The Fate of the Tala Read online

  “Didn’t your people heal her?”

  “Yes, but look at her. She still looks tired.”

  “I agree,” Ursula said. “Kelleah is with us, near the rear of the caravan. I’ll ask her to examine Andi.”

  “Caravan?” Rayfe replied. “You brought more people?”

  “And supplies,” she replied, frost creeping into her tone. “Don’t start with me, Rayfe.”

  He held up a hand. “We’ll discuss later. What’s important right this moment is Andi’s condition and what we—”

  “Enough.” I amplified my physical voice on mental and sorcerous levels, focusing it on the pair of them, but loudly enough that everyone winced, even those with no Tala blood, like Harlan and Marskal. Rayfe and Ursula spun on me in shock. Marskal shook his head, silently laughing, and Harlan actually grinned.

  Zynda’s mental laugh rippled through my mind.

  I drew myself up, letting magic from the Heart fill me. Rayfe and Ursula both topped my height by a fair amount, but when I crackled with sorcery, I more than made up for it. “I am the Sorceress Andromeda,” I informed them, “and Queen of the Tala by birthright and by proof of might. I also have more important things to do than listen to you two try to run my life.”

  Fully fed up, I went for the dramatic exit, slightly delayed by my needing to pause before shifting. Concentrate. Focus. With a clap of wings, I leapt into the air, and soared as the heron over the calm blue waters.

  ~ 5 ~

  The gate screamed in my mind, trembling under the strain of attack as the forest creaked with a massive internal groan, trees shuddering out audible booms as they fell before the Deyrr monsters. The ocean teemed with ships, so thick I couldn’t see the water, though it was no longer aqua blue, but swirling deep red with blood, gray with ash, and black with the oily stench of Deyrr. A dragon swooped down—the smoke too thick for me to make out which one—blazing with fire. People screamed, but theirs or ours, I couldn’t tell.

  Dasnarian boats, disgorged by the enormous troop carriers, bore down on the beach. I stood on by the old stone lionhead on the breakwater, hands outstretched, holding them back with sheer force of will. Though it hardly mattered. They’d outflanked us and, behind me, thousands more Dasnarian soldiers thundered through the Gate of Annfwn, trampling my wards as they passed, ripping the connections from me along with gobbets of magical flesh. I’d failed to stop them.

  So many futures held this scenario. I’d seen it countless times and it varied little except in minor details. I also intimately knew the various cascades of events leading up to this scene. The closer we got to this point in time, the more the events settled into a consistent shape. One, two, three, the decisions clicked one into the next, all leading to this: Annfwn overrun, the forest falling, the threshold breached.

  I’d looked at everything Moranu let me see in this vision, accumulating details without understanding anything more. With effort, I wrenched my mental eye beyond that moment. What about after? If nothing seemed to alter this future—in fact, it had only grown more consistent—maybe we could do something after it. I scanned the scenes of the further future. A tumult of conquest filled my mind, kaleidoscopic images of the twelve kingdoms falling one by one. Pitched battles at Ordnung and Windroven. More dragons in the sky and then dragons falling into the sea, sending tidal waves of reaction. Ami facing down Deyrr creatures in the dark. Ursula disappearing into the sea of charging beasts.

  So many dead. Scattered like withered leaves to the wind. Moranu, with Her silver moon eyes and changeable face gazed at me with challenge. What will you do, Sorceress? What are you willing to sacrifice to save them?

  My mother’s face filled my mind, storm gray eyes glittering with the same challenge. I made sacrifices—would you do less?

  “You’re more like her every day,” Ursula commented. Her voice scattered the visions, jerking me back to myself.

  For once I didn’t mind the interruption, gratefully seizing the opportunity to clear my mind for a moment. Ursula clambered over the last rock and paused by the old stone lionhead, looking it over with interest. She still wore her fighting leathers and sword, but had shed her boots and was incongruously barefoot. “Salena,” she clarified, as if she needed to. She sat beside me and stretched out her long legs toward the gentle surf.

  “By that, I really hope you don’t mean crazy as a loon and wasting away,” I replied.

