He missed Oria immediately when he awoke, knowing with some deep sense he’d acquired that she wasn’t in the room. The warm weight nestled against his side stirred, and Chuffta lifted his head, emerald green eyes shining like jewels in his narrow, triangular face. He’d liked being able to hear the derkesthai’s thoughts—snotty as they’d been at the time—because reading the expression in that reptilian gaze wasn’t easy. As if understanding, which he might, Chuffta cocked his head and lifted his wings in a very human-seeming shrug.
Lonen chuckled and lifted a tentative hand to scratch the spot between the golden horns that curved out of Chuffta’s head and rub the surprisingly soft white ears that flanked them. The derkesthai leaned into his hand, making a rumbling sound of pleasure that sounded much like a cat’s purr. Not an easy spot for Chuffta to reach, that little valley, Oria had explained, and Lonen could see why. After a moment, though, Chuffta pulled away and looked at the door. A murmur of feminine voices where there had been silence.
“Best see what’s up, eh, Chuffta buddy?” He levered himself up, feeling considerably less winded, his side moving more easily as he pulled on his pants. He could be the better man and admit they’d been right about treating him. That would be the answer to ending this enforced inaction. He needed to get into top form—okay, at least working condition—to find Oria a sustaining source of magic.
The rest could wait, Arill take them.
Opening the door, he heard the tail end of the conversation, words that chilled his blood. …or you won’t last much longer.
“How much longer?” he demanded. Oria whirled in the big chair that dwarfed her slight frame, her mass of hair crackling, strands rising with static like the flames leaping behind her, copper eyes enormous in her white face. So much thinner. He’d noticed it before, but her unusual appearance always struck him as exotically beautiful. Now he could see how her high cheekbones stood out like knife blades, her skin seeming nearly transparent enough for them to cut through. Seeing her clearly, without the fog of love and relief at having her alive and with him, filled him with rage that he’d been allowing himself to live in a fantasy the last few days.
Does nothing dim your optimism?
Apparently, a dose of reality from a healer did. Baeltya’s eyes widened, though not in alarm—concern?—as he took hold of her and asked how much longer.
“I can’t answer that,” she said.
He resisted the urge to shake the truth out of the woman. Baeltya had the sheen of Arill about her, as all the best healers did. She knew more than she let on.
“Can’t or won’t?” he snarled.
“Lonen.” Oria was beside him, hand hovering next to his arm, where normally she’d touch him if he’d remembered to put on a shirt. “Baeltya helped me. She can touch me without harm. Don’t break her.” A smile ghosted around her lips.
He let go of the healer. “I didn’t hurt her,” he grumbled. “Wait—she could touch you?”
“Yes.” Oria nodded with a broad smile. “Something to do with her healer’s control, like our hwil.”
“Is this something I can learn?” he demanded of Baeltya. The possibilities whirled in his mind, while the healer gaped, clearly thrashing for an answer to the odd question from her king.
“It would involve meditating, no doubt,” Oria teased him. At least some of her mischievous spirit had returned.
“To lie with you, I’d learn even that,” he told her with fervor, and she shifted, flicking a cautious glance at Baeltya. “Fine. We’ll pursue that later. I want my straight answer.”
Baeltya held up her palms, unruffled. “I can’t answer, not won’t. Oria isn’t just foreign, she’s different from the Destrye in many ways. Her physiology and energy feel unlike anything I’ve encountered before. I’d hesitate to predict anything with her.”
“But you said you could compare her to other patients, who you knew to be starving.”
Baeltya frowned in thought. “Yes, I can discern that much, though even that is odd. She ‘feels’ malnourished to me on both those physiological and energetic levels. I don’t understand it.”
“Then you should have a sense of how long she has.”
“I don’t. I have some ideas that might—”
“Stop hedging, healer. How long?”
“She should be dead already!” Baeltya snapped. “If she were Destrye, she would be.”
It took a moment for his stricken heart, to catch up to a regular beat. “You have to help her.”
“I am working on it, Your Highness.”
“Enough of this,” Oria put in with some asperity, her voice cutting. “I do happen to be standing right here. I’m not one of your horses that you can be debating whether it’s too ill to be put down.”
