Inside the walls, the familiar feel of home enveloped her. She’d always known—had always been told—that Bára and her sister cities had been built to create a perfect place for sgath and grien to exist in balance. Outside the walls, wild magic would erode the very life of a sorceress.
As with everything she’d been taught, those lessons contained a seed of truth, but had strayed so far from the fullness of truth as to make them into outright lies. Yes, the walls of Bára had been woven with spells that filtered out the magic of the greater world, creating an oasis of apparent peace within. With her expanded senses and understanding of magic, however, Oria understood that the sense of coherence came from homogeneity. All magic but one kind—which the Bárans and their ilk called “sgath”—had been screened out.
That process, along with the efforts of Bára’s sorceress population, created the vast pool of magic beneath the city. But, like the Destrye in the tunnels for a week, accustomed to darkness and weak candlelight, then blinded by the sun, living with only one kind of magic had made the Bárans painfully sensitive to any other kind. The men in Bára, trained to draw on magic only from Bára or their sorceress companions, benefited from this system.
The women, however… They’d been made into prisoners, captive livestock bred and trained to feed magic to the sorcerers. No wonder the men used grien so easily. They’d essentially had their magic chewed up by the walls and the women, then fed to them like milk produced by a cow.
The realization filled Oria with cold rage.
“Rage is good, as long as it stays cold,” Chuffta advised. “You’re not so good at breathing fire.”
The superior tone in his mind-voice made her smile—and did help restore perspective. She was here to do a job, and she would focus on that. Time enough later, when she was recognized as Queen of Bára, to make changes, both here and in her sister cities.
So many changes she would make.
For the moment, she tucked her hands inside the wide sleeves of her crimson priestess robes and strolled out onto the smooth stones of the paved city paths. The eyeless mask prevented her from seeing the city as she had for most of her life, but her magical perception revealed far more. She understood now how wearing the mask could become a crutch for a priestess. Without the competition of physical vision, even a poorly skilled practitioner could more easily focus on only magical sight. It was hardly the badge of honor that Bárans regarded it as, however. Did a sorcerer or sorceress with real power need to advertise it via something as basic as seeing without physical vision?
The mask did give Oria the anonymity she needed, and she passed citizens and guards with serene equanimity, acknowledging their bows and greetings with a gracious incline of her head—and continuing on her important business.
Whatever a Báran priestess might be doing, it was always important.
In the same way, she strolled over Ing’s Chasm and into the palace without challenge. Yar had built a new bridge of stone over the chasm. She recognized his magic instantly, able to observe how he’d woven the stone together with his grien. If she wanted to spend the time, she could likely trace every bit of stone and sand back to where he’d pulled it from. Each bit retained a thread to where it had been before, and where and what it had been before that. Levels upon levels, strands infinitely woven together to create physical reality. Fascinating—and potentially overwhelming.
And nothing she had time for.
Especially because, as she crossed the bridge and entered the palace, the matte black taint of the Trom impacted her senses. Not present, exactly, not at that precise moment, but they’d left their essence behind, as obvious as muddy footprints on the white and gold polished marble floors. She hadn’t been practiced enough when she’d encountered the Trom before to differentiate the strength of their recent presence from the more distant kind, so she couldn’t pinpoint how old this trace might be.
What would she perceive now when she encountered the Trom again? She’d have to brace herself for that, because even in her formerly dulled state, they had seemed to her like black suns of magic, drawing light inward instead of radiating it. It could be they did that with all magical wavelengths, devouring everything around them.
Somehow, knowing that they’d once been as human as she—and that she carried the potential to become what they were—gave her such a chill of terror that her thoughts began to fragment. What if she became that? The peril loomed beneath her like Ing’s Chasm, lightless and bottomless.
“You would never become them, if only because I won’t let you,” Chuffta assured her with stalwart arrogance.
“I’m holding you to that.” Once again, her Familiar’s steadying presence helped her regain her sense of self and perspective. She wished she could have him on her shoulder.
“It seems to me that if you were a truly great sorceress, and you made me big, you could also make me small again.”