  She snorted out a laugh. “Well, at least you seem to be washing your hair.”

  Our mother hadn’t, near the end. Some of my most vivid memories of her were when I’d spent hours brushing out the tangled mass of her long hair while she sat and stared unmoving out the window toward Annfwn, the home she’d never see again. She’d been pregnant with Ami, and wouldn’t let anyone but Ursula and me touch her.

  “Today I did it the regular way, which reminded me how much work it is. Usually I don’t. It’s a side-benefit of shapeshifting,” I explained, suddenly understanding that aspect of my mother letting herself go. She hadn’t been able to shapeshift at the end. “When I return to human form, I come out clean.”

  “Convenient.”

  When she said nothing more, I knew she waited on my next move. Ursula had always had been able to outwait me, so though I was tempted to match myself against her, I figured I’d better save the effort for a more important battle. “How did you find me?”

  “Rayfe said you’d be here.” When I glanced at her in surprise, she lifted a shoulder and let it fall, a very Dasnarian shrug she’d clearly picked up from Harlan. “He said you like to come here to be alone.”

  I digested that. Rayfe had never indicated he knew I came to this rock outcropping to sit with the silent stone lion and stare at the sea. It was a quiet place to follow the future paths and branchings of possibilities, and not far from the Heart, so I could easily draw on its magic for strength. Or just soak in its magic in the quiet, restoring my internal equilibrium. When I returned, Rayfe never asked where I’d been. Sometimes that had annoyed me, especially when he seemed so absorbed in other things that I wondered if he’d even noticed my absence.

  That he had known where I went all along, and also knew why … I didn’t know what to think of that.

  “I apologize,” she said, “for my behavior at the gate. It was wrong of me.”

  I raised a brow, though I didn’t look at her, tempted to make a remark that an apology from her surely meant we’d reached the end times. But that would be petty of me and also too uncomfortably near the truth. The closer we got to the final conflagration, the more we all seemed to change, as if that ultimate fiery crucible melted us further out of shape.

  She blew out a long breath, dipping her chin in acknowledgment, staring out at the sea. “I know this is no excuse,” she continued, “but we both love you. Rayfe and I… well, we’re alike enough that we both deal with the vulnerability of those we love by putting walls around them, so we’ll be safe.”

  “You mean, so the people you love will be safe?”

  She shook her head ruefully, running a hand through her fiery hair. Longer now than in recent years, the locks curled in the sea air, softening the hard lines of her profile. “We’d like that to be the case, because that motivation would be ever so much more noble, but no. As long as we love people, we’re in danger of being hurt. Taking a wound ourselves is nothing compared to seeing the people we love in danger. So we protect ourselves from injury by trying to keep you wrapped up and safe.”

  I considered that, placing her explanation alongside how I felt watching her swallowed up by that army in the visions. Blowing out the emotion and tension, I rubbed my belly. “I know you’ve always tried to protect me, that you did keep me safe from terrible things. I understand, and appreciate, the lengths you went to for Ami and me when we were growing up—but I’m an adult woman, who’s going to have a baby. I can protect myself, and my child.” To the extent I could protect anyone in the coming days, but no use saying that aloud.

  “I kn
ow you can,” Ursula said softly. Then she straightened, sweeping her hands in a grand gesture. “I am the Sorceress Andromeda,” she intoned in a booming voice. “Fear my wrath!” She snickered.

  I stared at her in outrage. “I did not sound like that.”

  “Oh, honey, you so did.” She tried to swallow the snicker, choked on it. Swallowed, then burst out into a full belly laugh.

  “I cannot believe you are laughing at me.”

  She tried to pull herself together, but took one look at my face and cracked up again. I just stared. Her Majesty High Queen Ursula folded over in a fit of helpless laughter. My lips twitched, and my cheeks felt the strain of wanting to break free, like ice giving way in spring. A giggle escaped me, despite everything. I laughed harder, and it felt so good.

  To my shock, Ursula slung an arm around me, pulling me close as we laughed together, tears rolling down our faces with it. And in that laughing, I realized we also laughed in the face of doom. Far better than weeping.