“Of course not, love,” he said, with some chagrin. Baeltya noticed the endearment, drawing in a breath, and looking between them. Better to make that clear, too. He’d kept them closeted too long. His people—and his family—would soon learn that he would not budge on his feelings, or on Oria’s place in his life. He’d abdicate first, if they forced him into it. “I apologize.”
Oria smiled at him, copper eyes soft with an affectionate glow she reserved only for him and Chuffta. “There’s your one for the day. Baeltya, you said you have ideas? I feel much better for your treatment, so I’d like to hear them.”
“Well, let’s start with the prosaic. Do you normally eat anything that you’re not eating now?”
Oria’s smile quirked a bit to the side. “That’s an easy yes. Almost nothing here is what I ate before.”
“Like what?”
“I never ate meat before this. Bárans eat lots of fruits, leafy greens, vegetables, grains. We do eat bread, like you do.”
Baeltya cast him a look, making him feel abruptly like a careless boy again rather than King of the Destrye. “Why haven’t you ordered these foods brought to her?”
“Meat is good for her,” he grumbled. Arill knew he’d gone to enough trouble to force it down her stubborn throat. Now that he had her compliant on the matter, he’d kept up with it. Meat built muscle and bone, didn’t it?
Baeltya sighed heavily for his idiocy, putting her hands on hips and shaking her head. “Your Highness,” she began, as if using his title again would mitigate the scolding to come, “a person who’s spent her entire life, whose physiology for generations—” she cast a glance at Oria for confirmation.
“At least,” Oria replied.
“Whose physiology for many generations is acclimatized or even adapted to extracting nourishment from non-meat sources, cannot simply go to an all-meat diet and thrive on it. Her body isn’t set up to process it effectively.”
“It hasn’t been all meat,” he said in his defense, though really there wasn’t any. “There’s been bread, too.”
Oria laced her fingers together. “I mainly eat the bread,” she confided, and Baeltya threw up her hands.
“What?” Lonen stared at her. “What about all the meat I give you?”
She lifted her chin in defiance. “I can’t eat all that. It makes my stomach hurt, so I slip it onto your plate when you’re not looking. You need it, too.”
He processed that, stunned. “Oria, if you think—”
“Arill save us,” Baeltya interrupted. “All right, at least this I can do. It’s the wrong season for leafy greens, but we do have stores of various grains, root vegetables, and dried fruits. What about fruit juices?”
“I would kill for some fruit juice,” Oria replied with fervor.
Lonen absorbed her bright-eyed enthusiasm with a growing sense of betrayed injury. “Why didn’t you tell me? You know I’d give you anything you asked for.”
Baeltya cleared her throat. “I’m going to step out for a moment and get a nourishing meal on its way while you two sort this out.”
Oria thanked her and waited for the outer door to close, returning her somber gaze to his. “Let’s sit.” She went back into the bedchamber and took her accustomed place by the bigger fire, curling her bare feet up under her, tucking them beneath the hem of the furry robe. Chuffta had also returned to his nest before the fire, the fine tip of his tail tapping in welcome, though he otherwise didn’t move. The both of them, still adjusting to the cold. And it wasn’t even deep winter yet. For himself, he left his shirt off as he sat, the fire almost too hot for him. A small sacrifice to make.
“Lonen,” she began, twisting her fingers together, “this is a strange place for me to be.”
“I know Dru is different, but you’ll get used to it. You’ve barely seen this land. Wait until I show it to you.”
“It’s not that.” She shook her head slightly, then tucked a heavy lock of her shining copper hair behind one ear. “I mean, I look forward to seeing Dru. From the few leaves I’ve seen, the trees must be enormous. And lakes! I want to see those, too. No, I mean, it’s strange for me to be in this position where absolutely everything I need comes through you. Food, clothing, this fire, healing. My very life depends on you and I don’t … like asking for more.”
“You don’t like it,” he echoed, feeling a dangerous edge, though he tried to contain it.
She eyed him warily, far too sensitive to his moods. “Don’t get angry.”
“I’m not.” Though he was and they both knew it. “Let me ask you this—how can I know what you need if you don’t like asking for it?”
Her eyes flashed hot copper. “Don’t pull attitude with me, Lonen. I’m trying to be honest here.”