“But what if I accidentally left out important bits?” She asked in her most innoncent mind-voice.
He was silent a moment. “You’re right. It’s not worth the danger.”
Suppressing a giggle, feeling much lighter, she made her way to her mother’s receiving rooms. When Oria was last in Bára, Queen Rhianna hadn’t returned to the bedchamber she’d shared with Oria’s father. After his untimely death, and how that loss tore Rhianna’s mind in half, the queen hadn’t been able to face their shared space. Time might have healed that wound, but Oria’s instincts said otherwise. Her mother would be sleeping sitting up, staring out the window, perhaps, watching for people who’d never returned to her.
That was, if her mother still lived. Oria could help Rhianna now—show her that she hadn’t lost half of herself at all—if only her mother hadn’t given up. Though that would have to wait for later. For the moment, Oria had no doubt that Yar would use their mother as a hostage against Oria’s good behavior. Better to secure Rhianna first, before Oria challenged Yar and took out his council.
The lack of guards posted outside the Báran Queen Mother’s receiving rooms made it easier for Oria to slip inside without being noticed but boded ill for her hopes. Indeed, as Oria passed from one room to the next, she found them all unlit and still with the quiet air of disuse. She’d have to keep looking.
Oria paused a moment by her mother’s chair, gazing out the unglassed window that looked out over the city walls and beyond to the desert. A cool breeze wafted in from the distant sea, smelling of brine and moisture—and forewarning of dawn approaching. Oria had stood in that window and seen Lonen for the first time, astonished into freezing like prey at the sight of the muscled barbarian striking down the priestesses guarding the walls of Bára.
So much had happened since then, and yet here Oria stood in the same place, almost as if she’d never left.
“Who are you?” A voice asked behind her, making her whirl with a gasp of startlement as her heart skipped a beat. She should’ve sensed another person in the room.
A priest in golden mask and crimson robes stepped into the rosy moonlight streaming in the window. A sorcerer, who’d shielded himself from her senses. Even after all this time, she knew that voice.
“Answer my question, priestess,” Yar commanded with lofty impatience. “Who are you and why are you here?” His grien snaked out, blue-green fingers to probe her, which she deflected easily. Would he notice that she did?
Why was he here in their mother’s rooms and where was Yar’s wife, Gallia? Oria couldn’t sense the priestess anywhere nearby, but she also hadn’t known her long, and the last time they’d seen each other, Gallia’s sgath had been weakened by moving to a new city. Even laboring under that terrible sapping of her native magic—a sensation Oria knew all too well—Gallia had helped them to escape. Oria owed her a life, and she knew exactly how to help her if the priestess from Lousá would be willing to learn.
“Are you even a priestess?” Yar’s voice climbed with offense. “It’s a crime punishable by death to wear a mask not ritually given to you.”
“Hello Yar,” Oria said, her voice remarkably steady.
He stilled, grien tentacles of power renewing their attempt to penetrate her mind and body. To no avail, as she sent them spinning into nothing.
“Oria.” Yar spoke her name like he’d found a venomous snake in the room. “How are you here? And masquerading as a priestess. I’ll remind you, Oria, that’s still a crime punishable by execution. But, then, you already have a death sentence on your head for being an abomination, don’t you? You only escaped it because we knew you’d die outside the walls. You were supposed to die!”
How very tiresome of him. She’d forgotten over the elapsed months, in her hatred of all Yar had done to the people of Dru and Bára, and intended to do to the Destrye, what a whiny brat he was at heart.
“Where’s Mother?” she asked.
“Mother is dead,” Yar replied with careless insouciance. “Your fault, of course, She died of a broken heart. Knowing she’d birthed a monster, and one too cowardly to face the temple’s righteous judgment, was too much for her to bear.”
“Oh no,” Chuffta moaned. “Not Rhianna. We loved her.”
“We don’t know it’s true. Even if it is, we’ll mourn later.”
“She waited for you, right here.” Yar’s voice oozed a manufactured sorrow not even remotely reflected in his emotions. “Day after day while we searched the desert for you, only wanting to bring you home.”
“Bring me home to be executed, you mean.”
