin on his thumb claws, eyes green and shining as the leaves of the fruit trees in her garden.

  “Listen,” he soothed, no doubt sensing Oria’s ire. “Perhaps we shall learn something.”

  “Better, but I don’t understand, High Priestess.”

  “Of course you don’t. Had you achieved hwil and taken the mask before all this happened, you would be better prepared.” The high priestess sounded weary, on top of the eternal stain of disappointment. “Knowing what we know now about Queen Rhianna, perhaps we erred in letting her have such a strong influence over you.”

  Though Oria, of course, could not see Febe’s eyes, she nevertheless felt certain they rested on Chuffta. Much as Oria wanted to bristle, it seemed that the High Priestess emanated something through her careful hwil. Uncertainty?

  “Anything you can tell me that the temple will allow would be helpful, High Priestess Febe.” Oria pulled off the humble tone reasonably well. Chuffta agreed with a mental snort of amusement.

  Febe paced over to a window. “Some of it, naturally, is a question of whether your mind and spirit have the maturity to understand. However, the situation is grave enough that I believe I should endeavor to teach you, though it may be pouring water into a bucket with no bottom.”

  Fortunately, the promise of information had Oria restraining a smart remark in response to the not-so-subtle insult.

  “Despite all that has been studied on the flow of sgath to grien, there is a great deal we do not consciously understand, that lies in the realm of hwil. Testing showed your mother and father to be a perfect match. There were no indications otherwise, else the temple would not have blessed their marriage. To all appearances, she’d always provided him an unending source of sgath, which made him a powerful sorcerer and king.”

  “I know all this,” she muttered softly enough that the high priestess could not hear. Chuffta, however, heard clearly.

  “No, you know what you’ve always believed. What your parents believed and taught you in turn. Listen to a new truth.”

  She didn’t want to. Stubbornly, she stared at her ceiling, the mosaic of clouds and sky not as restful as usual.

  “Or, if you are not ready to hear, if you need to rest, we need not do this now. Tell her to keep her secrets for later.”

  Chuffta’s mind-voice, while solicitous, held enough reproof that she unbent. At the gate, facing down that bloodied warrior prince, she’d resolved to improve her knowledge. That included the painful things.

  “Particularly the painful things, some would argue.”

  “We’ve since learned that perhaps some individuals are able to falsify the appearance of hwil, of compatibility with a mate.” Febe’s voice held suspicion, stopping short of accusing Oria of faking hwil. Though Oria had never claimed to have reached that miraculous state. Had others done so? Simply said so without really doing it? Had her own mother? It had never occurred to her to pretend, and yet…what a simple answer that would be, to gain access to the temple knowledge, to buy time to cultivate control of sgath in secret.

  “King Tavlor relied on that bond heavily,” Febe was saying, “believing it to be unshakeable, that with his temple-blessed marriage and the combined pool of power from all the priestesses, the sorcerers could not fail. Then the Destrye began killing the priestesses, an unprecedented event, at least in recent memory.”

  That was why he’d committed nearly everyone to the battle. Her father had believed they couldn’t fail. Had he realized the truth before he died? She hoped not. What a horrible thing to realize, then to die without being able to rectify such a terrible mistake.

  “We knew killing a priestess would obviously sever the bond between her and the sorcerers. We did not predict what might result if a number of priestesses died in rapid succession because it never occurred to anyone that it could happen. The walls of Bára have never been breached in such a violent and sudden way. Now that you know it could and did, knowing what you know of sgath magic, what do you predict? Think it through.”

  Oria quelled her stubborn impulse to disobey the high priestess’s pedantic instructions. Her obstinacy had held her back in the past and she needed to learn to do better. She tried to calm her emotions. One of the clouds in her ceiling mosaic had always looked like a winged horse to her, ever since she was little. She found it and traced its lines with her eyes while she thought about it. “Priestesses absorb energy from all living things, particularly the focused and purified magical sources, as below Bára, and transform it into sgath.”

  “And some nonliving things. Perhaps an exacting point, but an important one for this puzzle,” Febe said. “What are some examples?”