He flung himself out of the chair, pacing off the surge of … okay, anger. First his cursed brothers, now this. “Since you’re being so honest, how about telling me why in Arill you still don’t trust me? I thought we were past this. You’re my wife, Arill take you. You know I love you; you say you love me. We’re in this together. You’re not dependent on me. Everything I have is already yours. Why can’t you understand that?”
She had her face averted, and Chuffta raised his head, looking to her. She gazed back at her Familiar as they clearly exchanged some confidences, ones that left him out. “What does Chuffta say?” he demanded.
Oria transferred her gaze to him, her eyes pooled with unshed tears. “That you’re a boor and a brute of a barbarian Destyre warrior and I’m better off without you!”
Lonen clenched his fists and growled. “He said no such thing.”
“Then why did you bother to ask?” she snapped at him, tucking herself deeper into the chair and hugging herself.
“Oria.” The anger drained out of him, like water lost from a broken vessel. He dropped to the rug at her feet and laid his head on her fur-covered knees, wrapping his arms behind her slim hips. “I am a boor and a brute. I’m sorry.”
Her fingers drifted through his hair, soothing with the relief the caress brought him. “You’re not. I shouldn’t have said so. I’m sorry, too. There—we’re even with each of us over by one for the day.”
“Then we’ll have to be sure to do nothing to apologize for tomorrow.”
“That would be good,” she said softly.
“I thought everything would be okay,” he said, rubbing his cheek against the fur, “if we could just get to Dru. Back in the desert, even the oasis, I just felt so certain that, once here, we’d be all right, that everything would fall into place.”
“There’s your rosy optimism coming into play,” she replied, though she didn’t sound scornful with it. “I love that about you, Lonen, I really do. But things don’t end as in the tales. There’s no happy ever after in real life. There’s just the ending of that time of trial, and then the people go on to face new trials. We maybe don’t usually hear that part of the story, so we forget it.”
He lifted his head, resting his chin on her knees, looking up at her. “We can go back to the oasis. You at least weren’t starving for magic there.”
“You said it wasn’t sustainable—no game coming in, no fruits on the trees, or other food to gather.”
“We’ll take food with us. Chuffta and I can go hunt in the desert.”
“And we’ll do what? Just hang out and do nothing all day?”
“And have sex. Lots and lots of sex,” he reminded her, massaging her back through the robes. “We can touch there.”
A light, pretty flush graced her cheekbones. “Besides that. We married for duty, to serve our peoples, not to run off and indulge ourselves in sex.”
“The latter is sounding better to me all the time.”
“Be serious, Lonen—we have responsibilities. You said it yourself.”
He regretted that, too. It had seemed so urgent to get them back to Dru, to save the Destrye. “That was before I knew Nolan had survived. He can be king instead. I never wanted it. He does.”
“Nolan can’t fight Yar or the Trom,” Oria said gently, her expression oddly compassionate as she brushed a curl back from his forehead. His hair tie was around there somewhere. “You know that as well as I do. No matter what your brothers think, we both know this war isn’t over.”
“I can’t fight them without you.” The ache grabbed his throat. “Without you I won’t even want to.”
“Don’t say that,” she whispered. “You’re not a man who stops fighting, not for any reason. Look how far we’ve made it. That’s all because of you and your determination to get us here to Dru.”
True. And part of that had determination had also been to save Oria. Maybe that had been rosy optimism, but he’d believed Arill’s healers could help her, that she could find magic here. That they’d triumph. Somewhere, deep in his heart, he still believed that.
“You’re going to get better,” he told her.
She looked amused. “Is that an order, Your Highness?”
“It is, Your Highness.”
“I take it you two have made up?” Baeltya said from the doorway. She had the grace to look slightly abashed at Lonen’s glare. Healers claimed a certain autonomy that let them skirt even the more relaxed protocols of the Destrye nobility, but cheekiness went a bit far. “That is, the food is on its way, Your Highness, Oria.”
“Your Highnesses,” Lonen corrected.
Baeltya edged into the room. “Not under Destrye law, King Lonen.”
“A formality only.”
“A critical one,” Baeltya pointed out. “And not my purview. Oria’s health is, so let’s discuss the energetic aspect of her condition.”
He deferred to Oria on that one, who was naturally discussing it with her Familiar. She got a certain look in her eye when she did, an unfocused distraction that gave her away. Not that he’d reveal how he could tell, as it gave him a rare window into the thoughts of his sorceress wife.