“It’s not the fault of anyone here that you’re anathema, not even our mother’s. It is your fault that you lied to hide what you knew went against all that’s good and right, and that you attempted to use that twisted, cursed, and demonic ability to steal the throne from Bára’s rightful king. You may be an abomination, but your poor, abandoned mother wanted only to lay your body in the family crypt so she could mourn you properly.”
“Nothing about me is an abomination,” Oria replied evenly, grateful for Chuffta’s mental reassurance of that, and the love flowing down the marriage bond from Lonen. It was one thing to know in her mind that she wasn’t a monster, and another entirely to feel the truth. It took effort to resist the image Yar attempted to paint, especially when her own guilt gave it fuel. She’d abandoned her mother, the woman who’d not only given her life, but had been her greatest—and sometimes only—champion.
“But you denied her even that small peace,” Yar talked over her. “She died believing you lost forever.” He’d wound himself up, his wiry body tense under the priest’s robes. His grien—now thick, blue-green ropes of magic, still unable to find purchase in her—flailed about her body like the tentacles of a sea creature a trader had once brought to Bára.
“Did I—or did you?” Oria retorted. “I think you, at least, knew I was alive and in Dru.”
“Found my little spy, did you? I wondered.” His grien stabbed at her with sudden, increased force. Enough to sting. If he figured out how she’d changed, he might be able to hurt her in truth.
Oria set all other concerns aside, studying Yar’s magic. Strong, yes, but all of one flavor. And she couldn’t determine whose sgath he’d filled himself with. It was all Báran sgath, processed and purified until nothing of the individual remained. Where was Gallia?
“How is it that you’re alive, sweet sister?” Yar asked when she didn’t reply to his accusations. She gave no sign she sensed his invasion, even as he redoubled his efforts to scan her. He was using his magic all wrong—like using a club to slice bread—but a club would smash the bread to mush. “You have no magic left at all.” Yar crowed his discovery, incredulous and gloating.
“But I do. In fact, I’m more powerful than ever,” Oria replied, very seriously, tempted to lecture him on drawing hasty and false conclusions. “And I can teach our people, so that we need never call on the Trom again. So that we can banish them again entirely.”
Yar burst out laughing, a manic edge to it. “Silly sister. As you had little training with the temple and none with grien, you won’t know that I can sense these things.” His grien buffeted her once more, clumsy, but painful enough to make her scramble to convert it to another wavelength of magic.
“When I scan you, there’s nothing at all,” he rambled on, hitting her again, even harder. “Is that what the wild magic did instead of killing you? It stripped you of even that crippled excuse for magical potential that you never used. Now you’re like your barbarian husband. Queen of the Destrye and just as mind-dead as the lot of them. You’re not even a sorceress now. So that’s how you lived.”
Yar laughed again, grien brightening with renewed confidence. “How our parents used to go on about how you were so special, that your latency meant your power would bloom into something spectacular. Giving you a Familiar even. Did it occur to them to give me a derkesthai? No! Just for super special weakling Oria. And now it turns out they were wrong, and you have nothing. You are nothing. How utterly fitting.”
“The wild magic is not what we believed, it’s true,” Oria replied, growing weary of his posturing. “Neither are the Trom. Their foul presence lingers here. How recently have you had contact with them?”
“What do you care? I don’t even know why you’re here. Could it be that mind-dead brute of a hunk of barbarian meat tired of you and dumped you back at our doorstep? If you’ve come crawling for forgiveness there’s no tolerance for anathema in my reign.” He redirected his grien, giving up on her entirely, snaking those blue-green tentacles to the stone walls around them, totally unaware that Oria could perceive exactly what he was doing. And showing her what she’d needed to see—he only reached for stone and earth. That had been his talent, but she’d wondered in the intervening months. She, herself, had an affinity for growing things, but her own magic wasn’t limited to that realm. The sorcerer who’d animated the golems had died in the Battle of Bára, so someone had taken his place. She’d thought Yar, perhaps, but clearly not.
She’d have to look elsewhere—but she had to get past Yar first.