  “Magical energy also comes from the sun, from Sgatha and Grienon, and from certain kinds of rock and heated gases in the earth below Bára. Depending on her nature, a woman might absorb one kind of energy more than another.” Oria had no idea what her nature tended toward, which had always been part of the problem. Without hwil, the energies just piled up into in a meaningless jumble. “A priestess releases sgath ideally to a priest who’s her perfect mirror. Through their bond, he converts that into grien, supplementing his own and repurposing it into whatever element his nature dictates.”

  “And for those without marriages, let alone without temple-blessed ones?”

  “Those priestesses direct their sgath into a kind of pool that all sorcerers can dip into.” The logic began to take shape. She wrenched her gaze from the winged horse in the mosaic sky to Chuffta’s discerning, somber gaze. “When they died, if they were effectively bonded to the pool of magic, then all their energy poured into it, one after another.”

  “Yes. One life, even with the violence of murder, would not have made a difference. That energy would have been diluted into the rest. But, with so many powerful priestesses dropping their entire life energy into the Báran pool, within minutes of each other…” Febe sighed, her sorrow palpable.

  “The priests overloaded. I can see how that would happen, though I don’t think they could.”

  “No one imagined that scenario. But then, never before have so many priestesses been so actively contributing to a common pool, nor so many sorcerers drawing from it so heavily. The battle magics consumed so much that the priestesses offered more and more to sustain it.”

  “So what happened?” Oria asked, mouth dry with dread.

  “It’s difficult to explain to one without hwil, and the framework of teachings to support your understanding. But what you need to know is that King Tavlor overspent himself and died, which left Queen Rhianna unmoored. She should not have survived.” There was a question there, an expectation, and Febe’s mask faced Oria, scrutinizing her with uncomfortable intensity. “How is it that she did?”

  “I—I don’t know.” She hadn’t expected to feel accused of something, especially not knowing what she’d done, right or wrong.

  “You were alone with her. Think back. What exactly did you do?”

  “Nothing.” Oria tried to think, so much of that a blur. Aware also that maybe telling the exact truth would not be the smartest step. “I chafed her wrists, called her name, and she woke up.”

  “That can’t be all.” Though Febe remained serene, an impatience crawled through the room. “Tell me, moment by moment, how you—” Her chin snapped up, head swiveled to the window. “I must go. Don’t leave the tower, Princess.”

  She swept out so abruptly that Oria frowned after her. “When she says ‘overspent,’ does she mean they broke?”

  “Sounds that way to me.”

  “I didn’t think men could break, because they can always release the grien.”

  “Now we
know they can. Like you, they lost consciousness from the overload. Many of them died immediately.”

  “Did I… For a while I thought I was dead.”

  “We feared as much.” His mind-voice became a gentle stroke. “I couldn’t sense you at all. I suspect that… Well, it’s not relevant.”

  “It is to me. What do you think?” She studied the jade-deep eyes, full of some uncharacteristic emotion.

  “That perhaps you did die, that your essence departed your body, but then returned. Much as your mother’s did.”

  “Why did I come back?”

  To her surprise, he sounded vaguely amused when he replied. “I don’t know—why did you?”

  It took her aback, to contemplate that she’d somehow made this choice and caused it to happen. She’d think about that later.

  Shouts reverberated outside. A new energy sliced through Oria’s mind, unlike anything else she’d ever sensed. “What is that?” But she knew. That was why the high priestess had rushed out so precipitously.

  “Unless I am mistaken, that is the arrival of the Trom.”

  ~ 14 ~

  The Destrye demand that masks be removed had not gone over well. King Archimago had agreed with the wisdom of the strategic move—though Ion couched the proposal in terms of transparency of expression—with no mention of magical influence. Their father balked at discussions of magic.

  All of them did, really, despite all they’d seen.

  A rapidly heating argument seemed to be headed directly toward renewed combat, a prospect Lonen actually welcomed as it would be far better than this endless debate—killing a few of them would go a long way to releasing the building tension—when Ion’s first captain ran into the room. He whispered urgently to Ion as Lonen’s stomach dropped. And as shouts rose outside.

  He didn’t miss the way the young king, his adviser, Folcwita Lapo, and Prince Yar all exchanged glances that radiated smug satisfaction, even through the blandness of their masks. Most of the Bárans, however, looked confused and uneasy. As did many of city guard, who drew their weapons.

  Shouts turned to screams.