Her focus returned to him. “Baeltya says I can trust her with my secrets.”
It was a question for him. He stood, pulling on his shirt while he thought. Arill’s healers did take a vow of confidentiality, but there were also plenty of stories throughout history of healers helping various political factions with the potent information they extracted. Without studying Baeltya outright, he considered her and checked his gut feeling about the junior healer. He’d picked her to attend him because she wasn’t Talya—not necessarily a strong recommendation—and because her calm and steady reserve reminded him of Juli, who’d been good for Oria—which might be as good a recommendation as any.
“Oria has explained her skin sensitivity to me, and that it’s part of her absorbing magic from the world,” Baeltya said evenly, catching his eye. “I can guess that if she is starving energetically, that’s because she’s not able to absorb what she needs here in Dru, because we have no magic here.”
“That’s true,” Oria said, not flinching when he narrowed his eyes at her in warning. “If it’s a choice between trusting her and maybe living or not trusting anyone and dying, I’m going to take the risk.” Her eyes held the knowledge of the same feelings he’d confessed to her. She wouldn’t necessarily act to save herself, but she’d gallop headlong into every battle in order to save him.
He folded his arms and leaned against the mantel. “Go on, then. It’s up to you to decide what to tell.”
She nodded at him, her expression soft as a kiss, then spoke to Baeltya. “You do have magic here. It’s everywhere, arising from all living things, pushed and pulled by the moons as they wax and wane. But here it’s what we call wild magic. It’s… chaotic. Very strong but also in a form I can’t digest, to compare it to food.”
“Like deer can eat bark but we can’t, because our guts aren’t set up for it,” Baeltya supplied, thoroughly intrigued, judging by the light in her dark eyes.
“That makes sense. Only imagine the tree falling on you because you can’t eat it. In Bára, we had a source of purified magic, called sgath, that we could all draw on.”
“How did it get purified?”
Oria glanced at Chuffta, silent a moment. Then shook her head slightly “We don’t know.”
“We?” Baeltya pounced on that. “You can communicate with it.”
“You Destrye and your ‘its,’” Oria laughed, holding out an arm to her Familiar. He hopped up, craning his neck with interest at the healer. “His name is Chuffta. He’s a derkesthai and, yes, I can talk to him mind-to-mind. He’s slightly smarter than your hunting hounds. Ow!” She pulled her hair from Chuffta’s mouth where he yanked on it. “Okay, much smarter. You can touch him, if you like.”
Baeltya’s face went reverent as she ran a finger down Chuffa’s arched neck, and Lonen remembered that feeling well. He’d expected the scales to be hard and slick, not soft as talc. “As smart as we are?” she asked.
“Different,” Oria hedged. “Don’t you bite me. You know it’s true. He is similarly intelligent, though he sees the world differently. His kind tell stories to transmit history, rather than recording them in books.”
“Oral histories.” Baeltya’s shrewd gaze flicked to Lonen. “Once the Destrye were the same. Barbarians telling tales around the campfires.”
“We’ve progressed in any number of ways since then,” Lonen pointed out.
“And not in others,” Baeltya retorted.
“A work in progress,” he agreed without rancor. Oria looked back and forth between them, filing the information away in her own keen memory.
“So,” Baeltya returned to business, still stroking Chuffta, who tipped back his chin for a scratching there from the healer’s adept fingers. “You said, ‘we don’t know,’ meaning you and Chuffta. He advises you?”
“Yes, he’s my Familiar. He helps me manage chaotic magical input, gives me advice, and is my oldest friend. Neither of us knows how the sgath came to be below Bára, except that the part of the duties of any priestess is to take sgath she absorbs and feed it into the common pool.”
Baeltya frowned. “That’s circular. You pull it from this source and also put it back?”
Oria looked thoughtful. “I never thought of it in those terms. Some things you just grow up thinking you know, and then when you step back and evaluate them through other eyes, they don’t make sense.”
“I think that’s part of becoming an adult,” Baeltya replied, glancing at Lonen again with wry amusement, then away, as if remembering herself.
“Maybe one day I’ll find out,” he commented and Oria rolled her eyes.