  At last we quieted, Ursula letting me go and wiping the tears from her face. She smiled, though, gazing out at the lovely sea, not at all ashamed of the emotional display, as she once would’ve been.

  “Marriage has changed you,” I teased.

  She snorted. “Like magic? Ha to that.”

  “Was it only to circumvent the treaty terms?” I asked, terribly curious and for once feeling able to ask the question I normally wouldn’t have dared pose to my prickly sister.

  “Yes and no.” She wiggled her toes, staring at her feet thoughtfully. They were as long as the rest of her, and white from being in boots for weeks of the colder weather on the other side of the mountains. “The Dasnarian offer made the timing critical, but it had been looking like I’d have to marry, one way or the other. I bet you knew that.” She gave me an owlish look of inquiry, then smiled thinly when I didn’t give her any hints. “Well, I didn’t need a sorceress to explain that future. I’ve always known sitting on the high throne would require me to marry someday. With our current conflict, I’d come to the inevitable conclusion that I’d have to marry a Dasnarian prince. And, well, if I had to shackle myself to a Dasnarian, there was only one I could marry.”

  “Regardless of his political status with his family.”

  She side-eyed me. “Details that can be handled given sufficient motivation.”

  “Harlan agreed to that?”

  “I can be persuasive.”

  “Besides that, he fell in love with you at first sight and swore a life oath to you.”

  “True. The man is daft in the head, but I love him anyway.”

  “The bond between you was clear from the beginning,” I acknowledged, remembering how I’d seen it, like a ribbon of gold connecting them, even though she’d refused to acknowledge it. That ribbon wound through the future events, embedded in the causalities. “Still, I’d thought he was determined to clear the way for you to have a marriage of state with a legitimate ruler. That’s what he said every time we discussed it.”

  She slanted me a wry glance. “I manipulated him into marrying me.”

  “Of course you did.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me. “You could have the grace to act surprised.”

  “No, I couldn’t.” I grinned at her.

  “Oh, right, I forget who I’m talking to. You know everything before it happens.” She wiggled her fingers in the air, in a pantomime of branching paths, and possibly weird magic.

  “Not even close,” I said. “I’m not our mother. I don’t have half her abilities.”

  “How could you? You’re not even half the age she was when she left Annfwn, and you’ve only been practicing, what, two years. Not even that long. At the rate you’re progressing, though, you’ll eclipse her powers.”

  Something about the matter-of-fact way she assessed my skills reassured me more than Rayfe’s glib praise or Zynda’s similar observations. Ursula had a gift for knowing people. Yes, she used that ability ruthlessly to get the most out of people, but she didn’t dish out idle flattery. Besides, I’d probably never get over wanting my big sister to think well of me.

  “If I live that long,” I had to say, though.

  “At least you’re less crazy than she was.”

  “She wasn’t crazy at my age. She got that way over time.” Salena had been so present in my mind of late that I wondered if she’d sat on these rocks and communed with the Heart, traced the fearsome future. Maybe she’d glimpsed me in her visions, her ghost and shadow.

  “Uorsin had a way of doing that to people,” Ursula said in a hard voice.

  I smoothed my hand over my belly. “It wasn’t all him. Losing all those babies broke her bit by bit, long before she met our father.”

  “Could you be afraid of that happening to you?” She asked the question of the ocean, and managed to pose it almost philosophically.

  So I answered honestly. “I would be a fool not to be afraid. But Kiraka showed Zynda how to stabilize the pregnancy, and the baby is doing well. I’m mostly tired of the constant hovering. Rayfe and I…” Ouch, that burn of shame that my marriage was failing. Or, rather, that the relationship inside the shell of our marriage was crumbling. Ursula had tried to stop me, and I hadn’t listened to her. I couldn’t possibly confide in her at this point. “We’re all under pressure, and I apologize that I took it out on you.”

  She shrugged that off, unbothered. As usual, her expectant silence drew me to keep talking.

  “Honestly, I’m more worried about everything else. A lot can happen between now and when this baby will be born.” Will happen.