“The Trom are anathema, not me,” she said, letting him hear the conviction in her voice. “According to temple teaching and our own eyes. You summoned them to attack the Destrye—broaching our treaty—and they devastated the city and Bárans along with our enemy.”
“You’re still stuck on that? I saved Bára! Sometimes one must cut off a limb to heal the body. Thanks to me, Bára will continue to flourish. I am the hero of this story and you, my mind-dead sister, are the villain.” His grien fingers dug into the stones, tensing on them as a warrior might flex his muscles, giving forewarning of his intent.
Keeping a wary mental finger on the pulse of his power, Oria tried one more time. “Yar, listen to me. I’ve come here to help you and Bára. We are not enemies.”
He paused, finally assimilating some clues. Yar had always been bright, but too self-involved to be truly observant. “How did you get into the city anyway? This is what we’ve been seeing. You traitor, you brought the Destrye here. Guards—to me! We’re under attack!”
And he yanked on the stones around them, chunks flying at Oria. She deflected them, sending them zooming toward Yar instead, and they slammed him to the floor. He crumpled into a heap, his grien collapsing. Had she killed him?
Stricken she moved closer to check. “Yar?”
A lightning bolt of grien shot out, striking her hard enough to stun, and she staggered back, head swirling like a sandstorm.
“Take that, you bitch,” Yar snarled.
“Another wave of golems incoming, Your Highness,” Alyx reported. Even with the warmth of the light of the stubby candle she carried, the warrior woman looked wan and exhausted. They’d been battling golems nonstop, with barely a pause between assaults. In the eternal night of the tunnels, Lonen had lost all track of time. He had no idea how long it had been since Oria left for Bára.
Only the pulse of her at the distant end of the marriage bond reassured him that she yet lived. The continued waves of golems, however, bore witness to the reality that Oria had not succeeded in defeating Yar—or whoever continued to create and animate the mindless creatures. Oria was alive, yes, but in what condition?
Certainly not in any that would let her help them. At this rate, the Destrye would emerge beneath the city only to be finally and permanently decimated. At least they hadn’t been drowned. Yet.
Grimly, Lonen relayed the order for a fresh battalion to move up, to relieve the group that had just spent hours chopping up the previous wave of golems. The warriors jogged past, iron weapons at the ready. Before long, another wave would pass him going the other direction, carrying the wounded back to the far end of the caravan.
“How long can we keep this up?” he asked no one in particular.
Arnon emerged from the gloom ahead, having led the previous defense and yielded to Alby for this one. All the commanders had been taking it in turns. All of them were exhausted.
“If we make the logical assumption that the golems will continue to assault us according to the established pattern,” Arnon said, “then I estimate they’ll chew through us in another eight assaults.”
“Oh, well, is that all? We’re fine then,” Lonen replied, resting his battle-axe on the floor of the tunnel and leaning against the wall.
“The good news is,” Arnon continued as if Lonen hadn’t spoken, “I calculate that we’ve passed under the bore tide flats—at least the tunnels let us avoid that hazard—and if we can keep pressing forward at the same rate, we should reach the underground lake Nolan and his men fell into in fewer than three assaults.”
Lonen wondered at the kind of hell they found themselves in, where they’d relinquished daylight and counted time in golem assaults. “What kind of army will we have when we get there?”
“Able-bodied warriors? About a third of what we started out with,” Alyx replied somberly.
Wonderful.
“We never planned to take Bára by might,” Arnon reminded them. “We did that once before—and only because Lonen figured out how to knock their sorcerers out of action, particularly the one setting the golems on us—and we pretty near decimated our army doing that.”
“I don’t think bashing our heads against waves of golems counts as guile, either,” Alyx commented, dabbing her fingers at a freshly bleeding slice across her cheek. “What did we plan to take Bára with again? I know we gave up on surprise.”
“Stealth,” Arnon supplied, gesturing at the enclosing tunnel.
“Oh right. I keep forgetting we’re not actually mole people,” Alyx replied wryly.