“So, maybe you can purify the wild magic, create your own reservoir here,” Baeltya prompted. “If you knew how to input to the one in Bára, you should have the instinct and ability.”
Oria blanched at the mention of accessing the wild magic, a glimmer of fear she so rarely evinced. “I think… that is not an option,” she said softly.
“Maybe you can find a way to both cushion the effect on yourself and then purify and store it. It seems someone in your ancestry must have done that in the first place.”
“Oh yes? You sound very confident of that. Is that how your Arill-delivered healing happened? A priestess woke up one day and said, ‘hey, I think I’ll meditate a whole bunch and see if Arill will give me some of her divine power!’” Oria’s eyes flashed with emotion as she said it, so Lonen didn’t laugh, knowing that her fear spoke.
Baeltya regarded her steadily. “Actually the legend is pretty close to that. I’ll tell it to you some day.”
If he’d expected her to apologize to the healer again, she didn’t. Instead she firmed her chin. “I’d be interested to hear that. It would be helpful if I had a similar legend to work off of. Everything I’ve been told is that wild magic means death—fast or slow—but death.”
“Overload on one hand, or starvation because you shut it out?”
Oria inclined her head in acknowledgment, a rueful twist to her mouth—that became a smile for her Familiar. “Chuffta says the problem with humans is that we’re too black and white, that it’s not always one thing or another.”
“So, is there another option?”
“There’s one.” Oria’s coppery eyes, dark now with consideration, looked to his. “Though that solution has a number of moving parts also.”
“We’ll discuss that,” he told her, certain she contemplated some plan of enticing golems through the recently discovered tunnels so she could steal the packets of sgath they carried. Perhaps the danger of that truly would be less than her wrestling the wild magic, but he knew fighting golems from personal experience. His side throbbed with the memory and the scar over his eye twitched. He wanted Oria far from the lethal creatures. “A possible back up plan, but even you have to admit it’s far from a long-term solution.”
“Then it’s back to you purifying wild magic into a sgath source like you had in Bára,” Baeltya pointed out in all practicality.
“It is some sort of cycle,” Oria mused. “We’ve been wondering if the source in Bára has something to do with that underground lake.”
“That Prince Nolan nearly drowned in?” Baeltya raised her brows. “That would be interesting. Though we have no underground lake here that I know of.”
“We have other lakes.” And he would take Oria to one. He should have thought of it sooner.
“Lake Scandamalion is a day’s journey from here,” Baeltya pointed out. “It’s the closest with any water left in it.”
“And that’s not the one I have in mind.” No, he’d take her to Lake Chenault, his favorite. If they only had a little time left—don’t think of it—well, he wanted her to at least see it.
“Surely you’re not thinking of going to—”
“Where I go is my business, healer. I’ll remind you of your vows.”
“Your Highness,” Baeltya gave Chuffta one last caress and held up her palms in surrender. “Is that wise?” Her question held a volume of unspoken information.
“It’s not,” Oria put in crisply. “You cannot leave the palace now. Not with all that’s going on.”
“I am king,” he told his wife, ignoring the healer. “I decide what I can and cannot do.”
“Don’t pull out your ‘hear my manly roar’ bluster with me.” Oria glared at him. “You might be a barbarian, but you don’t frighten me.”
“Maybe I haven’t tried hard enough,” he replied in a tone as silken as the robes she once wore.
Baeltya looked between them and, apparently deciding they were done, scrubbed her palms together. “I’m going to check on that meal. I think I heard the servants.”
“Besides,” Oria continued, “you have no idea if your plan would work either. Neither you nor I know where to begin.”
“I actually do have an idea on that.” One he’d been nursing for some time. If his memory served him correctly, he might have something of a place to start. “For tonight, though, you eat the food Baeltya has arranged. We’ll sleep. Tomorrow, after another round of treatments, I will introduce you to my brothers, show you to the people, and settle matters there. The day after, if the healer approves, and if we’ve thought of nothing else, we’ll set out on our journey.”
“I agree that we’ll talk about possibilities more then.”
“There’s but one viable possibility, if you’re not too stubborn to see it.”
“I don’t know about this, Lonen.”
“Trust me.” He’d meant it to be firm, but an edge of a plea filtered in.
“I do.” She trailed long fingers down Chuffta’s back. “I promise that I do.”
As much as she trusted in anything anymore.