  “You’ve seen?”

  “Not everything.” I shook my head. “Like you marrying Harlan, I didn’t see.”

  “It happened fast. We started out that day with an enormous argument where I threatened to exile Harlan if he couldn’t resolve his conflicting loyalties.”

  I had to close my sagging mouth, and she clicked her tongue in satisfaction as she smiled at my shock. “Harlan?” I said, trying to assimilate that information. “I don’t believe it.”

  She went very serious, jaw tight and gaze flinty. “Believe it. He’s kept some critical secrets.”

  I wondered if those secrets had to do with that strange Dasnarian-looking woman in the land of elephants—but Ursula had her mouth set in a way that I knew meant she wouldn’t tell me more. I was tempted to take a peek at her thoughts, but it might not be necessary yet. “Well,” I said, “that kind of turnabout explains a great deal.”

  “Does it?” She turned to face me fully. “Tell me, did this marriage shift the future?”

  She rarely asked me questions like that, flat out, having been through this sort of conversation with me before. I contemplated how much to confide in her. Telling people the possible futures required a delicate balance. Often the best outcomes depended on them blundering rather than trying to create specific results. And often their efforts to change a future they didn’t want only made it more certain. I sometimes wondered at the influence of the goddesses in that. They didn’t seem to like mortals interfering with Their purview—and They imposed consequences for our arrogance.

  Also, I knew that she’d take the guilt for her decision very seriously, and I wouldn’t wish that on her. On the other hand, while we all had our parts to play, Ursula was High Queen and as such she led the top-level strategy. I wouldn’t lie to her to spare her feelings—she wouldn’t thank me for it.

  “Yes,” I told her honestly, “and no. But more yes than no.”

  “Now you sound like me.”

  I acknowledged that ruefully. “Let me put it this way: there were a set of futures where we allied with Dasnaria, and there are fewer of them at this point in time.”

  “But it’s still possible?”

  “Possible, yes, but unlikely.”

  She nodded grimly. “That was Harlan’s primary argument, that I should marry one of his brothers because I could’ve stopped this war. It was a selfish choice, and I only hope I didn�
��t doom us all.”

  “Well, I can set your mind somewhat at ease. With your usual good luck, the one selfish choice you ever made didn’t change that much.”

  She eyed me, searching out evidence of a soothing lie. “An alliance with Dasnaria against Deyrr might’ve stopped the war cold.”

  I shook my head. “Nothing you did could’ve stopped the war entirely. Deyrr is too powerful, and while we speak of the Dasnarian Empire as a single unit, there are many factions at play there, too. Agreeing to the marriage and treaty would’ve tipped the balance of some things, but not everything.”

  “Hmm. That’s something.”

  “Yes. I imagine Danu wouldn’t have let you make such a misstep.”

  “I don’t know about that. I wish I could be as sure of Her hand as you and Ami are of Moranu and Glorianna’s guidance.”

  I laughed at that, though without humor. “Funny—I was just thinking the same thing about you and Ami. The goddesses can be… obscure, and the goddess of shadows and changeability more than most, I’d think. At least Danu, with Her clear, bright lines, makes Her will known without uncertainty.”

  Ursula tipped her head thoughtfully, then shook it. “No, I won’t put this on Danu. I made the choice on my own. Because I couldn’t be true to myself, couldn’t look at myself in the mirror, and vow to marry one man when everything in me is devoted to another.”

  Her words took my breath away for a moment. When I could, I said, “You never were someone who could promise one thing and mean another. And isn’t that Danu’s way? She is the goddess of clear eyes and unflinching decisions.”

  “Heh.” She half-smiled, a wistfulness in it. “It might be wishful thinking, but it did feel like Danu blessed the marriage. Kaedrin turned up for it, performed the ceremony.”

  “Did she?” I tried to sound surprised. Dafne had sleuthed out the location of Ursula’s old teacher for the coronation, but then the peripatetic priestess of Danu had vanished again. However, I’d seen Kaedrin and her pivotal role in near future events, so that piece fell into place.