“We just need to keep ourselves in optimal form until word arrives from Oria,” Lonen told them, not for the first time. “Once defeats Yar, she’ll stop whoever is driving the golems at us. The city guard was always sympathetic to her rule. She’ll be able to persuade at least some to open the gates.”
“And if she doesn’t?” Arnon demanded. “It won’t do us much good to have crept here all this way if we emerge outside the city walls with the gates barred.”
“She will. And, if not, we took the walls with the gates barred before. We’ll just do it again,” Lonen asserted.
Arnon and Alyx exchanged a speaking look. They’d developed a friendship through this campaign. It wasn’t clear if their relationship was of the brothers-in-arms variety or something more intimate. Not that it mattered, but on the rare occasions Lonen found the energy, he amused himself by contemplating the latter. Unfortunately, his first impulse then was to share his speculations with Oria, which killed any lightness of heart.
“Lonen,” Arnon said gently, “if Oria hasn’t succeeded by now, then we have to face that—”
“She’s alive,” Lonen said, cutting him off.
“We believe you,” Alyx supplied in the same tone. “But clearly she hasn’t been able to—”
A tremor shook the earth, dirt, sand and small rocks rattling down from the tunnel roof. A bore tide, thundering above? No… something else. As if, for a moment, reality dislocated itself. The derkesthai perched on Arnon and Alyx’s shoulders spread their wings, giving eerie screeching cries that had the two humans covering their ears and cringing.
“What in Arill is wrong?” Alyx shouted.
Arnon met Lonen’s gaze. They both knew that feeling, had experienced it before. If Oria had been with them, she likely could have described the color of the magic wave that had just passed through.
“Nothing to do with the goddess.” Arnon told her through gritted teeth, pressing his lips together as if he might puke. He remembered that day, too, when their father and brother died. “That happened before when…” He trailed off, unwilling to say the words.
“When the Trom arrived,” Lonen finished for him. With renewed energy, he shouldered his axe. “Alyx, pass down the alert. Everyone who can lift a weapon to the fore. Enough of them chewing through us. We’re punching through.”
She saluted, mounted her horse, and galloped downt the tunnel, her derkesthai messenger winging ahead to clear the way. Lonen reached for Buttercup, who stamped with delight, sensing his master’s change of temperament—and the opportunity to engage in the fight at last. Thus far, they’d been forced by the tunnel dimensions to face the golems on foot. That would change now. Shouts echoed down the tunnel, the clash of battle engaged ahead, the chants of battalions on the move from behind.
“Lonen!” Arnon said, not for the first time. “Are you mad? Even if we can ‘punch through’ those waves of golems, what we will we do? You can’t face the Trom.”
“No, but Oria can.” And she’d be facing them all alone if he didn’t get there in time.
Arnon kept his grip on Buttercup’s cheek strap, a dangerous and bold obstinacy in the face of the warhorse’s mighty impatience to be off. “Then let Oria do it,” Arnon said, very reasonably, except that he shouted the words.
“We promised her,” Lonen replied, leaning over to speak clearly into his brother’s face. “I promised her. The Destrye army and the derkesthai squadrons must be ready when Oria signals us, to convene on the city at the same time.
“And if Oria has been taken out of the equation?” Arnon asked soberly. “Without her we can’t communicate well enough with the derkesthai to coordinate strategy. Without her magic, we can’t defeat the sorcerers. We learned that to our sorrow last time.”
Lonen shook his head, refusing that possibility. It didn’t bear thinking of—and planning around it would change nothing. “I can’t control what the derkesthai will do, and I can’t help Oria right now, but I can have the Destrye warriors where we’d said we’d be. We won’t fail in this.”
With that, he gave Buttercup his head. Arnon, cursing, stepped out of the way just in time. Lonen galloped at top speed down the tunnel, bent low over Buttercup’s neck so his head would clear the tunnel roof atop the warhorse’s towering height. His blood coursed with battle fury and he gave over control to it, letting it flow down the bond to Oria, signaling and fueling her, too.
Enough with measured progress. To hell with this waiting game. Time to engage the enemy, bust out of these cursed tunnels, and finish this war.
And pray to Arill that Oria would meet him on the other side.